You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from Oliver Sacks’s Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989). I broke the rules a bit here: rather than a single passage of a few paragraphs, I have two, because the latter one reinforces one of the important points of the former, and also because it’s damn near impossible to pick out any one thing that is the most interesting from the chapter. So here goes:

The situation of the prelingually deaf, prior to 1750, was indeed a calamity: unable to acquire speech, hence dumb or mute; unable to enjoy free communication with even their parents and families; confined to a few rudimentary signs and gestures; cut off, except in large cities, even from the community of their own kind; deprived of literacy and education, all knowledge of the world; forced to do the most menial work; living alone, often close to destitution; treated by the law and society as little better than imbeciles–the lot of the deaf was manifestly dreadful.

But what was manifest was as nothing to the destitution inside–the destitution of knowledge and thought that prelingual deafness could bring, in the absence of any communication or remedial measures. The deplorable state of the deaf aroused both the curiosity and the compassion of the philosophes. Thus the Abbé Sicard asked:

Why is the uneducated deaf person isolated in nature and unable to communicate with other men? Why is he reduced to this state of imbecility? Does his biological constitution differ from ours? Does he not have everything he needs for having sensations, acquiring ideas, and combining them to do everything that we do? Does he not get sensory impressions from objects as we do? Are these not, as with us, the occasion of the mind’s sensations and its acquired ideas? Why then does the deaf person remain stupid while we become intelligent?

To ask this question–never really clearly asked before–is to grasp its answer, to see that the answer lies in the use of symbols. It is, Sicard continues, because the deaf person has no symbols for fixing and combining ideas … that there is a total communication-gap between him and other people. But what was all-important, and had been a source of fundamental confusion since Aristotle’s pronouncements on the matter, was the enduring misconception that symbols had to be speech. Perhaps indeed this passionte misperception, or prejudice, went back to biblical days: the subhuman status of mutes was part of the Mosaic code, and it was reinforced by the biblical exaltation of voice and ear as the one and true way in which man and God could speak (In the beginning was the Word). And yet, overborne by Mosaic and Aristotelian thunderings, some profound voices intimated that this need not be so. Thus Socrates’ remark in the Cratylus of Plato, which so impressed the youthful Abbé de l’Epée:

If we had neither voice nor tongue, and yet wished to manifest things to one another, should we not, like those which are at present mute, endeavour to signify our meaning by the hands, head, and other parts of the body?

Or the deep, yet obvious, insights of the philosopher-physician Cardan in the sixteenth century:

It is possible to place a deaf-mute in a position to hear by reading, and to speak by writing … for as different sounds are conventionally used to signify different things, so also may the various figures of objects and words …. Written characters and ideas may be connected without the intervention of actual sounds.

In the sixteenth century the notion that the understanding of ideas did not depend upon the hearing of words was revolutionary.

But it is not (usually) the ideas of philosophers that change reality; nor, conversely, is it the practice of ordinary people. What changes history, what kindles revolutions, is the meeting of the two. A lofty mind–that of the Abbé de l’Epée–had to meet a humble usage–the indigenous sign language of the poor deaf who roamed Paris–in order to make possible a momentous transformation. If we ask why this meeting had not occurred before, it has something to do with the vocation of Abbé, who could not bear to think of the souls of the deaf-mute living and dying unshriven, deprived of the Catechism, the Scriptures, the Word of God; and it is partly owing to his humility–that he listened to the deaf–and partly to a philosophical and linguistic idea then very much in the air–that of universal language, like the speceium of which Leibniz dreamed. Thus, de l’Epée approached sign language not with contempt but with awe.

The universal language that your scholars have sought for in vain and of which they have despaired, is here; it is right before your eyes, it is the mimicry of the impoverished deaf. Because you do not know it,you hold it in contempt, yet it alone will provide you with the key to all languages.

