Читать книгу Woodstock Rising - Tom Wayman - Страница 12
ОглавлениеI tried to live up to my vow to grind forward with the thesis for what was left of the weekend. The sun woke me a few hours after I crashed. I spent another hour or two fitfully dozing, then got up and groggily hit the books. I could sense the clock ticking toward my rendezvous with Dr. Bulgy. Having the desk in the bedroom was a disadvantage, since my pillow and sheets were an ever-present temptation as I read, scratched notes, and typed draft after draft of new paragraphs.
The room was hot and close all afternoon. I was working in shorts and had to be careful not to drip sweat from my forearms on freshly minted pages. After I cranked out three entire new pages, I rewarded myself by stumbling onto the deck and nodding out on the recliner in the comparative cool of a fresh sea breeze. What seemed like seconds later, voices roused me: the couple who had rented the downstairs last year had arrived. I helped them haul boxes of their household stuff from their rented truck parked on Cajon down the steep driveway and into their living room. As we ascended and descended the route, we yakked, filling one another in on our summers and plans for the new academic year. Like me, Robert was determined to finish his thesis before June; Georgiana had lined up a secretarial gig in the registrar’s office. I could hardly refuse a beer as thanks for helping unload their pile of cartons.
Robert and Georgiana were good neighbours to have, unobtrusive except for an occasional late-night TV binge audible through my bedroom floor. Pretty straight arrows, however: their hope, I had been informed by them, was that once Robert had earned his degree he would find a university position in the Midwest — in Ohio, if possible, where they came from. The moment their future was secured, they would begin a family.
Mostly, the pair socialized with other young married grad students like themselves. Whenever I hosted a party, I invited them, of course — they wouldn’t have been able to sleep with the stereo blasting and people stomping in my living room over their heads. At these gatherings Robert and Georgiana resembled anthropologist participant-observers at the ritual of some savage tribe: the Midwest meets California hippie-student life. Robert even smoked a pipe, and I don’t mean hash. You’d see him perched on an arm of my couch, talking earnestly with Remi or Meg or Alan, highball glass in one hand as the other hand inserted into and withdrew from his mouth the stem of his pipe, depending on whether he was speaking or listening. Georgiana would stand beside him, one hand on his shoulder, eyes fixed on whoever was talking to her husband, shifting her gaze to him when he replied. They called each other “hon.”
But, for all that, I liked them. I never probed too far about their views on the war. They were aware I was in SDS, but they didn’t raise the topic of Vietnam, either. From oblique comments they uttered, I deduced they believed that, even if the war was wrong, a citizen had to support the government in wartime. Georgiana’s brother was in the air force, stationed someplace in Texas.
That Saturday, once we emptied the truck and sucked back a brew, they invited me to supper, but I declined, explaining my thesis dilemma. I trudged upstairs and worked until 11:00 p.m., when nothing I read or wrote was comprehensible. Sunday was entirely a thesis day. I considered phoning Guantanamero Bay, but instead kept my nose to the grindstone.
I duly presented myself with considerable trepidation at the office of Dr. Bulgerak — Bulgy’s real name — late Monday morning, another fifteen pages completed. Suckhole that I am when required, I had also prepared a timetable outlining dates for completion of the first draft, the second and third rewrites, submission to my thesis committee, and the formal defence. I knew from experience that Dr. Bulgerak would demand this proposed schedule: I’d already developed four of these over the past two years, none of which I’d lived up to. I was resolved to adhere to this version, though; I wanted to be finished. With my master’s in hand I’d have to decide whether to pursue an academic career, which meant applying for a Ph.D. program somewhere, or return to journalism and fall into the gaping maw of the Vancouver Sun newsroom. If I goofed off the master’s, Sun reporter was my only employment option. There was always the possibility I’d be in jail by June, a consequence of some SDS protest in the upcoming months, or as a result of the scheme hatched at the Bay — if that actually went ahead and if I participated. Yet I couldn’t conduct myself as though prison were a career path. That left the thesis.
My topic was the Denver-based Western Federation of Miners, a union that at the turn of the century extended into southeastern B.C. The thesis focused on how the WFM had played a key role in the founding of the radical Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, yet only two years later withdrew from the organization.
My engagement with labour history had been Dr. Bulgy’s brainwave. He was more enthusiastic about my thesis topic than I was. “The ideological tensions that led to the WFM’s change of heart,” he had insisted, “are still present in the workplace and employee organizations today.”
