Jimmy Higgins: Life and Times in the Labor Movement
By Ron Blascoe
Jimmy Higgins was there. He’ll tell you all about it if you have the time.
Like the time he spent back in the ‘30s with organizers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. You think its tough organizing unions today? You haven’t faced a bunch of shotgun toting deputies on a dark night on a back road in rural Missouri. Jimmy Higgins has.
And the time he spent organizing marches and rallies for the old socialist Eugene Debs. You kids today go on your peace marches. Back then Jimmy and his comrades would get their heads beat in by mounted, club-swinging cops.
And Debs, himself, would end up in federal prison, a 10 year sentence, in fact, for daring to speak out against the draft. That was back when they were protesting “The War to End All Wars,” which later had to be renamed World War I, just to keep track.
Oh, and if you want to know about the time when Henry Ford sent his goons out to beat up Walter Ruther and other UAW organizers, just ask Jimmy. He had the good fortune to be on the scene, as a sympathetic newspaper reporter, when it happened. He probably would have ended up in the hospital himself that day had not a cop stepped in to help out a fellow Irishman.
Jimmy grew up with newsprint in his blood. His father ran the Sandusky Standard newspaper and the boy got his start hawking papers and setting type for political leaflets. He remembers coming in to the office one night to find his old man crying, writing an obit for his older brother, who he had just learned had died in that War to End All Wars.
If you want to hear all about these stories, and a whole lot more, all you have to do is sit down and listen. Jimmy isn’t exactly a hard guy to get talking. Especially after a dram or two of Scotch. He’ll give you more material than you can use in an article like this.
Problem is, Jimmy Higgins doesn’t really exist. He was a made-up character, invented by Ben Hanford around the turn of the last century.
We know about Jimmy and his life and times, through a one-man play, written and performed by Harlan Baker. Brother Baker, a long-time union activist himself, brought his play, entitled Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement, to the Labor Temple on March 31.
True Confession: it had been a long day and I had planned to take a couple of pictures and duck out when the lights went down. A 90-minute, one-man show? I’d already positioned myself in the back of the room, near the door, so I wouldn’t be noticed when I split.
But, after the first five minutes I was hooked, in for the duration. This guy was good.
We all know how the history of the working class has been distorted, hidden and forgotten. Baker’s mission is to bring back some of that history, bring it to life, and tell the untold stories, perhaps even to a new generation.
One of the devices he uses is to be telling his story to a reporter for a high school newspaper. And, through his one-sided conversation with the young reporter, you buy the premise. And he sets up the poignancy of an old man telling his forgotten story to a youngster, a la Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man.
Baker does his one-man show for free--although a couple of bucks in the jar for gas money is appreciated.
And you can imagine a young working class audience getting its first glimpse of its own distorted, hidden and forgotten history. Maybe even inspiring a few of them to go on to do good things.
If you caught Jimmy Higgins at the Labor Temple on March 31, you get it. If you missed it, keep a watch out. We may be able to persuade Brother Baker to come back this way again.