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May
8, 2003
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May
10, 2003
History is Not Frozen in the
Past
Labor in the
Dawn of Empire
by JOANN WYPIJEWSKI
Editors' note: In the run-up to the atttack on Iraq , for the
first time in nearly a hundred years the the AFL-CIO reversed
its traditional pro war posture. On May Day itself this year
we were proud to feature here Peter
Linebaugh's marvelous recovery of revolutiionary sentiments around
the world in May of 1916. This last May Day CounterPuncher
JoAnn Wypijewski spoke about those heroes of the US labor movement
who denounced their country's first imperial lunges, in the Spanish-Amrican
war and in the Philippines. It was a powerful address, warmly
received, given as part of the Fifth Annual Hudson Mohawk May
Day Festival at the First Unitarian Society, Schenectady, NY;
sponsored by the Troy Area Labor Council (AFL-CIO), the New York
Labor History Association, the Solidarity Committee of the Capital
District and Eighth Step.--AC/JSC
Workers, Comrades, Friends,
We gather here to celebrate May Day--Workers
Day, 8-Hour-Day Day, Revolutionary Labor Day, Haymarket Riot
Day, give or take a few days.
Some might say "terror day"
but terror cuts two ways.
We commemorate May Day, Workers Day,
but in another, less-remembered sense, May 1st might also be
called Empire Day.
For on this day in 1886, labor had declared
itself dedicated to effect the eight-hour day. And on this day
in 1898, American warships commenced the Battle of Manila Bay,
which would be the culminating act of the Spanish-American War,
and thus the inauguration of America as an overseas imperial
power.
Separated by twelve years, those two
events are nonetheless on a continuum--as we, this day, with
the fresh memory of the bombardment of Iraq, its culture looted,
its cities devastated, its children crying out, gagged with rags
to keep from howling as their ruined limbs are amputated without
anaesthetic or clean water--just as we are on a continuum.
Call it the war at home and the war abroad.
Call it capitalism and imperialism. We have seen this before.
We are in it, deep in it.
We are being seduced, even by some of
our allies, to think that what we are seeing unfold today--the
cries of terror, the call to arms, the assaults on workers, the
false consciousness, the scoundrel's patriotism--is something
new.
Of course, its features are new, its
details, simply because history moves. We are in new times. But
it is good to remember that history is not something frozen in
the past. It is revived and revised, made and remade in the present.
And if the details of what is unfolding today are new, the outline
is familiar.
So while we are concentrated here today
on the matter of the working class in the midst of war, at home,
abroad, I thought it necessary for us to remember the Battle
of Manila Bay as well:
- to remember the Philippines and its
people, slaughtered fighting for their independence in the aftermath
of that famous battle.
- to remember a war that in many ways
resembled the one just prosecuted in Iraq--prosecuted in most
elemental form by the working class against the working class,
for the rich.
- and to consider its meanings for workers,
for people of conscience, for anyone keen to the lessons of the
past.
The wonderful Czech writer Milan Kundera
once said, "The struggle of people against power is the
struggle of memory against forgetting." So let us remember
S curious things.
In 1886, the bomb that was rolled into
Chicago's Haymarket Square during a labor rally may have been
the work of anarchists--or it may have been the work of police
or agents provocateurs.
Louis Lingg, the only one of the seven
men later prosecuted for the bombing who may have actually done
it, told the court upon sentencing: "I despise you! I despise
your 'order', your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me
for it!"
Before they could hang him, his sweetheart
smuggled a tiny percussion cap into his cell. He bit down on
it, and blew his head off.
But he never claimed the bombing as his
deed.
To this day, we don't know exactly who
was responsible for it. But we do know that in its wake came
a crackdown on labor: came the blacklist, came a generation-long
setback for the eight-hour movement, came fear and, among too
many, resignation.
And we also know that elsewhere in the
country at about that same time, the counselors to power were
propounding theories of expansion. The histories of the period
are full of the propaganda of intellectuals: n urging America
to build a great Navy n to claim dominion over the Pacific n
to gain a foothold for trade (i.e., theft) in China n to find
a solution to the problem of America's "surplus manufactures".
Before the election of 1896, William
McKinley cried, "We need foreign markets for our surplus
products!"
Like his capitalist braintrust, he never
considered that the solution to the surplus might be found in
those who created it: in other words, in raising the wages of
American workers, in limiting their work hours and employing
the jobless, in eliminating child labor and general misery; in
short, in transforming a system that made the American working
class a band of near-beggars.
There was a simple solution, a Robin
Hood solution: take from the rich and give to the poor. Bye-bye
surplus.
But markets were all anyone in power
could think about. While the workers toiled and starved, their
masters spoke of markets, which is a more polite way of saying:
take from the poor, from the poorest, create a bigger band of
beggars and near-beggars, and give to the rich.
