ckaihatsu
20th October 2016, 13:30
Sunday Loyola film series:US Working Class History films
Sundays, 2pm
Loyola University (downtown) Corboy Law Center, room 301, 25 E. Pearson Street, Chicago (one block north of Chicago & State Red line L stop)
Sunday October 23 The Occupation of the American Mind:
Israel’s Public Relations War in the US 2016 85 min
Israel's ongoing military occupation of Palestine and its repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world — except the United States. The Occupation of the American Mind takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S. Narrated by Roger Waters and featuring leading observers of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the film explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel's favor. The Occupation of the American Mind provides a sweeping analysis of Israel's decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people — a battle that has only intensified over the past few years in the face of widening international condemnation of Israel's increasingly right-wing policies.
Sunday October 30 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation 1984 30 min
10 Days That Changed America: The Homestead Strike 2006 44min
1877: The Grand Army of Starvation 1984 30 min
A major depression, worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, shook the US from 1873-1878. By the US centenary, a nationwide working class rebellion brought the country to a standstill in the summer of 1877. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked out, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the excesses of the railroad companies and the misery of a four-year economic depression. At this time, the power and control of the railroad companies played the same role as steel, auto and oil corporations later played. Police, state militia, and finally federal troops were used for the first time to crush the workers uprising, shooting down unarmed strikers and allies, leaving more than one hundred dead and thousands injured. The Great Uprising inaugurated a new era of conflict over the meaning of America in the industrial age. As a result the railway unions were destroyed.
"To see this film is to enter a world of marvelous colors and remarkable drawings . . . Then you realize that the most violent incident in American labor history, and one of the most important ever, has just been carefully explained. . . . Don't go see 1877 because you think you need a history lesson . . . Go because you want to see what a vanished industrial world looks like, and how a revolutionary moment in America feels." Paul Buhle, The Guardian
https://ashp.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/1877-viewersguide.pdf
10 Days That Changed America: The Homestead Strike 2006 44min
With Henry Clay Frick as the bad cop, steelmaster Andrew Carnegie sought to oust the union from his recently acquired Homestead Works. In July 1892, Frick locked the union out, then sent two barges of armed Pinkerton "detectives" to guard the mill so scabs could tend its furnaces. The locals met the barges with gunfire, taking the Pinkertons prisoner. The uprising drew international media attention, but was soon crushed with the aid of the state militia. Labor leaders were prosecuted, harassed, ruined. Unions were barred from the steel industry for the next 40 years.
With a script penned by Jack Youngelson, director/producer Rory Kennedy doesn't just lay this history bare; she flays the skin from the industrialist's rotting bones. The documentary notes the growing disparities between rich and poor at the time, and highlights dreary working and living conditions. (Arguably, it makes too much of these: Local labor historian Charlie McCollester says that before the strike, Homestead was a worker's paradise compared to other company towns. Frick's machinations are what turned it into a Hobbesian nightmare.)
The documentary's half-dozen academics side with the workers, and even Frick's descendent, Martha Frick Sanger, doesn't sound terribly sympathetic to her great-grandfather's cause. By the end of the documentary's 45 minutes, I found myself feeling sorry for Carnegie. Almost.
Sadly, while the film was made with help from the local Steel Industry Heritage Corporation, little of it was shot here. (Having outsourced its steel jobs and replaced them with shopping, Homestead must outsource much of its heritage too.) The film is also plagued by modern film re-enactments, the curse of many History Channel productions. Still, by shooting the "historic" footage on grainy Super-8 film, Kennedy kept it from looking too much like a movie in social-studies class. She also breathes new life into old photos: Computer effects turn archival photographs into 3-D dioramas, which literally draw the viewer inside Homestead's mills and working-class ghettos.
Indeed, Kennedy and Youngelson's most impressive accomplishment is keeping the material fresh, even for those who've heard it before. What was at stake in Homestead wasn't just wages, the film argues: It was the idea that workers should have an equity stake in, and be consulted about, their employer's decisions. As one of the documentary's talking heads puts it, the workers believed "you owned your job" and that "a right to it seemed fundamental."
Such ideas are "unfathomable to us today," he adds. And that, as this forceful, well-made documentary concludes, may be the measure of what we lost in 1892.
Sunday November 6 Tsar to Lenin 1937 63 min Lenin: Leader of the Bolshevik Revolution 1970 38 min James Cameron
Tsar to Lenin a remarkable cinematic account of the events leading up to the formation of the Soviet Union.
