Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  And so trucks drove slowly down country roads past the homes of rural scabs. Bullets were fired through windows. Tires were slashed. Headlights were shattered by cables strung across driveways. Scabs were beaten up. The union’s religious allies, especially a friendly Catholic priest, insisted on a policy of nonviolence. Publicly and officially, Watts adhered to that. But to his more belligerent members, he said, “Do what you gotta do; I don’t want to know. There are a lot of ugly but necessary things that have to be done, but I don’t want to know about them.”

  The first time I saw a nail jack was at the police station. Due to my low seniority, I was the newspaper’s Saturday-night cop reporter. My job was to spend an hour bullshitting with the desk sergeant and maybe get him to read me the crime reports. On one of those evenings, an officer walked into the sergeant’s room carrying a paper tray filled with barbed metal objects that looked like tiny steers’ horns, joined with a dab of solder. They’d been found in the driveway of a Staley replacement worker.

  “What are those?” I asked Sergeant Coventry, who was a year from retirement and could afford to be friendly with a newspaperman.

  “Nail jacks,” he said. They were designed to penetrate a tire tread. Then he began laughing. “You smell a story, don’t you?”

  Of course I did. Sergeant Davis, who was built like a Soviet weight-lifter and whose nickname was “the Gruffest Man in the World,” made it clear he did not want me to write one.

  “You’re just going to teach people how to make these things,” he grumbled. “I don’t want that happening in my hometown.”

  As long as the members of the Allied Industrial Workers had been employed at Staley, the police had considered them upright Americans and even gave them the respect of one blue-collar worker to another. (As much as cops respect anyone who’s not a cop.) Now that the millwrights and corn processors were unemployed street protesters, the cops lumped them into the same troublemaking scum as ghetto blacks and chickenshit antiwar marchers. A police officer’s job is to preserve order. Naturally, they dislike anyone who makes that difficult. But the cops also resented the AIW because they couldn’t form a union themselves and agitate for higher wages or more officers. The cops had a “Policeman’s Benevolent” to care for the wives and children of sick and wounded officers.

  “If I weren’t a police officer, I’d start an antiunion movement in this town,” Sergeant Davis said. “They’ve been using children in their demonstrations. That’s putting little kids in danger.”

  “People said the same thing about Martin Luther King,” I said.

  “Sheeee-it,” Sergeant Davis swore. “Martin Luther King had more class than all the unions in this town put together.”

  Another sergeant opined on the work ethic of Decatur unionists.

  “I know people who used to work in that plant. They’d come in and go to sleep under a box. They’d work two or three hours and then they’d just bag out. I think they’re getting everything they deserve there.”

  On the first anniversary of the lockout, the bad blood between the cops and the union finally turned violent. The labor dispute had dragged on for eighteen months, going back to the work-to-rule campaign. The union needed a dramatic event to persuade its members that the struggle was worth another year of unemployment. Decatur was showing signs of economic distress: two new pawnshops were collecting hunting rifles, necklaces, guitars, bows, wristwatches, and other blue-collar toys. Locked-out workers were openly blackballed in help-wanted ads at employment centers. Companies specified, “Will not consider applicants involved in labor disputes.” Dave Watts’s wife worked as a nurse at both Decatur hospitals to support the household. Mike Griffin’s took a job as a waitress. Art Dhermy’s wife owned a cake shop, but it didn’t earn enough to make ends meet, so she got a full-time job selling baking equipment while Art baked and frosted the cakes. Still, the Dhermys had to refinance their house, lowering their monthly nut but extending a mortgage they’d been only three years from paying off.

  “There was lots of people that lost their homes, lots of divorce, lots of bad medical situations, because the first thing Tate & Lyle done was cancel everybody’s health care,” Watts said. “If you had a toothache, if you had a health crisis, you were shit out of luck.”

  For the anniversary demonstration, the union decided to march down Eldorado Street and stage a sit-in at the main gate, blocking trucks and scabs from entering the plant. They would use the tactics of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi to temporarily stop corn processing in Central Illinois.

