Tuesday, October 30, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt nine)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

The lovers of poetry that Ezra had organized rallied to Dunning’s aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in wax paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase “Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre” gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very great poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery.



Monday, October 29, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt eight)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

“You’re to get it,” he said. He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. It made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. I’ve seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust for all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death. Now you will con me. Con not, that thou be not conned. Death was not conning with him. It was coming all right.



Sunday, October 28, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt seven)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

Ezra wanted me to teach him to box and it was while we were sparring late one afternoon in his studio that I first met Wyndham Lewis. Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible. But it was not very good because he knew how to fence and I was still working to make his left into his boxing hand and move his left foot forward always and bring his right foot up parallel with it. It was just basic moves. I was never able to teach him to throw a left hook and to teach him to shorten his right was something for the future.

Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat, like a character in the quarter, and was dressed like someone out of La Bohème. He had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him. At that time we believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no official uniform for the artist; but Lewis wore the uniform of a prewar artist. It was embarrassing to see him and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra’s left leads or blocked them with an open right glove.



Saturday, October 27, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt six)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

“Oh here you are,” he said.

It was Ford Madox Ford, as he called himself then, and he was breathing heavily through a heavy, stained mustache and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead.

“May I sit with you?” he asked, sitting down, and his eyes which were a washed-out blue under colorless lids and eyebrows looked out at the boulevard.

“I spent good years of my life that those beasts should be slaughtered humanely,” he said.



Friday, October 26, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt five)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story after losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to the Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Well, I thought, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be much doubt about that. There is most certainly no demand for them. But they will understand the same way that they always do in painting. It only takes time and it only needs confidence.



Thursday, October 25, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt four)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

She was angry at Ezra Pound because he had sat down too quickly on a small, fragile and, doubtless, uncomfortable chair, that it is quite possible he had been given on purpose, and had either cracked or broken it. That he was a great poet and a gentle and generous man and could have accommodated himself in a normal-size chair was not considered. The reason for her dislike of Ezra, skillfully and maliciously put, were invented years later.

It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein’s Ford. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patron had said to him, “You are all a generation perdue.”

“That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” Miss Stein said. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”



Wednesday, October 24, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt three)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

I think Miss Stein would have liked the good Simenons—the first one I read was either L’Ecluse Numéro 1, or La Maison du Canal—but I am not sure because when I knew Miss Stein she did not like to read French although she loved to speak it. Janet Flanner gave me the first two Simenons I ever read. She loved to read French and she had read Simenon when he was a crime reporter.

In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald. When I first met her she did not speak of Sherwood Anderson as a writer but spoke glowingly of him as a man and of his great, beautiful, warm Italian eyes but I liked some of his short stories very much. They were simply written and sometimes beautifully written and he knew the people he was writing about and cared deeply for them. Miss Stein did not want to talk about his stories but always about him as a person.



Tuesday, October 23, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt two)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

This had not become an acute situation when I first knew her, since she had published three stories that were intelligible to anyone. One of these stories, “Melanctha,” was very good and good samples of her experimental writing had been published in book form and had been well praised by critics who had met her or known her. She had such a personality that when she wished to win anyone over to her side she would not be resisted, and critics who met her and saw her pictures took on trust writing of hers that they could not understand because of their enthusiasm for her as a person, and because of their confidence in her judgment. She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them.

But she disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to make her writing intelligible, although she needed to have publication and official acceptance, especially for the unbelievably long book called The Making of Americans.



Monday, October 22, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt one)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apértifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.



Sunday, October 21, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt fourteen)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

After 47 years, Dowd knew the game, knew prosecutors. They built cases. With all the testimony and documents, Mueller could string together something that would look bad. Maybe they had something new and damning as he now more than half-suspected. Maybe some witness like Flynn had changed his testimony. Things like that happened and that could change the ball game dramatically. Former top aide comes clean, admits to lying, turns on the president. Dowd didn’t think so but he had to worry and consider the possibility.

Some things were clear and many were not in such a complex, tangled investigation. There was no perfect X-ray, no tapes, no engineer’s drawing. Dowd believed that the president had not colluded with Russia or obstructed justice.

But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”



Saturday, October 20, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt thirteen)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

In a small group meeting in his office one day, Kelly said of the president, “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.

“I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”



Friday, October 19, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt twelve)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

Don’t take any questions, all the staff told him with urgency. Trump said he did not plan on taking any.

