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CounterPunch
February
22, 2003
The Hidden History of Butte's
Working Class
A Response to
Jeffrey St. Clair
By JOHN MIHELICH
I read with great interest the recent article
entitled "Something About
Butte" in CounterPunch by Jeffrey St. Clair (Jan
4/5, 2003). St. Clair provided fascinating background history
on Butte's labor relations and commentary on the significant
environmental challenges Butte and the EPA face as a result of
a century of mineral extraction. Because Butte exemplifies the
results of extensive and blatant corporate environmental exploitation,
St. Clair's essay is timely and welcome. Its early radical labor
history, discussed by St. Clair, is also significant both in
terms of labor activism in the United States and heavy-handed
corporate and state responses to organized labor. Given the anti-union
sentiment in the corporate-controlled media and in United States
culture in general, a further comment on Butte's labor history,
particularly in the period between 1936 and 1980, merits our
attention. During those years, the working people of Butte maintained
"closed-shop" conditions in a majority of wage-paying
jobs in the private sector of the city. Closed shop conditions
meant that only union members were employed in wage-paying occupations
ranging from miners and trades in Butte mines to bartenders,
bus drivers and grocery store clerks. The closed shop situation
was made possible by a community-wide culture of solidarity built
upon a shared conception of competition, unanimous rejection
of scabbing, and a more encompassing set of cultural values.
If Butte serves as a case study of corporate environmental and
labor exploitation, it is equally informative as a case study
of working class cultural responses to corporate power and capitalism.
The ideology of capitalism (meritocracy,
equality of opportunity, individualism, etc.) with its interpretive
frameworks (seeing the world as a limited-sum game, etc.) produces
a conception of competition that shapes and sustains economic
practice and labor relations. Hegemonic capitalist ideology organizes
the dominant understanding of competition both within classes
and between them. In terms of competition within classes, the
ideology highlights, on the one hand, competition in the marketplace,
claiming it gives rise to high quality goods at consumer-friendly
prices as owners compete with one another for market share. On
the other hand, capitalist ideology renders competition among
workers as a matter-of-fact part of American life and depicts
competition as a "noble" American practice closely
associated with the virtue of hard work. One who does not strive
to "win" or strive to be "better" (measured
against someone else), is unmotivated or a "loser."
The ideology of capitalism also encourages workers to seek satisfaction
from how well they do their job, not necessarily from how much
they get paid, and to treasure the intrinsic rewards of work.
Competition, it seems, embodies all that is noble and good in
the human heart-at least the "American" heart. The
structure of capitalism forces workers to sell their labor for
wages, minimizes surplus accumulation among workers, and discourages
alternative economic means such as communal or state ownership
of the means of production and distribution. These structural
factors, combined with the ideology, encourage competition among
workers in practice, or in everyday action.
Competition between classes is virtually
eliminated conceptually in capitalist ideology when the attention
is directed toward avowed cooperation between the classes and
tension deflected onto the capricious nature of "the market"
or the "economy." The abolition a conception of class
conflict portrays an economic condition where owners and their
employees are working together and all would be right in the
world, at least economically, if it were not for the unpredictability
of the economy and those few rouge owners/managers like those
guys at Enron or Montana Power.
This ideological construction of competition
has not gone unchallenged in all places throughout U.S. industrial
history. Alternative conceptions of competition have shaped perceptions
and the practice of competition among working people in places
like Butte. An alternative perspective focuses on the competition
between class interests, or class conflict, rather than competition
within classes. Actual capitalist practice, not capitalist ideology,
has, in reality, followed the alternative conception for quite
some time as the history of the industrial revolution since the
second half of the eighteenth century attests. Owners, in practice,
relentlessly attend to the competition between the owner/capitalist
class and the working class resulting from conflicting material
interests. And, they have persistently taken measures to reduce
competition within their class. While owners and corporations
have indeed competed for market share and economic viability,
one primary pattern has been toward consolidation and collusion
within the dominant class, and within the marketplace-not to
mention with the federal government. This pattern of collusion
in capitalist practice has, over time, reduced competition within
the class. Fewer entities compete with each other as larger corporations
emerge. Workers, however, have waxed and waned on how they perceive
and respond in practice to class conflict or competition between
classes. Today, most Americans, following capitalist ideology
rather than capitalist practice, perceive and respond to only
the competition within classes. However, when actual labor practice
among the working class reflects the alternative ideology, labor
solidarity emerges. Thus, the ideology supporting labor solidarity
mirrors the competition propagated by the capital class in actual
practice rather than the capitalist ideology of open and fair
competition.
