For Chicago physician Mitch Wilner, July 4, 1937, began as a typical holiday—a leisurely afternoon at the beach with his wife and young children. But when a peaceful protest erupts in violence, and Mitch sees unarmed steel mill strikers attacked by the local police, he finds himself thrust into the heart of America’s labor struggles.
In the days and months that follow, Mitch witnesses the aggressive strike-breaking tactics used by the steel mill companies, the brutality of the authorities, and the blatant corruption of the local government and media. But in the unionists, Mitch discovers a bond that crosses ethnic, class, and racial boundaries, and truly embodies the spirit of the American dream.
Inspired by the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, Citizens looks at some of the darkest days in modern US labor history in a “powerful, photographic novel [that] will catch the imagination of the social minded” (Kirkus Reviews).
“One of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition.” —Norman Mailer
For Chicago physician Mitch Wilner, July 4, 1937, began as a typical holiday—a leisurely afternoon at the beach with his wife and young children. But when a peaceful protest erupts in violence, and Mitch sees unarmed steel mill strikers attacked by the local police, he finds himself thrust into the heart of America’s labor struggles.
In the days and months that follow, Mitch witnesses the aggressive strike-breaking tactics used by the steel mill companies, the brutality of the authorities, and the blatant corruption of the local government and media. But in the unionists, Mitch discovers a bond that crosses ethnic, class, and racial boundaries, and truly embodies the spirit of the American dream.
Inspired by the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, Citizens looks at some of the darkest days in modern US labor history in a “powerful, photographic novel [that] will catch the imagination of the social minded” (Kirkus Reviews).
“One of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition.” —Norman Mailer
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Overview
For Chicago physician Mitch Wilner, July 4, 1937, began as a typical holiday—a leisurely afternoon at the beach with his wife and young children. But when a peaceful protest erupts in violence, and Mitch sees unarmed steel mill strikers attacked by the local police, he finds himself thrust into the heart of America’s labor struggles.
In the days and months that follow, Mitch witnesses the aggressive strike-breaking tactics used by the steel mill companies, the brutality of the authorities, and the blatant corruption of the local government and media. But in the unionists, Mitch discovers a bond that crosses ethnic, class, and racial boundaries, and truly embodies the spirit of the American dream.
Inspired by the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, Citizens looks at some of the darkest days in modern US labor history in a “powerful, photographic novel [that] will catch the imagination of the social minded” (Kirkus Reviews).
“One of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition.” —Norman Mailer
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625670656 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 656 |
| File size: | 893 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PORTRAIT OF A CRANE OPERATOR
Ladislas Wyznowieki was a scrawny, scratchy, hairy-knuckled crane operator in the Standard Steel mills. For some reason or other he was a leader among the Poles. He never spent any time in the taverns and he didn't even belong to any of the old country friendship and benefit associations, but if you wanted to get the Poles behind something all you had to do was tell Ladislas. He would go whispering, sniffing, trotting around among his pals, and if you wanted the Poles at a meeting, within four hours his cronies would gather up half the Poles in the Harbor. And Ladislas would be in back somewhere grinning and chattering and quarreling with somebody about the best time to pick cherries for cherry brandy.
He wasn't seen in the taverns because all the time he wasn't working he spent on his farm. This farm was the joke and yet the envy of the Polish population. First, a joke, because it wasn't a farm at all. It was just a few lots, three lots at the edge of East Chicago, and the two south of his house didn't even belong to Wyzy. He rented them for five dollars a year, and the great dread of his life was that Mr. Kranow, the real estate man, would manage to sell those lots to someone who would decide to build on them. If that happened, Wyznowieki threatened, he would go someplace and buy a real farm.
On the three lots he had everything complete: a cow, a horse, pigs, chickens, rabbits, a corn patch, vegetables, four cherry trees, two apple trees, and two goats. He had a flock of pigeons on the roof of his "barn"— a Sears-Roebuck garage onto which he had built a loft. He tended beehives between the cherry trees. No one had ever managed to count the cats and dogs around the place.
And the Wyznowieki farm was constantly in production. It was as though that little three-lot ranch was a single, fecund being teeming and swarming with life and new life; litters of kittens were underfoot on the basement steps; hens with new chicks marched beneath Mrs. Wyznowieki's clotheslines; once the cow calved in the tiny garage-barn, and Wyzy carried the gaunt-legged new little beast into the kitchen for comfort.