Max Eastman’s discusses the autocratic nature of Tsar Nicholas II and the royal family’s disinterest in the struggles of the poor and working class in Russia. They were in charge and paid little mind to the struggles of the masses.
This is truly one of the great historical films of the 20th century. This footage is priceless.
Vladimir Lenin is shown multiple times. “He was free of any trace of greed or personal ambition,” Eastman says. “He devoted every working hour of his life to the cause of liberating the toiling of the whole world from capitalist exploitation. His mind was as flexible as his purpose was fixed.”
“Russia belongs to the workers and peasants. All power to the soviet,” narrates Eastman, as images of a fiery Lenin is featured, surrounded by his comrades.
Speaking quite passionately about Lenin’s communist goals, Eastman says of V.I. Lenin: “He never lost faith in the goal of a liberated humanity. Living without war, without nationalism, without class exploitation. In friendliness and decent justice throughout the earth.”
Sunday November 13 10,000 Black Men Named George [A. Philip Randolph and the Sleeping Car Porters] 2002 89 min
Union activist A. Philip Randolph’s work to organize the Black porters of the Pullman Rail Company in the 1920s. This is the powerful story of the first Black-controlled union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
When the Great Depression struck America in the 1920s finding work was hard, but if you were poor and black it was virtually impossible. Working as a porter for the Pullman Rail Company was an option, but it meant taking home a third as much as white employees and working some days for free. You could forget about being called by your real name — all Black porters were simply called “George” after George Pullman.
Asa Philip Randolph, a black journalist and socialist trying to establish a voice for these forgotten workers, agrees to fight for the Pullman porters’ cause and form the first black union in America. Livelihoods and lives would be put at risk in the attempt to gain 10,000 signatures of the men known only as “George.” This is the true story of how a courageous leader came to be known as “the most dangerous man in America.”
Sunday November 20 An Injury to One [The Story of the Wobbly Frank Little] 2002 53min Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman 2007 24 min
AN INJURY TO ONE chronicles the mysterious death of Wobbly organizer Frank Little, a story whose grisly details have taken on a legendary status in the state. Much of the extant evidence is inscribed upon the landscape of Butte and its surroundings. Thus, a connection is drawn between the unsolved murder of Little, and the attempted murder of the town itself.
Butte's history was entirely shaped by its exploitation by the Anaconda Mining Company, which, at the height of WWI, produced ten percent of the world's copper from the town's depths. War profiteering and the company's extreme indifference to the safety of its employees (mortality rates in the mines were higher than in the trenches of Europe) led to Little's arrival. "The agitator" found in the desperate, agonized miners overwhelming support for his ideas, which included the abolishment of the wage system and the establishment of a socialist commonwealth.
In August 1917, Little was abducted by still-unknown assailants who hung him from a railroad bridge. Pinned to his chest was a note that read 3'-7'-77", dimensions of a Montana grave. Eight thousand people attended his funeral, the largest in Butte's history.
The murder provides AN INJURY TO ONE with a taut, suspenseful narrative, but it isn't the only story. Butte's history is bound with the entire history of the American left, the rise of McCarthyism, the destruction of the environment, and even the birth of the detective novel. Former Pinkerton detective
"One of American independent cinema’s great achievements of the past decade." —Dennis Lim, Los Angeles Times
Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman 2007 24 min
Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman is a documentary about the amazing labor heroine, Mary Harris Jones, known as “Mother” Jones. Mother Jones mobilized thousands of workers in struggles for justice in the early 20th century.
The documentary shows how Mother Jones’ organizing career influenced the history of early 20th century United States. Featuring historian Elliott Gorn, leading biographer of Mother Jones, it shows how Mother Jones transformed personal and political grief and rage into an effective persona that led workers into battles that changed the course of history.
For labor activists such as Mother Jones, labor and civil rights such as freedom of speech and assembly were a goal rather than a reality. The documentary evokes the terrible conditions and labor oppression that motivated her to travel across the country, mobilizing thousands to fight back.
This documentary “should be shown in schools all over the country.”
—Howard Zinn, author of The People’s History of the United States
A “music video” of the 1914 “Ludlow massacre” and Mother Jones’ role in these events brings to life a forgotten vista of brutalities that immigrant laborers have long faced. The use of hired mercenaries and public police forces to brutalize and suppress workers rights was a common condition of the period.