Labor solidarity can, to a point, respond
to the power of capital by providing a unified front through
which to negotiate and counter the threat and the degree of capitalist
exploitation. Capitalist ideology and practice implemented by
a dominant class, however, pose a constant threat to labor solidarity.
When labor solidarity fails to become a shared cultural value,
capital can discourage labor organizing effectively. More importantly,
if some form of solidarity exists, capital can more easily induce
workers to break ranks. As a result, workers seek personal economic
gain at the expense of other workers and compete among themselves
(meaning within their own class), particularly during a strike
when workers "replace" other workers. The terms "replacement
worker" and "scab" refer to the same behavior,
but they are premised on contrasting ideologies resulting in
dramatically differing cultural meanings and behaviors. A replacement
worker denotes a hard-working individual who will work in the
place of another person who "chooses" not to. The connotations
of a replacement worker are consistent with the work ethic of
capitalist ideology of competition. The conception of the "scab"
originates in a culture of labor solidarity. In a speech given
to the Oakland Socialist Party Local on April 5, 1903, Jack London
offered a "technical definition" of a scab as, "one
who gives more value for the same price than another." London
also stated that the "sentimental connotation of 'scab'
is as terrific as that of 'traitor' or 'Judas.'" In cultural
practice, the presence of the scab disseminates the alternative
ideology of competition consistent with labor solidarity. In
Butte, from the late 1930s to 1980 the scab was alive and well
as a conception with deeply felt connotations, meanings and associated
cultural practice.
"If you were a scab, you were just
no goodsociety wouldn't accept them anymorepeople wouldn't even
speak to one of those scabsA scab, as far as Butte was concerned,
was just the rottenest thing in the world." (Butte elder,
1996)
A variety of forces led to the eventual
emergence of closed shop conditions in Butte mines in the mid
thirties under the organization of The Butte Miners' Union. The
Butte Miners' union did not ultimately threaten capitalist extraction,
accumulation and exploitation, but it did offer an acceptable
adaptation, through labor solidarity, to the conditions of capitalism
in Butte and the realities of immigrant lives. Butte's working
population heavily relied on the conception of the scab as a
central organizing image to sustain its solidarity. In the predominantly
Catholic and surprisingly tolerant community of Butte, the one
"mortal" sin one could commit was the sin of scabbing.
It was not that Butte did not indulge
in competition. Butte fostered competition through sport (community
baseball, football, and bowling, boxing), bar fighting, neighborhood
and ethnic rivalries, in its high schools and grade schools.
And men engaged in competition in the mines. As part of the demonstration
of masculinity and the construction of identity, contract miners
competed amongst each other. They sought to secure reputations
built on their mastery over the ore. Craftsmen also competed
with each other for recognition as the top in their trade. But
miners and craftsmen simply did not allow competition among individual
workers for jobs, wages, and security. They collectively bargained
for wages and job descriptions while relying on structures of
seniority and kinship networks for job acquisition.
The lives of Butte's workers point to
a central issue in contemporary capitalist labor relations-the
reconceptualization of the corporate hegemonic ideology of competition.
In Butte, the notion of competition was shaped through the ideology
of solidarity. Such a cultural worldview turned attention to
competition between the classes, like the workers and the Company.
This contrasts with the ideology of capitalism that pits worker
against worker. Scabbing in Butte resulted in a final and often
brutal "social death" for those who committed such
an act. The social death was facilitated by a shared community
understanding of the scab and competition. For a social sanction
to reach beyond a stigma in the workplace to the level of social
death, a community-wide support of labor solidarity must be achieved
along with an adherence to a shared conception of competition.
A further look into the culture of Butte
helps explain the community-wide support that existed in the
era of solidarity. Butte's population formed various ethnic-based
neighborhoods each with its full compliment of modest residential
dwellings, churches, bars, grocery stores, and other small businesses.
Many of those neighborhoods were built up around a mine. These
included the enclaves of Meaderville, McQueen, East Butte, Finntown,
Chinatown, Dublin Gulch, Centerville, Parrot Flats, the Boulevard,
and others. The residents of these ethnic-based neighborhoods
maintained strong cultural traditions, languages and identities
much like many large cities in the United States. Butte also
had a large uptown business center, dominated by the Hennessey
Building that housed the ACM, and it had its elite neighborhood
called the West End.
