A Worker Looks At Memorial Day...

My godfather was an American ambulance driver during the First World War. I have a few letters that he saved from the mother of a young soldier who died in his care during that war. She lived in Indiana and apparently wanted some details on how her son had died. The young soldier was drinking tea at a campfire on a rainy and cold day when a shell hit, another victim of that extended royal family feud we call World War One. He was her only son and she wrote almost poetically of her loss.

An uncle of mine was killed during the so-called Battle of the Bulge and is buried in Belgium. His grave was tended for many years by an anti-fascist Belgian couple who saw doing that as their duty. Somehow our families connected briefly. There are only a couple of people still living who remember him. My father was nearly killed in that war as well.

My father and my uncle grew up in the hard coal region of Pennsylvania and carried with them into the Army the community and work ethic of their time and place: no one worked alone, no one died alone if that could be helped and everyone had some responsibility for the group and a place in the group.

Tony Herbert, who served as a highly decorated Marine in both Korea and Vietnam, also came from a Pennsylvania mining family and wrote about this in his book Soldier. Herbert credits his own coal mining background in part for his later heroism. His book can be read as an insider's account of what happens to the military when capitalist logic takes over. I believe that Herbert was framed and defamed by people in the Nixon administration or in the media when he came forward with accounts of the Phoenix Program and war atrocities in Vietnam.

I don't have a picture of my uncle--I'm not sure that anyone does now. Way back in the hills of Pennsylvania's anthracite region there is a little cemetery with a memorial for him. The picture on the stone there shows a smiling young man, dark and muscular, in a suit that doesn't quite fit. The closest photo I can come up with is of the mine the family worked in. People also died for America in that mine.

Without romanticizing their times or consciousness, it is important to remember that masses of Americans went to war during the Second World War as anti-fascists and because their experiences during the 1930s had instilled in them an idea or instinct that was essentially democratic and progressive. My father, and many more like him, certainly returned from the war with a heightened sense of equality and entitlement: they had beaten back fascism and expected good jobs, education, equality, peace and some new level of prosperity. It took the cold war and the red scare, the purge of progressives under McCarthy, two recessions, the Korean misadventure, a short-lived strike wave stopped dead by sell-out union leaders and a massive propaganda campaign by government and industry to put them back in their place. Even still, a new civil rights movement emerged to challenge what looked like a racist social consensus and many of the leaders of that movement were veterans, union activists and leftists.

The anti-fascist front that existed in the US during the Second World War brought many key unions into cooperation with the government. This cooperation gave people a reasonable hope that the New Deal could continue on and be extended after the war. My parents were among the millions of people who shared this hope. Instead, eleven of the best unions which took leadership during the war years were purged by CIO as part of the red scare and as a precondition for a weak "labor unity" that survived until recently. Among the victims of this purge were also thousands war heroes and at least three veterans' organizations--the Union of New York Veterans, Veterans Against Discrimination (part of the Civil Rights Congress) and the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America. (The relatively liberal American Veterans Committee, formed during the war, was also attacked during the postwar red scare but managed to survive until recently.)

Patriotism for us remains an ambiguous legacy. We have much to be proud of as we reflect upon what it means to be a working class American. This country has a set of revolutionary traditions extending back to its founding days which still affect us today. This may have found its best expression in the book Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell. Had the above-mentioned veterans' organizations and unions survived the red scare intact we would be telling a much different story and have a different legacy and context to locate ourselves within. On the other hand, we look with dismay on a country built from conquest and by slave and bonded labor which has yet to fulfill its republican and democratic promises of liberty, life, the pursuit of happiness and equality for all. There are unfinished American tasks within reach.