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WHAT'S ON THIS PAGE NAVIGATION BOX LEAD FEATURE: The Long and Winding Road: Part Two -- Ain't Got No Home; SIDEBOX: Manic Depression; SIDEBOX: Digging the Dirt; SIDEBOX: Workers of the World Unite | INSPIRATIONAL Use Contents Navigation Console | Go To Next Page (Page 10) |
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Before the Beats there were the Hobos. With their freewheeling attitudes, radical opinions and semi-outlaw status, they were the archetype on which the Beats based their lifestyle. There was, however, a world of difference between the Beats and the Hobos. The latter had not made a lifestyle choice. They had not decided to lead a life outside of society, to be carefree wanderers seeking adventure on the road. They were Hobos by necessity. And they had been blown down the road by a very big wind. HARD TRAVELLIN' |
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| . |  had all been a dream. An American dream. The landof opportunity, the land of the free, the land where Mr. No-One could become Mr. Someone. And, like most dreams, it had burst to reveal a reality that no one wished to experience. In a blink of an eye it had all turned to sand. And nowhere was that more literally the case than in the Great Dust Bowl that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and northeastern New Mexico. As Wall Street crashed in a rain of falling bodies, in the Dust Bowl the winds blew and blew. ...The Great Depression that grip- ped the United States in the 1930s |
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| . | was and is one of the defining moments in modern world history. In a stroke it changed American society so radically that its reper- cussions are still being felt. In an immigrant society that defined itself by nationality, suddenly there were new |
.... | . | a trial. Thus wasthe scene set fo one of the great migrations of modern America. ...In the early to mid 1930s, thous- ands of families left the area. In normal economic conditions, many would have headed into the cities seeking work in the growing |
.... | . | ...Relying for transport on the railay system that criss-crossed the vast country, the hobos also fell victim to the railway guards, conductors and brakemen who would probe the underside of the cars with long sticks to dislodge any early hangers on. And, if |
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| . |  social groupings,based on econ- omics. In the cities unemploy- ment was an epidemic as trail- ing queues of ragged, poverty stricken victims lined up for handouts of just about anything. Soup kitchens boomed but that was about all that did. In the ruins of America’s industrial and commercial infrastructure, little stirred. But, while the Gov- ernment fretted and fumed and tried to reverse |
.... | . | theydidn’t get away fast, would often beat them viciously, a deterrent that rarely worked. On the more prosperous lines there were billy club swinging ‘Bulls,’ company police, who were not above swooping through the odd migrant camp and beating everyone therein senseless. ...The hobos’ life style was defined both in myth and in reality by the rail system and the great locomot- ives that hauled freight along the endless steel tracks that covered America. The locomotive is a powerful and evocative symbol. For many of those who had prev- iously been tied to the land, the lonesome sound of a train whistle in the distance was, they thought, the closest they would ever get to going anywhere. But they could, at least, dream of faraway places. ...It would not be long before the locomotive would assume a whole |
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| . | the trends, it did so in the sure knowledge that America’s great wealth was based not on the commodity and stock markets |
.... | . | industrial centres that were devel- oping. But these were not normal times. And the options were lim- |
.... | . | new iconographic position in the equation. ‘Riding the rails,’ was much more than merely riding the freight trains across the empty |
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| . | but on the rolling farmlands that stretched endlessly away into the horizon. ...But in the Dust Bowl the winds blew and blew. It was just a bit of bad timing. But, what bad timing. ...They called it America’s Bread Basket. Originally it had been cattle country but following the First World War millions of acres had been ploughed and sown with wheat. It was, perhaps, strange to create any kind of basket in an area that received less than 20 inches (.5 m) of rain a year but with ‘modern’ intensive cultivation methods, the horticulturalists told the sceptical farmers, it |
.... | . |  spaces of middle America.The whole life style of the hobo was hung around the railway infrastructure. The journeys ofthe freight trains started from a goods yard and ended in a goods yard and that is where the hobos tended to hang out. That was where the camps were, even when -- as in California -- they did not need to be. And a freight wagon, cov- ered or uncovered (there was always tarpaulin) made for sleeping quart- ers that were almost luxur- ious to those with no home. |
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| . | was clearly sustainable. As the teens made it into the 20s, the land was farmed and farmed intensively and fortunes were made on the showering crops of golden grains. No one, however, was looking to the future. |
.... | . | ited. At the height of the Great Depression, there were few areas in the great US of A that had not fallen victim to economic collapse. ...One exception that offered the inducement of constant sun, arable land and immediate work was the |
.... | . | ...And already, in the blues of those original hobos, the Negroes, and, later, in the folk music of the white radicals, the locomotive would be given all due credit. In- deed, it would become, ultimately, an almost universally accepted |