The institutional vice harbored in Butte
through much of the 20th century included a semi-public red-light
district, wide-open casino style gambling, and round-the-clock
drinking establishments that catered to three daily shifts of
miners. It is widely remembered by Butte elders that the christening
of a new major drinking hole centered around breaking out the
lock on the front door. Butte's bars were also notorious for
fighting. This vice formed an intricate part of Butte's character
even as the community supported its Catholic parishes and numerous
other denominational churches. Numerous people I interviewed
affirmed that vice "was part of life." In Butte's Catholic-framed
moral code, vice was venial. Aside from the institutionalized
vice, the working people of Butte were extremely tolerant of
a myriad of individual behaviors not consistent with prevailing
images of acceptable behavior in the broader American culture
or the mandates of the Catholic Church (or Protestant sects).
These included excessive fighting, gambling, and drinking, homosexuality,
adultery and abortion. Anyone looking for hand-to-hand conflict
could easily find someone to meet at "knuckle junction"
in a Butte bar, but the bar was equally a place where one could
avoid fighting with the proper attitude. Abortion was readily,
if covertly, available for those interested. Also of interest
for what it says about the community, one "gay" Butte
elder commented that Butte was "the best place in the world
to be gay."
While not everyone condoned this vice
and "deviance," most report that behavior of this sort
was best left as a matter between the individual and God. The
wider public was not in a position to judge. The working people
of Butte, however, did not extend the tolerance and acceptance
displayed toward these and other forms of venial vice and behaviors
to scabbing. Publicly professed support of labor organizing was
mandatory even if private sentiments diverged. Anyone who openly
challenged the basis of labor organization was chastised and
scabbing was brutally punished--no matter what the personal circumstances.
Butte's working people tended very devoutly to the economic realm
of their existence. They held labor organizing to be the foundation
of their economic life; a threat to that organization was unacceptable.
Unlike their Catholicism which allowed absolution even for mortal
sins, there was no confessional, no "Hail Marys,' no absolution,
no forgetting, and no relief for the sin of scabbing.
Because of the shared attitudes toward
scabbing, the consequences of scabbing were ubiquitous. A person
who worked in the place of a union employee did not simply have
to vie with contestation at the site of work or with picketers,
but also was forced to contend with the entire community. As
the identification of a scab quickly spread through social networks,
he and his family were despised and harassed. Even the children
of a scab could not escape the taunting and beatings at school.
Butte's miners employed behaviors learned willingly in their
bars to the situation of scabbing. When asked about people who
crossed a picket line in the mines, one Butte elder responded:
They'd chastise you. Beat the tar out
of you probably. Yeah, it was a rough and ready town. A scab
couldn't get by here in Butte at all. They used to have a some
of that in the mines, you used to hear about the scabs. They'd
chase them out. They may make three or four shifts and they'd
nab on to them and they'd take them out to the Flat or to the
Nine Mile and beat the hell out of them"
The solidarity mandate did not only apply
to men or the mining trades-it was near-universal in wage-paying
jobs in Butte. The Company employed various tactics to break
labor solidarity, including demanding salaried workers to work
during strikes. One man in Butte told a story about his father
who, after working his way through the ranks, became a foreman.
Asked to "stay behind the fence"-to scab, in the 1946
strike, the man refused. After only a half a shift, at lunch
that first day back, the head foreman of the mine called the
father into his office. The foreman said, "I have to let
you go because the fellahs [the other bosses who stayed behind
the fence] don't feel right working around you. You were asked
to stay, and what did you tell me? You said you had too many
relatives and friends, that you couldn't possibly see your way
to stay. Maybe now its up to your friends and relatives to get
you a job." From that point on, the father was "blackballed"
by the company and never worked for the company again except
for a short stint years later as a low level worker on the surface
of one of the mines. Although the father endured a company-imposed
exclusion from the only trade he knew, his family retained their
good name in the community--because he did not scab.
For those who did stay behind the fence,
the community responded. The following conversation between two
Butte men in 1996 is revealing:
Man A: A lot of guys, boy, they just
don't ever forgive [the behavior of scabbing].
Man B: Nope, I know this guy, he was a boss and he scabbed. He
said, "You know what? The biggest mistake I ever made in
my life was staying behind that fence. You know what? You can
go up to the M&M [a landmark Butte miner's bar], you can
go to any bar in Butte, no one bothers you. I walk into the M&M
and the first thing I got to do is fight or get my ass kicked
all over the city of Butte. I can't go anywhere." He had
to go out of town to do his drinking. All the way up to West
Yellowstone. And he says, "You know what?" He says,
"I get up there and I have somebody from Butte say, 'why
there's that scabby bastard!'" He says, "I got to get
out of there also." He says, "Jesus Christ, even my
old friends won't talk to mehalf of my family won't even talk
to me."