Dr. B.’s nickname reflected his appearance — short and bloated. Unlike most UCI profs, he sported a tie, though it was usually askew atop his dishevelled short-sleeved dress shirt, whose buttons scarcely drew the cloth together over his paunch. He was also one of the few Irvine profs who didn’t invite us to call him by his first name. I had been assigned Dr. Bulgy by the department, since I expressed no particular affection for any historical specialization. As my thesis supervisor, he was delighted to discover — after some probing — that my family had a trade union background. He had seemed unmoved by my parents’ upward mobility. My father had progressed at the paper mill from the mill yard to digester operator to minor office functionary. My mother had returned to school when my sister and I were in junior high to bring her clerical skills up-to-date; she was now employed by the North Vancouver school board, helping to deal with truancy cases.
The current status of my parents hadn’t dented Dr. Bulgerak’s enthusiasm for what he had seen as the perfect fit between my parents’ lives and the specialty he had decided should be mine. “Labour history, after all,” he had told me, “is the story of your own family, your people.” His area of expertise was retention or loss of community in urbanized areas; he probably would have thought it impertinent if I had asked whether his field had a familial link. I had tried to tell him that my parents, while positive about their own unions and the union movement, were realists about shop stewards and business agents scrabbling for careers in the hierarchy. He had brushed my quibbles aside. “History —” his arm had flailed toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and papers that lined his office “— isn’t a connection with the dead. History is our connection with living men and women. The conditions of your father’s job, whether as factory hand or in his present white-collar status, are due to history. How much time, money, and energy he has at the end of a shift, his views on a host of topics, who his friends are, the very design of the subdivision he lives in, all are a specific consequence of history.” When he paused for breath, I had reflected on whether I should mention that my parents’ house wasn’t in a subdivision. But I had kept my big mouth shut.
As I composed myself to knock on Dr. B.’s door nearly three years later, I had forty-three pages completed of the sixty new pages I had promised to hand him at the end of the summer. But I hoped to convince him I had learned my lesson and was finally intent on graduating in June. To butter him up, I would quiz him on possible grad schools for a Ph.D. I had also assembled a fund of stories to confirm his belief that the issues surrounding the WFM’s history still resonated.
My examples of ideological differences among workers were collected over the summer mainly in the Waldorf Hotel beer parlour on East Hastings in Vancouver. I had stayed for July and August with friends at a communal house near Nanaimo Street and Kingsway. All six other occupants were left-wing activists of one shade or another. To varying extents they were heads, as well. Half were, like me, working at summer jobs. The others had already fully merged into the city’s industrial workforce: one was employed at a plywood plant on the Fraser River, another shipped out as a tugboat deckhand, the third had hired on at Hayes Trucks, where logging and highway tractors were assembled.
My friends’ experiences confirmed my sense that the unionized blue-collar world was closer to college student existence in Vancouver than in California. Perhaps this was due to B.C. being highly unionized, with a third of the province’s jobs covered by labour contracts. Or perhaps this was because many elected B.C. union leaders were born in the United Kingdom, where the social change aspect of unionism was still present and where ties to leftie academics were part of a belief in organized labour’s mission to create a more equitable society. Maybe the proximity between students and organized employment was simply a consequence of the province being a primary resource industry economy. Logging, fishing, and mining were still the major generators of wealth, and these industries were bastions of the union movement. Without a large tertiary economic sector, almost everybody either was employed or had close relatives at work in the woods or mills, at sea or in canneries, or in mines or smelters. A strong trade union participation in the city’s End the War Committee also facilitated acquaintanceships between students and union militants.
In California, agriculture and defence duked it out for the state’s main industry. Despite the population of the Golden State equalling all ten provinces and two territories of the Frozen North combined, I had yet to befriend anybody in California who had worked in either the fields or an aircraft plant. Our connection at UCI with unionism began and ended with support for César Chávez’s United Farm Workers: distributing UFW literature, publicizing their grape boycott, and participating in occasional information pickets outside large Safeways in Santa Ana or up in L.A.
During the summer, I had met through my Vancouver housemates a number of rank-and-file union members who considered themselves revolutionaries. Many of these interactions had taken place at the Wal-dorf Hotel, whose giant pub was a favourite drinking spot for the city’s labour radicals. Also for ordinary longshoremen, since their union dispatch hall was only a few blocks away. The ’Dorf bar, like every other Vancouver pub we drank at, was one vast room filled with a myriad of small round tables covered with terry cloth.