The documentary includes rare photos as well as the only existing live footage of her at age “100″ proclaiming she is still a radical, still awaits the day that the people will “replace this moneyed civilization,” and “longs for the day when labor will have the destination of the nation in her own hands.”
Sunday December 4 Cesar Chavez: The Fight in the Fields
1997 120min
The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Struggle (1997) This Cinema Guild documentary provides a vivid history of more than 100 years of California commercial farming and of the generations of farm workers and their organizations. The producers collected extraordinary archival footage, mixed with a wide range of interviews, to show the development of agribusiness in California, built upon the stoop labor of successive waves of immigrants (Chinese, Filipinos, Okies, Mexicans and Chicanos).
Every generation of workers tried to organize with work stoppages and community pressure, attracting political radicals, religious reformers and sympathetic social workers—many of whom were interviewed for this documentary--to la causa. By the late 1940’s, the workers established a permanent organization, the United Farm Workers (UFW), which is the main topic of this documentary. The UFW grew against the bitter hostility, of both class and race, from the growers in California’s central valley.
The UFW offers a lesson for unions today because it was, of necessity, a multi-ethnic, multicultural movement, which made the workers struggles into a social movement and a national cause—que viva la huelga! It was a movement of immigrants, and mostly “illegal” ones at that, creating institutions, like housing projects, credit unions, cafeterias as well as narrow collective bargaining benefits.
For anyone who participated in farm worker activities, like the grape boycott of the 1970s, this documentary will revive many memories—some pleasant, like the signing of the first contracts with the growers and the temporary political support from Governor Jerry Brown in the early 1970s—and some unpleasant, like the desperate campaigns by the Teamsters Union to split the farm worker movement by signing sweetheart deals with the growers.
The documentary provides extensive interviews about Chavez from his siblings, children and friends, and shows how he attracted both the rich and famous (like Bobby Kennedy).
Sunday December 11 Salt of the Earth 1954 94 min
Salt of the Earth provides one of the best examples of blacklisted filmmaking in the 1950s. Few films were so affected, from every possible direction, by the House Un-American Activities Committees proceedings. For one thing, the movie focused on a highly controversial topic - labor relations - in its story of Chicano workers in a New Mexico zinc mine. When Anglo workers are given higher wages and safer conditions, the Chicanos go on strike to receive the same treatment. The film follows not just their strike but how the workers' wives become involved as well.
The project started with director Herbert J. Biberman who was a member of the Hollywood Ten and had served 6 months in jail for being an uncooperative witness. Blacklisted in Hollywood, Biberman joined forces with producer Paul Jarrico, another film industry expatriate, to create a production company where those on the blacklist could have a chance to work. Co-writer Michael Wilson was among the artists who signed on. Wilson, whose previous credits had included A Place in the Sun (1951), was like many other blacklisted writers who found that they could continue writing, but were not given screen credit for their work. In fact, Wilsons writing credits for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) (not to mention a Best Writing Oscar for the second film) were awarded posthumously as late as 1995.
With the country in the midst of right-wing McCarthyism, the subject of Salt of the Earth didn't help matters any. Based on an actual New Mexico mineworkers strike, the docudrama depicts measures taken by a Hispanic union to improve conditions for its workers. Many of the actors were non-professionals who were real life participants in the strike. Two exceptions included Will Geer, who would go on to play Grandpa on the TV series "The Waltons" (Geer himself was blacklisted at the time Salt of the Earth was made) and, Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who was mysteriously deported during the making of the film on a minor passport violation. (The movie had to be completed with a double.)
Co-produced with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, who had been ejected from the CIO for alleged communist leanings, Salt of the Earth would be the only film made by Biberman and Jarrico's company. The opposition was too great. Residents of the New Mexico towns while the movie was filmed made life miserable for them, with vigilantes starting fights and merchants who wouldn’t do business with them. State police finally had to be called in to allow the filming to be completed. Even then RKO chief Howard Hughes jumped on the bandwagon against the movie, with a plan to stop its processing and distribution. After eight labs refused to process the film, Biberman finally had to submit the reels under the title "Vaya Con Dios" to even get a print made.