Westward expansion had created markets,
but now the frontier was closed. While workers in the industrial
cities had been agitating for better conditions, taking rifle
practice in the woods, reading dangerous tracts on revolution
and dynamite, the cavalry had been subduing the last of the Indians.
Four years after the Haymarket explosion came the massacre at
Wounded Knee, and with it the official closing of the frontier.
That was 1890.
Westward expansion continued on, across
the waters, its racist presumptions going international too.
In 1893, white American planters backed
by American guns overthrew the sovereign kingdom of Hawai'i.
The USS Boston supplied the guns, and after Queen Lili'uokalani
was led away in chains and the American flag was raised atop
her palace, US troops began training exercises in Honolulu, repelling
off the walls of Kawaiaha'o Church, preparing for their next
mission.
The USS Boston would go on to Manila
Bay.
But it took another mysterious explosion
to set that war in motion.
As with the Haymarket bomb, to this day
we do not know precisely who was responsible for the explosion
that led to the Spanish-American War, sinking the USS Maine and
with it 268 seamen in Havana harbor in February of 1898.
Terror! Outrage! screamed the yellow
press.
Meanwhile, the journal of the International
Association of Machinists pointed out that on America's own soil:
"a carnival of carnage takes place every day, month and
year in the realm of industry; the thousands of useful lives
that are annually sacrificed to the Moloch of greed, the blood
tribute paid by labor to capitalism, brings forth no shout for
vengeance and reparation."
Before the first spark flew--a year before--Teddy
Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, wrote to a friend:
"in strictest confidence S I should welcome almost any war,
for I think the country needs one."
Like George Bush today, he had a particularly
narrow definition of "the country", for, in fact, much
of the organized working class opposed the gunboat drive for
markets early on.
They opposed America's coup against the
Hawaiian sovereign.
They opposed annexation of Hawai'i.
And before war was declared on Spain,
most of them opposed it, not believing President McKinley's high-sounding
talk of democracy and liberty for the Cubans, the Filipinos and
the others under Spanish rule.
After the sinking of the Maine, a fellow
named Bolton Hall, treasurer of the American Longshore Union,
wrote what he called, "A Peace Appeal to Labor".
"If there is war", it declared,
"you will furnish the corpses and the taxes, and others
will get the glory. Speculators will make money out of it--that
is, out of youS. You will have to pay the bill, and the only
satisfaction you will get is the privilege of hating your Spanish
fellow-workmen, who are really your brothers, and who have had
as little to do with the wrongs of Cuba as you have."
Replace 'Spanish' and 'Cuba' in that
declaration with 'Iraqi' and 'Iraq', and it is as apt today as
it was more than a century ago.
Before war began, Samuel Gompers and
the American Federation of Labor cautiously opposed intervention.
But once it began, Gompers, infected by false patriotism, shifted
course and declared America's cause against the Spanish "glorious
and righteous". As it happened, that righteous cause was
also against the people of Cuba and the Philippines, who'd been
fighting for their independence.
John Sweeney's turnaround this year on
Iraq--first cautiously opposing unilateral intervention but then,
as soon as it was on, falling in line--was not as dramatic, but
a similar politics of no politics was at work.
They didn't chant "Support our troops"
in 1898. Rather, tens of thousands of working men, caught up
by war fever, rushed to enlist. Others gestured approvingly at
the booty.
The mineworkers hoped the spike in coal
prices would reflect in their wages.
The typographers cheered that the establishment
of English schools in Spain's former territories would help the
printing trade.
Glassmakers looked forward to a surge
in demand for bottles and so for their craft.
Railroad unions said more goods moving
meant more work for them.
"Where shall we turn for consumers
of our surplus?" Albert Beveridge thundered on the Senate
floor. "Geography answers the question."
Remarkably, or maybe not, some unions
parroted the same opinion. Thus was American labor made complicit
in American imperialism, a complicity that bedevils unions and
the working class as a whole to this day.
McKinley's men called the Spanish-American
encounter "a splendid little war". Admiral Dewey out
in the Pacific had predicted it would last five days. It lasted
three months. This, remember, was over a hundred years ago.
More than a quarter-million American
soldiers were mustered for the fight in the Caribbean and the
Pacific combined. Today, with respect to Iraq, we hear of US
overwhelming force, of war as a low-casualty or even, for Americans,
a no-casualty enterprise. It's worth contemplating that in the
Spanish-American War, only 379 American soldiers died as a result
of combat. Five thousand more, it also ought to be remembered,
died of diseases or other causes, such as rotten, contaminated
meat, sold to the government by the Armour Company of Chicago
for a nice profit. Thus were the injuries of war and the injuries
of capital twinned.
In the "pacification" of the
Philippines that took place afterwards and lasted until 1904,
hundreds of thousands of Filipinos--"rebels" or "terrorists"
in the argot of the day--were exterminated. In 1899, before the
worst of the slaughter, in debate on the Senate floor (something
we have not seen in the current period) one Senator Tillman of
South Carolina asked whether it had ever previously happened
that a colony at war for its freedom with one nation had ever
been sold in the meantime to another nation (here the US) that
was also at war with the colonizer.