Every manner of farm tool was there; crowded in the shed and in the basement he had harrows and seeders and reapers enough for a hundred-acre establishment.
Sure, Wyzy used to say, every Polish fellow works in the mills, he says some day I'm gonna have farm. Some day gonna live on farm. Saves up the money and some day he's gonna go home to the old country, have his own farm, that's like in the old country, be a paritz, a big lord. Or maybe he's gonna buy farm in Wisconsin, Indiana, big place, good-by mills. Every fellow his whole life he saves and maybe when he is old man, so old he cannot even pull a cow's tit, he's gonna have farm, yah, I tell you: all he's gonna plant is his own dead nuts in a piece of land in the cemetery! Me, enjoy life when I got it!
The way he enjoyed life was to get up at four-thirty every morning to feed his stock. He pulled down fodder for his cows, and pulled up turnips for his rabbits, and stirred a mush for his pigs, and yelled at the old lady and his daughters to hurry up and milk the cows and feed the chickens and take that goat out and tie him to a tree but keep him away from those beehives, and by 6 a.m. the whole farm was a commotion of munching and chewing and creatures breathing the new day, and in the kitchen Ladislas and his wife and their two daughters drank pitchers of warm milk, ate home-baked bread with ham and eggs, Polish ham; he made it here on his own farm.
Wyznowieki's wife was no taller than the man, but monumentally broad; she could make three of her husband. And their daughters were tremendous. In America children grow big, Wyznowieki always said, showing his big American daughters Helen and Theresa. Oversized girls, tail, big-boned, and with big features and voices like for hollering on a ranch. They were now eighteen and nineteen, and sometimes for days they would try to be delicate like little girls, putting napkins on the table and speaking almost in whispers trying to make their voices be soft. Then all of a sudden they would wrestle like boys or strong dogs, laughing so loud the walls shook, rolling on the floor with their legs thrashing and their hair wild, playing.
The old man was always trying to get the boys at the mill to come and see his daughters. Every new fellow coming to work in the scrapyard had to run the risk of getting married to one of Wyznowieki's girls. It was a standing joke, how Wyzy would peer into every department, sniff around the openhearth, investigate the blooming-mill if he heard there was a new man there. It was a gag around the plant. Any new man, Ladislas would walk around him like a sniffing dog. "You come out on my farm Sunday, you get some real Polish ham to eat; I raise him myself, I show you my American daughters. They give you good time."
They give you good time, boy! that was the gag. You try the younger one, Helen, see, take her for a walk down by the barn!
Now in summer it was tough for the girls and they bothered the life out of him. Pa, we never meet anybody here on the farm, we might as well be out in the sticks. All of a sudden they wanted to go to Chicago and take up a nursing course, cost three hundred dollars. But hell damn, he said, he didn't raise two big daughters to learn a trade and be old maids; no, he had girls to get married, have kids, straw-haired little bums running around pulling cats' tails. Hurry up, he wanted to see lots of kids, hear kids yell in the house.
The house was a four-room frame with the kitchen swollen out from several rebuildings; the rooms were crowded with huge, old-fashioned chunks of furniture; the dining-room table was so big that Mrs. Wyznowieki had to squeeze sidewise to get around it. In the front room there were four cages of canaries, and the girls had added a parrot. Everywhere there were rubber plants and geranium pots, on all the window sills, on top of the console radio, and a flower pot had to be moved off the sewing machine before it could be used. On the kitchen window ledge Mama Wyznowieki kept a row of milk bottles filled with water, and potatoes flowering out of the tops of the bottles.
Ladislas ran the magnet crane in the scrapyard. Seven years now he had been on that old crane. Before that, scrap-loader down on the ground. One job he wanted. He wanted to run the big Hulett unloader that grabbed iron ore out of the boats in the slip and deposited it on the ore-dock. That was the best crane job. Four times, in these last years, he figured it had been his turn by rights to get promoted to an ore-dock crane. Nearly four dollars more a day, on the average. But it was not only the money, goddamit. It was to prove to those goddam Swedish and their smart American sons. Here was an old Polack who could clean out a boat as quick and as slick as any of them. He would handle those giant jaws like watchmaker's pincers, picking up the last speck of iron dust from the bottom of the boat. Why wasn't he good enough for the Hulett crane? He had a perfect safety record on his skidding, jerking, cranky old scrap-picker. Besides, he had proved he could handle the ore-unloader because once a couple of years ago, when one of those Swedes took sick, he had worked a week over there on the docks.
