HANGING SEPARATELY, HANGING TOGETHER A Labor Day Reflection

James Ishmael Ford

4 September 2011

First Unitarian Church

Providence, Rhode Island           

Let me tell you a story. George Pullman was born in 1831. He was an inventor and eventually an industrialist. His most famous and wildly successful project was a train car designed to accommodate sleeping passengers, as it was advertised, “luxury for the middle class.” He eventually pretty much controlled the passenger train industry, and in the process became fabulously rich.

Pullman also engaged several innovations with social consequences. For one he hired former house slaves to become porters on his train cars. While he paid poorly and the porters essentially
had to live on tips, these porters traveled widely and became important figures in a rising consciousness of southern blacks about the world beyond their lives, no longer as slaves, although in practice very little more than serfs in the agricultural south. Pullman would become the greatest employer of African Americans in the post civil war era.

He also designed and built a town for employees that offered clean and attractive homes as well as a school, a store and a church. Pullman was lauded for his benevolence and vision. Although one academic who studied the town opined that no potentate of the day possessed the power Pullman exercised over its residents.

Then came the depression of 1894. In reaction Pullman repeatedly cut his employees wages. He did not, however, adjust the rents or the costs of goods at his store, which he considered unrelated issues. Employees began to object to the punitively low wages, the failure to take costs into account for housing, and, as long as they were at it, the sixteen-hour days they were expected to work. He refused to meet with a delegation of the employees who wanted to put these issues to him.

Under the leadership of organizer Eugene V. Debbs, the American Railway Union was formed. Not limited to a single craft but open to all aspects of the railway industry, in a single year it became the largest union in America. However, despite Debbs pleas, the white members refused to let blacks join. As things turned out, possibly a fatal mistake. In May there was a walkout. This was followed by a lockout. And the strike began.

The strike was bitter and sometimes violent. Some two hundred, fifty thousand workers were caught up in it, and the strike extended to twenty-seven states. Eventually, and after much pushing, President Grover Cleveland ordered twenty thousand federal troops to crush the strike. It was brutal and fast. Eugene Debbs was given a questionable trial and sentenced to six months in prison. During this time the union dissolved.

A couple of footnotes. During his time in prison Debbs became a Socialist and would run four times for president on that quixotic ticket. Pullman’s reputation suffered so severely that when he died in 1897, fearing reprisals against his body from former strikers, and even, possibly, from the general public he was buried at night in a lead-lined coffin placed in a concrete and steel-reinforced vault that then had several tons more concrete poured over it.

Oh, and one more thing. While the public had mixed feelings about the strike itself, there was such loathing of how it was suppressed that the president felt it necessary to change tack and to find ways to support the burgeoning labor movement. His most notable achievement, such as it was, was setting aside Labor Day as a Federal holiday.

Labor Day falls effectively on the last weekend of the summer. So if the weather even slightly permits it has become a time for picnics and backyard barbecues. After all, while not in the wake of the Pullman strike, we achieved the eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek. By the middle of the twentieth century, pretty much anyone willing to work could expect to own a car and a house and to send their children to college. It felt. It seemed.

Well, here’s the bad news. Perhaps you’ve noticed. Things are going wrong. It looks like after near a century of social advance where each generation could, it seemed, hope to do better than their parents, unless you were an African American or a Native American, it has come to a screeching halt for everyone. Today nearly half the American people are too poor to pay income taxes. In fact the poor pay taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, sales taxes, state income taxes, and sometimes property taxes. It’s just that our progressive income tax system at its best protects the poor. As it should.

But, nearly half of us are too poor to pay income taxes.

Now, we have an amazing ability to deny what’s right in front of us. It’s a human thing, I suspect. But, it is also a very dangerous thing. Even in times of rising prosperity, all ships were not rising together. This, dividing us, and leaving some out, has been a cancer. And it has grown because we ignore it, or deny it.

For instance, today there are those who scoff at all this saying these people aren’t poor. Why they have refrigerators and televisions and cell phones. And, many of them are fat. And, after this litany of excess many of these critics think these so-called poor should be stepping up and paying taxes, as if income taxes were all taxes.

Let me lay some blame. We have a generation of people who’ve been fed on a philosophy of selfishness, where taxes are seen as theft and the poor as parasites. And there we are. Reality is, as it often is, a bit different than the stories we tell.

A couple of weeks ago on PBS’s Newshour, Paul Solman & Elizabeth Shell did a distressing story about wealth distribution in the United States. Something near one tenth of one percent control substantially over eighty percent of America’s wealth. The rich have gotten very rich, the number of poor have increased, and in between is a very unstable, shrinking and very scared middle class. Maybe you’ve noticed.

Mostly, people haven’t. Solman took a piece of paper with three pie-charts, one described the U.S., another showing Sweden, which has a lot of rich people, but in general has much more equity, and a faked up chart where wealth was equally distributed. He asked people he accosted on the street,
to choose which chart represented the wealth distribution of America. Almost everyone picked Sweden.

John Steinbeck, one of the heroes of my youth commented on this economic myopia, observing that, “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” But it’s not true. As far as social mobility is concerned, compared with other industrialized nations today we’re pretty much in the middle of the pack. And, this is the most distressing part, slipping. One analysis I read said if you want your children to do better than you did, move to Canada. Here we are on a serious roll with the rich getting richer and the poor, poorer. And, as I’ve said, our shrinking middle class is ever more fragile.