  The night before the march, Dan Lane’s brother called to tell him he’d heard the union was “going to be taught a lesson.” As he dressed in his red solidarity T-shirt on the morning of June 27, Lane expected to get beaten up. By then, he looked like a radical. Since his firing at Staley, Lane had grown a beard—beards were prohibited by Tate & Lyle, and uncomfortable in the humid plant—and wore a bandanna around his lengthening hair. He was beginning to think like a radical, too. Not only had Lane been reading about the civil rights movement, he’d been hearing about it firsthand from black union brothers. They’d never been friends inside the plant, where workers separated into ethnic cliques, but now that they were sharing Road Warrior rides to distant union halls, Lane heard stories of parents denied the right to vote, of uncles and cousins lynched. Having gone straight from high school to Vietnam, where he served from 1965 to 1969, Lane had missed his generation’s protest movement. Now, twenty-five years after his peers had chanted antiwar slogans, he had a cause to which he could apply that movement’s lessons.

  It was hot that day. Ninety degrees. The asphalt was soft and the heavy air stank with the malty odor of roasting corn. Not much shade in the sparsely arbored prairie city, so the day felt like the inside of a glass terrarium. Labor’s red line numbered two thousand demonstrators wearing cardboard signs with contradictory rhetoric: “ILLINOIS IS A WAR ZONE” covered one man’s chest. But another insisted, “THIS IS NON-VIOLENT CIVIL RESISTANCE.” The vanguard banner read “STOP A.E. STALEY COMMUNITY BASHING,” but hundreds of union sympathizers had traveled from as far as New York, and all carried signs with their own alphabetical affiliations: URW, USWA, UAW. (Flint’s Local 529 was there to share in the militancy. So were UAW workers from Caterpillar, whose Decatur and Peoria plants had walked out as part of a nationwide strike earlier that week.) When the marchers reached the main gate, they were confronted with the yellow line—and beyond it, another line of Decatur police officers, blocking the factory entrance. As the crowd chanted, “Cross that line! Cross that line!” locked-out workers began, one by one, to trespass on their old workplace. Lane was one of the first across. Halting three feet from the police, he turned around and shouted, “Solidarity!” to the crowd, which responded in kind. At one point, Lane was jostled forward and felt a nightstick against his shoulder blade. He sat on the pavement, back still turned to the officers. Moments later, the police unholstered pepper-gas canisters and aimed a stinging aerosol fog at the seated unionists. Lane ducked his head and turned away from the caustic cloud, only to be sprayed from the other side. One officer grabbed a demonstrator, turned him on his back, and sprayed him in the face as though applying Raid to a giant, helpless beetle.

  Lane, who had been hoping the police would join their march, felt suddenly alienated from the law, from his old employer, from his hometown. “What the hell is going on?” he thought as his face and eyes burned. Around him, demonstrators were pouring cold water onto pepper spray victims, who included a TV reporter and several children. Lane had worked at Staley for twenty years, spent twenty years contributing to the company’s profit margin by following orders, trying to be creative, offering suggestions, and now he was sitting outside on the hot asphalt, choking on gas.

  “Why are they doing this to me?” he thought. “I’ve got a family they don’t give a crap about. They don’t give a crap about me. How can this be happening? Why would you treat somebody like this?”

  The
union filmed the demonstration and used the footage as propaganda. It was the climactic scene of Struggle in the Heartland, a thirty-minute video the Road Warriors began showing at union halls. The union even procured a letter from a Massachusetts police department, accusing the Decatur police of overreacting.

  Less than a month after the Eldorado Street march, the workers at Decatur’s Bridgestone/Firestone plant went on strike. The company’s new Japanese owners—eager to rid themselves of the union they’d been stuck with when they bought the tire company—had demanded rotating shifts, lower wages for new workers, less vacation time, and worker contributions to the health plan. Thus, in the summer of 1994, one out of every fourteen workers in Decatur was involved in a labor dispute. Staley was locked out. Caterpillar was on strike. Firestone was on strike. At Macon County Board meetings, the Democrat who delivered the invocation now included a prayer “for those who are striking and locked out.” At Decatur city council meetings, the reminder was more direct: unionists in red T-shirts filled the gallery every week, demanding the city tolerate their pickets.

