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Friday, March 25, 2011
Striking Workers, Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Source
Christina Pacosz, poet. Source.
In 1897, in Hazleton, Pennsylvania,
striking Bohunk and German coal miners were killed in what has become known as
the Lattimer Massacre.
In 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado,
coal miners, many immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, were massacred.
In 1927 striking coal miners were attacked with machine guns
in Columbine, Colorado. Flaming Mika, a Croatian teenager, was a strike leader.
It's interesting to read web-based commemorations of these
events, and others like them. Many such webpages are maintained by leftists.
I salute leftists for working to keep alive history that is
otherwise buried and ignored. I ask, semester after semester, if any of my
students are aware of this history. They are not. When I tell them that
American troops fired on American workers, their jaws drop and their eyes get
large.
Unfortunately, though, the leftists who
commemorate these events often work hard to obscure the ethnic identity of the
striking workers. Those who struck, who lead the strikes, who were shot, who
were wounded and killed, are all "workers."
In
fact, though, those who struck, who lead the strikes, and who were shot and
killed were disproportionately immigrants or children of immigrants, and
largely Bohunk. Those who shot and killed them knew this.
Leftists, for their own ideological reasons, often work to obscure this
historical reality: "white" Bohunks were identified by contemporary
science as racially inferior. (In the same way, the Soviet Union, when it had
control of Auschwitz, identified the bulk of its victims, not as Jews, but as
"enemies of fascism." You'd never know, from many Soviet treatments
of the Holocaust, that the Nazis had an agenda of scientific racism. In its
heyday, scientific racism was embraced by the left as well as the right.)
The scientific racism, widely accepted one hundred years ago,
that identified Bohunks as racial inferiors, certainly informed those who
abused them in the workplace, and shot, and killed them when they asked for
better work conditions.
During the 1915-16 Bayonne, New
Jersey, refinery strikes, Standard Oil's manager announced, "I want to
march up East 22nd street through the guts of Polaks." He
didn't just want to march through the guts of workers. He wanted to march
through the guts of *Polak* workers.
In describing the
murderous suppression Andrew Carnegie and his fellow industrialist, Henry Clay
Frick, visited on strikers, Carnegie's biographer wrote, "Frick had ...
been unfortunate in the type of workmen with whom he had previously dealt. The
Hungarians, Slavs, and Southern Europeans of Connellsville were a savage and undisciplined horde, with whom
strong-arm methods seemed at times indispensable."
Most Polish Americans have no idea that their grandparents and
great-grandparents were identified by the New York Times, the canonical
anthropological publications, the Museum of Natural History, and the US
Congress as racially inferior. Most Polish Americans have never heard of the
Lattimer Massacre.
Me? I'd never heard of the Lead Belt Riot until poet Christina Pacosz
introduced me to it. And I study this stuff. Amazing how busy and effective
those who erase history can be.
***
In her essay, "A Great Deal of Doing: The Missouri Leadbelt Riot of
1917," poet Christina Pacosz describes the riot that drove her Polish
father, and others like him, out of the lead-mining region of Missouri.
Poles and other Bohunks arrived in Missouri to mine lead. Lead
was needed for World War I. The locals did not like the "noisy and
aggressive Hunkie," as Missouri's state historian described them. And, so,
the locals rose up and drove the Bohunks out, including Pacosz's father, who
"vividly remembered mattresses stuffed into windows, all
the children huddling in a dark, stuffy room. The emotional trauma of a small,
scared boy is what my father recounted on those muggy, mosquito-filled summer
nights we rocked together on our front porch in Detroit's Polish ghetto."
Pacosz's recounting of this forgotten history is priceless.
Her Beat-inspired prose is grittily beautiful and yet highly detailed. This is
poetry, and this is history.
Pacosz is not just a poet,
not just an historian. She is also, unavoidably, a moralist. Given the skill of
her pen, Pacosz is potentially a hanging judge – at least metaphorically. Should
the modern-day descendents of those who terrorized, dispossessed and exiled her
Polish immigrant father and grandfather be condemned? "I wonder if these
people had any relatives who wore white sheets and terrorized my father?"
she asks.
Pacosz's generosity is as abundant as her
talent. Her rich heart and insight into the multifarious causes of ethnic
violence that pits one worker against another inspire her to conclude, "There
is no one here I can be angry with."
Lewis Hine. Breaker Boys. My father could have been in this photo.
Me? I am angry.
My angry words here are
all mine, and they are not related to Ms. Pacosz's generous essay.
I'm angry at modern day, politically correct Missourians who
piously adopt the same lies that their racist ancestors adopted to lynch my
people. Nowadays their ropes are words.
My old Peace
Corps buddy, Missourian Maggie Finefrock, from Kansas City, sent me a book that
her colleague, Bill Tammeus, also located in Kansas City, had written.
In that book, published by the very politically correct
University of Missouri Press, very politically correct Bill
Tammeus distorts history, invests in stereotypes, and ultimately tempts readers
to hate Poles.
Poles were brutes to the Missourians
of the Lead Belt Riot who drove us out with violence and hate. Poles deserved
to be violently driven out of their homes, driven out with "guns, knives,
and hatchets," because they were "noisy and aggressive."
That racism, over one hundred years old, is not dead.
To the elite, Poles are still brutes, and they still deserve
to be blamed and scapegoated and treated as inferior. Books like Tammeus' lynch
with words.
Again, the anger here is all mine, and is
not related to Christina Pacosz's essay.
***
Please acquire and read Christina Pacosz's essay. Nothing else
I've read about Poles in America could take its place.
"A
Great Deal of Doing: The Missouri Leadbelt Riot of 1917."
By Christina Pacosz
John Brown Press
PO Box 5224
Kansas City, Kansas 66119
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