(On the far right in the photograph is the late raging Southern liberal Sander P. Margolis with yours truly and my wife Suzanne at a restaurant in Oxford, Miss., several years ago. This is my only photograph of Sandy.)
The Southern Right-Wing's assault on labor remains under-the-radar of most mainstream media even as it becomes increasingly war-like:
- In North Carolina, conservatives in the legislature are calling for a constitutional amendment to ban collective bargaining for public employees. The Southern Workers Assembly says a "South-wide and national campaign for labor/workers rights" is needed against "this right-wing push."
- The loathsome National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board to prevent workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., from getting a German-style works council at the plant. Both company leaders and the United Auto Workers as well as a majority of workers at the plant are supportive of the works council, but Tennessee leaders like U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Gov. Bill Haslam are aghast at the idea of a major union-friendly plant on their home turf. The anti-union foundation alleges the UAW fooled and pressured workers into supporting the works council. The UAW told Reuters the charges were "frivolous and baseless."
- Cedric Gina, president of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa, and a South African labor delegation visited UAW headquarters in Canton, Miss., last week and met with workers at the Nissan plant there to get a better idea of those workers' struggles to get a union election at the 5,200-worker plant. "We think this is not supposed to be happening in a so-called First World country, a so-called bastion of democracy," said Gina about Nissan anti-union tactics such as one-on-one meetings between management and workers warning of plant closures and lost jobs. NUMSA represents 325,000 workers in South Africa, including 2,000 Nissan workers near Pretoria. "This is really a shame. People in authority must be ashamed that a Japanese company has come and is allowed to exploit people in their own state, in their own country."
- The recent federal government shutdown in Washington, D.C., can be largely blamed on Southern conservatives in Congress, more and more analysts are saying. According to Zack Beauchamp in ThinkProgress, the U.S. House count of Southern Republicans on last week's re-opening of government was 73 voting "No" and 18 voting "Yes". The Southern accent at Tea Party gatherings is strong, even dominant, and it validates something I said in my 2008 book, Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press: "The South's political, business, religious and journalistic elite" continue to wage a civil war, and it's against working people. The regular folks among the Tea Party ranks sadly don't realize they're fighting a war against themselves. They hate government, but just try to take away their Social Security and Medicare. The South has always had plenty of people who work against their own interests. After all, this is the same South that South Carolina's John C. Calhoun rallied together in the failed "nullification" campaign of the 1830s, when he wanted Southern states to be able to override federal laws. It took another Southerner, President Andrew Jackson, to nullify the "nullification" effort.
Lots going on in the South these days, and the more things change, the more they stay the same!
(On a different note: Below is a feature column of mine that was recently published in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss. It's about a fellow Southerner and diehard liberal whom I call The Last of the Letter Writers.)
OXFORD, Miss. – The letters from Edwards, Miss., began
arriving around 11 years ago.
The penmanship was a big, wild scrawl not always easy to
read. Jumping off those pages, however, was the passion of the writer.
“There will be unions in the South in time because it is
right,” lawyer and former journalist Sander P. “Sandy” Margolis wrote in one of
them, responding to a column of mine about unions and the raw deal
working-class people get.
Then, in big, capital letters, he offered a quote from
Eleanor Roosevelt. “`YOU GAIN STRENGTH, COURAGE, AND CONFIDENCE BY EVERY
EXPERIENCE IN WHICH YOU REALLY STOP TO LOOK FEAR IN THE FACE. YOU MUST DO THE
THING YOU THINK YOU CANNOT DO.’”
I miss getting those letters. Sandy Margolis, the last of
the letter writers, died at age 74 two years ago last month. His had been a
long illness, and the letters had stopped long before. Still, I knew, as long
as Sandy Margolis was breathing, things like justice, truth and honor had a
champion.
A Virginia native, he came from a Jewish immigrant family
with roots in Lithuania. A grandfather lived in South Africa, and an uncle once
wrote for the Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish
Forward, in New York. His parents struggled during the Depression. His father
lacked education and lost his job, but “FDR’s New Deal gave him hope for
employment and a better life.” They lost family members to the Holocaust.
In the Margolis household, politics and social justice were
part of the regular conversation.
“My father … saw through Nixon’s `Southern Strategy’ in
1968. He remembered when LBJ said after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 that `we’ve lost the South.’ But my father never let racism dishonor his
soul.”
Sandy studied at the University of Virginia and Notre Dame
and got his law degree at Ole Miss. He
worked as a liberal reporter and columnist in political boss Harry Byrd’s
Virginia during the time of “massive
resistance” to racial integration. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr., A.
Philip Randolph, United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and many thousands
of others in the 1963 March on Washington.
He wrote columns for different newspapers, worked as a
lawyer, and until he became ill fired off letters to the editor—perhaps the
last place in the world where people still actually write letters.
Ah, those letters! Whether to me or to a newspaper they were
full of fire. After Republican Haley Barbour’s election as governor in 2003—a
campaign in which Barbour brandished his state flag lapel pin with its
Confederate insignia and allowed his image on the ultra-right-wing Committee of
Conservative Citizens’ Web site--Sandy said this in a letter to the Jackson (Miss.)
Clarion-Ledger: “He orchestrated a racist campaign. He knew
that playing the ‘race card’ works in Mississippi. … Will Haley Barbour now
seek the way of honor and apologize to African Americans for his campaign
methods?”
Those words produced an outcry. Another letter writer
responded angrily by linking Sandy with columnist Bill Minor and yours truly as
three “hysterical” liberals unable to cope with Barbour’s victory. Sandy said
he was proud to be in such company.
The Margolis pen was just as sharp in a column as in a
personal letter. “The promotion of extreme corporate wealth and favoritism is
corrupting and corroding the bedrock institutions of our republic,” he wrote in
a piece for the alternative publication Planet
Weekly in 2004. “Even the press and media, the sentinels of our liberty,
are being subverted by corporate ownership and used as public relations and
propaganda tools.”
Like the great crusading Jewish journalists Abraham Cahan,
George Seldes and I.F. Stone, Sandy was an unabashed intellectual. His writings
are replete with quotes—Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Edmund Burke, Lewis
Carroll, William Faulkner.
Here’s one he sent me from FDR, again in letters as big as
his laugh: “`THE TEST OF OUR PROGRESS IS NOT WHETHER WE ADD MORE TO THE
ABUNDANCE OF THOSE WHO HAVE MUCH; IT IS WHETHER WE PROVIDE ENOUGH FOR THOSE WHO
HAVE TOO LITTLE.’”
Although proud of his Jewish heritage, he admitted he was
“not a formally religious person.” Yet, he said, “we must treat every human
being as a child of God, with justice, mercy and love.”
His wife Alice and his daughters Kate and Amanda keep his
memory alive. And now maybe I’m helping a little, too. A postcard from Sandy
and Alice hangs on the wall next to my desk, and I’ll never forget what they
wrote. “We believe you have a Jewish heart because you believe in justice and
truth and honor.”
No letter has ever pleased me more than that card.
