Hi. Beyond saying I wish it were true I can't vouch for the perceptions of Professor Cobb. I put it out as a thesis that merits consideration and critique. It belies the stories about the rich neighborhoods bordering New Orleans, but that doesn't mean it's untrue. I know first-hand the warmth and generosity of working-class, white southerners, but racial attitudes are deep and pervasive.
What I am sure of is a vast number of Americans are right-now being shaken of long, deeply-held surities, questioning the war and their own government, Katrina spurring half of that. Class/racial consciousness is definitely on the table, with huge potential for changing people and politics. And I've always believed the south would play a principle role in changing America, because of it's history and people, and how that legacy and character has been used and distorted by the ruling class. You can bet those people with power are doing their best to contain and exploit this profound malaise and potential. It's an uphill battle with the growing forces for change, black, white, and otherwise needing each other to seize this historical moment. That's what's important. Information, thoughts, articles gratefully received. Somehow, Joe Hill, as man and symbol seemed particularly appropriate to send-with. Ed http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/opinion/19cobb.html?th&emc=th Southern Exposure By JAMES C. COBB Op-Ed: November 19, 2005 Athens, Ga. IN 1964, when the blood and terror of Freedom Summer prompted many Americans to condemn the South as backward and bigoted, the historian Howard Zinn struck a nerve with his suggestion that "the nation reacts emotionally to the South precisely because it sees itself there." Now, as Americans rebuild from the wreckage and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, they see another portrait in time, one that tells us much about what has and hasn't changed in the South in recent years, as well as about what the South can still tell the rest of the nation about itself. At the very least, Hurricane Katrina put the lie to a generation's worth of ballyhoo about the newfound prosperity of the Sunbelt South. It showed us not only the impoverished and immobile masses of New Orleans, but the shack-dwelling, hand-to-mouth lives of thousands of others within the three-state swath of its hellish destruction. Here the disaster laid bare the shackling legacy of generations of pursuing industry through promises of low-wage, nonunion labor and minimal taxation and the correspondingly inadequate investment in public education, health and social welfare in the South. Many of the places leveled by the hurricane were one-industry towns that had been reduced to no-industry towns when low-paying, tax-exempted, union-free employers repaid their hospitality by heading east or farther south where even cheaper labor and lower taxes awaited them. If Sherman originated urban renewal in Atlanta, Hurricane Katrina may have accomplished small-scale urban removal along the Gulf Coast, considering the number of towns that will likely never be rebuilt. Even before the hurricane, more than two-thirds of the poverty-level families with children in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama fell into the "working poor" category. This figure is pretty much standard across the Old Confederacy, meaning that a great many Southerners beyond the physical reach of the storm would also be at the mercy of any such catastrophe of similar proportions. However, the same might be said for the almost equally prevalent working poor in such decidedly un-Southern locales as Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where folks have been laid low by wholesale outsourcing of jobs and economic policies that have left real wages stagnant and a social safety net in ever greater disrepair. No Americans have had more experience with burden-bearing than Southerners, white and black. In this they have been well served by traits they exhibited repeatedly in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, especially their willingness to suffer extreme hardship and even death rather than sever their enduring ties to place, family and community. Indeed, while Katrina may have bared the lie behind the New South's supposed prosperity, it has also highlighted a remarkable shift in racial attitudes. The small towns throughout the hurricane area where the rabidly segregationist Citizens' Councils once flourished produced some striking scenes of black and white Southerners in physical and emotional embrace, commiserating about what they had lost and sharing what they had left. As community after community across the South opened its arms to the displaced, small-town papers were awash in stories about middle-class whites who had obviously made homeless and penniless evacuees the first black guests ever to sit at their tables and sleep on their sheets. These breakthroughs might seem especially emblematic of change in Southern white racial attitudes, but my guess is that there were a lot of these "firsts" registered as well in homes above the Mason-Dixon line where Hurricane Katrina victims found shelter. Hurricane Katrina should also have demonstrated to skeptical blue-staters that the South's vaunted religiosity amounts to more than a convenient vehicle for political manipulation of the ignorant, unthinking masses. Black and white survivors told story after story of reciting the Lord's Prayer or the 23rd Psalm as the storm raged around them, and though left penniless, homeless and uninsured, they expressed both gratitude and absolute confidence that the Lord would protect and provide. If the Hurricane Katrina experience reveals that the South remains in many ways what Mr. Zinn described as a "marvelously useful" mirror where other Americans can see some of their nation's most egregious flaws magnified, it also suggests that in looking southward these days they should recognize some of its most admirable virtues writ large as well. James C. Cobb,a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is theauthor of "Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity." *** Commentaries are sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet To learn more consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org Today's commentary: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-11/19meister.cfm ZNet Commentary Joe Hill: The Man Who Didn't Die November 19, 2005 By Dick Meister It's Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud. "Fire!" he shouts defiantly. The firing squad didn't miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, "ain't never died." On this 90th anniversary of his execution, he lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols. Joe Hill's story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously anti-labor employer and government forces, a man who never faltered in fighting for the rights of the oppressed, who never faltered in his attempts to bring them together for the collective action essential if they were to overcome their wealthy and powerful oppressors. His is the story of a man and an organization destroyed by government opposition yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the IWW made "an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American society," laying the groundwork for mass unionization, inspiring the formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind "a genuine heritage ... industrial democracy." Joe Hill's story is the story of perhaps the greatest of all folk poets, whose simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did so