That this was a misapprehension–for sign language is not a universal language in this grand sense, and Leibniz’s noble dream was probably a chimera–did not matter, was even an advantage. For what mattered was that the Abbé paid minute attention to his pupils, acquired their language (which had scarcely ever been done by the hearing before). And then, by associating signs with pictures and written words, he taught them to read; and with this, in one swoop, he opened to them the world’s learning and culture. De l’Epée’s system of methodical signs–a combination of their own Sign with signed French grammar–enabled deaf students to write down what was said to them through a signing interpreter, a method so successful that, for the first time, it enabled ordinary deaf pupils to read and write French, and thus acquire an education. His school, founded in 1755, was the first to achieve public support. He trained a multitude of teachers for the deaf, who, by the time of his death in 1789, had established twenty-one schools for the deaf in France and Europe. The future of de l’Epée’s own school seemed uncertain during the turmoil of the revolution, but by 1791 it had become the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, headed by the brilliant grammarian Sicard. De l’Epée’s own book, as revolutionary as Copernicus’ in its own way, was first published in 1776.

De l’Epée’s book, a classic, is available in many languages. But what have not been available, have been virtually unknown, are the equally important (and, in some ways, even more fascinating) original writings of the deaf–the first deaf-mutes ever able to write. Harlan Lane and Franklin Philip have done a great service in making these so readily available to us in The Deaf Experience. Especially moving and important are the 1779 Observations of Pierre Desloges–the first book to be published by a deaf person–now available in English for the first time. Desloges himself, deafened at an early age, and virtually without speech, provides us first with a frightening description of the world, or unworld, of the languageless.

At the beginning of my infirmity, and for as long as I was living apart from other deaf people … I was unaware of sign language. I used only scattered, isolated, and unconnected signs. I did not know the art of combining them to form distinct pictures with which one can represent various ideas, transmit them to one’s peers, and converse in logical discourse.

Thus Desloges, though obviously a highly gifted man, could scarcely entertain ideas, or engage in logical discourse, until he had acquired sign language (which, as is usual with the deaf, he learned from someone deaf, in his case from an illiterate deaf-mute).

–Oliver Sacks (1989), Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, pp. 13–18.

And:

When Laurent Clerc (a pupil of Massieu, himself a pupil of Sicard) came to the United States in 1816, he had an immediate and extraordinary impact, for American teachers up to this point had never been exposed to, never even imagined, a deaf-mute of impressive intelligence and education, had never imagined the possibilities dormant in the deaf. With Thomas Gallaudet, Clerc set up the American Asylum for the Deaf, in Hartford, in 1817. As Paris–teachers, philosophes, and public-at-large–was moved, amazed, converted by de l’Epée in the 1770s, so America was to be converted fifty years later.

The atmosphere at the Hartford Asylum, and at other schools soon to be set up, was marked by the sort of enthusiasm and excitement only seen at the start of grand intellectual and humanitarian adventures. The prompt and spectacular success of the Hartford Asylum soon led to the opening of other schools wherever there was sufficient density of population, and thus of deaf students. Virtually all the teachers of the deaf (nearly all of whom were fluent signers and many of whom were deaf) went to Hartford. The French sign system imported by Clerc rapidly amalgamated with the indigenous sign languages here–the deaf generate sign languages wherever there are communities of deaf people; it is for them the easiest and most natural form of communication–to form a uniquely expressive and powerful hybrid, American Sign Language (ASL). A special indigenous strength–presented convincingly by Nora Ellen Groce in her book, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language–was the contribution of Martha’s Vineyard deaf to the development of ASL. A substantial minority of the population there suffered from a hereditary deafness, and most of the island had adopted an easy and powerful sign language. Virtually all the deaf of the Vineyard were sent to the Hartford Asylum in its formative years, where they contributed to the developing national language the unique strength of their own.

One has, indeed, a strong sense of pollination, of people coming to and fro, bringing regional languages, with all their idiosyncracies and strengths, to Hartford, and taking back an increasingly polished and generalized language. The rise of deaf literacy and deaf education was as spectacular in the United States as it had been in France, and soon spread to other parts of the world.

Lane estimates that by 1869 there were 550 teachers of the deaf worldwide and that 41 percent of the teachers of the deaf in the United States were themselves deaf. In 1864 Congress passed a law authorizing the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and the Blind in Washington to become a national deaf-mute college, the first institution of higher learning specifically for the deaf. Its first principal was Edward Gallaudet–the son of Thomas Gallaudet, who had brought Clerc to the United States in 1816. Gallaudet College, as it was later rechristened (it is now Gallaudet University), is still the only liberal arts college for deaf students in the world–though there are now several programs and institutes for the deaf associated with technical colleges. (The most famous of these is at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where there are more than 1,500 deaf students forming the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.)