  For Mayor Erik Brechnitz, a conservative stockbroker, the leadership of Strike City, USA, was an ibuprofen headache. His own son was a replacement worker at Staley. When the union discovered this, it began referring to the mayor as “Brezhnev.” At the Decatur Celebration, a summer carnival of carousels, elephant cars, and musicians who had retired to Midwestern midways (Tiny Tim; the Mamas and the Papas, with only one original Papa), someone dumped beer on the mayor’s white hair. The mayor’s Jaguar shattered a headlamp when it ran into a chain stretched across his driveway. The unions bought billboards on all the main roads with the legend “You Are Now Entering A War Zone” bracketed by vines of barbed wire. When distinguished visitors flew into Decatur, city officials plotted roundabout routes from the airport, so their guests wouldn’t see the embarrassing messages.

  Brechnitz, though, was less contemptuous of the union than most of Decatur’s elite (Dwayne Andreas jocularly suggested that the AIW fire its leadership). The labor disputes were bad for his city’s image—even the Wall Street Journal was writing about the union’s Adopt-a-Family program—so Brechnitz secretly tried to negotiate a settlement. His partner was Decatur’s congressman, Glenn Poshard. Poshard looked like the Wizard of Oz, down to his fine white mustache, and was either the northernmost Southern Democrat in Congress or the southernmost Northern Democrat. Hailing from the same Bible Belt coal-mining country as many of the Staley workers or their fathers, Poshard had grown up among people who decorated their parlors with three portraits: Jesus Christ, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John L. Lewis, the one-time Southern Illinois resident who was president of the United Mine Workers of America for forty-one years. In matters of personal morality, he was antiabortion and antihomosexuality. In matters of economic morality, he believed there were few higher acts of patriotism than buying an American product built by a unionized worker. Brechnitz talked to Staley, Poshard talked to the union, and they got together to discuss where each side would give.

  Poshard had resisted his own party’s campaign to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement; he saw Decatur’s labor troubles as the “flashpoint” for a new economic globalism that discarded family and community values in the name of profit. Poshard had also become something of an Anglophobe after dealing with Tate & Lyle and Balfour Beatty, a British firm building a dam on the Ohio River with nonunion labor. Those companies, he believed, were devoted to the financial Darwinism of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had broken the coal-mining unions in England and Wales.

  “To me, Decatur was a microcosm of what was sweeping the entire world, with the multinational corporations,” he would say much later. “The bottom line was profit, a lot of it was greed, but the sense of community that the old American corporations had developed with the Staleys and so on, it just tore apart, and these guys were struggling not just to keep their jobs but they were struggling to get that sense of community back, to have a company or a corporation that loved and understood and saw it as a complete family. When Tate & Lyle came in there, all of that sense of community, they didn’t even want it. I read extensively about the new corporate culture that was coming into the country as a result of the multinationals. Decatur was probably the most prolific example of how that clashed with the America that used to be.”

  The America that used to be. Decaturites were traditional people. One of their first questions to newcomers was, “Do you have a church home?” The most beloved restaurant in town was a diner that served thirty-six varieties of pie. The most popular nightspot was a club that played 1950s rock and roll. Its parking lot was crowded with hot rods, its dance floor with fifty-year-olds who had outgrown their leather jackets and poodle skirts but wore them anyway. “It’s nostalgia for Decatur’s heyday,” a friend theorized. Indeed, downtown stores sold T-shirts with the label “I remember …” beneath photos of vanished Decatur landmarks, such as the Transfer House, where the streetcars changed tracks, or Fans Field, home of the minor-league Decatur Commodores until the city fathers declared it unsafe to host a rock concert, thus giving the San Francisco Giants an excuse to move the team. Conservatives are often accused of a futile nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s, but at least in Decatur, there was also an attempt to maintain the economic order that made such a world possible. Mothers could stay home with the children because their husbands could support a family on union wages. If a girl got in trouble, the boy who’d caused it could hire in at the factory and earn more money than she could collect on welfare.