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. .........................................................................fruit growing area to thewest of the Rocky Mount- ains. With hankerchiefs over their faces, they piled all their belongings onto flatback trucks, crammed their families into the cabs or draped them over the furniture and headed west. The great migration, capt- ured in all its desperate poverty and insecurity in Steinbeck’s master- piece, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, changed the face |
.... | . | symbol of the times and the milieu. Even the names of those original privately-owned lines live on -- the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, the Union Pacific, the Baltimore and Ohio and the famed Rock Island Line, a section of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. And the trains themsel- ves -- the Sunshine Special, the Panama Limited, the Cannonball, the Dixie Flyer and the St. Louis Belle. ...But if the lifestyle might seem a colourful one, that is only because we cannot handle the brutal reality. |
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| . | ...When, in the early 1930s, the region experienced a severe drought lasting several years, the results were devastating. The once rich soil had become thin and |
.... | . | of America. For out of the migration came the labour movement, the assent of trade union power and the States’ first encounter with what would become a prevailing obsession for the next | .... | . | Sure it was exciting trying to outwit ‘the Man,’ avoiding the clubs and the fists, But it was a dangerous life. Making that break from cover, that dash towards the accelerating locomotive as it headed around a |
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| . |  70 years — communism....Although the Monterey peach farms were a common goal of many of those who had been disenfranchised by the great winds down south or by the economic crash in the cities, not all had the where- withall to get there fast. For many, it was a case of ‘hard travelling’ as they walked or ‘rode the rails’, jumping on- to moving trains out of sight of the ever vigilant conduct- ors, to cling precariously to |
.... | . | bend creating the perfect blind- spot; the jump, grappling with steel andwood to find something to hold onto and a foothold; clinging to the sides, back, roofs and undercarri- ages of the freight cars. All that was fraught with dangers. And as for hanging on there, hour after hour, in all kinds of weather . . . . The tales were legion of those who had missed their footing, lost their grip or had simply fallen into an exhausted sleep and been mangled beneath the great steel wheels. Colourful but dangerous. But, hey, |
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| . | granular and, without the water retaining roots of the native grasses to anchor it, unstable. When the heavy spring winds hit the dessicated landscape, they |
.... | . | the undercarriage of the wag- ons, from hobo camp to hobo camp on a trail that meand- ered through a ‘green and pleasant land’ on its way to the |
.... | . | it was not a life style choice they had made. The life style had been imposed on them -- most of them, anyway -- and few would have picked the poverty and physical | |
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MANIC DEPRESSION If the Dust Bowl and those it deprived of a living and a home was a |
.... | . | danger option if the choice had been up to them. ...For some of them, a few, the freedoms of the open road, of having no Bossman breathing down their necks, of the unknown adventure waiting around the next corner, of the new places and people outweighed the dangers and the insecurity. But the majority were California bound.
...They were however, a disillus- |
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| . |  October, the concern turnedto panic as they tried to save what they could by selling and selling fast. On that day nearly 13 million shares were traded, a record that would soon be broken. Although a number of major banks and investment companies stepped in to buy large blocks of shares and thus stem the panic, there was more of the same only four days later. The panic began again on Black Mon- day, 28th October. On even Blacker Tuesday, over 16 million shares were traded |
.... | . | urity, all of their relationships, all of their dreams and aspirations, had simply been blown away. This was not the way the Great Amer- ican Dream was supposed to happen. This .nightmare of transience, unemployment, deprevation, starvation, of cold winds and colder rain, of violence and brutality, it would not do at all. But in California there would be work and regular food and the opportunity to reassemble the family and make a home. ..But the reality was not quite like that. Reality rarely is. Steinbeck’s |
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| . | and the stockmarket collapsed completely. It was the start of the longest and worst depression the western world had ever witnessed. .....As well as ruining many thousands of individual investors, the coll- apse of the stock market put severe strain on banks and investment houses. Within two years almost half of America’s banks had gone into insolvency. Many of them taking their customers’ money with them. The failure of so many banks fed the increasing lack of confidence in the country’s economy. This, in turn, led to much reduced consumer spend- ing, Less consumer spending means less demand for manufactured products. And suddenly we are in a downward spiral. The dramatic fall in consumer demand produced a dramatic rise in unemployment as workers were laid off. By 1932, US production has halved from it’s pre- Drepression levels and unemployment had risen to between a quarter and a third of the total workforce. .....When the factory whistles sounded for the last time and the work- ers were laid