Palin Would Not Be Governor If Not for Community Organizers

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities.

- - Sarah Palin, GOP convention speech

One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.

- - Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Sarah Palin's attack on community organizers shows that she has no clue about the exacting job requirements of community organizers. Worse, she has no clue about her own debts to the history of community organizing in America, which stretches back to the 19th Century.

One of the most important books in the history of social movements is Robert Fisher's Let the People Decide. In that book Fisher traces the genealogy of community organizing from the 1880's, and if Gov. Palin knew that history she would see that the privilege she enjoys in serving in a high state office and her chance to be placed on a major party's presidential ticket is due in no small part to community organizers who started fighting for national women's suffrage in 1920 and a 2nd wave of organizers in the 1960's and 1970's who demanded equal rights for women.

But she owes what she has to an even larger cloud of organizers. The legacy of community organizers includes prominent women focused on various types of communities. Jane Addams started the first settlement houses that provided day care for working mothers and education for all ages of people at the bottom of the pecking order. Dorothy Day, mother of the Catholic Worker Movement, advocated for women's rights, ran hospitality houses for the dispossessed in urban slums and opposed the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Sarah Palin's children owe the existence of the leisure time to join their mother in Minneapolis to community organizers like Mother Jones, who organized children working in mills and mines in the early 20th Century to leverage change from a Republican administration that otherwise ignored the ills of child labor. The tiny contingent of African American delegates applauding Ms. Palin attacks enjoyed the right of traveling to Minneapolis via desegregated interstate travel thanks to Rosa Parks, who learned the art of civil disobedience right here in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School from a community organizer, Myles Horton (who also trained Martin Luther King, Jr.).

You see, so much of Sarah Palin's public life would have been erased had it not been for the thankless work of an unbroken line of community organizers (both remembered and forgotten). But she had no thanks in her snide and sophomoric denigration of community organizing. She expressed prideful and pompous disdain for her forebearers as if she earned the privileges of public service all by herself (thus confirming the perception that Republican leaders get born on third base and assume they hit triples). And her previous life as a beauty pageant contestant, TV desk reporter, and hockey mom never afforded her the opportunity to stand in the shoes of people who work night and day (including weekends) for modest pay to serve their community by organizing it.

Worst of all, she abdicated her responsibility as a public servant to retell the story of American progress as her own story. For the sake of personal gain and her own portfolio, Sarah Palin attempted to poison the perception of Americans who may know community organizing even less than she does. The story of America since the late 19th Century is the story of immigrants being "Americanized," women getting the vote and breaking through vocational glass ceilings, African Americans finally enjoying the basic civil rights to which they were entitled ages ago, Latinos fighting for the full fruits of their labors, children being freed from sweat shops to go to school and to play (and, in Bristol Palin's case, freed to have their own children), and neighborhoods leveraging a place at the table of decision makers. Community organizers are the central protagonists in that story, even if Sarah Palin doesn't really understand or acknowledge that.

Tell 'em about the dream, Martin.

There are so many events connected to the Civil Rights March on Washington that occurred 45 years ago this day. John Lewis resisting removing references to revolution and Sherman's March in his speech, Malcolm X ridiculing the march as a Kennedy tool, Kennedy staffers camped out by the sound system ready to pull cables if speeches wandered into unapproved territory, a president discouraging Martin King away from economic solutions. All of those events and many more stand out to me. Those and more:

Mounted in the eagle's eye of the Washington Monument, a CBS television camera showed viewers a thick carpet of people on both sides of the half-mile reflecting pool and all around the base of the Lincoln Memorial. At noon, nearly two hours before the rally began, the police estimated the crowd at more than 200,000 .... [T]he numbers reduced observers to monosyllabic joy. Within the movement, the gathering sea of placards and faces produced the most brain-numbing sight since the first ghost fleet of empty buses chugged through Montgomery.

An ancient man reached halfway across the world to fix the historical moment: W.E.B. Du Bois had died in Ghana .... For those who revered Du Bois, news of his death that very morning came as a shockingly appropriate transition. Gone finally was the father of pan-Africanism, the NAACP, and the Negro intelligentsia ....

King faced ... a giant press corps and listeners as diverse as the most ardent supporters of the movement and the stubborn Congress at the other end of the Mall, where by quorum calls sullen legislators "spread upon the Journal" the names of the ninety-two absent members who might have let the march distract them from their regular business. For all these King delivered his address in his clearest diction and stateliest baritone. Ovations interrupted him in the cracks of infrequent oratorical flourish, and in difficult passages small voices cried, "Yes!" and "Right on!" as though grateful and proud to hear such talk. From the front, a woman could be heard to laugh and shout, "Sho 'nuff!" when King told them about the freedom checks that had bounced ....

