A Mighty Story Retold
Geltman, Emanuel
TOIL AND TROUBLE: A History of American Labor, by Thomas R. Brooks; foreword by A. H. Raskin. New York: Delacorte. xx + 800p. $6.00. There are Civil War buffs who read and reread the chronicles...
...The terror they face hits with a computer instead of a fist— and may ultimately hurt more...
...But make no mistake about it: there will still be simple, "classic" beatings, and workers, white and black, will be the victims...
...But it is good to have a book which situates our present dilemma in the rich fabric of our past...
...Sad to say, it is to be supposed that some of the people administering the beating may be union men, and the victims could be men wanting to be union men...
...They pinned my arms and shot short jabs to my face...
...Tell their story a hundred or a thousand times, and it is always fresh and inspiring...
...If Walter Reuther is today "accepted" by the auto magnates, it is worth recalling that just 28 years ago, at the overpass near the River Rouge, "Seven times they [Ford goons] raised me off the concrete and threw me down on it...
...There are labor buffs—and I am one—for whom Antietam was never as searing as Harlan County, which is merely a statement of fact and not meant to belittle the one or exaggerate the historic scale of the other...
...How much toil and trouble went into building the huge (perhaps paunchy, but still troubled) labor giant we know...
...I grabbed the railing and they wrenched me loose...
...More sophisticated readers may consider this a flaw, but I do not...
...I was punched and dragged by my feet to the stairway...
...Mighty legends are like that, and the best of them are based in fact—as this one is...
...He has used his journalistic skills to good advantage in covering the entire range of American labor history from its beginnings to the problems and perplexities of Negro organization and automation today...
...Thomas Brooks has charted no new paths in labor history or interpretation...
...I know of no general labor history so accessible to the novice yet sufficiently compelling to hold the attention of the expert...
...Thomas Brooks observes, "The beating did not do a bit of good...
...some will say too much so...
...What began in feeble skirmishes for goals that seem modest now, and was nurtured in a sacrificing struggle, became the established and reasonably affluent union movement of today...
...Then they kicked me down the other flight of steps until I found myself on the ground where I was beaten and kicked...
...The UAW came back again and again...
...There are minor flaws (Farrell Dobbs was not the "head of the tiny Socialist Workers Party" in 1934), but they do not detract at all from a work that is extraordinary for compressing so vast a subject into a manageable and readable book...
...The cordwainers, the Knights, the Homestead strikers, the sit-in auto workers are the heroes I've lived with...
...The tone is sympathetic and optimistic...
...Others have been, and will be, writing about these problems, and so they should...
...It rather assumes the role, while realistically contemplating the difficulties...
...There is little here about the current anxieties on the role of the labor movement...
...And we will have to overcome all of this too...
...There are Civil War buffs who read and reread the chronicles of that immensely important time...
...I was thrown down the first flight of iron steps...
...It is unlikely that the UAW members in Detroit need worry about the terror of a beating from company hoodlums...
...It seems incredible that men and women had to give their lives to win a ten-hour day, or the right to strike, or union recognition—and more incredible that some of the same battles, though in different locations or contexts, have still to be fought over and over...
...He has, however, presented an able and well-written guide...
Vol. 12 • April 1965 • No. 2
