‘Jimmy Higgins: A life in the labor movement’
(James M. McCarthy / The Times Record)
Photo-Journal: May 1, 2009
By James M. McCarthy
Published: Friday, May 22, 2009 2:44 PM EDT
In the time it takes to pour two shots of whiskey into a tall glass, Harlan Baker — teacher, actor and former legislator — becomes “Jimmy Higgins,” a rank-and-file union and socialist activist who also happens to be an ink-in-the-veins journalist.
It’s May Day, the International Workers Day for Peace and Justice, and Baker is the consummate storyteller as he settles into his role inside a Lewiston bar named Guthrie’s, a brick-walled place with the ambience of a working-class neighborhood’s watering hole. For the next hour-and-a-half, performing as his alter-ego Jimmy Higgins, Baker tells the largely forgotten story of the labor movement in America during the first half of the 20th century.
His play opens on the eve of the 1960 presidential election. Jimmy Higgins, an old-timer with a gift of gab, is being interviewed by a college student reporter. He tells the student that his father once owned a small-town newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio.
It’s 1912, before World War I, and he recalls telling his father about a conversation he’d had with an older man who made sure to set the young kid straight about the news coming out of Lawrence, Mass., where 25,000 men, women and children mounted a strike against the textile mills that lasted 10 weeks.
The issue? A new Massachusetts law on Jan. 1, 1912, had reduced the maximum number of hours of work per week for women and children from 56 to 54 hours. Within two weeks, workers discovered their employers had reduced their weekly pay to match the reduction in hours — a difference in wages amounting to several loaves of bread.
“Hey kid,” a sarcastic know-it-all tells the young Jimmy Higgins. “That strike is led by Wobblies. Do you know what I.W.W. stands for?”
“I don’t know.”
“I Won’t Work … hah, hah, hah.”
But Jimmy Higgins’ father sets his son straight: “I.W.W. stands for Industrial Workers of America. Those strikers at Lawrence have been working for 54, 56 hours a week …”
“And that is the first political discussion I ever had with my father,” Jimmy Higgins tells the college student, adding details that reveal his father to have been a progressive publisher sympathetic to the labor movement.
This opening monologue sets the tone for the rest of Baker’s one-man play, in which he artfully weaves actual political events into the fictionalized life of his union activist hero. The play, which Baker also wrote, is a throwback to the workers’ theater movement of the 1920s and ’30s, in which labor issues were dramatized in free street performances by and for workers.
We’re reminded of Eugene Debs, a founding member of I.W.W., Socialist and presidential candidate, arrested and convicted under the Sedition and Espionage Act of 1917 during the first “red scare” for speaking against American involvement in World War I. He later was pardoned by President Warren G. Harding and died soon after.
Debs’ words challenge, even today, our traditional notions of patriotism, social conscience and protest: “Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.”
Jimmy Higgins’ monologue is sprinkled with the names, events and organizations that helped build a labor movement in the United States: “Fighting Bob” Lafollette Sr.; Walter Reuther, who organized auto workers and, later, was instrumental in the formation of the AFL-CIO; the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a racially integrated union of tenant farmers in Arkansas that is considered a forerunner of the United Farm Workers Union.
Given what the late great Studs Terkel astutely describes as our country’s “historical amnesia” — and the corresponding collective fascination with the latest tabloid gossip that diverts attention from lessons of our own history — the play offers a quick study of the blood and sweat and tears that won American workers the 40-hour work week, health benefits (sadly, increasingly being lost), pensions (ditto) and safety laws (an ongoing struggle).
There are many lessons, but the overriding one is the bit of advice Baker has his alter-ego Jimmy Higgins pass on to his college student interviewer: “If you ever see something you don’t like that’s unfair or unjust, make some noise, cause a little trouble.”
Then, as now, it’s advice that takes courage to follow. But as Howard Zinn reminds us in his amazing book “A People’s History of the United States,” it’s the dissenters, the people who resisted and struggled for their rights, who challenged the status quo … these are the people who helped achieve so many of the rights and privileges that most of us now take for granted. It’s easy to forget the past, but when we do so we lose the overriding lesson of our own history — the way in which significant change only happens when the anonymous Jimmy Higginses of this nation rise up, join together and become a force too powerful for our leaders to ignore.
— James McCarthy