off, depression, in more ways than one, settled upon the nation. As the American Dream came crashing down around them, the population stared in consternation verging on horror at the nation’s shattered economy. The industrial infrastructure lay in ruins as banks closed and capital investment dried up. In a state of numbed shock, the unemployed gathered together on street corners to share their despair. Waiting in the soup kitchens clutching a tin cup or queuing in the breadlines for a hand-out, there was not much to do except try to keep body and soul together. There was no work, no jobs for which to apply, and there seemed little prospect that prosperity would return. There was no money around. Anywhere. .....As the Depression dragged on, things of course, did not get better. Unemployment was an epidemic that swept the country. By 1933 there were13 million unemployed. There was starvation and deprivation everywhere. Those who had been early victims of the crash were in a state of dire poverty. The coats they had worn through two winters were wearing thin, their trousers were ragged and patched, their feet and knees wrapped in gunny sacks as their clothes and shoes fell apart. Destitution, complete and utter, was the order of the day. With- out an income many found themselves without accommodation. Whole families would be evicted, all their belongings dumped on the sidewalk with no way to move it all and no where to move it to. .....On the outskirts of many cities, shanty towns of huts made of tar- paper, packing cases, corrugated iron and metal advertising boards grew up. Called Hoovervilles, in honour of President Hoover who had been in power when the slump hit, the shanty towns were just a development of the hobo camps that had been around for decades. .....Although the depression would drag on for a full decade, the tide started to turn in 1933 with the election to the presidency of Franklyn D, Roosevelt. There was only one issue in the presidential campaign that year -- the National Economy. Despite a crippling disability, the |
.... | . | masterpiece is called ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ There is no mention within its pages of anyone having a jolly good time but the ‘wrath’ in the title might have given that away. And if there was a lot of ‘wrath’ around, it is not surpris- ing. Life as a migrant worker was no peach. Even if you could get to pick them you could not eat them. But getting to pick them was hard enough. It was an employers’ market and exploitation was extreme. Living in shanty towns not much different from the hobo camps on the road, just a stones’ throw from the railroad tracks that had brought them here, in the same poverty, the same destitution, little seemed to have changed. ...There was work here; the orch- ards and fruit farms of the rich green Californian valleys were about the only sector within the American economy that was booming. There were just far too many people for the available jobs. It was an employers’ market and blatant exploitation was the order of the day. Soon even those who had jobs could barely afford to put bread on the table as wages were cut and cut again in the true knowledge that there was always someone who was more desperate and would work for less money. ...An employers’ market it might have been but the workers had one thing on their side -- numbers. ...They took what action they could, picketing the farms demand- ing a living wage while all the time |
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| . |  result of childhoodpolio, that had left him essentially wheelchair bound, the erstwhile pres- ident criss-crossed the country by train bringing his policies for recovery, which he called the New Deal, to the electorate. Speaking from the caboose (which, con- veniently, has a wrought iron safety fence he could use to support himself) at every stop, with his |
.... | . | defending the jobs they were no longer doing against the blacklegs whose desperation was such that they would do the work for the offered pittance. There was violence at the gates as worker attacked worker. The farm owners tried bussing the blacklegs through the picket lines and there was more violence. Then they tried bringing in the heavies -- more violence. And still the blockade went on. ...The confrontation may not have been the first, the longest or the bloodiest -- in fact, the first organised workers’ organis- |
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| . | reassuring smile, his articulate but easily understandable policies and, most of all, the impressive example he gave of the ability of man to rise above all difficulties, Roosevelt was the most positive thing that had happened in America since the turn of the decade. .....With his confident assertions that he could turn the economy around, Roosevelt took the election with a massive majority. He took office on 4th March 1933 amid a national banking crisis which had seen the banking sector virtually disappear as state after state suspending banking activities. In his inaugural address he told the numbed nation that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself’ but that was not much consolation when you were scraping the grease off the insides of dustbins to stay alive. On his second day in office, he put a stop to all trading in gold -- which was undermining the paper economy -- and declared an extended national ‘bank holiday.’ On 9th March he submitt- ed to Congress an Emergency Banking Bill giving the Government sweeping powers to support, reorganise and reopen all solvent banks. The bill passed through the two Houses with almost no opposition. On 12th march, the President announced that on the following day the banks would start to reopen. .....Everyone heaved a huge sigh of relief when the news came in at the end of the first normal banking day that deposits had exceeded withdrawls for the first time since the start of the crash. ’Capitalism,’ said one of Roosevelt Brain’s Trust, a select group of advisors, ‘had been saved in eight days.’ Although the bank holiday had dubious legality, it had had the right effect -- it had restored confidence where none existed and saved the financial system only days before its descent into oblivion. It was a masterful piece of leadership. |
