Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  FOUR YEARS AFTER Wisconsin Steel closed, Rob Stanley finally found a new job. He was tending bar at Luke and Nonnie’s when a softball teammate walked in and told him the federal government was hiring plumbers. That was close enough to pipe fitting, so Stanley got in with the feds. He married again, to the woman who cut his hair, and bought a craftsman house in the suburbs. In his mid-sixties now, he has no prospects of retiring. Because his pension disappeared along with the steel mill, Stanley had not been able to start saving for retirement until his late thirties.

  Even though he’d been working since he was eighteen, “there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, as far as retiring,” he said.

  Chuck Walley died in his sixties. His daughter blamed the drinking habit he developed after he was laid off, during the listless days when he lay on the couch and mumbled that he should have been buried along with Wisconsin Steel.

  At the foot of the 95th Street Bridge—the lift bridge the Bluesmobile leapt in The Blues Brothers—is a red-roofed takeout shack that serves baskets of fried perch and catfish and shrimp and salmon smoked in the curing shed out back. Calumet Fisheries has a perfect vantage for watching the freighters come and go. But the ships no longer float down from Minnesota or Upper Michigan with holds full of taconite to melt into steel. The ships are the Neve Trader, a Norwegian vessel with a Latvian crew, delivering girders from Poland, or the Federal Mackenzie, from Panama, with shining spools of steel. It’s cheaper to import steel than it would have been to modernize the Chicago mills. The sailors wander into Calumet Fisheries looking for beer and cigarettes or cabs and trains that will take them downtown, where they can buy cell phones, MP3 players, and brand-name athletic shoes for their wives and children across the sea. To a merchant sailor, America is a giant shopping mall. The manager gives them the name of the ship terminal and tells them, “Give this to the cab driver when you come back.” If she were a stranger in Latvia or Panama, she’d expect the same hospitality.

  The old steelworkers come in, too. Not as many as when the mills were running and Calumet Fisheries was open eighteen hours a day. They’ve died, or retired to Arizona, or moved away to find other work. Since they don’t have as much money as they once earned, and since the Great Lakes have been overfished, the shack serves more cheap foreign seafood than it did during the mill days. Lake perch, at nine dollars a pound, is too expensive. Smelt is almost impossible to obtain. The trout comes from Canada. The mill veterans buy it, carry it to the riverbank, and watch the ships bring in the cargo that ended their livelihoods.

  “You see older people, they come down to the river, and it’s like they’re reminiscing,” says the manager. “They’re watching the ships unload the coils and I want to say, ‘A penny for your thoughts.’”

  OIL CAN EDDIE LIKED to reminisce, too. Oil Can Eddie was Ed Sadlowski, a steelworker without a mill, a sloganeering, hymn-singing, street-marching, banner-waving, boss-hating labor captain without a union. Had he been born a generation earlier, Eddie would have been a glowering counterpart to George Meany or John L. Lewis, exhorting the picket lines with his bullhorn, cussing out the Yale men across the negotiating table, condescending to bended-knee machine pols who needed his legions on Election Day.

  Sadlowski had made a bid for that power. In 1956, after the army was through with him, he followed his father into the mill. They called him “Oil Can Eddie” because, as a machine repairman, he walked around the mill all day dispensing squirts of oil and talking union politics. A big, outspoken neighborhood kid, a beer drinker, a pool shooter, he was the kind of guy who needed a nickname for the loud greetings he heard whenever he walked into a tavern or a union hall. At twenty-five, he was elected president of the ten-thousand-member Steelworkers Local 65. Ten years later, after he beat the union bosses’ candidate for district director, the Washington Post declared, “A new labor star has been born.” Then Sadlowski decided to run for international president of the United Steelworkers, as a reformer. He cut a romantic figure: young, with a dark Bobby Kennedy forelock, a leather jacket, and a mouth that would say “fuck” and “Mozart” in the same sentence. The 1970s were the decade of Archie Bunker, of hard hats pummeling antiwar protesters on Madison Avenue. As the working class rejected liberalism, New York was looking for a genuine proletarian radical. Sadlowski appeared on 60 Minutes. He was interviewed by the New York Times. Jane Fonda and John Kenneth Galbraith endorsed his campaign. College-educated Marxists took jobs in the mills, looking to glom onto his blue-collar glamour. He derided the liberals as “colonizers,” but he accepted their help.

