Freedom Fighters in Steel

"I was fortunate to be caught up in a great movement.  Workers were gonna have a union, come hell or high water," John Sargent

Mike Olszanski put on SlideShare his article “The CIO and Its Left Wing: Their Rise and Fall.”  Believing that organized labor cut its own throat by purging radicals from its ranks, he wrote: “When I started at Inland’s Indiana Harbor Works late in 1963, John Sargent (nicknamed “Wildcat Johnnie”) was again running for president of the 18,000 member Local 1010.  My introduction to politics was an introduction to red-baiting, as all through the mill I saw posted Xerox copies of excerpts from Sargent’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with ‘commie’ scrawled across them in red marker.  Despite being cleared by HUAC’s 1958 Gary inquisition, as reported on the front page of the Gary Post-Tribune, John Sargent was viciously red-baited until his retirement from union activities due to a heart condition around 1967.  His Rank & File Caucus overcame it, and he won his last term as Local 1010 president in 1964.”

 Oz with Charlie Brooks

In our Steel Shavings volume “Steelworkers Fight back” Mike wrote that most of the blast furnace electricians that he worked with were for Sargent and as a joke called themselves “comrade.”  Sargent was pilloried for having been an ally of Nick Migas, an open CP member beaten up by goons after being ejected from the 1948 USWA convention for questioning President Philip Murray’s Cold War positions.  Olszanski concluded: “When the Left was run out, it left a vacuum and pulled the teeth out of the union.  Left leaders were no longer in positions to remind others that the adversarial relationship was basic and fundamental to capitalism.”

In “Black Freedom Fighters in Steel” Ruth Needleman has a section on McCarthyism entitled “Labor Takes Aim at Itself.”  She wrote that the USWA fired radicals on its staff and removed officers who refused to support anticommunist slates in local elections.  District Director Joe Germano used thuggery and intimidation to go after militants in Local 1010, known as the “Red Local.”  One leader who refused to be intimidated was African-American griever Bill Young.  At the 1958 Gary HUAC hearings, according to Needleman, “when Joe LeFleur, the government’s witness, completed his testimony, Young walked up to him with an outstretched arm, as if to shake his hand.  Bill Young was a very large, very unforgettable man.  LeFleur, flustered, asked, ‘Do I know you?’  Young responded, ‘No, you don’t but you named me anyway!’”  The HUAC committee subsequently decided not to call Young to testify.

Granddaughter Miranda turned 19.  From London Josh and older sister Alissa expressed the hope that she and Jerry (their dog that Miranda is taking care of) do something fun to celebrate.  Aunt Mercedes, quoting Helen Keller, advised: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.”  Coming up James turns 13.

Simine Short is speaking at “Miller Market University” on her book, “Locomotive to Aeromotive”: Octave Chanute and the Transportation Revolution.”  A railroad engineer, Chanute designed the Hannibal Bridge above the Missouri River in Kansas City (Paul Lindblad, who pitched for the 1964 Birmingham Barons, the subject of Larry Colson’s “Southern League,” graduated from Chanute H.S. in southeastern Kansas).  A reviewer for Civil Engineering called the University of Illinois publication “a fascinating, detailed, and intimate portrait of an engineering giant.”  In 1896 Chanute supervised hundreds of glider flights among the dunes of Miller Beach.  At age 64 he did not pilot these planes, but one who did, reporter Harry MacBeth, wrote that he experienced a sensation similar to “a man when taking his first ascension in an elevator.”  Rather than jealously guard his aeronautic findings, Chanute shared them with other aviation pioneers, including Orville and Wilbur Wright.  Born in Paris, France, he had a wife Annie and a daughter Alice; he died in 1910 in Chicago, whose stockyards he had designed.

In Sandy, Oregon, a thief broke into a car and stole $500 worth of sex toys, including blow-up items, that Chelsea Coutts had bought for a bachelorette party.  She told a reporter that the police officer “asked me to describe everything in detail, and it was just horrible.”

In the news: Using the Patriot Act as justification, the FBI and NSA secretly ordered Verizon to turn over telephone records of millions of customers, including time, location, and duration of calls.   In addition, for the past several years dating back to the Bush administration, the government has secretly demanded email records from leading servers, including Google.  Libertarians from both parties are appalled, and I’m unnerved.  This appears to be an example of bureaucratic momentum running amuck.  Time for Obama to become a more hands-on chief executive.

Ellen Sturtz of GetEQUAL heckled Michelle Obama as she was speaking about children’s education at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, calling on the White House to issue an executive order banning sex discrimination against gays by federal contractors.  The First Lady apparently was rattled by the interruption, abandoned the podium, and threatened to leave, until Ms. Sturtz was escorted from the room.

With Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson and area legislators looking on, Governor Mike Pence signed the so-called Gary Bill that provided for feasibility studies to expand the Port of Indiana and for a medical teaching center at IU Northwest.  While it takes some control by the city over the airport, hopefully it will lead to improvements there.

In “Betty White Is Not a Sex Machine: Our Culture’s Cruel Obsession with Dirty Old Woman,” Laura Bennett, writing for New Republic, argues that “the story of how such a versatile actress was reduced to an adorable receptacle for penis jokes is also the story of the condescending way we treat old people on television today.”  Unlike the tender, subtle sitcom “The Golden Girls,” the shows 91 year-old White currently stars in, “Hot in Cleveland” and “Off Their Rockers,” are crude and tasteless and geared to generating cheap laughs rather than reversing stereotypes about aging.  Once portrayed as sexless, humorless nags, old ladies now more commonly resemble lechers.

A member of the Central District Organizing Project, Samuel A. Love participated in a teach-in in Gary about 65 year-old Assata Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army convicted in 1977 of first-degree murder after a controversial shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in her being wounded and Trooper Werner Foerster being killed.  She escaped from prison and traveled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum.  While a member of Oakland’s Black Panther Party, Assata had coordinated the party’s free breakfast program.

Nicole Anslover asked how I liked “The Best Years of Our Lives” and extended an open invitation to come to her class and feel free to participate.  I told her I really enjoyed the movie but thought the young people looked really old and that I loved Fred's party wife Marie even though she was meant to be a bitch.  She seemed much more fun than the sergeant's daughter.