| by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author's program note. When I was a little whippersnapper 60 years ago and more, my young father used to take me on his knee, his only very occasionally used guitar in hand and sing me a song that I hadn't thought of in all these years. It's the kind of childhood memory that comes at you when you're least expecting, bittersweet, tugging at your heart. Now I just cannot get it out of my mind... The song is the "Wabash Cannonball" originally written in 1882 as "The Great Rock Island Route", a happy-go-lucky number credited to one J.A. Roff. In 1904 William Kindt rewrote the lyrics, changing the name of the train to the "Wabash Cannonball". It's a pip of a tune with a chorus that makes you glad to be alive... "Now listen to the jingle, and the rumble, and the roar, As she dashes thro' the woodland, and speeds along the shore, See the mighty rushing engine, hear her merry bell ring out, As they speed along in safety, on the 'Wabash Cannonball'." ... named after the great American main street town of..... Wabash, Indiana, its claim to fame the fact that in 1880 it became the first electrically lighted city on Earth. It is the center of the center state of America, the state that has just tossed a stink bomb into the politics of the Great Republic with its brand-new right-to-work law. Get into the spirit of this article by going to any search engine, finding one of the many excellent versions; (I prefer the one by Johnny Cash).... then let 'er rip.... because you're riding the rails through the great American heartland, once so prosperous, the pride of the nation, now blighted in so many disheartening ways. Born in 1947. In the year of our Lord 1947, at least two significant things occurred: I was born... and the Congress of the Great Republic resoundingly overrode the adamant veto of President Harry S. Truman on a matter of resolute importance to unions. The result was the Taft-Hartley Act, a haymaker by the Republican Party that punched a gaping hole in the closed union shop, thereby providing the U.S. labor movement with an abiding grievance and red-meat for a million stump speeches and union halls. Here's what Taft-Hartley did to the prevailing National Labor Relations Act. NLRA dictated that all employees at unionized workplaces must be members of the union as a condition of employment. It turned employee coercion into union power... and as such became a critical component of what transformed the disorganized, scattered Democratic Party into the majority party that ruled the Great Republic under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman for 20 years, with still major influence today. The politics of the matter went like this: To wed the millions of laboring people to his governing coalition, Roosevelt cut a series of deals with union leaders, including giving them the right of introducing the closed shop, wherein every worker -- whatever their personal views and politics -- was forced to join the union... and finance it with their dues. This gave the unions raw political power and Democrats a leg-up for local, state, and federal elections where this muscle delivered victory after victory. But it also created an outraged, seething menace from people who didn't like Roosevelt (and despised Truman)... patriots who vociferously demanded to know how such coercion, the stuff of Red revolution and godless Communism, could possibly be justified in the Land of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. One side said that employee coercion, fueling union power, brought good jobs and the realization of the American dream... the other demanded liberty and unfettered freedom of choice. Both arguments had valid points... which made the resulting battle bloody, bitter, protracted and internecine, a bona fide civil war... which Indiana has now re-opened, to the outrage of the unions... The matter was further complicated because of the unconcealed contempt the leaders of each side felt for their opponents, dictated by the unyielding, abiding, fathomless scorn and disdain of Senator Robert Taft (R-Ohio) (1889-1953) for President Truman. "To err is Truman," Mrs. Taft said... The words Senator Taft used are unprintable. No quarter asked for, no quarter given by anyone, war to the death. Taft-Hartley became the crucial weapon in that war. Taft-Hartley outlawed the closed shop. The union shop rule, which required all new employees to join the union after a minimum period of time, is also illegal. As such, it is illegal for any employer to force an employee to join a union. Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act goes further and authorizes individual states (but not local governments such as cities and counties) to outlaw union (as well as so-called agency) shops. Under the open shop rule, an employee cannot be compelled to join or pay the equivalent of dues to a union, nor can the employee be fired if he joins the union. In other words, the employee has the right to work, regardless of whether or not he is a member or financial contributor to such a union. 22 states ban "forced unionism"... 27 states and the District of Columbia do not. Proponents of right-to-work laws, based on freedom of association, went to work with a will signing up one state after another. The states they persuaded reads like the playbook of the Republican Party, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. There the great roll call of right-to-work states stopped, until now... with the adhesion of Indiana. Why did Indiana act now... and why does it matter? The signature tune of the people they call Hoosiers is "Back Home Again In Indiana" (1917) ... and there's nothing more domestic, more American, more representative of the Great Republic, than these sane, decent, responsible folk. They are the very salt of the Earth, the bedrock of who we are and what we believe in. And these folks in recent years have watched as the land -- and lifestyle they love -- diminish, as one job after another ends, so many shipped overseas, all gone forever. And as the jobs left, their outrage and despair waxed. To sustain the people, to maintain the land, there must be jobs... and so the people demanded jobs... seeing the bloated unions no longer as job providers but as menaces to their revival and reconstruction. Their representatives (in the persons of the majority Republican Party in the legislature) heard this plea... and essentially said by their actions that Indiana, to compete again and prosper again, must be prepared to face economic facts, no matter how unpleasant. Thus, unions must give back, divest, rethink... instead of merely waving placards, opposing this, blocking that, fulminating, never solving. For the issue here is and always will be the welfare of the people, not merely the welfare of the unions. Thus the unions face the growing disbelief in towns like Wabash that they are not up to the job at hand, the job of making Indiana, a key industrial state, livable again. And so as the unions argue against their fate in Indiana, the "Wabash Cannonball" surges anew... to Ohio, Michigan, Illinois... an engine of change for a nation that needs it, the ghost of Senator Robert Taft riding in triumph. "Oh, the Eastern states are dandy, so the Western people say Chicago, Rock Island, St. Louis by the way To the lakes of Minnesota where the rippling waters fall No changes to be taken on the Wabash Cannonball." All aboard... ** We invite you to submit your comments below. |