The great impetus of deaf education and liberation, which had swept France between 1770 and 1820, thus continued its triumphant course in the United States until 1870 (Clerc, immensely active to the end and personally charismatic, died in 1869). And then–and this is the turning point in the entire story–the tide turned, turned against the use of Sign by and for the deaf, so that within twenty years the work of a century was undone.

Indeed, what was happening with the deaf and sign was part of a general (and if one wishes, political) movement of the time: a trend to Victorian oppressiveness and conformism, intolerance of minorities, and minority usages, of every kind–religious, linguistic, ethnic. Thus it was at this time that the little nations and little languages of the world (for example, Wales and Welsh) found themselves under pressure to assimilate and conform.

–Oliver Sacks (1989), Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, pp. 21–24.

Most of this I heard on the radio yesterday evening. I add only (1) that there are no good reasons to care about constitutionality, but lots of good reasons to care about likely case law on the right of privacy, and (2) that it’s impossible to adequately convey such an oily, palavering voice in print.

DURBIN: The reason I asked you about those two cases is that neither of those cases referred to explicit language in the Constitution. Those cases were based on concepts of equality and liberty within our Constitution.

And the Griswold case took that concept of liberty and said it means privacy, though the word is not in our Constitution. And the Brown v. Board of Education took the concept of equality, equal protection, and said that means public education will not be segregated. …

Yesterday, when you were asked about one man, one vote, you clarified it. You said those were my views then, they’re not my views now.

When Senator Kohl asked you about the power and authority of elected branches as opposed to others, no; you said I want to clarify that’s not my view now.

And yet, when we have tried to press you on this critical statement that you made in that application, a statement which was made by you that said the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion, you’ve been unwilling to distance yourself and to say that you disagree with that.

I think this is critically important, because as far as I am concerned, Judge Alito, we have to rely on the Supreme Court to protect our rights and freedom, especially our right to privacy. And for you to say that you’re for Griswold, you accept the constitutional basis for Griswold, but you can’t bring yourself to say there’s a constitutional basis for the right of a woman’s privacy when she is deciding — making a tragic, painful decision about continuing a pregnancy that may risk her health or her life, I’m troubled by that.

Why can you say unequivocally that you find constitutional support for Griswold, unequivocally you find constitutional support for Brown, but cannot bring yourself to say that you find constitutional support for a woman’s right to choose?

ALITO: Brown v. Board of Education, as you pointed out, is based on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. And the 14th Amendment, of course, was adopted and ratified after the Civil War. It talks about equality. It talks about equal protection of the law.

And the principle that was finally recognized in Brown v. Board of Education, after nearly a century of misapplication of the 14th Amendment, is that denying people of a particular race the opportunity to attend schools or, for that matter, to make use of other public facilities that are open to people of a different race denies them equality. They’re not treated the same way — an African-American is not treated the same way as a black (sic) person when they’re treated that way, so they’re denied equality.

And that is based squarely on the language of the equal protection clause and the principle, the heart of the principle that was — the magnificent principle that emerged from this great struggle that is embodied in the equal protection clause.

Griswold concerned the marital right to privacy. And when the decision was handed down, it was written by Justice Douglas. And he based that on his theories of his theory of emanations and penumbras from various constitutional provisions: the Ninth Amendment and the Fourth Amendment and a variety of others.

But it has been understood in later cases, as based on the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no persons shall be denied due process — shall be denied liberty without due process of law.

And that’s my understanding of it. And the issue that was involved in Griswold, the possession of contraceptives by married people, is not an issue that is likely to come before the courts again.

It’s not likely to come before the 3rd Circuit; it’s not likely to come before the Supreme Court. So, I feel an ability to comment — a greater ability to comment on that than I do on an issue that is involved in litigation.

What I have said about Roe is that if it were — if the issue were to come before me, if I’m confirmed and I’m on the Supreme Court and the issue comes up, the first step in the analysis for me would be the issue of stare decisis. And that would be very important.

The things that I said in the 1985 memo were a true expression of my views at the time from my vantage point as an attorney in the Solicitor General’s office. But that was 20 years ago and a great deal has happened in the case law since then.

