A Round-Up Of Sunday Reads...On Monday!
Helen Keller's Political Views And The UAW Strike
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“…Keller called for the dismantling of an economic order in which ‘the working class lives in want while the master class lives in luxury.’ ”
I chose these readings for a quiet, fall Sunday, but today is anything but peaceful given the bombings and declarations of war in the Middle East. If you want to understand what’s happening from an Israeli’s perspective, here’s a piece on the recent attacks by @ .
On topics closer to home, I recently learned, contrary to the docile, traditional image projected onto Helen Keller by the books I read about her over half a century ago, she was known as “radical” in her beliefs, particularly for women of the time — she was a declared socialist, pacifist, suffragist and one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920.
Ms.Keller was also a staunch supporter of unions, which I believe meshes well with today’s extensive number of worker strikes. This connection is perhaps most prominently with the UAW strike that has continued to expand to more plants across the country since it began on September 15, as the three largest auto workers unions fight to regain benefits lost during the recession and keep its workers’ wage at least commensurate with current inflation.
Here are a few articles for your Sunday evening that discuss the impact of Helen Keller’s activism, the UAW strike and the differences between generations of auto workers.
— First up is a Time Magazine article about Helen Keller’s “radical” social activism written in 2015 on the 135th anniversary of her birth.
She joined the Socialist party in 1909, and became an IWW member shortly thereafter, supporting strikes, walking picket lines, giving lecture tours and writing articles for publications like The Liberator. She noticed the close relationship between disability and poverty, and blamed capitalism and poor industrial conditions for both.
https://time.com/3923213/helen-keller-radicalism/
— The Huffington Post wrote an interesting piece in 2016 on “Helen Keller Day” (June 27, the day of her birth) describing Helen Keller’s left leanings.
She [Keller] was the founder of what today is called the disability rights movement. In her investigations into the causes of blindness, she discovered that poor people were more likely than the rich to be blind, and soon connected the mistreatment of the blind to the oppression of workers, women, and other groups. Like all radicals -- in her own day and today -- Keller believed in justice, not just charity.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/helen-kellers-radical-vis_b_10696310
— You can also explore the extensive Helen Keller Archival Collection, fully digitized and made accessible by the American Foundation for the Blind, for whom she was an early leader.
There is more than a subtle connection between today’s worker strikes and Ms.Keller’s lifelong fights to achieve a modicum of justice for disabled and oppressed workers. Our country wants to project an image of hard work, perseverance and traditional values onto people who appear to succeed against the odds with only the help of their own gumption. Helen Keller spent much of her adult life trying to dispel that fiction: you live in America, you can succeed and achieve the “American Dream”. But what it takes to succeed is both targeted, well-funded government programs and groups of people coming together to fight for one another’s dignity, particularly in the workplace.
A bit about the United Auto Workers’ Strike (UAW)…
— This article from The New York Times, written just into the third week of the strike, is a marvelous profile of father and son caught up in the UAW strike in Detroit, and their different perspectives of what work means to the two generations.
His father said it pained him to see how much had changed since the days when a job at Ford Motor meant a comfortable middle-class life. He was making double his son’s wages when Keegan was hired.
“Twenty-five years later, they only offered him $3 more per hour than I got when I joined,” Steve said. “Is this the life I wanted for him? No.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/us/uaw-union-ford-michigan-generations.html
— Finally, a CNBC update as of Friday, October 6: Although the UAW strike has expanded to several other plants as contract negotiations stumbled, Shawn Fain, president of the UAW, has chosen not to expand the strike further as of last Friday, citing progress in the talks, most recently concerning battery production.
Electric vehicle battery plants have been a major point of contention in this year’s talks between the union and the three Detroit automakers. Each automaker has formed joint ventures with battery makers to manufacture EV batteries in the United States — a move the union has characterized as a plan to shut it out of the new factories, many of which are under construction now.
This is very interesting: Helen Keller was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920.