At the press briefing, he took questions, and the questions were about Charlottesville. He took out his Saturday statement. “As I said on—remember Saturday—we condemn in the strongest possible terms the egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” He left out the part about “both sides,” but this time he added, “the alt-left came charging” at the rally. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now.

“Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. . . . I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” Both had been slave owners, he noted. “You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

He reverted to his earlier argument: “There is blame on both sides . . . you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had a lot of bad people in the other group too . . . there are two sides to a story.”



Thursday, October 18, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt eleven)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

Priebus called an end to the meeting. Mattis seemed completely deflated.

Trump got up and walked out.

All the air seemed to have come out of Tillerson. He could not abide Trump’s attack on the generals. The president was speaking as if the U.S. military was a mercenary force for hire. If a country wouldn’t pay us to be there, then we didn’t want to be there. As if there were no American interests in forging and keeping a peaceful world order, as if the American organizing principle was money.

“Are you okay?” Cohn asked him.

“He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson said so everyone heard.



Wednesday, October 17, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt ten)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

Trump subjected Sessions to a withering attack in the Oval Office, calling him an “idiot.” Despite his promise to Bannon, Sessions sent a resignation letter to Trump. Priebus talked the president out of accepting it.

Recusing himself made the attorney general a “traitor,” Trump said to Porter. The president made fun of his Southern accent. “The guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner.” Trump even did a little impression of a Southern accent, mimicking how Sessions got all mixed up in his confirmation hearings, denying that he had talked to the Russian ambassador.

“How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general?” Trump asked Porter. “He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama. What business does he have being attorney general?”



Tuesday, October 16, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt nine)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

At the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in early July Trump wanted to talk with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. In violation of security rules he invited Turnbull into his Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Only those with the highest U.S. security clearances for Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information were allowed in the SCIF. It was an absolute rule, intended to prevent someone planting listening devices. This facility, a large steel room, had to be torn down after the meeting.



Monday, October 15, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt eight)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

On June 15, 2017, The Washington Post ran a story by three of its top Justice Department and FBI reporters headlined “Special Counsel Is Investigating Jared Kushner’s Business Dealings.” Mueller wanted more and more records. Kushner hired Abbe Lowell, a top Washington criminal defense lawyer. Priebus could see the fires building around a string of troubled investments Jared was involved in. He decided to escalate, make a big play. He told Trump that Jared should not be in the White House in an official capacity. Nepotism laws existed for a reason. The Mueller investigation was going deeply into Jared’s finances. And it will jump to your finances if it hasn’t already.

Normally Trump would ignore or dismiss. This time he paused, slowed down, and became reflective. He looked at his chief of staff. The response was jarring, so different.

“You’re right,” the president said.



Sunday, October 14, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt seven)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

Trump gave some private advice to a friend who had acknowledged some bad behavior toward women. Real power is fear. It’s all about strength. Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bulled. There is no choice.

“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” he said. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. That was a big mistake you made. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit.”



Saturday, October 13, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt six)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

The next day, Wednesday, May 17, Trump was in the Oval Office when he learned that Rosenstein had appointed Robert Mueller, who had run the FBI for 12 years, of all people, as special counsel to look into Russian election meddling and any connection to the Trump presidential campaign.

Trump’s mood deteriorated overnight and the next day, May 18, was the worst. The president erupted into uncontrollable anger, visibly agitated to a degree that no one in his inner circle had witnessed before. It was a harrowing experience. “We barely got by,” Porter said to an associate.

Normally Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk or in his private dining room. But this day he mostly stayed on his feet as he stormed between the two rooms.



Friday, October 12, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt five)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

Sonny Perdue gave a presentation in the Situation Room on May 4 on the role of agriculture in trade. Sensitive intelligence showed that if the United States imposed new tariffs on China, the Chinese would retaliate with their own tariffs.

The Chinese knew exactly how to inflict economic and political pain. The United States was in kindergarten compared to China’s PhD. The Chinese knew which congressional districts produced what products, such as soybeans. They knew which swing districts were going to be important to maintain control of the House. They could target tariffs at products from those districts, or at a state level. The Chinese would target bourbon from McConnell’s Kentucky and dairy products from Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin.

Several days later Wilbur Ross laid out the reasoning on the importance of trade deficits. Echoing the president, Ross said trade deficits are the lodestar and were a mark of our economic instability and weakness. The president was focused on trade deficits, he reminded everyone, and they ought to be focused on them.



Thursday, October 11, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt four)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who was a commander in the Naval Reserves, tried several times to persuade Mattis to appear on Sunday talk shows on behalf of the administration. The answer was always no.

