On this Labor Day, with myself and my fiancee unemployed, I thought it might be a good time to talk about what this holiday means for me, personally.
Just two generations ago, my family was a struggling working-class immigrant family, at least on my father's side. My great-grandmother died early, and so my grandmother was forced to quit school at the age of 8 to help raise her younger siblings and do all of the cooking and cleaning around the house. Those older siblings of hers who were not married generally worked to help support the family, long shifts in the local textile mills in Fall River. These were the days when most immigrant families in Fall River worked in the mills, sometimes multiple generations.
Near the end of her life, I was walking through the house when I saw a picture on the fireplace mantle in the living room. It was a picture of FDR, and I realized that as long as I could remember that picture had sat in that spot. I just didn't realize who it was until I was grown up. So I asked my grandmother about it.
"Yes. President Roosevelt was a great man, because he cared about all the people. He tried to help everyone. So every day I walk past that photo and I say 'thank you, Mr. President. Thank you.'"
My grandfather came here as a boy with his younger brother, and when World War Two broke out, my grandfather volunteered for the Navy. He did not have even a high school education, but he was smart, good with his hands, and had a tremendous drive, and so he asked his commanding officer to recommend him for submarine school. At this time, submarine school was only accepting men who were high school graduates and had a year or two of college, and yet my grandfather managed to get in anyway. In fact, he graduated near the top of his class. Not bad for a guy for whom Portuguese was his first language.
After the war he went to work for a well-known machine shop in Providence. He joined the union, and after a while he became the union steward for the whole shop. He was very, very good at his job. He remained with that shop, on and off, for almost 35 years. Even with the union he was still laid off at least twice, including once in my lifetime. When the company bought a factory in the UK, he went there to help them set it up. Time and time again he struggled to do what was best for his fellow workers, first fighting the layoffs and then fighting to see everyone hired back after prosperity returned to the company. My grandfather was such a union man that he often would only buy products made in union shops. If memory serves, he even picked out his beers that way.
He got his GED in 1960, the same year my dad graduated from high school.
One day when I was a little boy, I was talking to him as he worked on the farm. I told him about how some of the kids at school said that my parents were Yankees and that I was a Yankee too. I asked him if he was a Yankee. My grandfather turned to me and quite seriously explained this to me:
"A Yankee is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republican. I am a Latin, Catholic Democrat. And so is your father, and so are you."
I felt just a little bit prouder after that.
When my father got out of the service and went to work for the government, he joined the union for government employees. He remained in that union until he retired, just a few years ago. And even now he is constantly embroiled in political debates with his friends and former co-workers, many of whom are serious Republicans and Tea Partiers. It's the South, so it is almost inevitable. But he fights back, and sometimes he will include me on some of those e-mails, and I will take one of those arguments completely apart, and my dad will tell me how proud he is of me. One of my dad's friends, chuckling about how I had demolished someone's badly flawed historical analogy (I am a trained historian, it's what my degree is in) said to me "You are definitely your father's son."