.... | . | ations had appeared in the 1860s -- but it was certainly the most influential. How that came to be is a story in itself. Like much of this tale it is a story of action, reaction, over-reaction and hysteria. ...As they confronted the Boss- man and came away bruised and beaten, it became clear that organisation was needed. And some jolly songs to unite them all in a sub-marseillese hysteria of popular revolution. What, after all, is a revolution without some rousing anthems? ...Enter Woody Guthrie. He had been blowin’ down that long dusty road since 1927. And he was damned if he was going to see his hobo brethren ‘treated thisa way.’ PLAIN TEXT • TOP OF PAGE |
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| . | .....Over the next few months, with Congress almost continuously in session, the President put together the basis of his New Deal. In addition to creating support packages for industry and the financial sector, he set up large municipal work projects like dams and power plants and sought to bring relief to the starving millions. He also turned his attention to the struggling-to-survive farming sector which had not only been undermined by the downturn in domestic consumer spending but also by the knock-on effects of the depression on ex- ports. Then there was the big wind that blew across the southern and mid-western states. That didn’t help at all. .....Slowly but slowly the US economy struggled back. In the wake of the depression there was widespread disillusionment. Angry, embitt- ered, scarred by their poverty, those who had survived the depress- ion no longer viewed the world with a rosy hue. They had had time to think about the inequalities and the realities. The workers could see that they were the lifeblood of the economy and they were intent on making sure that they got something back for what they put in. If the employers thought that it was their market still, to use and abuse as they saw fit, they were in for a bit of a shock. PLAIN TEXT • TOP OF PAGE |
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DIGGING THE DIRT There were some people who be- |
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| . | simply carried it away with them. The ‘black blizzards’ that blotted out the sun for days at a time, that carried the fields away, that piled up the fine soil in drifts, could kill. Lost in a swirling sandstorm, vision was impossible, breathing was a labour and |
.... | . | Californian sunshine. ...It was, however, and this is about the best that can be said of it, a colourful lifestyle. With their be- longings tied in hankerchiefs hanging from sticks over their shoulders, their picturesque pov- erty displayed in patched and |
.... | . | ideals expressed in the documents that defined its freedoms. At every level of political activity, corruption was rife; social injustice was everywhere, in the segregated ghettos, in the run-down slum areas where the poor huddled in doorways, on the farms and reservations; is honesty, duplicity, abuse and worse were every- |
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| . |  ragged cloth-ing, their rom- antic starvat- ion showing in deeply etched, characterful faces and deep dark eyes, they defined a national trag- edy that had the makings of a myth. Linked by their home- lessness, their unemploy- ment, their mobility and |
.... | . | where throughout American society. ....But there are always those who will oppose such abuses of power, governance and social control. Such people have forever been a thorn in the side of those in cont- rol. From the Muckrakers to the Watergate guys, Bernstein and thingummmybob, they have been wheedling out political corruption and making it public for the benefit of all (except the politicians.) Good on ya, guys. .....It all started with the Muck- rakers. The title was borrowed from John Bunyan’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and was used in a speech by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 to describe a breed of jour- nalist ‘who could look no way but downward.’ He was talking about a group of writers, heirs of yellow journalism, who specialised in exposés of Government corrupt- ion, injustice and inefficiency. The public, however, did not believe a word of it. They had a taste for honest, no holds-barred exposé style journalism, particularly if it uncovered corruption that might involve abuse of their money. And they liked the social concern and courageous zeal of the exposé writers. .....Although the part of the Muck- rakers in the rise of the alternat- ive culture was small, it was signif- icant. They were the precursors of the out-spoken and sometimes outrageous freedom of speech that characterised many of the movements that came together to form the alternative culture. Indeed, they were part of the voice that the alternative culture eventually developed. PLAIN TEXT • TOP OF PAGE
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| . | survival was in the hands of God — but, at least, you usually got buried for free. ...As the winds stripped the soil from the face of the earth and piled it up against empty barns and outhouses, the population cowered indoors eeking out a meagre existence from a dwind- ling backlog of prosperity supp- lies and hoping for a change for the better. But they hoped in vain. With each arid year that passed existence became more of  TOP OF COLUMN |