The crowd responded to the pulsating emotion transmitted from the prophet Amos, and King could not bring himself to deliver the next line of his prepared text, which by contrast opened its lamest and most pretentious section ....

There was no alternative but to preach. Knowing that he had wandered completely off text, some of those behind him on the platform urged him on, and Mahalia Jackson piped up as though in church, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin." Whether her words reached him is not known. [Source]

Those Wacky Academics

Pay them enough money and they'll re-write history to your liking. It's nobody's business but the Turks.

G-town's Kate & Karsten Win Historical Commission's Architectural Award

Given how much work our Germantown neighbors have put into their craftsman-looking historic home, I was not surprised to read that it is now considered an award-winning masterpiece. Kudos to Kate and Karsten! They make the North End a better place to live.

Century-Old Germantown House Makes Historic "Endangered List"

There's a 1900-era house still standing in Nashville, which means that it's a matter of time before Metro Codes (via Sonny West) and the pro-developer, pro-big-box segment of the Metro Council call for its demolition. While the building is considered a part of the Germantown neighborhood, it actually sits across Jefferson Street in the Sulphur Dell/Bicentennial Mall section of Downtown, and the recently passed Germantown Historic Overlay does not appear to extend to the Geist property, which means that its facade is not protected should the owners sell to someone who wants to demo the structure.

Given Nashville's tear-down and pave-over culture, don't be surprised if the Geist property moves from being endangered to extinct. And it looks like there is nothing those of us with an appreciation of history, but without any power can do about it.

HBO's John Adams

Last night we watched the final episode in HBO's mini-series adaptation of David McCullough's book on John Adams. From beginning to end it really was a remarkable production (by Tom Hanks) that showed the human dimensions of the American Revolution stripped of all of the high-minded pretension that goes with so much of the history that gets passed down as neatly as the posed lines of all-present signers in a John Trumbull painting. The subject was both a deeply flawed but remarkably courageous human being. If you have a chance to see John Adams, I highly recommend the whole thing. Our entire family was just mesmerized by it. The cinematography alone is sweeping, detailed, and breathtaking. If you can see it in HD, then by all means do so.

Here's a clip:

The Lack of Consumer Protection Sunk Them

Substandard rivets and financial ambition are said to be the causes of the sinking of the unsinkable.

Happy 75th Anniversary, New Deal

The Nation magazine has an informative podcast/interview with various folks evaluating the New Deal and its legacy. Discussions noteworthy for me were mainly those of Howard Zinn about the presidential how candidates advocating New Deal-like initiatives for full employment and comprehensive health care coverage--Edwards and Kucinich--were shunted asided by the Party establishment. Also, Zinn's remarked that the New Deal did not depend on FDR as much as it did a broad social movement that spurred FDR toward his reforms in federal policy. He suggested that Barack Obama's supporters could likewise leverage him away from the more conventional and cautious policies that he is espousing. I think that it is interesting that the Democratic campaigns employ language connecting their campaigns with social movements against party establishment even while they fight over superdelegates. I would bet that the larger progressive social movement would be much more committed to New Deal reforms that the Party is rejecting right now (the establishment seems more committed to ideas like that of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s that the "era of big government is over").

Texas Won't Buy Fabled Tennessee Volunteer's Letter

The State of Texas cannot authenticate a letter supposed to have been written by the granddaddy of all Tennessee Volunteers, Davy Crockett (a.k.a., "King of the Wild Frontier"), so it will not be paying almost $500,000 for it.

Crockett is as much a legendary figure in Texas as he is in Tennessee (where he was a soldier, State Legislator, and Congressman), mainly because of his death at the the Battle of the Alamo during the Texas Revolution. He also told others to go to hell because he was going to Texas. What's not to like about that?

Thus Averting the Plan to Build Red Square on Top of Plymouth Rock

Doctor, question that's always bothered me and a lot of people: Mayflower, combined with Philadelphia - a no-brainer, right? Cause this is where the Mayflower landed. Not so. It turns out Columbus actually set foot somewhere down in the West Indies. Little known fact.

- - Buck Laughlin, Best in Show

Music City Bloggers Blogger Glen Dean would probably be more at home during the Red Scare period of American history, and he demonstrates that by channelling Mark Rose, who does his own impression of Buck Laughlin with a wish bone lodged in his gullet, spinning the original Mayflower landing into a socialist plot.

Both Dean and Rose got a little history lesson from a commenter named bridgett, who seems to have a less partisan grasp of the facts.

Governor Goes Macaca on Us

You know, I didn't place much stock in those "dispatches" that Governor Phil Bredesen has been sending back from his trip to China until the Tennessean's Jennifer Peebles reported earlier this afternoon that he wrote one that referred to Chinese by the archaic and derogatory term of "coolies." "Coolies" is a catch-all term for lower caste and class laborers in Asia, India and South Africa, and it usually had racist connotations. When he was a practicing attorney in South Africa, future Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi was called a "coolie barrister" to distinguish his status as second class because of the color of his skin.