Stories of community sanctions abound
among the elder population in Butte. These are folks who adhered
to a culture of labor solidarity. Their stories include descriptions
of the sacking of homes of scabs and other sanctions including
a common recollection of an effigy of a scab hung by a rope over
a streetlamp pole in East Butte. One Butte elder recalled, "I
remember this dummy that they hung on the arc light, and they
told [[the scab's wife] 'if we see him, this is what we're going
to do to him.'"
Butte elders recant numerous stories
about how workers managed their peers who did not devote care
and energy to their job. They did their work or threatened, ridiculed
or coddled them. But they were seldom given up to management,
for that constituted the sacrifice of a degree of control over
labor, and they were only infrequently chastised or excluded.
They were never treated with the brutality that met the scab.
Scabbing was a behavior of a different order, an offense alone
with the magnitude to constitute a "mortal" sin in
the realm of Caesar and one met with the harshest penalty Butte
had to offer.
The cultural lynch pins that held Butte's
labor solidarity together were twofold. First, the community
shared a clear conception of class conflict. They knew that Company
interests conflicted with those of the workers. They also knew
that they depended on the Company for subsistence, but the Company
also depended on them for labor. If they could control the labor
end of the relationship, through circumscribing the community,
they could preserve a measure of power. They also knew, from
experience as much as ideology, that the Company would take every
advantage available to further its interests. They did not expect
any more or less from the Company. The community understood it
was imperative to keep focus on this adversarial yet cooperative
relationship. The cultural conception of this relationship, the
way people made sense of it on the streets, took the form of
a love-hate attitude toward the Company. They hated the Company
for the ends and goals it stood for. Because it its predatory
nature, the Company posed a continual threat to their livelihood;
it required ceaseless vigilance. But the community loved the
Company because it represented the economic source of their livelihood.
Second, while the people of Butte tended
diligently to economic matters, they directed their primary attention
toward ends involving existential matters and meaning creation
based on a non-materialist system of values. The labor solidarity,
signified by the scab, was only one vital part of the overall
philosophical cultural system. The working class culture of Butte
aimed to infuse individual life with significance and a degree
of happiness. In doing so, it made the brutality of life, part
of which could be traced to capitalist exploitation, endurable.
Butte's people, and their culture, generated meaning in the larger
existential realm of life through constructing celebration, observing
existential time, and cultivating individual significance. This
ultimately enabled the economic sacrifice necessary for the cultural
of solidarity. The creation and maintenance of a shared philosophical
cultural program was Butte's biggest coup of Butte's workers.
This was no small accomplishment in a world largely dictated
by capitalist corporate culture and hegemony. This philosophical
stance made Butte, in the final analysis, the "Richest Hill
on Earth." Butte's riches were not found in the extraction
of ore and environmental destruction. Its riches lie in its people
and the culture they created.
Butte was not a working-class paradise.
Common patterns of racial and gender exclusion existed, the workers
did not challenge the fundamental inequalities of capitalism,
they did not effectively confront environmental issues, and,
in the end, they lost its control over the labor market. But,
during the years between 1934 and 1980, the working people of
Butte generated a culture with a fundamentally different notion
of competition among workers.
The larger significance of Butte's labor
and cultural history is that it challenged the emerging American
modernist capitalist hegemony on a broad scale. The cultural
system challenged hegemonic culture beyond the workplace. It
offered an alternative way of life that recognized and adapted
to the unique challenges facing labor in an era of industrial
capitalism. It also acknowledged and addressed the importance
of non-material or existential conditions in the era of modernity.
The local working class culture addressed life in its totality.
Subsistence needs were considered a high priority. This was the
case in Butte, Montana between the years of 1936 and at least
through 1975.
