My grandfather, Jess Edge, was a copper miner in the hardscrabble thirties in Bisbee, Arizona. He was blackballed for his union activity under one of the most anti-union organizations in American history. His story has something to tell us all.
While a small island in Alaska claims my soul for the memories of my youth there, my mother’s magic home is Bisbee. She remembers many things about Arizona, like the time her baby sister crawled down the root cellar and was bitten on the hand by a big rattlesnake before my grandmother could shoot it with a .22 rifle. As it struck, the serpent's fangs slipped by on each side of one small finger, leaving both her and my grandmother with nothing more than a scare and the shaky thought of what might have been.
During this time, my grandfather worked in the copper mines owned by the notorious Phelps-Dodge Corporation. Phelps-Dodge was then, as now, one of the largest import-export companies in the nation and its anti-union activities have continued right up to the present day. Their tactics were some of the dirtiest ever recorded, including the infamous 1917 ‘Bisbee Deportation’ during which 1,180 workers who were active in the union were herded onto a train at gunpoint, driven deep into the New Mexico desert and left stranded without food or water. My grandfather came later and was a shop steward in 1934 when the union struck for better wages. As a result, he lost his job and was blacklisted.
My grandfather and grandmother in Washington State in the 30's.
After that, the family traveled all over the west looking for work. Usually, he could find a job, but it would only last for a few days before the blacklist caught up with him and he was summarily fired. In Climax, Colorado, he worked for an entire week before being told to stay home. In one such job, he only lasted one day. At one point, an employer hired the entire family for a dollar a day.
They lived on the road for four years, following grandfather, who followed what work he could. Living arrangements were not easy for a family of eight and at one point they stayed in an abandoned service station.
It wasn’t until he was able to get onto a WPA program that they found a measure of stability. He worked building a bridge at a point between Tombstone and Bisbee, Arizona. It was a job that paid $44.00 a month and he worked half time, fifteen days a month in order to share the other fifteen days with another man who needed work for his family. Times were very difficult. Though the union won a class action lawsuit that brought him $6,000.00, a princely sum at that time, it was not until after the family had already become more settled. It was only after Pearl Harbor, when he went to Los Angeles to work building Liberty ships, that they could finally consider themselves on firm ground.
At the time, my mother was resentful of his union activities and his inability to find steady work afterward. It wasn’t until later that she came to realize that the ideals that he was fighting for were worth the battles, that some principles are more important than the people that fight for them because it will mean that other people won’t have to lose their jobs.
We are still fighting those battles today. People are kept down by predatory insurance companies who sell you a product that doesn’t cover your needs, by corporations who, given tax breaks, plow the money into bonuses and payment for their own high lifestyles, by companies that collude to fleece people of their cash by offering what they can’t afford, then pulling the rug out from under them after the executives have made their billions. People are also damaged by governments that lead them into an economic wilderness for the sake of consolidation of presidential power and by elected officials who start wars to make a name for themselves.
It is not as obvious now, but it goes on in a thousand different ways. My grandfather understood that when you make a stand, you sometimes have to suffer for that stand. He did not ask why, he just did what he had to do.
We are facing a time when we are all asked by our new President to contribute, in whatever way we can, to make this nation great again. It is not a president that defines a nation, but it’s people. Us. This is the challenge of our time. The question each one of us faces is will we sit around bitching or will we get up and work for it?