Worrying about education on Labor Day, with good reason — I get e-mail from the woman who would make a great lieutenant governor in Texas:
Queridos Amigos,
As you light up the grill and enjoy some well-deserved relaxation with family and friends, I hope you will take a moment to reflect on a question I like to ask myself every Labor Day.
We forget how indebted we are to a brave group of forgotten heroes, all of who were labeled troublemakers in their day. They bucked the status quo, stepping out of line to stand up for the dignity of every human being. Their bravery was often met with a baton, or the butt of a pistol, but they showed that the human spirit can not be silenced.
Their names seldom make the history books, but we owe these troublemakers for many of the blessings we take for granted today —including the 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, vacations, and child labor laws.
This past Saturday a group of over 30 volunteers joined my campaign team to go door-to-door in Brownsville, Texas. I want to send a special thanks to County Commissioners John Wood and Sophia Benavides, as well as Jared Hockema, the Vice Chair of the Cameron County Democratic Party for helping inspire the crowd.
Stirring up their own brand of trouble, they got South Texas parents to sign the “Linda Chavez Thompson Today, Tomorrow and November 2nd Pledge” — pledging to do more to help kids succeed in school, to stand up for candidates who support education, and pledging to show up a the polls on November 2nd.
Today millions of jobs are being created in science, technology, engineering and math. But instead of investing in education so our kids can compete for these jobs, Rick Perry and David Dewhurst and have led the Texas economy to the greatest share of minimum wage jobs.
We can do better. And in real conversations in Brownsville, Texas, parents and grandparents told us time and again they want more for their kids.
Teachers make great trouble, as everyone knows — which is why Socrates was condemned to death, why Booker T. Washington is so feared, and why the world’s greatest democrats always support education — like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, to mention a few education-supporting presidents.
Strike a blow against ignorance: Give a few bucks to Chavez-Thompson’s campaign, or sign up to help out if you live in Texas.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s Labor Day 2010 in the United States, a federal holiday, and one of those days Americans are urged to fly the U.S. flag.
The poster was issued by the Office of War Information in 1942, in full color. A black-and-white version at the Library of Congress provides a few details:
Labor Day poster. Labor Day poster distributed to war plants and labor organizations. The original is twenty-eight and one-half inches by forty inches and is printed in full color. It was designed by the Office of War Information (OWI) from a photograph especially arranged by Anton Bruehl, well-known photographer. Copies may be obtained by writing the Distribution Section, Office of War Information
It wasn’t in the textbooks before, and after the Texas State Soviet of Education finished work on new social studies standards last month, the Great Cowboy Strike of 1883 remains a topic Texas students probably won’t learn.
In the history of labor in the U.S., the common story leaves out most of the great foment that actually drove progressive politics between, say, 1865 and 1920. Union organization attempts, and other actions by workers to get better work hours and work conditions, just get left behind.
Then there is the sheer incongruity of the idea. A cowboy union? Modern cowboys tend toward conservative politics. Conservatives like to think of cowboys as solitary entrepreneurs, and not as workers in a larger organization that is, in fact, a corporation, where workers might have a few grievances about the fit of the stirrups, the padding of the saddle, the coarseness of the rope, the chafing of the chaps, the quality of the chuck, or the very real dangers and hardships of simply doing a cowboy’s job well.
Until today, I’d not heard of the Great Cowboy Strike of 1883.
COWBOY STRIKE OF 1883. In the two decades after the Civil War the open-range cattle industry dominated the Great Plains, then died and was replaced by closed-range ranching and stock farming. In West Texas during the 1880s new owners, representing eastern and European investment companies, gained control of the ranching industry and brought with them innovations threatening to many ranchhands. Previously, cowboys could take part of their pay in calves, brand mavericks, and even run small herds on their employers’ land. New ranch owners, interested in expanding their holdings and increasing their profits, insisted that the hands work only for wages and claimed mavericks as company property. The work was seasonal. It required long hours and many skills, was dangerous, and paid only an average of forty dollars a month. The ranch owners’ innovations, along with the nature of the work, gave rise to discontent.
In 1883 a group of cowboys began a 2½-month strike against five ranches, the LIT, the LX, the LS, the LE, and the T Anchor,qqv which they believed were controlled by corporations or individuals interested in ranching only as a speculative venture for quick profit. In late February or early March of 1883 crews from the LIT, the LS, and the LX drew up an ultimatum demanding higher wages and submitted it to the ranch owners. Twenty-four men signed it and set March 31 as their strike date. The original organizers of the strike, led by Tom Harris of the LS, established a small strike fund and attempted, with limited success, to persuade all the cowboys in the area of the five ranches to honor the strike. Reports on the number of people involved in the strike ranged from thirty to 325. Actually the number changed as men joined and deserted the walkout.