much to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them into a collective force. Songs like "The Preacher and the Slave," which promises,"You will eat, bye and bye/In that glorious land above the sky/Work and Pray, live on hay/You'll get pie in the sky when you die." Ralph Chaplain, the IWW bard who wrote "Solidarity Forever," found Hill's songs "as coarse as homespun and as fine as silk; full of laughter and keen-edged satire; full of fine rage and finer tenderness; songs of and for the worker, written in the only language he can understand." Joe Hill's story is the story of a man who saw with unusual clarity the unjust effects of the political, social and economic system on working people and whose own widely publicized trial and execution alerted people worldwide to the injustices and spurred them into corrective action. It's the story of a man who told his IWW comrades, just before stepping in front of the firing squad: "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize!" Hill's comrades aimed at nothing less than organizing all workers into One Big Union regardless of their race, nationality, craft or work skills, calling a general strike and wresting control of the economy from its capitalist masters. The revolutionary message was presented in the simple language of the workplace, in the songs of Hill, Chaplain and others, in the streetcorner oratory and in a tremendous outpouring of publications, including a dozen foreign-language newspapers which were distributed among the many unskilled immigrants from European nations where unions had similar goals. Workers were told again and again that they all had the same problems, the same needs and faced the same enemy. It was they who did the work, while others got the profit; they were members, all of them, of the working class. To aspire to middle-class status, as the established labor movement advocated, would mean competing against their fellow workers and chaining themselves to a system that enslaved them. Organized religion also was a tool of enslavement, to keep the worker's eye on that "pie in the sky" while he was being exploited in this world. Patriotism was a ruse to set the workers of one nation against those of another for the profit of capitalist manipulators. IWW organizers carried the message to factories, mines, mills and lumber camps throughout the country, and to farms in the Midwest and California. The cause of radical unionism to which Joe Hill devoted his life was lost a long time ago. The call to revolution is scarcely heard in today's clamorously capitalist society. Labor organizations seek not to seize control of the means of production but rather to share in the fruits of an economic system controlled by others. Yet Joe Hill's fiery words and fiery deeds, his courage and his sacrifices continue to inspire political, labor, civil rights and civil liberties activists. They still sing his songs, striking workers, dissident students and others, on picket lines, in demonstrations, at rallies, on the streets and in auditoriums. They echo his spirit of protest and militancy, his demand for true equality, share his fervent belief in solidarity, even use tactics first employed by Hill and his comrades. Hill emigrated to the United States from his native Sweden in 1902, changing his name from Joel Haaglund, working as a seaman and as an itinerate wheat harvester, pipe layer, copper miner and at other jobs as he made his way across the country to San Diego, translating into compelling lyrics the hopes and desires, the frustrations and discontents of his fellow workers. In San Diego, Hill joined in one of the first of the many "free speech fights" waged by the Industrial Workers of the World against attempts by municipal authorities around the country to silence the streetcorner oratory that was a key part of the IWW's organizing strategy. Not long afterward Hill hopped a freight for Salt Lake City, where he helped lead a successful construction workers' strike and began helping organize another free speech fight. But within a month, he was arrested on charges of shooting to death a grocer and his son and was immediately branded guilty by the local newspapers and authorities alike. Ultimately, Hill was convicted on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Hill had staggered into a doctor's office within an hour after the shootings, bleeding from a chest wound that he said had stemmed from a quarrel over a woman. The prosecutor argued that the wound was inflicted by the grocer in response to an attack by Hill, although he did not introduce into evidence either the grocer's gun or the bullet that allegedly was fired from it. He did not introduce the gun that Hill allegedly used and did not call a single witness who could positively identify Hill as the killer. But he easily convinced the jury that the murders were an example of IWW terrorism and that since Hill was an IWW leader and had been arrested and charged with the crime, he was guilty. As Hill's futile appeals made their way through the courts, Gov. William Spry of Utah was swamped with thousands of petitions and letters from all over the world asking for a pardon or commutation. But he would not even be swayed by the pleas for mercy from the Swedish ambassador. Not even by the pleas of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. The governor paid much greater attention to the views of Utah's powerful Mormon Church leaders and powerful employer interests, particularly those who controlled the state's dominant copper mining industry. They insisted that the man they considered one of the most dangerous radicals in the country be put to death. Joe Hill's body was shipped to Chicago, where it was cremated after a hero's funeral, the ashes divided up and sent to IWW locals for scattering on the winds in every state except Utah. Hill, with typical grim humor, had declared that "I don't want to be caught dead in Utah." Even in death, Hill was not safe from the government. One packet of his ashes, sent belatedly to an IWW organizer in 1917 for scattering in Chicago, was seized by postal inspectors. They acted under the Espionage Act, passed after the United States entered World War I that year, which made it illegal to mail any material that advocated "treason, insurrection. or forcible resistance to any law of the United States." The envelope, containing about a tablespoon of Hill's ashes, was sent to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It remained hidden there until 1988, when it was discovered and turned over in Chicago to the men who preside over what little remains of the Industrial Workers of the World, shrunken now to only a few hundred members. The Post Office apparently had objected to the caption beneath a photo of Hill on the front of the envelope. "Joe Hill," it said -- "murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915." Or maybe the authorities objected to Hill's Last Will, which was printed on the back of the envelope: My will is easy to decide, For I have nothing to divide, My kin don't need to fuss or moan "Moss does not cling to a rolling stone." My body? Oh if I could choose, I would to ashes it reduce, And let the merry breezes blow My dust to where some flowers grow. Perhaps some fading flowers then Would come to life and bloom again. This is my last and final will, Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill Copyright (c) 2005 Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based freelance columnist. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Help save the life of a child. 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