That was a clean, quiet job, sitting all enclosed in the fine little control cab, with windows all around, instead of in his open rattly old scrapyard box. That was good, sailing suspended under the long bridge stretched like an arm over the docks with a finger projecting out over the water, and from the tip of that finger sending the gigantic scoop-jaws down into the boats, hauling up the rusty dirt, and riding it back along the bridge-arm to unload onto the great hills of ore between the docks and the blast furnaces.
There, as nowhere else in the mill, a man had a sense of making something out of earth: almost like on a farm. There from the height of the ore-dump bridge the entire plant could be seen, stretching for two miles along the lakeshore, as a thing of order and sense instead of the haphazard puzzle it appeared to be when a man had only one small task inside a shed or in an enclosed yard. For there a man dredged the very ore and limestone off the barges; he dumped it to form waiting hills, and from his perch saw those hills eaten away by the transfer cars, rolling the raw dirt to the blast furnaces that stood like a row of earth-eating monsters behind the ore-dumps. Iron ore, limestone, and coke — red, white, and black — he saw the different dusts of earth loaded into the larrycars that crawled up the inclines to the tops of the blast furnaces, dumping the ore, limestone, and coke like fodder into the upturned mouths of the beasts, and streams of molten iron issuing below. From that high bridge, Ladislas could see the iron pouring into ladles on wheels, could see the fuming ladles hauled by train-engines to the next row of buildings, the long high open-hearth sheds, seven furnaces, boxcar size, under each roof, and in those furnaces was scrap iron already melting, ready for this boiling pig iron to be added to the soup, to mix and boil and purify and make new steel. From the backs of those boxcar furnaces the steel poured into a great pot, and from the pot ingot-molds were filled, and he could see the long trains of gray-sheathed ingots, like trains of upended iron coffins, pulling toward the stripping-shed where the casings were lifted off the newly poured ingots, leaving the red-glowing blocks of steel bare on the ingot-buggies, and he could see those red-hot naked ingots pulled to the soaking-pits, buried in the heated ground so that the heat might spread evenly through them, all even-baked inside, like a man in a Turkish bath; and he could see glowing ingots emerging from the pits, being carried to the various mills, the blooming-mill where the man-sized blocks of steel would be squeezed into workable chunks, thick slabs or long billets; he could see the chipping-yard behind the bloomer, and the sparks as automatic hammers chipped blemishes from the slabs; and from there, cranes lifting the slabs onto flatcars again, and the slabs hauled to the next row of great barn-shaped sheds where the steel would be rolled down, and down, and passed through shaping-rolls, until it came out girders or sheets, or rods, or as wire; and he could see the boxcars at the far end of the yard, hauling the product away.
And then, in the other direction, beyond the slip into which the oreboats came, he could see the repetition of all these things in the three successive millyards that stretched toward Chicago: the TriState, and Midwest, and Consolidated mills, each with its flocks of openhearth smokestacks and its tall, fat blast furnaces reaching above all.
On the Hulett unloader, moving over the hills of raw ore, it was as though he had command over the huge sprawling beast of a mill, by feeding it.
But after that one week on the unloaders, they put Wyznowieki back on his old scrapyard crane, that should itself have been thrown in for scrap. His crane-mount straddled the yard, fifty feet across, and traveled the length of a block. Wet days, the rails were skiddy; wintry days the wind went through the flimsy crane-box like a bunch of knives. But never mind, he knew his old traveler, knew to the fraction of an inch how much she would skid in rain or snow, and how much play there was in the brakes; he had the feel in his fingers of the very edges of the contact brushes.
That was the busiest crane in the whole damn mill; fifty lifts an hour was nothing. The train of empty charging-boxes for the openhearth furnaces was always waiting below him, like an endless row of empty bread-tins. On the other tracks came carloads of scrap: old busted-down auto bodies, rails, iron barrels, locomotive wheels, farm implements (when he spotted these, Wyzy always spent an hour after work hunting in the scrap pile for parts that might be useful on his farm). And from the mill itself scrap came: shear-ends, and blemished castouts, to be melted down again, poured into steel again.
Wyzy rode over the scrap heaps, lowering his magnet, lifting junk, filling the rows of feed-boxes for the furnaces. And all he wanted was two things: to be an ore-unloader, and to see his big daughters married and making kids around the farm.
