Now, I have reached the age when I understand those faint smiles from my elders when I was a kid telling them about something I had read or seen on TV about history they had actually lived through.
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| Construction Workers Attack Anti War Demonstrators |
The most stark example of this, I have mentioned before, when I was 9 years old, having been raised on newsreels, Hollywood films and magazine articles about the great heroic war which had ended just two years before my birth and which still governed the consciousness of the generation which fought that war, and those of us who followed in it's immediate aftermath. They were still wrapping up the Nuremberg trials when I was born.
So, there I was standing by, watching a hired man wield a pick-axe in the side yard of our new home, bought with the GI bill (available to veterans only if they were White); he was hacking out a hole for a lavender tree. I was fascinated by this man because he really seemed to know his way around a pick-axe and he had fought in the war. In the Army, it turned out. I was a Marine Corps fan myself.
"Oh," I said in my 9 year old assurance--this war was something I thought I knew all about. "Well, you were fighting the Germans. They weren't as tough as the Japanese."
He never missed a beat, throwing in that pick-axe, never looked up at this 9 year old White boy, but said something in his deep Georgia drawl/Black dialect which I could not understand.
I asked my father what he had said, once we were back in the kitchen.
"He said," my father smiled. "They fought like Hell."
"Who?"
"The Germans," my father said. "The guys he was fighting in Europe. And they surely did."
Even today, on Youtube, if you are a World War Two buff, there are plenty of episodes comparing the utter suicidal zeal of the Japanese to the dogged efficiency of the Germans, but none of them know what that man knew.
Now, having lived through the 1960's and 1970's, I thought I knew the history of that time in a way which makes me laugh at what I see on Youtube and Twitter today.
But, it turns out, I didn't know as much as I thought I knew, and in some ways, I'm still like that 9 year old kid in a Washington, D.C. suburb who thought he knew something.
It turns out, that utter sleazeball, Machiavellian Richard Nixon was not the guy I thought he was, and the sainted Democrats who opposed him, were not so saintly after all.
Here was a man who championed national health care, a national minimum wage, started the Environmental Protection Agency and the on job safety agency, OSHA, and who forced through the integration of construction workers and trade craft labor unions which were, when he took office almost entirely White, a "Father/son" monopoly.
As Melvin Urofsky details in his "Affirmative Action Puzzle," Nixon was faced with the explosion of rioting in inner cities and his advisers noted that one reason Blacks had no compunction about burning down the ghettoes they lived in was they had no stake in those neighborhoods, nothing to lose.
Why was this?
They were shut out of any but the most menial jobs by all white labor unions which controlled construction trades, plumbing, HVAC, electricians and carpenters. "I never knew anyone who wanted Niggers in our union," George Meaney, the head of the AFL told Nixon's secretary of Labor.
Nixon told his secretary, George Shultz, to push through a quota system to integrate the trade unions.
Some have argued Nixon did this cynically, just as he had a Southern Strategy to win Dixiecrats to the Republican Party. Lincoln was a Republican and so that name became an anathema in the South, but when Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act, old Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond, switched parties to the Republicans, who, under Nixon, promised to save Jim Crow and segregation in the South.
But the labor unions had always been solidly Democratic. Labor and minorities got out the vote for Democrats.
Labor, however, in the construction trades, was White. Go through the names of the unions' rosters and you saw Polish, Irish, but no Blacks. You got your job and your place in the union because your father had his, and Blacks had no place.
The idea that the playing field be "leveled" was insufficient, because there were no exams to get into labor unions. So Nixon agreed the only thing to do was to assure an outcome, not to talk about a process. If only 1% of the steamfitters union was Hispanic, Black or Asian, and collectively these groups accounted for 14% of the population, then you had to have 14% minorities in the unions building the buildings for any contract with the government. He wasn't going to lose votes for Republicans in the labor unions, but he might get some from minorities. He effectively split the Labor/Black coalition, which had always managed to live together when there was no expectation Blacks would ever challenge the stranglehold Whites had on the trades.
Democrats had managed to hold together a fractious coalition by winking at the exclusionary practices of some of its adherents: Labor was more Archie Bunker than Tom Hayden.
Kennedy had such a tenuous hold on his office, he could not afford to offend the racists of the Deep South and he only acted when the TV images of Southern racism became so appalling they could not be ignored.
Nixon felt no such constraints. He became a more liberal President than Kennedy ever had been. It took a Nixon to go to China, and also to affirmative action, guaranteed income, national healthcare, and environmental protection.
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