“Everything meaningful that’s ever happened in the world, any change, any improvement comes about because of optimism. The pessimists don’t get anything done. They’re naysayers. You have to see the potential for change. And you’ve got to see it not in terms of the moment but in terms of the long view, the long haul.” — Mel Leventhal
Mel Leventhal was involved in the civil rights movement in the deep South in the mid-1960’s. He was part of Martin Luther King’s inner circle, but because he was white in 1965, he was being pushed out of that circle by increasingly vociferous black racists. In the second half of the 1960’s, black nationalists began to get publicity. They began to penetrate the inner circle of King’s nonviolent movement. Leventhal describes how at one meeting, blacks simply told him to shut up. King listened to him on technical issues, since Leventhal was a law student, but the blacks made it clear they didn’t want him in the meetings anymore. He left. He complains that historians now ignore the whites who were involved.
I read his testimony in a book edited by the Left-wing professional interviewer, Studs Terkel. This was his last interview book. He was 91 years old. He died at 96. He had a long and successful career. The Leftist media loved him. He wasn’t that unique as an author. He was a good interviewer. He asked good questions, and he let people talk. Then he edited their transcripts, and he made them sound coherent. There is always a market for a good interviewer who can do this. Terkel made a long career out of it.
The title of the book caught my attention: Hope Dies Last. It was published in 2003. I just happened to spot it at the library over the weekend. Terkel begins the book’s introduction with this statement. “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.” That is a profound observation.
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With the exceptions of two retired generals — one of them dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima — one conservative congressmen, and Arlo Guthrie, everybody interviewed in the book was a Leftist. What I found interesting about the book is this: most of them had given up faith in the federal government. They were local activists. Terkel had been one of them long ago. He was a contemporary in Chicago of the legendary activist, Saul Alinsky. He was basically of the same mold. He believed in local activism, not grand world-changing projects. So did Alinsky. Alinsky really did not trust the federal government late in life. Given the careers of his two most famous disciples, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, it’s pretty clear that he was right not to trust the federal government. His two most prominent disciples became part of the establishment. They got rich. They accomplished little in the way of systematically Leftist change.
Terkel was part of the 1930’s Left. He was a great promoter of trade unionism. Of all the Leftists’ lost causes, trade unionism has to be the shining example. Membership peaked at 25% of the American labor force as members, and that was in 1953. It was always based on government coercion by the National Labor Relations Board: forced negotiations. The workers who were kept out of the above-free market wage union jobs wound up in below-free market wage jobs. They were hired by those companies that had not been unionized, and who had the pick of the litter of the excluded workers who were not allowed into the unions. The unions discriminated against them. This was especially true of blacks.
The labor movement was never really about labor in general. It was about handpicking certain industries and certain unions. They got preferential treatment from the government. Trade union workers would never admit this, but that was always the economics of trade unionism. The broad mass of workers were discriminated against by the combined efforts of the National Labor Relations Board, the particular union, and the protected industries that had a working arrangement with the unions.
By 2003, the percentage of workers in the American labor force who were members of trade unions was down to about 10%. Most of these worked for the government. In private industry, trade unionism by 2003 was basically invisible.
So, in his last hurrah, Terkel went out to interview a lot of members of the union movement. They were still filled with hope. Yet it was clear by 2003 that trade unionism was an utterly hopeless cause.
Trade unionism had been gutted by the combined forces of Ted Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson by promoting the Immigration Act of 1965, which was signed into law in 1968. This made it possible for low-cost immigrants to compete against union members across the country. Nothing did more for the anti-union right-to-work movement than low tariffs and open borders. The Democrats promoted both policies. The Republicans did not have the votes in Congress. So, the trade union movement was sold out by the establishment Democrats at the national level. I always regarded this as fitting and proper. The feds giveth, and the feds taketh away. I saw what was happening at the time, but the leaders of the union movement, committed as they were to the Democratic Party, rarely talked about it in public. There was never any organized political opposition within the union movement to the Democrats in Congress who sold them out.