It was the wrong time to strike. With a full month remaining before the spring roundup, ranchers had plenty of time to hire scabs and strikebreakers, to replace the striking cowboys. Some ranches increased wages, but most of them fired the strikers and made the strikers crawl back to beg for jobs. Santayana’s Ghost is tapping at the chalk board about the potential lessons there. (You should read the whole article at TSHA’s site.)
It didn’t help that the striking cowboys didn’t have a very large strike fund, nor that they drank a lot of the strike fund up prematurely.
The Great Cowboy Strike, unimpressive as it was, is part of a larger story about labor organizing and progressive politics especially outside the cities in that larger Progressive Era, from the Civil War to just after World War I. It involves large corporations running the ranches — often foreign corporations with odd ideas of how to raise cattle, and often with absentee ownership who hired bad managers. The strike talks about how working people were abused in that era, even the supremely independent and uniquely skilled cowboy. It offers wonderful opportunities to improve our telling the story of this nation, don’t you think?
More than just as tribute to the victims, more than just a disaster story, the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire, and the following events including the trial of the company owners, lay out issues students can see clearly. I think the event is extremely well documented and adapted for student projects. In general classroom use, however, the event lays a foundation for student understanding.
A couple of good websites crossed my browser recently, and I hope you know of them.
Cartoon about 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New York Evening Journal, March 31, 1911
Events around the fire illuminate so much of American history, and of government (which Texas students take in their senior year):
Labor issues are obvious to us; the incident provides a dramatic backdrop for the explanation of what unions sought, why workers joined unions, and a sterling example of a company’s clumsy and destructive resistance to resolving the workers’ issues.
How many Progressive Era principles were advanced as a result of the aftermath of the fire, and the trial?
Effective municipal government, responsive to voters and public opinion, can be discerned in the actions of the City of New York in new fire codes, and action of other governments is clear in the changes to labor laws that resulted.
The case provides a dramatic introduction to the workings and, sometimes, misfirings of the justice system.
With the writings from the Cornell site, students can climb into the events and put themselves on the site, in the courtroom, and in the minds of the people involved.
Newspaper clippings from the period demonstrate the lurid nature of stories, used to sell newspapers — a working example of yellow journalism.
Newspapers also provide a glimpse into the workings of the Muckrakers, in the editorial calls for reform.
Overall, the stories, the photos, the cartoons, demonstrate the workings of the mass culture mechanisms of the time.
Use the sites in good education, and good health.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.
In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.
On September 5, 1882, some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City to participate in America’s first Labor Day parade. After marching from City Hall to Union Square, the workers and their families gathered in Reservoir Park for a picnic, concert, and speeches. This first Labor Day celebration was initiated by Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labor union leader who a year earlier cofounded the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a precursor of the American Federation of Labor.
McGuire had proposed his idea for a holiday honoring American workers at a labor meeting in early 1882. New York’s Central Labor Union quickly approved his proposal and began planning events for the second Tuesday in September. McGuire had suggested a September date in order to provide a break during the long stretch between Independence Day and Thanksgiving. While the first Labor Day was held on a Tuesday, the holiday was soon moved to the first Monday in September, the date we continue to honor.
We’re glad to have the day off. Working people made this nation, and this world, what it is today. We should honor them every day — take a few minutes today, give honor to workers. Tomorrow, it’s back to work.
A hard look shows it’s not just the Deliverance-style local politics at the State Board of Education on science standards. Texas has trouble in a lot of areas.
For example, imagine a hurricane wiped out the town where one of the state’s major medical schools resides, and in the aftermath, rather than working to preserve the jobs of professors who agree to come back to the damaged buildings and storm-wracked town, the university uses the troubles as an excuse to get rid of faculty — not bad faculty, necessarily, just faculty the administration doesn’t like, or doesn’t know, or just for the heck of it.
No, Obama didn’t change his mind. He’s changing the way government does business — putting government on a more solidly-based, business-like model for performance, according to at least one observer. That’s the shift discussed.
And it’s about time, I say.
Max Stier’s commentary on the Fed Page of the Washington Postquickly lays out the case that Obama’s making big changes. Copy it for students in your government classes (or history classes, if you’re studying the presidency in any depth). Stier wrote:
There are some fundamental reasons why our federal government’s operational health has been allowed to steadily deteriorate. It’s hard to change what you don’t measure, and our government operates in an environment with very few meaningful and useful measurements for performance. Perhaps more significantly, it is run by short-term political leadership that has little incentive to focus on long-term issues.
A typical presidential appointee stays in government for roughly two years and is rewarded for crisis management and scoring policy wins. These individuals are highly unlikely to spend significant energy on management issues, when the benefits of such an investment won’t be seen until after they are long gone.