So, without being accused of undue political correctness, I think that I can fairly say that Gov. Bredesen's reference was regressive, ill-advised, and unstatemanlike. No serious leader of diverse peoples in the 21st Century should ever refer to another race of people by old terms that are based on degrading views of race and class. There is no rationalization for the sour taste this might leave with some people. The Governor is not in China as a professor teaching history. So, there is no reason to recall an archaic and controversial classification that has nothing to do with the business of his trip.

The Only Holiday Commissioned to Appease Striking Workers and to Avert a National Commercial Shut-Down

Labor Day is the only federally observed holiday that emerged out of a crucible of union strikes and a government bent on squelching the political organizing of workers at the end of the 19th Century. With Labor Day now mainly celebrated as an "official end of summer" and with department store sales, it looks like the government and the department stores won.

Nonetheless, Happy Labor Day! And some thoughts on work and dislocation from Stanley Aronowitz (steel worker, union organizer, and sociology professor, writing in 1992's The Politics of Identity):

The disjunction of work and living space obliges many to travel for as much as two hours to the job, leaving little time or energy for ordinary social intercourse in bars, bowling allies, or union halls. The classic model of contemporary mass society is provided by the suburban or exurban location of industrial and commercial working spaces. The horizontal patterns of home construction produce low density living arrangements. Hence, the nuclear family, the shopping center, the mass media constitute the nexus of social relationships that often effectively countervail the collective tasks formed in the workplace.

Critics impugn the internet used as a social medium and as a surrogate of face-to-face interaction.

But the precursor and all-time-champion of dislocation is the mass exercise of holing up in a car each morning and each evening to make the long trips to and from the suburbs with no political interaction beyond the muck and the silt of talk radio. That effectively undermined face-to-face political organizing outside of distant and dispersed communities, and it dulled the teeth of social change from the otherwise turbulent grassroots.

So UnPC, They're PC

I appreciate challenging political correctness (and I would point out that criticisms of liberal political correctness were started not by conservatives, but by liberals criticizing fellow liberals), but I have to marvel at those posers so rigid in their hatred of PC that they would even defend the idea of chattel slavery in order to fight PC. Let's keep things in perspective, Jackson.

Salemtown Was Once McGavock Farmland

I spent some time this afternoon in the Metro Archives in Green Hills. I braved Green Hills Gridlock in order to attempt to hunt down some historical information on Morgan Park.

One of the sideshows of this little project that I am embarked on has been to find out interesting information about secondary subjects like the area now known as Salemtown. For instance, I found out that the neighborhood now called Salemtown was subdivided from a farm originally owned by Dr. David T. McGavock, who was one of the titans of horse racing in the early 19th Century.

According to the December 22, 1929 Nashville Banner, McGavock's farm stretched from the top of the hill upon which now sits St. Cecilia Motherhouse to a point south of what is now Morgan Park. What would become Werthan Lofts was farmland for well more than half of the 19th Century. In 1865, at the end of the Civil War the McGavock farm was subdivided by "promoters," who declared that the area was "the most advantageous and coming residential sections of the city."

Some of us still feel that way some 140 years later.

Salemtown, A Century Ago: Rural Migrant Mill Workers and a Settlement House Center

A century ago, the area where Salemtown sits was a neighborhood of rural migrant workers from DeKalb County (Tennessee) and a center for the Settlement House Movement in Nashville. The Settlement House Movement came from England in the late 19th Century and took hold in New York and Chicago. Settlement Houses were started in immigrant and poor communities by middle- and upper-class social activists and reformers who moved to and lived in those communities in an effort to bridge class divisions.

In turn-of-the-century Nashville, Methodist women--who were immersed in the theology of "social gospel"--followed the growing national movement and started Settlement Houses in Nashville:

In 1908, the Warioto Settlement House began for mill workers at the Morgan and Hamilton Bag Company's Warioto Cotton Mill [now upscale Werthan Lofts; "Warioto" is the Native American name for the Cumberland River]. These were white, predominantly rural migrant workers, who lived in Kalb Hollow [now Salemtown], in North Nashville. Young Methodist women from the Methodist Training School of Nashville canvassed the community and invited mill workers to the new settlement. Warioto settlement services ranged from activities for pre-school children to sewing and cooking groups, to mothers learning the newest techniques of child care, diet, and the prevention of disease. From funds raised through the Methodist Centenary Drive, the Warioto Settlement House moved to Monroe Street [in current Germantown] in 1919. Two years later, a new building was erected and Warioto was given the name Centenary Methodist Institute.

Regardless of the dramatic changes that have happened to this area in 100 years, this history is a legacy for our neighborhood and it should be remembered and passed on.