A Crime to Fit the Punishment

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3140/a_crime_to_fit_the_punishment/

Features > April 27, 2007
A Crime to Fit the Punishment
By Christopher Capozzola

Unless you attended its 10-week run at New York City’s Grand Theatre in 1954, you missed Salt of the Earth the first time around. In the decades since, director Herbert Biberman’s dramatic account of the real-life strike by the men and women of a Mexican-American mining community has taken on a mythic status among cultural feminists, interracial unionists and indie film buffs. In most accounts, the movie itself is the main character. A heroic one at that: Producer Paul Jarrico called it “our chance to really say something.” Its blacklisted creators, he boasted, had finally committed “a crime to fit the punishment.”

In On Strike and on Film, historian Ellen Baker explores Salt of the Earth, but shifts the focus from crimes to labors: industrial work, political work, cultural work. She begins by charting the decades-long battles of miners in Grant County, N.M., who dug copper, lead and zinc out of one of capitalism’s most unforgiving corners. In the rural Southwest, struggles over class and power were always about race, too. The mining company Empire Zinc presided over a system of employment that sorted “American” and “Mexican” employees into two tiers of worker rights and housed their families in two kinds of company housing.

For workers like José Martinez, who started at Empire Zinc as a track laborer in 1918 and retired in 1953 from the same job at the bottom of the pay scale, it might have seemed like things would never change. But as Baker shows, in the 1930s the ground began to move. The Depression shut down some of the mines for years at a stretch, devastating nearby communities. “Let’s start up again clean”—without union labor—muttered the vice president of another closed mine; when it reopened in 1937, even the town’s leftist barber found himself blacklisted. But the Depression also created grassroots demands for action. Community relief work brought the federal government into company towns where bosses had never before answered to anyone. And there was a new actor on the stage, with a mouthful of a name: the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. After America entered World War II, workers wielded new weapons: patriotic rhetoric, military demands for copper and zinc, and the relative strength that came with wartime labor shortages.


Salt of the Earth defied '50s black listings to chronicle a labor strike in a Mexican-American mining town

Meanwhile, in California the cultural workers who made up the Hollywood chapter of the Communist Party gathered for beachfront struggle sessions. They were, as Baker shows, the party’s elite: cultivated and coddled, absolved even of the dreary task of selling the Daily Worker from soapboxes. Although the industry’s structure and its executives’ politics foreclosed any truly transformative possibilities, leftist filmmakers slowly opened opportunities.

But if New Mexican copper miners and progressive filmmakers emerged from the war with a new sense of power, the Cold War, as Baker shows, brought quick retraction. Loyalty oath requirements led to lost jobs. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenas appeared in Hollywood mailboxes. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act announced that the government would not hear complaints from unions that couldn’t certify their members weren’t communists; three years later the CIO purged Mine-Mill, “honeycombed” with subversion. “Mine-Mill was a beleaguered union in 1950,” writes Baker, “cast outside the pale of the mainstream labor movement that it had helped build.” On top of it all, changes in global metal markets made mining jobs scarce throughout Grant County. When the men of Local 890 walked off the job on Oct. 17, 1950, they were striking not only for better wages, but against America’s all-out assault on their union.

It was an ugly strike, with racist threats, blacklists and fisticuffs. Mine-Mill was a fighting man’s union, and fought back hard. Not only with the men of its rank and file, but—as eviction notices appeared on the doors of company-owned housing and the grocery store closed its credit books—with the energy of whole families. Finally, on June 12, 1951, came an injunction forbidding striking miners from returning to the picket line the next day. At the union meeting hall that night, as miners’ wives served coffee, the men of Local 890 considered their equally unappealing options: Give up the strike or go to jail. Either way, the strike was lost.

FULL article at link.