(According to the Post, “Max Stier is president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a group that seeks to revitalize the federal government.” I don’t know of him otherwise.)
Political appointees can be good, but too many have not been over the past 25 years. A bad enough political appointee can frustrate even the most adept, dedicated-to-the-people’s-business career federal service employees, and frustrate the law and good management of agencies.
Let’s wish them all good luck.
Potential questions to follow-up this article in discussions:
Constitution: Under the Constitution, who specifically is charged with managing the federal agencies, the “federal bureaucracy? What is that charge, in the Constitution?
Constitution, politics: What is the role of Congress in managing the federal bureaucracy?
Evaluating information sources: Do some research on the internet. Is Max Stier a credible source of information on managing federal agencies? Why, or why not? Who provides an opposing view to Stier’s? Are they credible? Why or why not?
Evaluating information sources: Is the Fed Page of the Washington Post a good source of information about the federal bureaucracy? (Students may want to investigate columnists and features at this site; the Fed Page was started as a one-page feature of the newspaper in the early 1980s, covering for the public issues that tended to slip through the cracks of other news coverage, but which were very important to the vast army of federal employees and federal policy wonks in Washington.) What other sources might be expected? What other sources are there? (Federal News Radio is another site that focuses on the functions of the federal agencies — Mike Causey started out writing the column on the bureaucracy in the Washington Post; this is an AM radio station dedicated to covering federal functions in the federal city. Other sources should include National Journal, and Congressional Quarterly, especially if you have those publications in your school library).
History, maybe a compare and contrast question: How has the federal bureaucracy changed over time? Compare the size, scope and people employed by the federal government under the administrations of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, James Garfield, William McKinley, Dwight Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton. What trends become clear? What major changes have occurred (civil service protection, for example)?
Analysis: How does the transition process from one president to the next affect federal employees and the operation of government?
Analysis: How does the transition of President Barack Obama compare with past transitions — especially that of President Franklin Roosevelt, who also faced a tough economic crisis, or Ronald Reagan, whose transition signalled a major shift in government emphasis and operation?
What other questions did your students find in this article? Comments are open.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Schools and teachers in Dallas still scramble to deal with the layoff of just over a thousand, including several hundred teachers. At our school, schedule changes will be effective Monday, we hope. Hundreds of students will have new schedules; in one case, we’re abandoning one elective entirely.
Teachers, staff and administration are shaken at best, bitter in worse cases, struggling to catch up everywhere.
About a dozen other teachers now have dropped by my classroom, asking about comparisons to corporate layoffs, an area where I have more experience almost all on the survivor side. If I had to typify their reactions, I’d say the corps of teachers in Dallas is just scared.
Other economic stories don’t help. Supplemental retirement funds have been hammered by Wall Street’s woes. I hear teachers saying they had hoped to retire in a year or two, but can’t now, especially with a child or grandchild in college and tuition costs rising.
Also, locally, Dallas is supposed to lose a score of Starbucks locations (600 across Texas). The first to close was the closest to Molina High School, last spring. Last night Starbucks shuttered the first location south of the Trinity River in Dallas, a partnership with Magic Johnson, on Camp Wisdom Road. It’s about four miles from here, a site I visited often when it first opened, but lately only when I get the tires rotated at the shop across the street.
Both of my parents lived through the Great Depression. My mother graduated from Salt Lake City’s West High in 1932, and plunged into the grim job market. She said that, on the farm, they had little awareness of the depression. On farms in the late 1920s, everyone was poor. Off the farm, things were a lot worse.
My father spoke about catching the first job that comes along. His series of jobs in the Depression came from big businesses collapsing about as often as he got a better job from jumping. He said it was possible to stay in employment, but once one got knocked out of the employment market, it was very difficult to get back in. He was happy to have the skills to get a job behind a drugstore or cigar store “fountain.”
What was the difference between a depression and a recession? They couldn’t say.
Tuesday I dropped into our remaining local Starbucks (may it remain open) for the weekly purchase of the New York Times featuring the science section. The woman barista noted my identification badge. “My husband was just fired from that school,” she said.
I said I was sorry, I said we miss him badly (true in all cases). I told her I hope he finds something soon.
Then I had to leave fast.
She’s working in a location condemned to close. He’s just been laid off. I didn’t ask about children.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
My father tended to vote Republican, too. For the first nine years of my life he remained a small business owner, in Burley, Idaho. When the workers at J. R. Simplot went out on strike one November (1961 as I recall, but I was a child), it doomed several furniture stores in and around Cassia County, and my parents’ was just one. For the rest of my life my father worked for other people, until he retired.