.... | . | their desolation, the hobos be- came an idealised social group that would provide grist for the creat- ive mill for many a decade to come. ...Myths are, however, just that. Merely facades behind which reality lurks. And reality in this case was a frightful monster, almost too terrible to behold. Life on the open road was, at best, a precarious existence. But it could also be a brutal experience. Pushed to the edge of desperat- ion, desperate people tend to do desperate things. And the road offered succour not only to those rendered destitute and desperate by the big winds down south but also to those on the run from the law, to thieves and scoundrels, to mountebanks and carpet- baggers with their glib tongues and cunning plans, to the feckless and the social misfits and to the crazies. In the camps that started to spring up along the main routes followed by the transient hobos, violence was a frequent occurrence. TOP OF COLUMN |
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| PLAIN TEXT WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE |
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| . | If, over the last half of the last decade, the USA had a prevailing obsession, a recurring nightmare, a spectre that haunted and hunt- ed it, communism has to be it. One, however, has to ask ‘Why?’ Why communism? Was it merely that the States could not abide a repressive society such as existed in Russia? Hardly, since it did a pretty good line in repression itself. Was the States truly in fear of a communist take over or even a Russian invasion? Maybe. Maybe. But America’s irrational fear of communism goes back a good deal further than that. Back to its own labour problems, to the rise of the trade unions within its own fair country, to a time before people even hoped to believe that they had the power. .....It is perfectly understandable that employers throughout history have felt that it was their market. They were, after all, the ones who were paying the money and it was, they felt, for them to demand good value from those they employed. However, what is seen as good value by the employer is often regarded as exploitation by the workers. And, indeed, it has often been so. .....It was only in the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s industrial revolution that workers started to band together to use their collect- ive power to force employers to improve working conditions, raise pay to reasonable levels and provide benefits to those in their employ. Although the UK had a long tradition of protectionist organisations based around the trade and craft guilds, they had served the interest of both employers and workers through protecting their skills. There had been no organised institutions exclusively for the workers. As the industrial revolution took off, there was a big move from the country- side to the cities. In just seventy years England made the transition from an arable economy to an industrial one. Life in the cities was a mean and dispiriting exper- ience and work in the factories and manufacturing plants was hard and exhausting. Hours were long, the breaks were few or non- existent, the working conditions were rough at best and hideous at worse, the employer’s rules were many and strict and if broken retribution was swift and punitive. Women and children worked alongside the men in dangerous environments earning a pittance that barely kept body and soul together. .....The first fraternal organisat- ions for workers came into being in the early 18th century before the industrial revolution had truly got off the ground. Violently opposed by the employers, who wanted to keep their strangle hold on the workforce, and by the Government, who were fearful of a popular revolution such as that which had only recently decimated the French intelligentsia and ruling classes, the trade union move- ment started as a stirring in the rural communities that were at the heart of the British economy. During 1833 and 4 there was a wave of trade union activity down on the farm as the former peas- ants started to organise. Still largely an agriculturally-based economy, rural England had remained trapped in the Middle Ages with an exploitative system of tenant farming that had changed little from the days of serfdom. Alarmed by the wide- spread discontent represented by this popular movement but unable to track down the organ- isers, the Government sought some way to warn-off the nation’s workers. Their chance came in 1884 in the County of Dorset, on the peninsula that pointed the direction to the New World for erstwhile immigrants. In an feeble and unjust swoop on six farm labourers, the Government creat- ed the first working class heroes -- the Tolpuddle Martyrs. .....Despite the fact that the accused were clearly banding TOP OF COLUMN |
.... | . | together only to protect their already meagre wages, at a thor- oughly botched show trial before a biased judge and a hostile jury, the six labourers were found guilty of swearing an unlawful oath (to a trade union) and were sentenced to transportation to the penal colonies in Australia. The injustice of the trial and the harshness of the sentences produced a wide- spread popular reaction through- out the whole of the country. In London, where feelings ran partic- ularly high, there were large-scale public demonstrations and protest meetings. In March 1886, the Government relented and commut- ed the sentences. In the mean- time, however, the trade union movement had received a health- giving injection of self-righteous justification as well as enough publicity to generate widespread support. Clearly the working class needed to come together, to unite, to resist the injustices of Government and industrialist alike. .....There was no looking back. As the workers realised their true power, they were in a position to confront the sources of injustice. In a true Power to the People leap of vision, the trade union move- ment aligned itself to a political ethos -- socialism -- that offered the prospect of a more even dist- ribution of wealth. As socialism gained a hold on the hearts and minds of the working class as the medium for their salvation