Salt of the Earth finally opened in March 1954 in thirteen theatres. Variety called it "a good, highly dramatic and emotion-charged piece of work" but also noted that "its chances as box office entertainment is practically nil." And in fact it received very few showings in the U.S., though it eventually gained a reputation in Europe before being rediscovered in America in the sixties in film societies and repertory cinemas. The film's re-emergence even prompted director Biberman to write a book about the making of Salt of the Earth. From today's perspective, Biberman's film no longer seems to deserve its reputation as an extreme leftist propaganda film. Instead, it provides a surprisingly realistic look at the inequalities mining workers faced, not to mention a behind-the-scenes history lesson on the politics of the time.
http://www.historynet.com/salt-of-the-earth-the-movie-hollywood-could-not-stop.htm
Sunday December 18 The River Ran Red 1993 58 min.
The Homestead strike, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. His plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, stepped up production demands, and when the union refused to accept the new conditions, Frick began locking the workers out of the plant.
On July 2 all were discharged. The union, limited to skilled tradesmen, represented less than one-fifth of the thirty-eight hundred workers at the plant, but the rest voted overwhelmingly to join the strike. An advisory committee was formed, which directed the strike and soon took over the company town as well. Frick sent for three hundred Pinkerton guards, but when they arrived by barge on July 6 they were met by ten thousand strikers, many of them armed. After an all-day battle, the Pinkertons surrendered and were forced to run a gauntlet through the crowd. In all, nine strikers and seven Pinkertons were killed; many strikers and most of the remaining Pinkertons were injured, some seriously.
The sheriff, unable to recruit local residents against the strikers, appealed to Governor William Stone for support; eight thousand militia arrived on July 12. Gradually, under militia protection, strikebreakers got the plant running again. Frick’s intransigence had won sympathy for the strikers, but an attempt on his life by anarchist Alexander Berkman on July 23 caused most of it to evaporate. Meanwhile, the corporation had more than a hundred strikers arrested, some of them for murder; though most were finally released, each case consumed much of the union’s time, money, and energy. The strike lost momentum and ended on November 20, 1892. With the Amalgamated Association virtually destroyed, Carnegie Steel moved quickly to institute longer hours and lower wages. The Homestead strike inspired many workers, but it also underscored how difficult it was for any union to prevail against the combined power of the corporation and the government.
Sponsors: Loyola University Department of Sociology, Chicago ALBA Solidarity Committee
For more information: [email protected], Stan Smith 773-322-3168
Sundays, 2pm
Loyola University (downtown) Corboy Law Center, room 301, 25 E. Pearson Street, Chicago (one block north of Chicago & State Red line L stop)
Sunday October 23 The Occupation of the American Mind:
Israel’s Public Relations War in the US 2016 85 min
Israel's ongoing military occupation of Palestine and its repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world — except the United States. The Occupation of the American Mind takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S. Narrated by Roger Waters and featuring leading observers of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the film explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel's favor. The Occupation of the American Mind provides a sweeping analysis of Israel's decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people — a battle that has only intensified over the past few years in the face of widening international condemnation of Israel's increasingly right-wing policies.
Sunday October 30 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation 1984 30 min
10 Days That Changed America: The Homestead Strike 2006 44min
1877: The Grand Army of Starvation 1984 30 min
A major depression, worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, shook the US from 1873-1878. By the US centenary, a nationwide working class rebellion brought the country to a standstill in the summer of 1877. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked out, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the excesses of the railroad companies and the misery of a four-year economic depression. At this time, the power and control of the railroad companies played the same role as steel, auto and oil corporations later played. Police, state militia, and finally federal troops were used for the first time to crush the workers uprising, shooting down unarmed strikers and allies, leaving more than one hundred dead and thousands injured. The Great Uprising inaugurated a new era of conflict over the meaning of America in the industrial age. As a result the railway unions were destroyed.
"To see this film is to enter a world of marvelous colors and remarkable drawings . . . Then you realize that the most violent incident in American labor history, and one of the most important ever, has just been carefully explained. . . . Don't go see 1877 because you think you need a history lesson . . . Go because you want to see what a vanished industrial world looks like, and how a revolutionary moment in America feels." Paul Buhle, The Guardian
https://ashp.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/1877-viewersguide.pdf
10 Days That Changed America: The Homestead Strike 2006 44min
With Henry Clay Frick as the bad cop, steelmaster Andrew Carnegie sought to oust the union from his recently acquired Homestead Works. In July 1892, Frick locked the union out, then sent two barges of armed Pinkerton "detectives" to guard the mill so scabs could tend its furnaces. The locals met the barges with gunfire, taking the Pinkertons prisoner. The uprising drew international media attention, but was soon crushed with the aid of the state militia. Labor leaders were prosecuted, harassed, ruined. Unions were barred from the steel industry for the next 40 years.