  Decatur was not a progressive city—culturally, it was twenty years behind the rest of America—and there were local leaders who saw the unions’ intransigence as a refusal to embrace the modern, global economy.

  “They just won’t adjust for the new way of doing things,” the city manager—a bureaucrat appointed to run Decatur’s day-to-day business—told me one night. (Soon after, he fled Decatur to manage a suburb of Detroit.)

  The question of who was more progressive, the companies or the unions, depends on your historic framework. If resistance to the new world order had grown out of a desire to avoid returning to the penury of their grandfathers, their great-grandfathers, and the ancestors who had sneaked off the manor in Sussex in the middle of the night to jump ship for America, then the union’s conservatism was simply a desire to prevent the return of a more genuine conservatism, in which the many toiled to provide pleasures for the few. Or, as the wife of one locked-out worker put it, “Some people aren’t getting what they need so other people can have what they want.”

  Poshard and Brechnitz made no progress in resolving the lockout. In Poshard’s opinion, Tate & Lyle had no interest in negotiating. The company had so much money it could afford to wait until the last worker pawned the last spoon in his kitchen drawer, then crawled across the yellow line, begging to have soup poured into his mouth. Brechnitz thought the company and the union were so far apart they could never settle on a contract.

  Poshard expected such disdain from British industrialists. He was more frustrated by the indifference from politicians in his own Democratic Party. When President Bill Clinton gave a speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, Poshard brought a group of Decatur union leaders to meet with Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. To a room full of workers in danger of losing their jobs and their homes, the Harvard economist gave a nebulous philosophical speech about the relationship between labor and business. Reich never gave a direct answer to any of the workers’ questions, nor did he give any indication that the Labor Department would intervene in Decatur’s labor disputes. The workers left feeling deflated; Poshard left feeling the meeting had been useless.

  “Clinton’s got plenty of time for gays in the military, but he doesn’t have any time for us,” I once heard a worker grumble.

  (He was getting at an important historical question. For the past twenty-five years, American politics had been dominated by issues such as busing, affirmative
action, women’s rights, guns, abortion, prayer in school, and gay rights. The Democratic Party, which since FDR had been the champion of the working stiff, was now dominated by overeducated liberals—like the Clintons—more concerned with protecting the interests of blacks, homosexuals, career women, and pregnant teenagers than the interests of labor. It’s the reason the white working class defected to the Republican Party—if the Democrats weren’t going to stand up for their right to have a job, at least the Republicans would stand up for their right to carry a gun. But this period during which we stopped talking about economic issues and started talking about social issues is coterminous with America’s Great Divergence in financial equality. The Republicans encouraged it, and the Democrats did nothing in response but shift their donor base from unions to socially liberal Wall Street bankers.)

  Poshard got another reminder of his rank in the new world order when he and forty anti-NAFTA congressmen tried to meet with Mexico’s chief negotiator on the treaty. The man wouldn’t see them, but when Poshard attended a meeting at ADM headquarters, he found the Mexican negotiator sitting in Dwayne Andreas’s executive suite.

  “I just thought at the time, ‘What kind of commentary is this on American life?’” Poshard would say. “Forty congressmen who have honest questions about this contract with Mexico can’t get an answer even in our nation’s capital, but I can go to ADM in Decatur, and the guy’s there at their request. It shows you how much power the corporation had at the time. Multinational corporations, they’re not loyal to any country. They’re loyal to the profit margin that they make, and being an American corporation, or being a British corporation, the loyalty is not even to the community; it’s multinational, and they will go wherever they can make the most money, and I don’t think that’s a complete picture of what a corporation, especially an American corporation, should be.”