Thornburg was decided and Webster and then Casey and a number of other decisions. So the stare decisis analysis would have to take account of that entire line of case law.

And then if I got beyond that, I would approach the question. And of course, in Casey, that was that was the beginning and the ending point of the analysis in the joint opinion.

If I were to get beyond that, I would approach that question the way I approach every legal issue that I approach as a judge, and that is to approach it with an open mind and to go through the whole judicial process, which is designed, and I believe strongly in it, to achieve good results, to achieve good decision-making.

— CQ Transcriptions (2006-01-11): U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Judge Samuel Alito’s Nomination to the Supreme Court

Later the same day, from the other side of the aisle:

BROWNBACK: … Judge Alito, the Supreme Court has gotten a number of things wrong at times, too.

That would be correct. And the answer, when the court gets things wrong, is to overturn the case.

Is that — that’s the way it works, isn’t that correct?

ALITO: Well, when the court gets something wrong, and there’s a prior precedent, then you have to analyze the doctrine of stare decisis. It is an important doctrine, and I have said a lot about it…

BROWNBACK: Let me just ask you, is Plessy wrong, Plessy v. Ferguson?

ALITO: Plessy was certainly wrong.

BROWNBACK: OK. I mean, and you have gone through this.

Brown v. Board of Education, which is in my hometown of Topeka, Kansas — I was there last year at the dedication of the school house, 50 years ago — that overturned Plessy.

Plessy had stood on the books since 1896. I don’t know if you knew the number. And I’ve got a chart up here. It was depended upon by a number of people for a long period of time.

You’ve got it sitting on the books for 60 years, twice the length of time of Roe v. Wade. You’ve got these number of cases that considered Plessy and upheld Plessy to the dependency.

And yet Brown comes along, 1950s case, poor little girl has to walk by the all-white school to go to the black school in Topeka, Kansas. And the court looks at this and they say, unanimously, that’s just not right.

Now, stare decisis would say in the Brown case you should uphold Plessy. Is that correct?

ALITO: It was certainly — would be a factor that you would consider in determining whether to overrule it.

BROWNBACK: But obviously…

ALITO: Doctrine that would consider.

BROWNBACK: Obviously, Brown overturned it, and thank goodness it did. Correct?

ALITO: Certainly.

BROWNBACK: It overturned all these super-duper precedents that had been depended upon in this case, because the court got it wrong in Plessy.

BROWNBACK: Is that correct?

ALITO: The court certainly got it wrong in Plessy, and it got it spectacularly wrong in Plessy. And it took a long time for that erroneous decision to be overruled.

One of the things, I think, that people should have understood that separate facilities, even if they were absolutely equal in every respect, even if they were identical, could never give people equal treatment under the law.

BROWNBACK: They don’t.

ALITO: I think they should have recognized that.

But one of the things that was illustrated in those cases — and Sweatt v. Painter, the last one on the list, brought that out — was that, in fact, the facilities, the supposedly equal facilities, were never equal.

And the continuing series of litigation that was brought by the NAACP to challenge racial discrimination illustrated — if illustration was needed, the litigation illustrated that, in fact, the facilities that were supposedly equal were not equal.

And that was an important factor, I think, in leading to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

BROWNBACK: I want to give you another number, and that is that in over 200 other cases, the court has revisited and revised earlier judgments. In other words, in some portion or in all the cases, the court got it wrong in some 200 cases. And thank goodness the court’s willing to review various cases.

BROWNBACK: I want to give you an example of a couple, though, that the court hasn’t reviewed yet that I think are spectacularly wrong.

The 1927 case of Buck v. Bell; I don’t know if you’re familiar with that case. The court examined a Virginia statute that permitted the sterilization of the mentally impaired. Buck, a patient at the so-called Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, was scheduled to be sterilized after doctors alleged that she was a genetic threat to the population due to her diminished mental capacity.

Buck’s guardian challenged the decision to have Carrie sterilized all the way to the Supreme Court, but in an 8-1 decision the court found that it was in the state’s interest to have her sterilized.

Majority opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents.

Clearly, some precedents are undeserving of respect because they’re repugnant to the Constitution. Isn’t Plessy repugnant to the Constitution?