With a script penned by Jack Youngelson, director/producer Rory Kennedy doesn't just lay this history bare; she flays the skin from the industrialist's rotting bones. The documentary notes the growing disparities between rich and poor at the time, and highlights dreary working and living conditions. (Arguably, it makes too much of these: Local labor historian Charlie McCollester says that before the strike, Homestead was a worker's paradise compared to other company towns. Frick's machinations are what turned it into a Hobbesian nightmare.)
The documentary's half-dozen academics side with the workers, and even Frick's descendent, Martha Frick Sanger, doesn't sound terribly sympathetic to her great-grandfather's cause. By the end of the documentary's 45 minutes, I found myself feeling sorry for Carnegie. Almost.
Sadly, while the film was made with help from the local Steel Industry Heritage Corporation, little of it was shot here. (Having outsourced its steel jobs and replaced them with shopping, Homestead must outsource much of its heritage too.) The film is also plagued by modern film re-enactments, the curse of many History Channel productions. Still, by shooting the "historic" footage on grainy Super-8 film, Kennedy kept it from looking too much like a movie in social-studies class. She also breathes new life into old photos: Computer effects turn archival photographs into 3-D dioramas, which literally draw the viewer inside Homestead's mills and working-class ghettos.
Indeed, Kennedy and Youngelson's most impressive accomplishment is keeping the material fresh, even for those who've heard it before. What was at stake in Homestead wasn't just wages, the film argues: It was the idea that workers should have an equity stake in, and be consulted about, their employer's decisions. As one of the documentary's talking heads puts it, the workers believed "you owned your job" and that "a right to it seemed fundamental."
Such ideas are "unfathomable to us today," he adds. And that, as this forceful, well-made documentary concludes, may be the measure of what we lost in 1892.
Sunday November 6 Tsar to Lenin 1937 63 min Lenin: Leader of the Bolshevik Revolution 1970 38 min James Cameron
Tsar to Lenin a remarkable cinematic account of the events leading up to the formation of the Soviet Union.
Max Eastman’s discusses the autocratic nature of Tsar Nicholas II and the royal family’s disinterest in the struggles of the poor and working class in Russia. They were in charge and paid little mind to the struggles of the masses.
This is truly one of the great historical films of the 20th century. This footage is priceless.
Vladimir Lenin is shown multiple times. “He was free of any trace of greed or personal ambition,” Eastman says. “He devoted every working hour of his life to the cause of liberating the toiling of the whole world from capitalist exploitation. His mind was as flexible as his purpose was fixed.”
“Russia belongs to the workers and peasants. All power to the soviet,” narrates Eastman, as images of a fiery Lenin is featured, surrounded by his comrades.
Speaking quite passionately about Lenin’s communist goals, Eastman says of V.I. Lenin: “He never lost faith in the goal of a liberated humanity. Living without war, without nationalism, without class exploitation. In friendliness and decent justice throughout the earth.”
Sunday November 13 10,000 Black Men Named George [A. Philip Randolph and the Sleeping Car Porters] 2002 89 min
Union activist A. Philip Randolph’s work to organize the Black porters of the Pullman Rail Company in the 1920s. This is the powerful story of the first Black-controlled union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
When the Great Depression struck America in the 1920s finding work was hard, but if you were poor and black it was virtually impossible. Working as a porter for the Pullman Rail Company was an option, but it meant taking home a third as much as white employees and working some days for free. You could forget about being called by your real name — all Black porters were simply called “George” after George Pullman.
Asa Philip Randolph, a black journalist and socialist trying to establish a voice for these forgotten workers, agrees to fight for the Pullman porters’ cause and form the first black union in America. Livelihoods and lives would be put at risk in the attempt to gain 10,000 signatures of the men known only as “George.” This is the true story of how a courageous leader came to be known as “the most dangerous man in America.”
Sunday November 20 An Injury to One [The Story of the Wobbly Frank Little] 2002 53min Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman 2007 24 min
AN INJURY TO ONE chronicles the mysterious death of Wobbly organizer Frank Little, a story whose grisly details have taken on a legendary status in the state. Much of the extant evidence is inscribed upon the landscape of Butte and its surroundings. Thus, a connection is drawn between the unsolved murder of Little, and the attempted murder of the town itself.