Still he voted Republican. He even had a union card, from the old plumbers and pipefitters union in Los Angeles, from when he worked on Liberty Ships during World War II. I never could figure it.
I do recall the stern lecture I got when I went to the Democrats’ mass meeting my first election, and then when I got elected as a delegate for McGovern and — the only one in my town, as I recall — I put up the McGovern bumpersticker (McGovern finished third in parts of Utah County, behind the American Party candidate). My father told me that no one in the family had ever voted Democratic before.
It was a great comic scene, somthing right out of Woody Allen. My father lecturing me about how voting Republican was rather a family duty, with my mother behind him shaking her head “no,” and mouthing “Don’t believe him. Not true. No.”
The only president I ever smuggled him in to see was Jimmy Carter. Carter showed up in Salt Lake City, and spoke in the Latter-day Saints’ Tabernacle on Temple Square, as I recall. I wangled the tickets, got Dad there and sat with him. Better than Christmas. Almost as good as when we watched Henry Mancini from nearly the same seats.
I don’t really know how my father would vote in this election, though. He was nervous about the civil rights campaigns, about Martin Luther King, Jr. He’d tell the stories about why he had problems with unions, about how the unions kept him from promoting African Americans he’d hire at United Cigar Stores in Los Angeles (before the Liberty Ship gig). And he’d say that he wouldn’t have any problem voting for a black man who had a history of accomplishment in areas outside of civil rights, too. He said he could vote for a black man from Harvard, someone who had the educational background of Kennedy, though he voted for Nixon against Kennedy (and Nixon twice more). Barack Obama might be the guy my father would have voted for.
Life sometimes imitates Thomas Kuhn’s observations about scientific revolutions. Sometimes the children have to go vote the interests of the parents, especially when the parents don’t, or won’t.
My father voted against Lyndon Johnson, too — twice. Johnson’s reforms of Social Security, designed to keep American senior citizens out of the county poor houses, kept my father out of poverty after he finally retired (at 75? 77?). The Republican businessmen he’d put his faith in managed to squander the pension funds he might have had, or cheat him out of the share of the business that would have kept him from having to rely on Social Security. My father put his faith in Republicans, but Lyndon Johnson rescued him.
I don’t know this “Joe the plumber.” I knew my father, the former plumber and pipefitter, the erstwhile small business owner, the man who worked from the time he was 14 to help his family get enough education to get out of poverty, first his sisters in college, then his own family. He never made enough to benefit from tax cuts for the rich. My father was real, and deserved better.
Labor Day, 2008 — in addition to honoring America’s working people, especially unionized working people, Labor Day is the traditional start of the presidential campaign in presidential election years.
What if we applied the false start rules the Olympics uses to presidential campaigns?
The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.
In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.
On September 5, 1882, some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City to participate in America’s first Labor Day parade. After marching from City Hall to Union Square, the workers and their families gathered in Reservoir Park for a picnic, concert, and speeches. This first Labor Day celebration was initiated by Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labor union leader who a year earlier cofounded the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a precursor of the American Federation of Labor.
McGuire had proposed his idea for a holiday honoring American workers at a labor meeting in early 1882. New York’s Central Labor Union quickly approved his proposal and began planning events for the second Tuesday in September. McGuire had suggested a September date in order to provide a break during the long stretch between Independence Day and Thanksgiving. While the first Labor Day was held on a Tuesday, the holiday was soon moved to the first Monday in September, the date we continue to honor.
We’re off to a barbecue-style picnic at the in-laws. Kenny is down from the University of Texas at Dallas, James still hasn’t begun classes at Lawrence University (which is too far to come from for dinner, anyway). Family usually gets precedence in this house, so we miss the IBEW, UAW, and other union picnics we get invited to here.
We’re glad to have the day off. Working people made this nation, and this world, what it is today. We should honor them every day — take a few minutes today, give honor to workers. Tomorrow, it’s back to work.
If a guy beats someone to death, it’s murder, right? And so the nation’s labor laws hold an employer liable for the death of a worker when unsafe working conditions caused the death.
But what if the worker doesn’t die? What if the worker only loses his arms, or legs, or arms and legs?
No death, no crime, U.S. law says.
What if the employer poisons the worker with cyanide that eats away the worker’s brain?
No death, no crime, U.S. law says.
My colleagues and I were shocked to learn that an employer who breaks the nation’s worker-safety laws can be charged with a crime only if a worker dies. Even then, the crime is a lowly Class B misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months in prison. (About 6,000 workers are killed on the job each year, many in cases where the deaths could have been prevented if their employers followed the law.) Employers who maim their workers face, at worst, a maximum civil penalty of $70,000 for each violation.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Miners and their children celebrate Labor Day, Littleton, Colorado, 1940 – Library of Congress
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 