Michael Kazin: In TNR, the Working Class Has Disappeared
[Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is completing a history of the American left to be published in 2011 by Knopf.]
Once upon a time, The New Republic ran detailed, empathetic articles about the lives, ideas, and activism of American workers. “They seem easygoing, good-humored and straightforward Southerners,” wrote Edmund Wilson in a 1931 essay about the coal-miners of West Virginia, “so much in the old tradition of American backwoods independence that it is almost impossible to realize they have actually been reduced to the condition of serfs.” In 1966, Maury Maverick Jr. joined a mass march by Texas farmworkers that ended on Labor Day, on the steps of the state capitol building. Two of the Mexican-Americans in that throng, reported Maverick, planned to remain on those steps “to say the rosary eight hours a day, every day in the week until Governor [John] Connally and the legislature pass the $1.25 minimum wage.”
In recent decades, however, the magazine’s interest in the laboring population seems limited to union leaders who struggle to revive their movement and fail at the task. Take, for example, the archived articles by Jonathan Cohn and John B. Judis featured on the website this Labor Day. There were, of course, sound journalistic reasons to profile a new president of the AFL-CIO like John Sweeney or the head of the Teamsters Union (particularly if his name is James P. Hoffa Jr.) or the impact on unions of the rise of the Chinese manufacturing colossus....
Read entire article at The New Republic
Once upon a time, The New Republic ran detailed, empathetic articles about the lives, ideas, and activism of American workers. “They seem easygoing, good-humored and straightforward Southerners,” wrote Edmund Wilson in a 1931 essay about the coal-miners of West Virginia, “so much in the old tradition of American backwoods independence that it is almost impossible to realize they have actually been reduced to the condition of serfs.” In 1966, Maury Maverick Jr. joined a mass march by Texas farmworkers that ended on Labor Day, on the steps of the state capitol building. Two of the Mexican-Americans in that throng, reported Maverick, planned to remain on those steps “to say the rosary eight hours a day, every day in the week until Governor [John] Connally and the legislature pass the $1.25 minimum wage.”
In recent decades, however, the magazine’s interest in the laboring population seems limited to union leaders who struggle to revive their movement and fail at the task. Take, for example, the archived articles by Jonathan Cohn and John B. Judis featured on the website this Labor Day. There were, of course, sound journalistic reasons to profile a new president of the AFL-CIO like John Sweeney or the head of the Teamsters Union (particularly if his name is James P. Hoffa Jr.) or the impact on unions of the rise of the Chinese manufacturing colossus....