Butte's history was entirely shaped by its exploitation by the Anaconda Mining Company, which, at the height of WWI, produced ten percent of the world's copper from the town's depths. War profiteering and the company's extreme indifference to the safety of its employees (mortality rates in the mines were higher than in the trenches of Europe) led to Little's arrival. "The agitator" found in the desperate, agonized miners overwhelming support for his ideas, which included the abolishment of the wage system and the establishment of a socialist commonwealth.
In August 1917, Little was abducted by still-unknown assailants who hung him from a railroad bridge. Pinned to his chest was a note that read 3'-7'-77", dimensions of a Montana grave. Eight thousand people attended his funeral, the largest in Butte's history.
The murder provides AN INJURY TO ONE with a taut, suspenseful narrative, but it isn't the only story. Butte's history is bound with the entire history of the American left, the rise of McCarthyism, the destruction of the environment, and even the birth of the detective novel. Former Pinkerton detective
"One of American independent cinema’s great achievements of the past decade." —Dennis Lim, Los Angeles Times
Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman 2007 24 min
Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman is a documentary about the amazing labor heroine, Mary Harris Jones, known as “Mother” Jones. Mother Jones mobilized thousands of workers in struggles for justice in the early 20th century.
The documentary shows how Mother Jones’ organizing career influenced the history of early 20th century United States. Featuring historian Elliott Gorn, leading biographer of Mother Jones, it shows how Mother Jones transformed personal and political grief and rage into an effective persona that led workers into battles that changed the course of history.
For labor activists such as Mother Jones, labor and civil rights such as freedom of speech and assembly were a goal rather than a reality. The documentary evokes the terrible conditions and labor oppression that motivated her to travel across the country, mobilizing thousands to fight back.
This documentary “should be shown in schools all over the country.”
—Howard Zinn, author of The People’s History of the United States
A “music video” of the 1914 “Ludlow massacre” and Mother Jones’ role in these events brings to life a forgotten vista of brutalities that immigrant laborers have long faced. The use of hired mercenaries and public police forces to brutalize and suppress workers rights was a common condition of the period.
The documentary includes rare photos as well as the only existing live footage of her at age “100″ proclaiming she is still a radical, still awaits the day that the people will “replace this moneyed civilization,” and “longs for the day when labor will have the destination of the nation in her own hands.”
Sunday December 4 Cesar Chavez: The Fight in the Fields
1997 120min
The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Struggle (1997) This Cinema Guild documentary provides a vivid history of more than 100 years of California commercial farming and of the generations of farm workers and their organizations. The producers collected extraordinary archival footage, mixed with a wide range of interviews, to show the development of agribusiness in California, built upon the stoop labor of successive waves of immigrants (Chinese, Filipinos, Okies, Mexicans and Chicanos).
Every generation of workers tried to organize with work stoppages and community pressure, attracting political radicals, religious reformers and sympathetic social workers—many of whom were interviewed for this documentary--to la causa. By the late 1940’s, the workers established a permanent organization, the United Farm Workers (UFW), which is the main topic of this documentary. The UFW grew against the bitter hostility, of both class and race, from the growers in California’s central valley.
The UFW offers a lesson for unions today because it was, of necessity, a multi-ethnic, multicultural movement, which made the workers struggles into a social movement and a national cause—que viva la huelga! It was a movement of immigrants, and mostly “illegal” ones at that, creating institutions, like housing projects, credit unions, cafeterias as well as narrow collective bargaining benefits.
For anyone who participated in farm worker activities, like the grape boycott of the 1970s, this documentary will revive many memories—some pleasant, like the signing of the first contracts with the growers and the temporary political support from Governor Jerry Brown in the early 1970s—and some unpleasant, like the desperate campaigns by the Teamsters Union to split the farm worker movement by signing sweetheart deals with the growers.
The documentary provides extensive interviews about Chavez from his siblings, children and friends, and shows how he attracted both the rich and famous (like Bobby Kennedy).
Sunday December 11 Salt of the Earth 1954 94 min
Salt of the Earth provides one of the best examples of blacklisted filmmaking in the 1950s. Few films were so affected, from every possible direction, by the House Un-American Activities Committees proceedings. For one thing, the movie focused on a highly controversial topic - labor relations - in its story of Chicano workers in a New Mexico zinc mine. When Anglo workers are given higher wages and safer conditions, the Chicanos go on strike to receive the same treatment. The film follows not just their strike but how the workers' wives become involved as well.