  “Never in my life have I experienced such exhilaration as that campaign,” he said years later. “I’d walk in a room, and the adrenaline is going.”

  Sadlowski’s biggest mistake was telling Penthouse he didn’t mind the steel industry eliminating jobs, as long as it retrained steelworkers for cleaner, more intellectual pursuits.

  “Working forty hours a week in a steel mill drains the lifeblood out of a man,” he said. “Nothing is to be gotten from that. Society has nothing to show for it but waste.”

  Instead, he suggested, the labor movement’s goal should be liberating workers from hard, sweaty labor, so they could develop their talents as lawyers, doctors, and poets.

  “How many Mozarts are working in steel mills?” he had asked another journalist.

  Even in 1977, steelworkers were anxious about job loss—their ranks had withered by 20 percent over the previous fifteen years. What kind of airy-fairy talk was this Mozart and poetry stuff, from a guy who palled around with Commies and listened to Pete Seeger albums in his basement? Sadlowski’s opponent—the union president’s handpicked successor—circulated copies of the interview, implying that Oil Can Eddie wanted to eliminate more jobs.

  Of course, Sadlowski lost. Young Turks always lose. Old guys don’t like to be told it’s the new generation’s turn. He felt he’d been cheated, but his opponent’s biggest margins were in Canada, and there was no way to challenge an election in two countries.

  Oil Can Eddie was spending the twenty-first century as a member of the Illinois Labor Relations Board, stuffed into a suit, caged behind a desk. I met him at a Southeast Side history museum, which was open for three hours every Thursday afternoon, in a park field house. He was sitting at the bullshitters’ table with a pair of retired steelworkers. White-haired, blunt-featured, he had a heavy granite head that looked as though it had been chipped out of the empty space on Rushmore and grafted to the body of a 250-pound man. The museum director told me that if I talked to anyone on the East Side, it should be Oil Can Eddie. Sadlowski couldn’t sit around and drink coffee all afternoon, so he gave me his card and told me to call him. But soon. He was going to Florida in a few weeks to spend time with his wife.

  When I called, he told me he was going out to Indiana that Saturday, to teach some wet-behind-the-ears ironworkers about their blue-collar heritage. They were gonna go down to the old Republic Steel mill, where the cops killed ten strikers back in ’37. Yeah, I could come along, if I gave him a lift.

  “But you’re gonna have to be there at seven,” he said, his voice low and feline, in the way a lion’s postprandial purr is feline. “I can’t wait around because I have to meet some people. If you fuck up, you fuck up. I’m not trying to be a drill sergeant …”

  The next time I saw Oil Can Eddie, I was knocking on the door of his bungalow at six forty-five on Saturday morning. I lived thirty miles away, but his lecture had frightened me into punctuality. In Chicago’s Bungalow Belt, most houses were built from the same square blueprint, the same sand- or mole-colored brick. I knew I was at Sadlowski’s by the placards in the window—“Hate Free Zone” and “Speak Up America: Health Care Is Our Right.”

  Oil Can Eddie answered the door in his underwear.

  “You’re here early,” he said, leading me through the dining room. The sun had not yet found the south windows, so the house was gray with predawn gloom. The dining table was stacked with u
nion pamphlets and printouts from a left-wing website. It looked like a campaign office.

  “Excuse the mess,” Sadlowski said as he pulled on a pair of faded jeans with a grass stain on the knee, a windbreaker, and a Cubs cap. “I’m baching it. My wife’s in Florida. Do you want some tea?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He found a clean mug in the cupboard.

  “Do you want anything in it?”

  “Milk and sugar.”

  “Ahhh.”

  His look told me I’d never make a steelworker. It made me self-conscious about the sportcoat and sweater I was wearing.

  Sadlowski swallowed a handful of pills with his unsweetened tea, and moaned about the state of his head and his belly.

  “Ahh, I’m tired,” he said. “I went to a fish fry in Indiana. I was there half the night. That fish is still with me. That’s always been a big thing—East Chicago, Northwest Indiana. For one hundred years, the staple was lake perch. Now it’s so expensive, I don’t know what they use.”

