Left Americana by Paul Le Blanc

Author:Paul Le Blanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-752-5
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

9

A Reluctant Memoir

of the 1950s and 1960s

I have been asked to write a memoir that would give a sense of the Old Left/New Left realities of the 1950s and ’60s. That seems quite odd to me (why would I be writing such a thing?), until I look in the mirror and see this old guy looking back at me. As I reflect, it does seem to me that I experienced a lot, met a lot of people, and perhaps learned from all that, so I will share some of my story.

This fragment can make sense, I think, only by placing it in a larger context, the aspects of which I have attempted to sketch out myself in various writings, and others have done likewise (one of the best recent efforts is Van Gosse’s compact 2005 study Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative Essay).1 And there are the memoirs of others whose journeys through this era can open up a rich variety of “universes” that intersect with this one.

I grew up in a rural area outside of Clearfield, Pennsylvania (population 10,000). My parents moved there in 1950 when I was three years old because my father was the District 2 director of the United Stone and Allied Products Workers of America, a small industrial union affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Clearfield was located in the middle of District 2, with some very large plants of the Harbison-Walker Corporation (then a Fortune 500 outfit), which made firebrick for the kilns of the steel industry. Many of these plants were organized by the Stoneworkers (which began many years before as a union of quarry workers in granite-rich Vermont, under the leadership of an old-time Socialist and Scottish immigrant, John Lawson, who remained secretary-treasurer for many years).

When John L. Lewis led those committed to industrial unionism in a break away from the de-radicalized and bureaucratized American Federation of Labor (AFL) to form the CIO amid the big strikes and organizing drives of the 1930s, the Stoneworkers followed Lewis. The main priority, in the CIO ethos, was to organize workers—all workers. Hence the quarry workers' union diversified into “stone and allied products workers,” drawing in those who labored in many different occupational categories.

This also helps explain why among my earliest memories is being at meetings and on picket lines of workers of the Clearfield Cheese Company, who fought a militant battle for the right to organize. When asked why the Stoneworkers union was trying to organize cheese workers, my father quipped: “Well, they make brick cheese, don’t they?” (The workers were defeated—but some years later my father helped organizers of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen to unionize that plant.)

The labor movement was like a religion to my parents. “Union” was a holy word: it signified workers coming together to help each other, to protect each other, and to make things better for themselves and their families (all of them), in necessary and inevitable struggle with the powerful bosses who sought to enrich themselves by exploiting the workers.

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