So, here we are today, on Labor Day Sunday. What do we see? Financial reporter Kim Peterson writes, “The gap between rich and poor continues to grow. Wage inequality is at the highest levels since the Great Depression. From 1980 through 2005, the wealthiest 1% took home 80% of the country’s increase in income. Executives at Wal-Mart can’t rev up U.S. sales because their customers still live paycheck to paycheck. Yet Tiffany just posted spectacular quarterly numbers.”

We have an economic meltdown that drives everyone except the richest among us into a ditch, a deep recession for most, a depression for African Americans and other minorities, and a continuing downgrading of our economic lives as individuals. And what do our outraged citizens go after? Plutocrats? Grasping banks and bankers? The uber-rich?

No. The mass of people bring out the pitchforks and burning torches and want to stick it to labor unions and government regulations. As was quoted on that NPR show, Warren Buffet wryly notes “Yes, there’s been a class war in the United State. And my class, namely the super rich people, have won.” And, if the current confused wave of political emotion is any indicator, this situation isn’t going to be changing anytime soon…

So, where’s the good news here? There is some. But, first we need to look hard at who we are. I see us as totally and completely part of nature. Look at us and our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Three species, all different, but also all with similarities. I suggest if we don’t get carried away, there are things to learn. We’re all constrained by our biology, but also we humans are the most generalized creatures. We have a lot of room to play about, we can modify a great deal about us, when we notice.

The best take-away I see in this is that we human beings are first of all, social animals. We need each other. A major part of our success as species is because we are cooperative. And, at the same time, at the very same time, individuals cheat. While we’re very much about each other, we also look out for ourselves. Oh, and one more thing, once an individual gets the upper hand, it is very, very hard to let go. These are facts on the ground, facts on the ground that we ignore at our peril.

I would go a bit farther and suggest that word cheat is itself a loaded term. The reality is that the individual is very important. We do look out for ourselves. And, I would go farther, and say we should. I’ll expand on this in a moment. But, first, I suggest any social ethic, and any economic theory needs to take into account both truths, we are cooperative, and we are individuals.

I have no problem with there being rich people. I think business is often where the most creative things emerge, innovation and possibility. A good businessman is like an artist or a musician. It’s in our nature. And, we look out for each other. That, too, is in our nature. The problems rise when we ignore one truth for the other.

The shadow of the individual looking out for herself or himself is that it can create a wake of sorrow, particularly in how we tend to hang on to that upper hand once we get it, but also in short cuts and when looking out for oneself does become cheating. The “me by myself” can be a very ugly thing.

And the shadow of the group is that it can crush the heart of the individual and along the way kill the birth of the new. The Marxist states, may they rot on the trash heap of history, we were, and if you look at North Korea, are gray places without enough of anything. That pretty much says it all about what happens when the individual is crushed.

That’s background. What about today?

In our culture, here in America, where we’ve put too much weight on the one side of the equation, the celebration of the individual, we need to restore balance. These days, despite rhetorical excess from our American right, we are not in danger of too much government. Nowhere near. Look at the stats, they tell us the truth. We’ve vastly overbalanced things toward the individual, with the consequence that society has suffered terribly, and, in fact, is in danger of fragmenting. The truth is we live within perilous times, because of institutionalization of greed we stand at the edge of an abyss. Taking one good and ignoring the other has set up something terrible.

So, what to do?

Well, let’s look at that most recent time of concentrated power and the oppression of the many. But, this time, let’s not screw it up. Let’s not cut anyone out. This time we all go together. All of us. That said, we need to organize.

We need to organize and restore the dignity and authority of our communal responsibilities. William Cohen, Unitarian Universalist, former Republican senator from Maine and Bill Clinton’s longest serving Secretary of Defense said it eloquently. “Government is the enemy until you need a friend.” Today we desperately need a friend. We need to organize and reclaim our social connections and to see how they come together within our social organization, within our governments.

To do this we need to reframe. We need to reclaim the title citizen over the title taxpayer. And we need to challenge the idea that taxes are a necessary evil or worse that they are theft. Taxes are not theft; they are the mother’s milk of society. We need to advocate for a fair and progressive tax system, and to fund what needs doing. To do this we need to organize.

We have to. For one thing to simply go on like we’re going will kill the golden goose that is our economic engine. For instance dismantling public education is insane. Our schools should be cathedrals of learning, the gateway to possibility; we should be throwing public money, and lots of it at education. Not seeking decent health-care for all of us, to put it baldly, is bad for business, putting the cost at the least effective part of our society, on the individual or on the employer. No other industrialized nation shifts so much of the cost of doing business in this way. Not only is it dishonorable, it is bad for business. And, we need secure and generous retirement systems, an expansion of social security, not it’s dismantling. We are all in this together, and wherever we are in the hierarchy of things, no one need be left behind. No one should be left behind. We need to organize.

And together with that we need to care for the planet and those living on it. This good earth is finite. We have over-bred and over populated on our fragile and small home,and we are now disrupting the balance of things. We need to face this and we need to deal with it. And this can only happen effectively at our governmental levels. This attention needs to range from ordinary health and safety to directly addressing the dangers of global warming and our part in this. We need to organize.

Okay, a long list. But the short of it is pretty short. Let us honor labor. Let us honor the creative spirit. Let us respect this planet that is our fragile and precious home. Let us celebrate ourselves, and let us celebrate each other.

And, on Tuesday, let’s get to work. Organize. Join with the like-minded, join with those who share your heart. Get active in government. Support those who believe in cooperation. Run for office yourself. Get on school boards. Local commissions. Preach the good news, we’re all in this together, and together we can succeed.

Much needs doing. The good news, the very good news is we can do it. We are the adaptable animal. We can do this. If we will it and give it our heart and hands, if we will organize and act.

Amen.