“Sean,” Mattis finally said, "I’ve killed people for a living. If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”



Wednesday, October 10, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt three)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

Graham had a contentious relationship with Trump during the primaries. One of 16 besides Trump running for the Republican nomination, Graham had not made it past the second tier. He’d called Trump a “jackass,” and in retaliation Trump gave out his cell phone number at a campaign rally in South Carolina, flooding his phone with so many calls that Graham destroyed it in a comic video. He endorsed Jeb Bush, contrasting him to Trump: Bush “hasn’t tried to get ahead in a contested primary by throwing dangerous rhetoric around.”

Priebus urged Graham to build a relationship with Trump. One of the selling points, he told Graham: “You’re a lot of fun. He needs fun people around him.”



Tuesday, October 9, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt two)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

As they sat down to dinner, Trump wanted to gossip about the news of the day. Senator John McCain, displaying his maverick credentials, had publicly criticized the U.S. military raid in Yemen.

Trump lashed out, suggesting that McCain had taken the coward’s way out of Vietnam as a prisoner of war. He said that as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War McCain, whose father was Admiral John McCain, the Pacific commander, had been offered and taken early release, leaving other POWs behind.

“No, Mr. President,” Mattis said quickly, “I think you’ve got it reversed.” McCain had turned down early release and been brutally tortured and held five years in the Hanoi Hilton.

“Oh, okay,” Trump said.



Monday, October 8, 2018

the last book I ever read (Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, excerpt one)

from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward:

Bannon was up next. He turned to what was driving the Tea Party, which didn’t like the elites. Populism was for the common man, knowing the system is rigged. It was against crony capitalism and insider deals which were bleeding the workers.

“I love that. That’s what I am,” Trump said, “a popularist.” He mangled the word.

“No, no,” Bannon said. “It’s populist.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Trump insisted. “A popularist.”



Friday, October 5, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, excerpt twelve)

from The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman:

St. Mary’s exerted a great influence on the tribe. By the time Rose attended, it had become less repressive. “We did do pow-wows and dances,” Rose said. “They saw that as social instead of spiritual.” But the school discouraged Native languages, ceremonies, and religion. Rose is still scarred from the school’s suppression of his Native identity.

“They used to tell us only humans had an immortal soul,” Rose said. “Nothing else in the natural world had a spirit. My mother would take my brother and me out to these ceremonies back in the woods. We’d learn from the elders that everything in the creation had a spirit. That was one of the first conflicts as a grade-school kid that I had trouble understanding.” The wolf, who the elders taught Rose was a blood brother to the Ojibwe, was soulless in Catholic theology. Rose sees a reason for that. “The wolf is always vilified in the Western tradition,” Rose said. In European literature, you can go all the way back to children’s fairy tales—‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ‘Three Little Pigs.’ Then you get into some of the adult tales, like the werewolves of Transylvania. The wolf is one of the most powerful symbols of wilderness, and that’s what they want to exploit as a resource. They can do that in good biblical conscience.”



Thursday, October 4, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, excerpt eleven)

from The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman:

Since Trump’s victory, Missouri, West Virginia, and Kentucky have become right-to-work, bringing the total to twenty-eight states, as conservatives continue to aggressively convert even more or them. And for good reason. A 2018 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that right-to-work laws decrease the Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5 percent, a decline that far exceeds the amount Clinton lost by in both Michigan and Wisconsin. The authors noted that right-to-work laws also affect Senate, House, governor, and state legislative races. The study underscored the importance of the anti-union strategy that began in Wisconsin with Act 10, which functioned as a right-to-work law for public-sector employees, going so far as to bar them from even choosing to have the union automatically collect dues. (They could, however, elect to have automatic donations for organizations like the United Way.) When the attacks on unions began in Wisconsin, many of the protesters noted that the first step the Nazi Party took to cement its hold on power was banning independent trade unions. The analogy seemed like gross hyperbole at the time, but with the rise of white nationalism since Trump’s election, the parallel has become more disturbing.

After the 2016 election, an underlying goal of attacking Wisconsin’s union movement—transforming the electorate—was articulated by Grover Norquist, the conservative anti-tax activist. “Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 did not lay the groundwork for Republican political dominance,” Norquist wrote. “But the March 2011 signing of Act 10, a dramatic reform of public-sector labor laws, by Wisconsin’s Scott Walker certainly did. To understate it: If Act 10 is enacted in a dozen more states, the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics. It’s that big a deal.”