There was a good friend of his, Waldemar Vikulik, worked as pitman in the openhearth, who had a son, young Pete, working in the Consolidated mill. Sometimes Waldemar brought young Pete along to the farm, to joke the girls; Pete even took Theresa to the moving pictures a couple of times, but no, you could see they were not a couple, maybe she was not smart enough for him. Smart clean boy, this Pete but, besides, a Communist maybe, a revolutionist, talked always politics. The girls, they listened good, like women, but maybe they wanted to play — give her a push, a chase, throw her on the ground, wrestle! Too solemn, young Pete, but anyway a fine boy!
C.I.O. comes and Pete is the first one with a button, and makes his father wear a button into the Standard mill. "Is going to be union now," Waldemar said. "My eyes are going blind, twenty-five years in this mill. No union, I get nothing. Is going to be union, I get pension for my eyes." Sign up in the union, Ladislas, he said, and they got to give you the job on the big crane.
"Last time we had union," Wyzy reminded him, "your boy he got kick in the pants. Fired quick from Standard Steel."
"Sure. That was different union. Now we got C.I.O."
Next Sunday, Waldemar Vikulik and young Pete came over, bringing with them the C.I.O. man, Frank Sobol.
"Yes, I seen you before someplace," Wyznowieki said. Where were they, his dumb cows, his daughters, why didn't they come sit, bring beer, when two young men were present!
Sure, Frank Sobol said, he had been around the Standard mills a couple of years ago, organizing the United Steel Workers that time. Young Pete was in that union, too.
"Yah, I seen you. The company was terribly down on that union. All Bolsheviks, they said."
"What union ain't they down on?" young Pete asked.
"That's right," Ladislas agreed. The girls came, standing, with foolish eyes.
"But they ain't gonna be down on the C.I.O., the C.I.O. is gonna be on top of them," young Pete said, laughing again. The cow Theresa, why didn't she laugh when Pete made jokes? Then maybe he would go more for her.
"Well, when you gonna sign up all the Polacks, Wyzy?" Pete wanted to know.
"I ain't sign up myself yet," he said. "I not sure about this C.I.O."
"Oh, sure, we know you're gonna sign up," Pete laughed. "But you got to get some of those old Polacks, they won't listen to Pop but you know how to talk to them, Wyzy!"
"They don't listen to me nothing," Wyznowieki demurred. "Old Polacks is not so foolish. You got good union, they sign it up, that's all. You know I got no sayso, I don't even belong to the Polish-American clubs."
Next day in the mill Ladislas Wyznowieki stopped at No. 4 openhearth to say a word to his friend Waldemar Vikulik, to say come over on the farm Sunday, bring over young Pete, we have some new wine. "Where is Vikulik?" he asked a pitman.
"Old Vikulik? He got bounced. They said he got bad eyes. Can't see good enough any more. That's what he gets wearing that button around here."
So on the following Sunday, Wyznowieki had sixteen of his old cronies sitting under the four cherry trees; Frank Sobol came over with the Vikuliks, and signed them all up in the C.I.O., and all took away extra cards, and pretty soon every goddam Pole in the mill had his name on a card.
Up until that time, two men used to work on the ground helping the crane, guiding the chunks of iron into the boxes. But now the scrapyard foreman took off a man. "Super says one man is enough," he informed Wyznowieki. "Hell, a good craneman ought to load those boxes without any help at all."
"Always was two men on ground!" Wyznowieki kicked. "Now you gonna have scrap stick out from box tearing up furnace door, maybe scrap falling from boxes, make some accidents too. I will tell super, myself!"
The foreman grinned. "Better take off your button before you talk to him."
"I gonna wear my goddam button. I been here seventeen years this mill; I want to wear C.I.O. button, okay, that's my business."
So all the while he talked, the super, with an easy smile on his face, was looking at that button on his cap. "Okay, Wyzy," the super said, "you claim you can't load those boxes with only one helper. We'll find someone that can do it. You want to come off the crane?"
"Nobody can work that crane so good as me!" Ladislas sputtered. "I am long time in line for Hulett crane. Why you don't give me Hulett crane job on the dock?"
"Why, you say you can't even run your old crane any more."
"I say you got safety rules, you gonna have accident, one man is not enough on ground. You gonna lose time charging furnace, for boxes cannot be loaded good."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Citizens"
by .
Copyright © 1940 Meyer Levin.
Excerpted by permission of Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc..
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