September 18 2001 An e-mail came last night from the names of a man and woman unknown to me. The subject line was STOP STOP STOP -- and the message was short and pointed: WILL YOU FOR GOD'S SAKE STOP. who cares. You are a sick person Good taste rules out any response -- facetious or otherwise -- seeking more specific info. Clearly, someone's coming apart and I see no point in contributing to the process. Although this expression of desperation carries contradictory implications, it's not hard at all to see sensitivity under all of this -- but a sensitivity caught up in the maelstrom of high, strong winds and blinding fog coming in from all sides. The result here is obvious immobilization. It may sound supercilious but this is simply another victim -- no more, no less. Other victims, at least for the moment, are some of the civil liberties and environmental and mainline labor groups that are currently stopped in their tracks, or pulling back -- silent. Or, some [not all!] social justice groups whose statements are devoted in the main to the self-evident hideous nature of the September 11 tragedy, with the rest spent on a call to apprehend and punish the guilty -- and maybe, maybe a faint and carefully tangled sentence or two on the threats to domestic civil liberty and to persons of Mid-Eastern background. For the rest of us, and we are many indeed, the high mountains of challenge lie directly ahead -- as they always do. And no matter how many we transcend , there's always another high range beyond. Everyone of us reading this, no matter one's age, has been through challenging crucibles with hard lessons -- emerging ever more sensibly toughened. I remember an old friend, the late Juan Chacon of Grant County, New Mexico, in the southwestern part of the state [Silver City and environs.] A veteran metal miner, he was one of a number of militantly committed and effective radical activists in that well-known Mine-Mill local -- Amalgamated Bayard District Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers: Local 890 of the hard-fighting and very Left International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. [ IUMMSW was formerly the Western Federation of Miners and, in 1905, the prime founder of the Industrial Workers of the World.] Juan Chacon had gone through no end of social justice fights from the moment he was hatched. Among his many battle stripes was that of the male lead in the extraordinarily fine film, Salt of the Earth, ostensibly in a fictional mode but based closely on the long and bitter Mine-Mill strike of predominately Mexican-American miners and their families against Empire Zinc at Hanover, NM -- which lasted from October 1950 to January, 1952. In this hard-fought campaign, following a court injunction prohibiting miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket line and played a key role in carrying the struggle to victory. "Salt," this great human rights film -- worker rights, racial equality, women's rights --filmed on location and with most of the acting done by local people, was made in the face of extreme Red-baiting and other attacks from the mining bosses, House Un-American Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy, and a gaggle of local New Mexico politicos -- and by open violence from local racist and right-wing "vigilantes" -- thugs. But the film was made and completed and won rave reviews even from mortal enemies. TIME -- however grudgingly: " . . .the film within the propagandistic limits it sets is a work of vigorous art. It is crowded with grindingly effective scenes, through which the passion of social anger hisses in a hot wind; and truth and lies are driven before it like sand. . .The passion carries the actors along too in its gale. The workers, actual miners of the New Mexico local, carry conviction in their savage setting as trained actors could never do. The best of the worker-players is Juan Chacon, real-life president of the local union. Ugly and cold as an Aztec amulet, his heavy face comes slowly to life and warmth as the picture advances and in the end seems almost radiant." Salt also took major international film awards -- even as it was systematically black-listed in every commercial movie house in the United States. Very recently, it was picked by the Library of Congress as one of the 100 most important films ever made in this country. Long before that, several years after his death a decade and a half ago, New Mexico Western University named a building in honor of Juan Chacon. [And Salt is now widely available on the Net -- if you haven't seen this great homegrown radical work of art, Do!] But let's jump back to the bitter fall of 1959. Copper workers were out on a massive industry-wide strike from Butte, Montana to the Mexican border -- and in some other settings as well -- led by Mine-Mill. At the same time, in a cruel, calculated, and extremely revealing move, long-dormant indictments were activated by the United States government against key Mine-Mill leaders -- who were then, concurrently with the strike, brought to trial in Denver on the trumped-up phony charges of "conspiring to defraud" the Government vis-a-vis non-Communist affidavits required by the viciously anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. Thus, Mine-Mill was not only embroiled in a huge fight against the powerful copper bosses -- Anaconda, Phelps-Dodge, Kennecott, Magma, and American Smelting and Refining -- but had much of the top International leadership tied up in Federal court in Denver in a Kafkaesque proceeding involving a variety of seamy, paid FBI informers and various mining company sycophants, I was a grad student, then, at ASU -- but, much more importantly, was coordinating a large-scale effort in central Arizona focused on raising miners' relief [food and money] and labor defense funds with respect to the "conspiracy" trial. In our setting, as in comparable ones elsewhere in this great multi-faceted struggle, we were met by constant Red-Baiting [I was tagged on the front page of the leading newspaper, Arizona Republic, as "young Mr. S., the head of the Arizona state Communist Party." [Note No CPUSA organization existed anywhere in Arizona by that time.] The Goldwater atmosphere was almost strangling, the Birchers were growing rapidly, and Phoenix alone had 100 "Anti-Communist Leagues." As part of our intensive miners relief / labor defense effort, we were showing Salt of the Earth -- in union halls, community centers, some Catholic parish halls, university settings etc -- and the FBI was working in an increasingly open fashion to try, generally without success, to get these places closed to us. We were attacked by thugs and our homes and cars were broken into. We kept going. At one point in the middle of all of this, Juan Chacon sent me a warm, personal Western Union telegram from New Mexico which concluded with, "Success will be ours in the long run." I've always remembered those words -- and I've carried them with me wherever I've gone: off to Mississippi and far, far beyond. Right to the present moment. The copper workers -- led by Mine-Mill -- won the Great Strike early in 1960. Eventually, even though the Mine-Mill leaders were convicted at Denver in an atmosphere of extreme fear and hysteria, those cases -- and all the other anti-Mine-Mill Federal witch-hunting cases -- were eventually won in the higher courts. [But the financial cost to the Union was very heavy.] If interested, see this page from a long 1960 article of mine,"IUMM&SW: The Good, Tough Fight" [under my former name of John R. Salter, Jr] which I've reproduced on our website and which has also some up-dating notes on the Mine-Mill legal cases and related matters. http://www.hunterbear.org/repression.htm So, when I get something like WILL YOU FOR GOD'S SAKE STOP. who cares. You are a sick person I shrug, remember Juan and his fighting words -- and all of the other good things I've heard and learned along the trail we're all continuing to blaze. Keep fighting. Keep moving ahead. Keep fighting. And -- any reactions from anyone reading this? In Solidarity - Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