  In my little red Dodge Neon, we vaulted onto the Skyway to the Indiana Toll Road, above the industrial villages of Whiting, Hammond, East Chicago, and Gary. On the lake side of the highway, steel mills drove spikes into the brightening sky. At U.S. Steel, in Gary, a flame wavered at the tip of a chimney, and battle smoke swept into downtown, obscuring the dome of city hall in a grainy haze. The Calumet Region—“Da Region” in the local urban patois—is linked to Southeast Chicago culturally, historically, and geographically. (It was once described as “a barnacle clinging to the underside of Chicago.”) People cross the state line for church services, union meetings, fish fries, and Catholic schools.

  “The common bond was the mills,” Sadlowski said. “Industry exists in all of us to a degree. We were all fed that bullshit from the cradle. Get ahead by stepping on the other guy. You went to high school, and they would have a recruiter from the mills, have a big assembly. Damn near everybody lived in South Chicago worked in that fuckin’mill. This used to be the biggest steelmaking area in the world. From South Works in Chicago to Burns Harbor, Indiana, there were one hundred thousand steelworkers—now there’s maybe twenty thousand. It’s horseshit. They took all the money they could out of it and left nothing. That’s what all industries do.”

  A yellow school bus was parked in the lot of the Ironworkers Hall in Hobart. Sadlowski taught labor history to the apprentices, and today he was taking them on a tour of the long-razed plants where their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had worked in peasantry, before the unions. The apprentices were young men with unfinished faces, lanky in blue jeans and work boots, eating bleary breakfasts out of fast-food bags. When Sadlowski boarded the bus, they came to life.

  “Wooo, Ed!”—from the back of the bus.

  “Don’t get smart, now,” he growled. “Don’t get smart. Anyone owe me a paper? Bring it in Monday. I heard that. It’s in the mail. The check’s in the mail.”

  Sadlowski faced down a hefty boy wearing a fluffy beard in progress.

  “Hello, Rizzi. Every time I see you, you’ve got your hand in a McDonald’s bag.”

  “This is the first one!” Rizzi protested. He reached into the sack. “Here, have a burger.”

  Sadlowski waved him off and addressed the bus.

  “Today, we’re going to go on a labor heritage tour.” He stood in the aisle, and you could hear the union-hall orator who’d drawn in thousands of steelworkers thirty years before. “That’s the heritage that belongs to the workingman in this country, and the workingwoman. Someday, some of you might have a kid or two you can take there. That’s an important part of your identity.”

  This was the winter of 2005, a month after George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term and proposed to replace Social Security with private investment accounts. Sadlowski was a staunch New Dealer. The New Deal had made unions possible, promoted the mill worker to the middle class.

  “Social Security is the greatest government program in the history of the country,” he lectured the young men. “Don’t let them bullshit you about personalized accounts. Social Security means just that”—a sweep of his hand encircled the riders—“social. Everyone. That’s the principle it was established under seventy years ago. You’ve got to stop thinking about me, me, me. How about us, us, us? I want to go up, you want to go up, let’s grab each other and go up together. Who’s in Bush’s camp? The rich guys. It’s not the millwrights or the carpenters.”

  They had gone up, at least the ones lucky enough to belong to a union. The parking lot was full of pickup trucks—Dodge Rams with swollen hoods and quarter panels, a young man’s first purchase with jackpot union wages. At the Chicago Reader, the city’s atternative weekly, college graduates were earning $9.50 an hour as editorial assistants. None of them seemed interested in forming a union. Neither were my friends who worked in bookstores. On the bus ride back to Chicago, I asked Sadlowski why white-collar workers had never embraced the labor movement.

  “The white-collar worker has kind of a Bob Cratchit attitude,” he explained. “He feels he’s a half step below the boss. The boss says, ‘Call me Harry.’ He feels he’s made it. You go to a shoe store, they got six managers. They call everybody a manager, but they pay ’em all shit.”

  Steelworkers and ironworkers still thought of themselves as blue-collar underdogs who needed to band together against the plutocrats. That was why these twenty-two-year-olds were driving new trucks, while on the fashionable North Side of Chicago, young graphic designers and computer programmers who fancied themselves “professionals” were riding the L to work. They had status but no money. The ironworkers had money but no status. Take your pick.

