I have never had to think about my party affiliation: I'm a before-I-was-born Democrat, enlisted when my mother was a child. I'm a Democrat, here in this world watching the pale full moon set in the west at dawn only because my party made it possible for me to be here at all.
The Wisconsin fight to preserve collective bargaining rights is more than personal for me; it is existential, a right to life.
This is how it was, before:
In Hannibal, Missouri at the height of the Depression a slight young woman rises before sunup to care for her three children. Her husband has abandoned them and disappeared. She walks through the cold to the factory of the Brown Shoe Company, and stands at an industrial sewing machine, assembling pieces of heavy leather, her hands vulnerable to the massive punching needle, until midday. She rushes home to give her two girls and a boy a lunch of thin soup and stale bread, never enough, and sips a little portion for herself. Then she hurries back to the noisy, filthy factory to stand at her machine as long as she is able, long after dark.
She has no wages, benefits, or pension. The logic of capitalism ordains that the Brown Shoe Company pays her by the piece, not by the hour. Only the strongest make enough to keep body and soul together, and it is not enough to keep a family healthy. She is always exhausted. She is weakening, and fearful that her hand may slip and be mangled by the needle, ending the meager flow of pennies that keep her children alive.
She is a skilled worker, adapting her humble homemaking skills to industrial production, turning out work boots for the Brown Shoe Company to sell at a profit. But for the company, she is a replaceable part. There are plenty of desperate people ready to step in when she falls.
She has only one weapon to wield in defense of her family: the vote. She, and millions like her, vote Democratic, and sweep FDR and the Democrats into office. The New Deal is launched, and in 1935 the Wagner Act enables and promotes collective bargaining. The factory is organized. My grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, and my mother survive.
"Without FDR and collective bargaining we wouldn't have made it." she tells me again and again, years later, when I, her first grandchild, am old enough to understand.
I remember.