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mob. In a remarkable April 1938 address to Congress, he warned
that  private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise, noting that
1 percent of the nation s corporations were taking 50 percent of the
profits.
From the beginning, FDR moved and acted and spoke with us,
and he did not call out the army or use his office to crush resistance.
In Inaugural Addresses, State of the Union Messages, fireside chats,
speeches, he always, always said hunger is wrong, joblessness is
wrong. This was at a time when everything from a minimum wage
to unemployment insurance was denounced as sovietizing the coun-
try, as the destruction of industry, as  un-American. Roosevelt s
achievement was to redefine what being American meant. For all
the New Deal legislation and regulation, the decade ended with the
same crowd in power and in profit, but they now had to contend
with a federal government that consistently intervened on the side
of the people.
FDR genuinely believed in capitalism, and he saved it. Yet he
grew and changed, and especially with the help of Eleanor he con-
nected to larger themes of human rights. Some of us, bruised by
the Fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, were ahead of
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a vision of fear and hope
him in anticipating the conflict to come. But he was ahead of most
of the country in preparing for war.
Today, the vision of full humanhood is battered, scorned, deemed
 unrealistic. But I still remember what people can achieve when
we act together. The 1930s were full of torture and brutality, but in
this country, at least, history was more than a boot in the face. It was
a time of human flowering, when the country was transformed by
the hopes, dreams, actions of numerous, nameless human beings,
hungry for more than food.
1994
138
The Stri ke
Do not ask me to write of the strike and the terror. I am on a battle-
field, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is
impossible to turn them back into the past. You leave me only this
night to drop the bloody garment of Todays, to cleave through the
gigantic events that have crashed one upon the other, to the first
beginning. If I could go away for a while, if there were time and
quiet, perhaps I could do it. All that has happened might resolve
into order and sequence, fall into neat patterns of words. I could
stumble back into the past and slowly, painfully rear the structure
in all its towering magnificence, so that the beauty and heroism, the
terror and significance of those days, would enter your heart and
sear it forever with the vision.
But I hunch over the typewriter and behind the smoke, the days
whirl, confused as dreams. Incidents leap out like a thunder and are
gone. There flares the remembrance of that night in early May, in
Stockton, when I walked down the road with the paper in my hands
and the streaming headlines, LONGSHOREMEN OUT. RIOT EX-
the strike
PECTED; LONGSHORE STRIKE DECLARED. And standing there
in the yellow stubble I remember Jerry telling me quietly,  . . . for
12 years now. But we re through sweating blood, loading cargo five
times the weight we should carry, we re through standing morning
after morning like slaves in a slave market begging for a bidder. We ll
be out, you ll see; it may be a few weeks, a few months, but WE LL
BE OUT, and then hell can t stop us.
H-E-L-L C-A-N-T S-T-O-P U-S. Days, pregnant days, spelling
out the words. The port dead but for the rat stirring of a few scabs
at night, the port paralyzed, gummed on one side by the thickening
scum of prostate ships, islanded on the other by the river of pickets
streaming ceaselessly up and down, a river that sometimes raged
into a flood, surging over the wavering shoreline of police, battering
into the piers and sucking under the scabs in its angry tides. HELL
CAN T STOP US. That was the meaning of the lines of women and
children marching up Market with their banners  This is our fight,
and we re with the men to the finish. That was the meaning of the
seamen and the oilers and the wipers and the mastermates and the
pilots and the scalers torrenting into the river, widening into the sea.
The kids coming in from the waterfront. The flame in their eyes,
the feeling of invincibility singing in their blood. The stories they
had to tell of scabs educated, of bloody skirmishes. My heart was
ballooning with happiness anyhow, to be back, working in the move-
ment again, but the things happening down at the waterfront, the
heroic everydays, stored such richness in me I can never lose it. The
feeling of sympathy widening over the city, of quickening class
lines sharpening. I armored myself with that on National Youth
Day hearing the smash and thud of clubs around me, seeing boys
fall to their knees in streams of blood, pioneer kids trampled under
by horses. . . .
There was a night that was the climax of those first days when
the workers of San Francisco packed into the Auditorium to fling a
warning to the shipowners. There are things one holds like glow in
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the strike
the breast, like a fire; they make the unseen warmth that keeps one
through the cold of defeat, the hunger of despair. That night was
one symbol and portent of what will be. We League kids came to
the meeting in a group, and walking up the stairs we felt ourselves a
flame, a force. At the door bulls were standing, with menacing faces,
but behind them fear was blanching the people massing in, they
had never dreamed it possible people coming in and filling the
aisles, packing the back. Spurts of song flaming up from downstairs,
answered by us, echoed across the gallery, solidarity weaving us all
into one being. 20,000 jammed in and the dim blue ring of cops back
in the hall was wavering, was stretching itself thin and unseeable. It
was OUR auditorium, we had taken it over. And for blocks around
they hear OUR voice. The thunder of our applause, the mighty roar of
it for Bridges, for Caves, for Schumacher.  That s no lie.  Tell them
Harry  To the Finish  We re with you  Attaboy  We re solid. The
speeches,  They can never load their ships with tear gas and guns,
 For years we were nothing but nameless beasts of burden to them,
but now. . . .  Even if it means . . . GENERAL STRIKE, the voices [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]