  The bus pulled into the parking lot of a single-story brick building on Avenue O. It was a day care center, belonging to a local church, but it had once been a union hall, and the new owners still rented a meeting room to the aged remnants of Local 1033. This was a sacred site. Out on the sidewalk, a plaque was bolted to the foot of a flagpole. Sadlowski gathered his students and explained why it was there.

  “Back in 1937, on May 26, there was a strike vote at Republic Steel.” He gestured across the street. You had to imagine the brick mill, the black sky. The land was back to prairie now, guarded by a snow fence hung with “NO TRESPASSING” warnings. “The company locked the gates. Four hundred workers were locked in, a couple thousand locked out. A rally was called for the thirtieth. Two thousand people converged on Sam’s Place. That was the strike headquarters. They marched to the gates, and fifty yards away, the police opened fire. They murdered ten men. The cops were saying a lot of ’em were Communists, because they kept chanting, ‘CIO, CIO.’”

  The names of the dead were cast on a brass plaque. They were as polyglot as a platoon in a World War II movie: Anderson, Causey, Francisco, Popovich, Handley, Jones, Reed, Tagliori, Tisdale, Rothmund.

  Sadlowski led his gaggle inside, to the low-slung auditorium with the flag-flanked stage at the distant end. When he was young, this was where the Christmas parties were held, where the sixteen-inch softball teams returned with their trophies, where tickets were sold for the big once-a-year night at Sox Park. As Sadlowski stood on the tile floor that had been crowded heel-to-toe, ankle-to-ankle, with a thousand steel-shank boots, his eyes focused on something in 1965. The rest of us were too young to see it, so he said, “This was a booming hall when the mills were going. It was really an integral part of the community, more than just a sterile hall. You can raise your voice in a union hall. You can’t argue in a bank, you can’t argue in a church. Union hall, you have differences of opinion. It’s okay. They used to serve great baccalà here during the meetings.”

  “What’s baccalà?”

  Sadlowski glared at the questioner.

  “You never ate baccalà? Some of youse are Polish and don’t even know how to pronounce your name.”

  There was one black apprentice in the crowd. He recorded Sadlowski’s speech on a microcassette.

  “That could have bee
n us standing here on a picket,” he said when I asked him why he needed a tape. “You gotta get it down, ’cause you might not come here again.”

  The bus called next at Pullman. Pullman looks nothing like Chicago. A few blocks of row houses whose clay-red bricks burn through faded sheets of whitewash. Pullman offers the illusion that one has taken a wrong turn off 111th Street and is suddenly driving the narrow avenues of working-class Baltimore or Philadelphia. It was never supposed to have been part of Chicago. In the 1880s, when railroad-car manufacturer George Pullman built the houses, the church, and the hotel, it was far south of the city limits, beyond the reach of any authority but his own. Pullman gathered thousands of workers on his manor. They lived in his residences, according to their rank; shopped in his stores; attended plays at his theater; read books from his library; and sent their children to his schools. The workers rebelled. A national railroad strike broke out. President Grover Cleveland sent twelve thousand troops to stamp out the uprising. The workers surrendered, signing pledges never to join a union. Pullman evicted the ringleaders from his village and replaced them with scabs, just as he would have replaced a balky carriage horse with an obedient gelding.

  We heard some of this story in the pews of Greenstone United Methodist Church, another monument to George Pullman’s impractical vision of the ideal community. It was built of pale jade Pennsylvania serpentine, which has had to be replaced by dyed rock as it disintegrates. Pullman’s workers never worshipped here, because the local denominations could not afford to rent a church with a twenty-one-stop organ. The boss was pleased, though, because it completed his village-green diorama.

  We heard the rest in the museum of the Pullman State Historic Site, sitting as quietly as grade-schoolers for a twenty-minute movie on the Great Strike.

  “This became a worldwide issue of how far you can go with paternalism, by virtue of being an owner,” Sadlowski lectured after it was over. “The schools here only went to the eighth grade. If you could read and write and do a little figuring, that was enough to work for Mr. Pullman. There were no high schools and colleges here. That wasn’t for us. That was for the elite. Pullman was such a tyrant that he was buried in Graceland Cemetery under rails, encased in concrete, so people wouldn’t desecrate his body.”