from poverty, it made its entree into the political arena in the form of the Labour Party. .....Meanwhile, in London’s Soho, a Russian emigre by the name of Karl Marx was watching the power shift towards the people as some of the economic imbalances were put right. In his own land (and throughout the whole world), there were such imbalances -- too many poor people, too much wealth in the hands of too few, too little social conscience, too much inequality. Working with his lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, he wrote a book -- Das Kapital -- that enshrined his philosophy for removing the inequalities of the class system that he saw as the monster than ensnared the workers of England. Later they would produce the Communist Manifesto. .....As the people took over the Government of Russia in a bloody and mindless flurry of killing, burn- ing and sacking, the world looked on in consternation. There had been other popular revolutions (France had been staging them on a regular basis for some time) but nothing quite like this. In an ext- remely heartless and bloody coup, the entire Russian Royal Family, the Romanovs, were assassinat- ed and buried in a shallow grave in a distant forest. They were followed by most of the aristoc- racy. Government passed decisi- vely into the hands of the prolet- ariate. Power to the people, right on. .....Amongst those watching were the Americans. They had been keen observers of social develop- ments in the UK and were waiting for their own labour force to rise. Although they were some way behind the British, they too had been going through a period of economic development and of urbanisation. .....The first effective US trade union that was more than regional was the Knights of Labor, estab- lished in 1869. Although the Knights did their best to improve wages and conditions for workers, like the British trade unionists, they were opposed by both Government and employers. A large railroad strike was broken by Government intervention in late 1870s but action on the workfront was largely a local affair. The Knights reached a peak of influ- ence a decade later when it orchestrated highly publicised strikes on the Union Pacific, Southwest System, and Wabash railroads that generated considerable public support and achieved a favourable outcome. TOP OF COLUMN |
.... | . | However, at its peak, the Knights of Labor only counted 700,000 members, a mere fract- ion of the total US labour force. .....The Knights of Labor and the whole trade union movement hit sticky times after an unfortunate incident in Chicago in 1886 when a protest meeting organised by the Knights was taken over by a group of anarchists who, as their grand finale, blew up and killed seven policemen. Oops. Although it had not been their fault, the public tended to blame the Knights and the entire labour movement for the violence believ- ing that the labour movement and violent insurrectionist activit- ies were synonymous. The labour movement would never, there- after, gain popular support. .....Although prior to the years immediately after the Second World War, there is little comm- unist paranoia evident in the States, the labour movement and the trade unions were repressed -- as everywhere -- by both government and industry. It was, however, the same old story. A classic confrontation between the workers and the bosses. And the same old techniques were applied: propaganda, information and disinformation and, of course, the violence. There was lots of that -- violence from the boss’ hired thugs that left bodies battered and bloody at the factory gates, violence from the strikers directed at the blacklegs, lots of violence. But, although many of the trade unions were headed by Marxists and were a breeding ground for communist agitators, there was little fear of commun- ism. At least on the surface. .....While the unions in the USA had not gone down the political road as had those in the UK, everyone remembered that before they had become preoccu- pied with pay and conditions, the concern of the labour movement had been with reform of the system with the introduction of a ‘commonwealth’ that offered a fairer and more distribution of the nation’s wealth. Indeed, commun- ism it was. .....Essentially the seeds of Amer- ica’s emerging attitude towards communism are to be found in its own repressive attitudes. The USA was a country that had been forged by revolution but was still in the process of defining itself. It was made up of a group of volat- ile, self-opinionated entities -- the states -- and a largely immig- rant population. Although it had a certain social structure, it had no class system to bind society together. Its social structure was one of the things in the making. As, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it watched world events, the USA could hardly miss the social changes that were sweeping across Europe. In seeking to forge a country out of such wayward elements as it had under its command, the US Government realised that it was going against the trend. Indeed, it had to buck the trend to survive. It, therefore, did everything in its power to keep the working classes in check. .....Sure there were communist agitators in every area of the labour movement but that was not an issue. Yet. And, it only became an issue as a part of one of those wonderfully imaginative bits of scapegoatism that America does so well. A political ruse that is distinctly American, it works like this. Give the public someone or something to blame for the evils in society and they won’t blame the government. At times of national instability, this cunning ruse had been played against the Negroes, the Chinese, the Irish and others. The turn of the communists was coming. But not until after the Second World War. For, as one war finished another one started. It was war, but of a different kind. The Cold War brought it all to head. |
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