The contemporary labor movement's focus
has shifted from protecting its boundaries in efforts to assert
some control of the labor market to increasing membership in
its organizations. Arguments have emerged urging unions to ally
with community organizations, forming coalitions that can collectively
work for working-class interests. In Butte, the premise of cooperation
within the working class, galvanized through community culture,
ultimately provided the foundation for a creative and powerful
alternative to capitalist hegemony. This cultural alternative,
comprised of ideology and practice, facilitated collaboration
between union and community. It helped forge resistant adaptation
to capitalist exploitation. Because the case of Butte demonstrates
an ideologically sound, community-wide, culture-based coalition
between community and unions, it suggests the effectiveness of
developing such coalitions on cultural grounds. The extent to
which the cultural form shapes individual lives or the lives
of members of a class depends on the degree to which a "community"
practices the form, the degree to which individual members adopt
it, and the nature of the community in question. When, as is
often the case today, the cultural depiction of scab, with its
associated meanings and values, is limited to union membership
and a few peripheral sympathizers and not diffused throughout
an entire interactive labor community or physical community,
its capacity to galvanize labor solidarity is likely not to extend
far beyond the corporate gates. I experienced such a situation
visiting the picket lines, as a sympathizer, during the United
Parcel Service strike of 1997 in the Pacific Northwest. However,
when the cultural formation of scab permeates the daily life
of a community and its associated interdependent labor market,
it forms a component of a collective culture. Such a worldview
has a vast capacity to galvanize labor solidarity supported by
an established ideological position.
As St. Clair points out, the contemporary
"town fathers" may "have a plan to recharge Butte's
flatlined fortunes" by turning Butte "into a tourist
haven, a kind of toxic wonderland" (3), but its working-class
"fathers" would like to recharge its cultural fortunes-the
soul of the "Richest Hill on Earth." This is why a
generation of people in Butte resist the characterization by
environmentalists, and the Company, in a strange way, of Butte
as an environmental wasteland. ARCO plays the role of victim
as much as those concerned about the environmental destruction.
But ARCO was not a victim. They inherited the Anaconda properties
in a merger, a merger concocted in the search for ever-expanding
profits. The elder generation of Butte knows this. What enrages
them is the lack of acknowledgement of what they did accomplish
under the most trying circumstances and with minimal outside
support. Many environmentalists have little awareness of this
accomplishment. The Company, ARCO or any other U.S. or multinational
corporation, would just as soon keep it that way. Few capitalists
would like the American public to hear of the hidden history
of "Gibraltar of unionism." They would prefer to write
the story in another way, excluding labor's successful contestation.
They will settle for the lesser of two evils (in their mind):
a focus on the environmental destruction coupled with their promise
to "do better" rather than give impetus to a collective
awareness of historically constructed cultural alternatives to
capitalist hegemony.
Could we replicate Butte? Probably not.
Would we want to? There are many reasons to not aspire to replicating
Butte, not the least of which is the environmental destruction
and workplace death resulting from mining. But, could a counter-hegemonic
culture of labor solidarity be resurrected from the slag heaps
of Butte that addresses the broader range of issues salient to
contemporary cultural reformers? I don't have the answer. Nevertheless,
Butte offers a model of working class power, however limited.
I'm convinced a counter-hegemonic culture COULD be created in
a U.S. post-industrial and industrializing global context. But,
change has to be rooted in culture, in a counter-hegemonic movement,
and it has to be community or system-wide.
The efforts of the people of Butte were
ultimately not successful, and this is due to the power of corporate
America, not simply the power of Anaconda or ARCO. Had the rest
of the working population in this country followed the example
of Butte, corporate power would be, or would have been, dramatically
reshaped. Butte was a Gibraltar as long as it had any influence
at all-an influence always mostly limited to the local community.
Once the mines closed, caused by external forces and behavior
on the part of corporate America and the American public, its
sphere of influence disappeared. The model of cultural labor
solidarity, facilitated by other local cultural values (e.g.
a non-materialist/non-consumption-based sense of meaning and
purpose, communal relations/obligations, duty, sacrifice, a non-hegemonic
sense of competition, etc.) evidenced from 1936 to 1980 in Butte,
if coupled with national public support and enhanced by the contemporary
awareness of environmental issues, diversity, etc., could go
a long ways toward informing people about alternatives and possibilities
for reconfiguring the world.
Environmentally speaking, Butte is a
mess. Butte may appear a "wasteland" to the naked eye
today, much as it did to outsiders throughout its dirty but complex
mining existence. However, limiting our understanding of Butte
to the imagery of a wasteland, because how this image eliminates
from our collective consciousness the powerful labor history
and labor organization of over four decades of the 20th century,
would make the Company and its contemporary corporate brethren
very pleased.
John Mihelich
is an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho with three
generations of family in Butte. John would like to acknowledge
Dale Graden, Professor of history at the University of Idaho,
for the encouragement to contribute this essay and for its title.
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February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
Katz, Scott Handleman, and Bruce Tomczak
Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|