ALITO: It certainly was repugnant to the equal protection clause.

BROWNBACK: And the vision of human dignity.

Isn’t Buck and those sort of statements by Oliver Wendell Holmes repugnant to the Constitution?

ALITO: I think they are repugnant to the traditions of our country. I don’t think there’s any question about that.

— CQ Transcriptions (2006-01-11): U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Judge Samuel Alito’s Nomination to the Supreme Court

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This one is from Susan Sontag’s essay, Against Interpretation (1964):

Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs behind the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning–the latent content–beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art)–all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.

Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of the mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

4

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world–in order to set up a shadow world of meanings. It is to turn the world into this world. (This world! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

5

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself–albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony–the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.

The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God…. Another oeuvre that has attracted interpreters like leeches is that of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness–pared down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically immobilized–are read as statements about modern man’s alienation from meaning or from God, or as an allegory of psychopathology.

Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide … one could go on citing author after author; the list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold. But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civliization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.

— Susan Sontag (1964/1966), Against Interpretation, in Against Interpretation, 6–9.

You might be interested to know that there’s a new weblog out there that you might enjoy — Winter Evenings: or, Lucubrations on Life and Letters. The author’s been writing for years in many forums; perhaps more than anything, against war and despotism. Here, for example:

Despotism delights in war. It is its element. As the bull knows, by instinct, that his strength is in his horns, and the eagle trusts in his talons; so the despot feels his puissance most, when surrounded by his soldiery arrayed for battle. With the sword in his hand, and his artillery around him, he rejoices in his might, and glories in his greatness. Blood must mark his path; and his triumph is incomplete, till death and destruction stalk over the land, the harbingers of his triumphant cavalcade.

And:

The total abolition of war, and the establishment of perpetual and universal peace, appear to me to be of more consequence than any thing ever achieved, or even attempted, by mere mortal man, since the creation.

His aims with the new blog, though, are a bit more modest, and more varied. He’s promised upcoming posts on everything from the titles of miscellaneous papers, the abuse of biography, modern heroism, and the influence of militarism on manners. Here’s a bit from one of the introductory posts:

However I may be disposed to self-delusion, I am not so simple as to imagine that a book which has nothing to recommend itself can be recommended by a preface. I think it indeed at once a mean and vain attempt to deprecate a reader’s displeasure, by preliminary submission. The avowal of conscious defects, of involuntary publication, of youth and inexperience, and of inability to resist the importunate solicitations of discerning friends, is ever supposed to be insincere; and, if it is true, ought in many instances to operate in the total suppression of the work for which it means to apologize. Great pretensions and bold professions, on the other hand, justly raise the contempt of a judicious reader. The liberal spirit of learning should scorn the language of self-commendation, and leave the soft and flowing diction of puffery to the pulpit of the auctioneer, and the stage of the empiric.

This new blogger is the Rev. Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821), an English essayist and minister known for his writing on morals and literature, and his preaching against war and despotism. The source is a decaying hardback volume from the early 19th century British Essayists series, which I stumbled across on the $1.00 rack of a used bookstore in SoHo just before leaving New York City last Thursday. The plan is currently to post each essay in sequence, at a pace of somewhere between one post a day and one post a week; we’ll see how well that is maintained.

I’ve been interested for a while now in the idea of what you might call a retro-blog — the word being my own contribution to the store of cutesy web neologisms, and the thing being an old book, especially a collection of short essays, a periodical, or a diary, serialized into the format of a weblog for easy and pleasant reading online. I first came across it with The Diary of Samuel Pepys, and ran across it again with the Diaries of Lady of Quality (maintained by Natalie Bennett), and The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. It’s an interesting experiment, because of the ways that it may help make public domain literature online easier to publish and easier to manage (since it offers the same advantages for publisher that weblogging software normally offers to authors), and also more accessible, useful, and pleasant for readers (since it breaks up the work into readable chunks, and makes use of a successful convention for periodic reading, easily takes advantage of standard features such as syndication feeds, categories, and reader comments). Winter Evenings is my first stab at implementing the idea. If it goes well, I hope that I can follow it with more.

Let me know what you think. And enjoy!

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is again from Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor.