Wednesday, October 3, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, excerpt ten)

from The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman:

It wasn’t the first time right-wing populism made inroads with Wisconsin’s white working class. In 1964, on a speaking trip to Madison, George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, learned he needed only sixty Wisconsin residents to act as delegates to get on the state’s ballot in a run for president. He quickly found them, filed his candidacy, and started his presidential campaign, focusing on Wisconsin and a few other states. Though he ran as a Democrat, Wallace’s hastily conceived presidential bid was meant to rebuke Lyndon Johnson for his support of civil rights legislation, and to push conservative economic policies—especially cutting the federal government, taxes, and business regulations. By the end of March, Wallace’s stops in Wisconsin had become more frequent, drawing enormous crowds—supporters and protesters alike. Bomb scares were common, and Wallace always traveled with armed guards.

In April 1964, Wallace’s Wisconsin campaign crested with an appearance at American Serb Memorial Hall, a community center on Milwaukee’s heavily Polish South Side. Milwaukee had been in the throes of a growing racial backlash for eight years, since a race-baiting whisper campaign suggested that Frank Zeidler, the city’s last Socialist mayor and an unapologetic advocate for civil rights, had paid for billboards across the South encouraging African Americans to move to Milwaukee. The smears led to death threats against Zeidler and his family and contributed to his decision not to seek reelection in 1960. Milwaukee’s next mayor, a machine politician named Henry Maier, stayed silent about Wallace’s visit. Despite Wallace’s fears about his reception in this urban ethnic enclave, hundreds of people waited outside the hall that night after the room had been filled to capacity.



Tuesday, October 2, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, excerpt nine)

from The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman:

The day after the paper printed the editorial, a Houston political activist named Vance Muse called Ruggles to ask permission for his organization, the Christian American Association, to pursue the proposal. Ruggles agreed and suggested to Muse that he call it a “Right to Work Amendment.” Muse, an avowed racist—he told a United States Senate committee in 1936, “I am a Southerner and for white supremacy”—held a special animus toward unions, which he believed fostered race-mixing. In Southern Exposure, a 1946 book about racism in the South, the muckraking journalist Stetson Kennedy quoted Muse’s pitch on the need for right-to-work, in which he said: “White women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes, whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

But Muse was also an effective fundraiser—he received support from General Motors and the du Pont family, among others—and lobbyist. In 1944, the Christian American Association sponsored the amendment that made Arkansas one of the country’s first right-to-work states. By 1947, ten more states, most of them in the South, had become right-to-work, embodying the growing national backlash against labor brought on by the Red Scare. That same year, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which undercut the Wagner Act by placing numerous restrictions on unions, among them a clause granting states the power to become right-to-work. Muse died in 1950, but his campaign had already been taken over by more mainstream proponents. In 1955, Fred Hartley, the former congressman from New Jersey who helped draft Taft-Hartley, founded the National Right to Work Committee. Three years later, Kansas legislators, with the enthusiastic support of the oil magnate Fred Koch, David and Charles Koch’s father, adopted a right-to-work amendment in their state.



Monday, October 1, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, excerpt eight)

from The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman:

Kohler refused to meet with the independent union, and tensions continued to mount until, on July 16, 1934, workers called a strike. Less than two weeks later, the company’s armed guards escorted a coal car through the picket lines, and a riot ensued. Guards shot two strikers in the back, killing them and wounding forty-seven others, many of them also shot in the back. The strike lasted seven years, until the United States entered World War II. In 1954, workers at Kohler had gone out on strike again, only returning to work eleven years later, when the strike finally ended. It was one of the most rancorous, and longest, strikes in American history.

The violence of the Kohler strike recalled an earlier Wisconsin labor battle, which built to a climax on May 5, 1886, when some 1,500 workers, most of them Polish immigrants, marched on the Rolling Mills iron plant. The Milwaukee Iron Company had built the plant and the neighborhood where its employees lived, and it demanded in returned that they work as many as sixteen hours a day, six days a week. A citywide strike for an eight-hour day and better working conditions had shut down every large factory in Milwaukee except Rolling Mills, and as the marchers began climbing the hill toward this last holdout, members of the Wisconsin National Guard fired down on them. They killed seven people, including a thirteen-year-old boy. Jeremiah Rusk, the governor of Wisconsin, had given the order. “I seen my duty and I done it,” he later said. At the time, he thought he might become president, but in the end he never ran. The event, largely forgotten until 1986, when the Wisconsin Labor History Society began holding an annual commemoration, became known as the Bay View Massacre.