"I think", said Henry Cabot
Lodge in reply, "the situation is unique in the fact that
the people whom we liberated down there have turned against us."
To which Tillman replied, "Well,
the question of liberation is one which will present two points
of view." He couldn't know the half of it.
That era's "smart bombs" were
500-pound shells, which Admiral Dewey shot into Filipino trenches.
In some places, the Filipinos fought back with bow and arrow.
Along the Pasig River dead Filipinos were piled up like sandbags.
Americans used their bodies for fortifications.
One US soldier from Washington State
wrote home: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted
to kill 'niggers'S. This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting
to all pieces."
Back home in these years, there was a
frenzy of lynching, and though called upon to intervene, McKinley
cared no more about stopping it than stopping the "nigger-killing"
that his white troops abroad boasted of. And yet, African-American
soldiers were deeply involved in the fight as well.
One famous regiment was responsible for
winning all of the major battles in Cuba that Teddy Roosevelt,
with his own embedded reporters and photographers, made sure
to be credited with. When those black soldiers returned home,
they were shunned and spit upon, despised and sometimes killed.
This particular regiment had been Buffalo
Soldiers before they went to Cuba, mustered against the Indians.
Their next deployment after Cuba was to Colorado--to put down
strikes and radical rebellion by the Western Federation of Miners;
to terrorize the militant mining towns and guard the infamous
bullpens. For the working classes, these were wars of all against
all.
When liberation struggles in Cuba and
the Philippines were finally suppressed, American capitalists
ravaged the land and the resources. The dupes of the working
class saw their benefit as well. During the war, employment in
the US did rise. Wages did rise too, albeit meagerly. But prices
rose more. Over the course of the war, the purchasing power of
workers' wages dropped 20 percent.
Worse than that, labor was divided and
compromised. A vast segment made its peace with barbarism. It
made its pact with expansionism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation
of the worst sort.
Throughout the land there were rebellions
workers. And those who'd joined their voices to the Anti-Imperialist
League would fight on against foreign adventures and brutality
up into the First World War. Their children and children's children,
and children's children's children fight on to this day.
But "the war at home"--the
essential complement of every war abroad--struck equally at those
workers who praised the bloodletting and those who damned it.
One hundred years later, no cowed or
cowardly support for George Bush's war will save American workers
from the blows of the war at home. That war began precisely at
the moment Bush declared "you're with us or against us",
and it will continue on as part of the administration's strategy
of endless war--or what, in a McKinleyite formulation, the national
Security Council described as its mission: to impose "democracy,
development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the
world".
It will continue on unless we stop it.
And we must stop it.
Do not imagine that my advertings to
the nineteenth century are simply the product of my own quirky
historical interests. They are that, of course. But in the councils
of power, the enemies of the working class are also reviewing
history for its nourishing lessons.
Grover Norquist, part of the Bush team's
activist light artillery from his redoubt at Americans for Tax
Reform, was recently asked just what is the fundamental goal
of the right in the current period.
"The McKinley era", he replied,
"absent the protectionism. You're looking at the history
of the country for the first 120 years, up until Teddy Roosevelt,
when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax,
regulation--all that" presumably must go.
That is where the enemies of labor would
have us on this May Day of 2003: peering backward, at the abyss
the nineteenth century.
History, as I said a moment ago, is no
frozen, finished thing. The legacy of America's first overseas
imperial adventure takes a very live form in the Filipino laborers
lining up for jobs with Bechtel, Brown & Root, the unionbusting
Stevedore Services of America and others in the reconstruction
of Iraq.
Their own economy pillaged over 100 years,
they are the Philippines' chief export, and the remittances they
send home the country's Number One source of income. Before the
first contracts were awarded, The New York Times reported that
whichever companies were named, they are likely to use Filipino
labor, which is skilled, plentiful, reliable and, above all,
cheap.
Their desperation is our shame, and a
warning both to the newly "liberated" Iraqis and to
the American working class. There are no winners on our side
in the war program: workers of the world are being pitted in
ferocious competition to see who comes out last.
For workers, there is always a war at
home and a war abroad, and it is not enough--it will never be
enough--to oppose one without the other.
JoAnn Wypijewski
can be reached at jwyp@thenation.com
Yesterday's
Features
Julie
Hilden
When It's a Crime to Visit Your Son
Mickey
Z.
Partisan Protests?
Mark
Zepezauer
Evil is as Evil Does
David Lindorff
The Coming Senior Revolution
Abu
Spinoza
The Detention of Dr. Huda Ammash
Ben
Tripp
The Other "F" Word
Norman
Madarasz
God in the Service of the Security
State: a Dispatch from Brazil
Stew Albert
Pushovers
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/08
Website
of the Day
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