The province’s liquor laws were still based on a fundamentalist Christian belief that drinking was sinful, and thus should be undertaken in surroundings as unpleasant as possible. By law, windows in beer halls were forbidden, as these would permit passersby to observe unrepentant reprobates consuming alcohol. By law, patrons were forbidden to carry their drinks if, once seated, they subsequently elected to join acquaintances at a different table. Such a transfer had to be effected by a usually begrudging waiter. A PA system blared over the often-deafening roar of conversation in the hall: “Phone call for Dave Ronson, Dave Ronson” or “Taxi for Arnie Black, Arnie Black.” The only sanctioned activity, besides drinking oneself insensible, was a table shuffleboard game. A few pubs had also installed a jukebox, but the music could scarcely be heard over the swirling bellow of sound.
Yet on a hot summer evening in Vancouver, the Waldorf bar was our regular destination after a solidarity meeting or a protest rally, or simply when we had a night off. If we were at the ’Dorf the evening of the weekly meeting of the Vancouver and District Labour Council, we invariably would link up with activist delegates. Our tablemates would have adjourned to the pub to rehash the defeat of yet another of their motions.
The Labour Council, I quickly learned, was dominated by a bloc of representatives from unions whose leadership was under the sway of the Communist Party. The CP played a conservative role: its concern to appear respectable resulted in muted official union pronouncements against the war, or in weak expressions of support for beleaguered independent unions excluded from the Labour Council. On social change issues, CP members resisted endorsing Vancouver organizations outside the party’s control, such as ones that supported U.S. draft evaders and deserters from the military, or a nascent local anti-poverty group that was garnering headlines with its confrontational style. The exceptions to this CP timidity were in areas where Moscow had flashed the green light. An annual antinuclear peace march, and petitions to have Vancouver declared a nuclear-weapons-free zone, received enthusiastic approval and financial aid from the council.
The military suppression of the Czechs the previous summer, occurring only a week before the attacks on protesters at the Chicago Democratic Convention, had further undermined the Communist Party’s credibility — especially among young people — since the CP locally had followed Moscow’s lead in “explaining” why the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been necessary. Yet according to the union activists I was getting to know, the party had a long tradition of manipulation and anti-democratic manoeuvres inside those unions where it could muster a large enough presence.
“Your Birch Society member may think he’s anti-Communist,” I was informed by an angry construction tradesman, who had relayed a tale of a motion being railroaded through his local, and who had somehow misheard the details when I was introduced and thought I was American. “Your Bircher probably doesn’t even know any fucking Commies. If he did, your Birch Society guy would really be anti-Communist.”
One of the residents at the house, the one employed in the paint shop at Hayes Trucks, had applied to join Progressive Workers, a Vancouver Maoist labour organization. The founder of this outfit, a veteran CP member, had been expelled from the party for his persistent support of Red China after the Soviet Union’s leaders had parted company with their former ally. Despite the similarity in name to Progressive Labor, which had been one side of the SDS split in June, Progressive Workers had no connection with the American organization. The new Vancouver group, besides regularly undertaking solidarity picketing alongside strikers enmeshed in difficult disputes, promoted the formation of independent Canadian unions. Over a few rounds in the ’Dorf with some PW members who sat at our table one night when their weekly meeting let out, I was reminded that the majority of Canadian unions traditionally have been locals of American ones. “No country in the world besides Canada, not even in the Soviet system, has its unions controlled from another country.” Through my truck plant housemate I met his friends in PW, an electrician and railway brakeman, who had recently returned from an invited excursion to China. The news was conveyed to me with pride that during their visit they had met and shaken hands with the chairman himself. “Yeah, and the first thing Gordie here said to Mao was: ‘You know anyplace around here I can get a beer?’”
I was sure Dr. Bulgy would be fascinated by my widening firsthand knowledge of the Canadian labour movement. I was impressed myself to be on easy terms with men — and a few women — who appeared to have leaped off the pages of the books, pamphlets, and articles on revolutionary theory I was reading as an SDS member. And I could certainly assure Dr. B. that I now understood better how my thesis related to the present. Around the somewhat sodden tables of the Waldorf beer parlour I first heard the term business unionism. Much of what was spoken between sips of brew echoed Big Bill Haywood’s condemnation of the aims and practices of the American Federation of Labor at the IWW’s founding convention in June 1905 — Haywood being secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners at the time, as well as one of their delegates to — and chairman of — the Chicago gathering.
I remained aware that, while Dr. B. might be thrilled by my summer’s discoveries, such field research was tangential to the content of the thesis. My hope was that his pleasure at what I had absorbed might distract him from the shortfall in my page count.