The project started with director Herbert J. Biberman who was a member of the Hollywood Ten and had served 6 months in jail for being an uncooperative witness. Blacklisted in Hollywood, Biberman joined forces with producer Paul Jarrico, another film industry expatriate, to create a production company where those on the blacklist could have a chance to work. Co-writer Michael Wilson was among the artists who signed on. Wilson, whose previous credits had included A Place in the Sun (1951), was like many other blacklisted writers who found that they could continue writing, but were not given screen credit for their work. In fact, Wilsons writing credits for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) (not to mention a Best Writing Oscar for the second film) were awarded posthumously as late as 1995.
With the country in the midst of right-wing McCarthyism, the subject of Salt of the Earth didn't help matters any. Based on an actual New Mexico mineworkers strike, the docudrama depicts measures taken by a Hispanic union to improve conditions for its workers. Many of the actors were non-professionals who were real life participants in the strike. Two exceptions included Will Geer, who would go on to play Grandpa on the TV series "The Waltons" (Geer himself was blacklisted at the time Salt of the Earth was made) and, Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who was mysteriously deported during the making of the film on a minor passport violation. (The movie had to be completed with a double.)
Co-produced with the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, who had been ejected from the CIO for alleged communist leanings, Salt of the Earth would be the only film made by Biberman and Jarrico's company. The opposition was too great. Residents of the New Mexico towns while the movie was filmed made life miserable for them, with vigilantes starting fights and merchants who wouldn’t do business with them. State police finally had to be called in to allow the filming to be completed. Even then RKO chief Howard Hughes jumped on the bandwagon against the movie, with a plan to stop its processing and distribution. After eight labs refused to process the film, Biberman finally had to submit the reels under the title "Vaya Con Dios" to even get a print made.
Salt of the Earth finally opened in March 1954 in thirteen theatres. Variety called it "a good, highly dramatic and emotion-charged piece of work" but also noted that "its chances as box office entertainment is practically nil." And in fact it received very few showings in the U.S., though it eventually gained a reputation in Europe before being rediscovered in America in the sixties in film societies and repertory cinemas. The film's re-emergence even prompted director Biberman to write a book about the making of Salt of the Earth. From today's perspective, Biberman's film no longer seems to deserve its reputation as an extreme leftist propaganda film. Instead, it provides a surprisingly realistic look at the inequalities mining workers faced, not to mention a behind-the-scenes history lesson on the politics of the time.
http://www.historynet.com/salt-of-the-earth-the-movie-hollywood-could-not-stop.htm
Sunday December 18 The River Ran Red 1993 58 min.
The Homestead strike, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. His plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, stepped up production demands, and when the union refused to accept the new conditions, Frick began locking the workers out of the plant.
On July 2 all were discharged. The union, limited to skilled tradesmen, represented less than one-fifth of the thirty-eight hundred workers at the plant, but the rest voted overwhelmingly to join the strike. An advisory committee was formed, which directed the strike and soon took over the company town as well. Frick sent for three hundred Pinkerton guards, but when they arrived by barge on July 6 they were met by ten thousand strikers, many of them armed. After an all-day battle, the Pinkertons surrendered and were forced to run a gauntlet through the crowd. In all, nine strikers and seven Pinkertons were killed; many strikers and most of the remaining Pinkertons were injured, some seriously.
The sheriff, unable to recruit local residents against the strikers, appealed to Governor William Stone for support; eight thousand militia arrived on July 12. Gradually, under militia protection, strikebreakers got the plant running again. Frick’s intransigence had won sympathy for the strikers, but an attempt on his life by anarchist Alexander Berkman on July 23 caused most of it to evaporate. Meanwhile, the corporation had more than a hundred strikers arrested, some of them for murder; though most were finally released, each case consumed much of the union’s time, money, and energy. The strike lost momentum and ended on November 20, 1892. With the Amalgamated Association virtually destroyed, Carnegie Steel moved quickly to institute longer hours and lower wages. The Homestead strike inspired many workers, but it also underscored how difficult it was for any union to prevail against the combined power of the corporation and the government.
Sponsors: Loyola University Department of Sociology, Chicago ALBA Solidarity Committee
For more information: [email protected], Stan Smith 773-322-3168