Paradoxically and simultaneously, industrial unionism–though born of the radicalism of Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco–became a new mode of enforcing the contract. Attempts to seize back the initiative from foremen and time-study experts were met, now, with directives from industrial union leaders to stay in line until a greivance could be properly negotiated. Soon, union dues would be deducted automatically from wages, so that officials no longer needed to bother making personal contact and monthly appeals to the loyalty of members.

Meany, treating industrial unionists at large as enemies, could not for many years grasp that events were bringing the CIO’s elected officials closer to him. He was steeped in a craft tradition to which the very idea of workers united into a single, roughly roughly egalitarian body hinted at revolutionary transformation. But many less conservative sectors were equally surprised by the course of the more democratic CIO unions toward the end of the 1930s. A triangle of government, business, and labor leadership brought about a compact that served mutual interest in stability, though often not in the interests of the workers left out of this power arrangement.

Not until 1937 did business unionism confirm its institutional form, when the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act. Now, a legitimate union (that is to say, a union legitimated by the National Labor Relation Board) with more than 50 percent of the vote in a union election became the sole bargaining agent for all. Unions stood on the brink of a membership gold-rush. The left-led Farm Equipment union could that same year, for instance, win a tremendous victory of five thousand workers at International Harvester in Chicago without a strike, thanks to the NLRB-sanctioned vote. But union leaders also prepared to reciprocate the assistance with a crackdown against membership indiscipline. The United Auto Workers, a case in point, arose out of Wobbly traditions mixed with a 1920s Communist-led Auto Workers Union and an amalgam of radicals’ efforts to work within early CIO formations. The fate of the industry, which fought back furiously against unionization, was set by the famed 1937 sit-down strikes centered in Flint, which seemed for a moment to bring the region close to class and civil war. Only the personal intercession of Michigan’s liberal Governor Murphy, it was widely believed, had prevented a bloodbath of employers’ armed goons retaking the basic means of production and setting off something like a class war. Therein lay a contradiction which the likes of George Meany could appreciate without being able to comprehend fully. The notorious willingness of UAW members to halt production until their greivances were met did not end because the union had employed the good offices of the goveronr (and the appeals of Franklin Roosevelt) to bring union recognition. On the one hand, a vast social movement of the unemployed grew up around the auto workers’ strongholds in Michigan, generating a sustained classwide movement of employed and unemployed, lasting until wartime brought near full employment. On the other hand, union leaders, including UAW leaders, swiftly traded off benefits for discipline in an uneven process complicated by strategic and often-changing conflicts within the political left.

The continuing struggle for more complete democratic participation was often restricted to the local or the particularistic, and thanks to a long-standing tradition of autonomy, sometimes to insular circles of AFL veterans. For instance, in heavily French-Canadian Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a vibrant Independent Textile Union had sprung up out of a history of severe repression and the riotous 1934 general textile strike. The ITU remained outside the CIO and set about organizing workers in many industries across Woonsocket; then, after a conservatizing wartime phase, it died slowly with the postwar shutdown of the mills. To take another example, the All Workers Union of Austin, Minnesota–an IWW-like entity which would reappear in spirit during the 1980s as rebellious Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers–held out for several years in the 1930s against merger. A model par excellence of horizontal, unionism with wide democratic participation and public support, the AWU (urged by Communist regulars and Trotskyists alike) willingly yielded its autonomy, and in so doing also its internal democracy, to the overwhelming influence of the CIO. In yet another case, the Progressive Miners of America, which grew out of a grassroots rebellion against John L. Lewis’s autocratic rule, attempted to place itself in th AFL that Lewis abandoned, on the basis of rank-and-file democracy with a strong dose of anti-foreign and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric. Or again: the AFL Seaman’s Union of the Pacific, reacting ferociously to Communist efforts to discipline the sea lanes, stirred syndicalist energies and like the PMA simultaneously drew upon a racist exclusionary streak far more typical of the AFL than the CIO.

These and many less dramatic experiments died or collapsed into the mainstream by wartime. But for industrial unionism at large, the damage had already been done to the possibilities of resisting creeping bureaucratization. Indeed, only where union delegates themselves decreed safety measures of decentralization, as in the UAW in 1939 (against the advice of Communists and their rivals), did conventions emerge guaranteeing participation from below, to some significant degree.

–Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor, 119-121.