I was resolved, however, not to mention my growing conviction that alcohol consumption might represent a factor in the failure of many of the unionists I met to achieve their aims. I had been excited to meet genuine Red workers, and found in turn that most had been following the student unrest in the U.S. closely and were interested to hear about my experiences, to listen to my opinion on what might develop next. But even the labour militants expressed a black humour with regard to their drinking. “Call me as soon as the revolution starts,” one plumber joked at our table on a Friday night at the ’Dorf. “You’ll find me right here.”
Dr. Bulgy also didn’t need to be informed, I had decided, that among the younger left-wing workers I met, the “revolutionary discipline” touted by both the CP and Progressive Workers fatally clashed with the attractions of the counterculture. Endless meetings dedicated to adopting a “position” on a plethora of social issues at home and abroad — an analysis that henceforth all group members were bound to support, even if they disagreed with it — held no attraction. Progressive Workers’ part in successfully organizing a city cable manufacturing plant earned praise, as did their efforts among smelter employees farther inland who were disillusioned with the United Steelworkers union currently representing them. But PW meetings endlessly dissecting the finer points of Quebec separatism or sectarian violence in Northern Ireland were far less appealing to many of the labour activists I encountered over the collection of full and empty glasses crowding our table. The SDS slogan of “Less talk, more action” was enthusiastically endorsed. My recounting of my unease at the surreal chanting at the recent SDS convention also struck a chord with the unaffiliated Red workers, since PW’s use of Maoist phraseology seemed alien to my usual table companions.
In addition, I didn’t plan to mention to my thesis supervisor that among Vancouver’s young Maoist freaks, PW was regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned in its approach to bringing about social change. Progressive Workers’ strategy was to engage in the lengthy, arduous task of building an independent Canadian union movement as the first step toward winning adherents to revolutionary socialism. Whereas the loose alliance of pro-Maoist young people who called themselves the Vancouver Liberation Front had no desire to undertake the dreary business of leafleting parking lot gates at the city’s factories and mills in the name of nascent unions or of union reform. Negotiating union contracts or processing a grievance on the shop floor were rated as distractions from the sweeping social changes both envisioned and urgently desired by VLF adherents. Instead, they believed socialism would be won by direct action. The latter was defined as every sort of anti-establishment activity from be-ins to rock concerts, and from street protests to — eventually — armed guerrilla columns on the Cuban model.
Most VLF members lived in five or six “revolutionary communes.” Really, these were just communal houses, very much like the one I inhabited. Theirs, however, were more rigorously structured and functioned with Maoist-type “criticism, self-criticism” sessions — mandatory meetings of house denizens attempting to solve the inevitable problems of co-op living, such as who should clean the mess in the kitchen, an unexplained spike in the electrical bill, or how to make up the shortage in rent this month. VLF commune members were expected, in the name of the revolution, to fully confess their personal deficiencies and cheerfully accept the complaints of others about their transgressions. “The people” expected no less. I had concluded I didn’t know enough yet about the theory and practice of social change to adopt some variant of Marxism-Leninism, whether Chinese, Cuban, or North American in origin. On the one hand, I approved of the ability of disciplined organizations — or, at least, disciplined members of such organizations — to initiate actions, to produce publications, to show up when and where they said. On the other hand, the largely humourless earnestness of many of the people advocating adherence to an inflexible belief system was a turnoff. The music, light, and colour of the freak world pulsed with energy, the kind I wanted whatever new world we were fashioning to be flooded with.
As far as I could see, the sometimes scattered, always exciting, enthusiasm of young people was responsible for sparking the revolutionary environment we were in. “The more I make love, the more I want to make the revolution” was one of the previous year’s Paris May Day slogans that summarized the feeling. So far I hadn’t seen evidence of such energetic, transformative goals on the part of Leninists of any stripe. Whatever the possibilities of a future hippie-political alliance, currently SDS for me represented the amalgam of radical vision, high spirits, and effective social action.
Despite my careful preparation for my meeting with Dr. Bulgy, I received a shock when I stepped over the threshold of his office. Both the man and the room had undergone alterations since I had last stood here in early June. The professor’s customary shirt and tie had been replaced by a short-sleeved turtleneck garment. A large gold-coloured medallion was suspended from his neck by a chain, the ornament resting atop the upper slope of his protruding stomach. His hair, once crew-cut to near-military precision, was shaggy.
The brown wingtip shoes he previously wore were gone; his feet were sandalled. I could take in such detail about his appearance because his massive desk had been shifted. The office bookshelves that formed the perimeter of the room remained as overloaded as ever, but previously Dr. Bulgy’s desk had been situated to make a barricade in the middle of the room, enabling him to address students from safely behind it. Now the desk had been rotated against one wall. When Dr. B. faced me, nothing was between us but air and an uncharacteristic lopsided smile.
Only after I left his office did the thought occur that somebody over the summer must have turned Bulgerak on. Or maybe he had simply decided to get “with it” — I could imagine the quotation marks around the phrase in his mind. When I stood in front of him, and a moment later sat stunned on the chair he waved me to, the unexpectedness of the changes evident before me nearly derailed my well-laid plans. I fumbled mentally for a few seconds, spouting an inane query about how his summer had gone.
As I regained confidence, I handed over my draft pages, presented my this-time-for-sure list of deadlines, and described the Vancouver experiences I had chosen as fit for his ears. I noted while I did so that his new medallion displayed not the peace symbol but the yin-yang linked tadpoles. Was his a religious conversion then rather than a cultural or political one? Dr. B.’s approving expression didn’t alter as he accepted the papers I handed him. He swivelled briefly away to lower them into the papery ocean on his desk. Far from grilling me on my failure to achieve the production goals we’d set at the end of the previous term, he nodded encouragingly as I spoke of my new timetable, and why I felt confident that this one would be adhered to. I was so disconcerted by his alteration in demeanor that I forgot to ask his advice about Ph.D. programs.
“Seems like you had a useful summer and are on top of everything” was his comment when at last I stopped babbling. He didn’t ask me a single question in response to my depiction of Vancouver’s Red workers and their views. Instead, he inquired if I’d seen much of my parents when I was back north. I assured him that, though I was living in Vancouver itself, I’d driven across the harbour inlet bridge to visit them several times.
I didn’t mention my father’s puzzlement about why, since I had a guaranteed job at the Sun, I was intent on acquiring a graduate degree — and a degree in history, to boot. Nor did I speak of my mother’s worries about my involvement with, as she phrased it, “civil-rights causes.” My difficulty lay in conveying to my parents my pleasure at uncovering layers of complexity associated with historical events, occurrences often popularized into two-dimensional, cartoon-like episodes. And since my parents had come of age during the Great Depression, I found it hard to explain why the routines of a shift in the Sun newsroom — steady salaried employment, in their eyes — just didn’t cut it in comparison with being immersed in the thrilling changes emerging around me in California. I never enjoyed the deep-seated cynicism of the lifer reporters and editors and photographers I worked among. Nor was I excited by the ceaseless round of punching out three paragraphs on the latest traffic fatality in the Fraser Canyon, or on a Rotary Club noon-hour speaker who detailed the establishment of a fabric export enterprise in rural Peru. Did I really want forty years of phoning the city planning department for a comment on a provincial government press release that outlined a proposed review of residential property assessments?
“As I recollect,” the new incarnation of Dr. B. observed, “we had agreed you’d take Dr. Bonder’s grad seminar this semester. That’s the one on the post-frontier U.S., some of which might be useful to your project. Although I rather think we’re past the research stage.” His eyebrows lifted. “Your other course is —”
I reminded him we had decided I would sign up for the new American Culture grad course, an interdisciplinary venture involving English, history, philosophy, and anthropology.
“Right, right. The one designed by Dr. Shoemaker. Our house Marxist, if you will. I hope it’s not a waste of your time.” He sighed. “‘Interdisciplinary’ is the latest ‘in’ thing in the Humanities Division, I’m afraid.”
The last was the sort of comment I was used to hearing from Dr. B. I felt a surge of gratitude that he hadn’t totally refashioned himself. His new embodiment was disconcerting, as if after three years I was meeting him for the first time. I was braced to hear him declare, “Just call me ‘Sid,’ man, not ‘Dr. Bulgerak.’”
His dubious attitude toward interdisciplinary studies conveyed, he spun toward his desk and pivoted back with my revised timetable in his hand. “Shall we meet again on … hmm … first week of October?”
Moments after, I was free and clear, sauntering from the Humanities Building toward lunch down a pathway between undulating lawns speckled with freshly planted eucalyptus saplings. The heavy weight of a potentially hideous interview had lifted away into the flawless Gold Coast sky. As I strolled, I checked out the hordes of students I travelled among, watching for Janey, or anybody else I knew.
Ahead on the paved walk that led to the lunchroom in the lower level of the Commons Building, a trio ambled more slowly than I. Two of them were young women, gorgeous in sundresses that left a lot of shapely leg bared to the hot sun. Their long hair oscillated slightly down their mostly exposed backs as they spoke animatedly or tossed their heads to laugh. One of them clutched a heavy-duty stapler.
