Polish with everything

Dateline Chicago, Huey’s Hot Dogs, Balmoral and Clark.  Love it.

Reader Request Thread

I’ll be posting documents more frequently now that we’re getting closer to the annual Bughouse Square Debates (Saturday, July 26th, in Washington Square Park, Chicago).  If readers have any particular topics they’d like to read about (or read more of), let me know in the comment section.  By now you can see the general range of topics.  Anything I’m missing?

Send me over the top

With the quarter coming to an end, it’s time to refocus my activities toward research and writing, some of which I’ll be sharing here. But first, dear readers, I need your help on a statistics-related issue. Over at my Flickr.com site, I’m pushing 10,000 image views (9,825 to be exact).

Can I get over 10,000 by the end of the week? Yes we can! I just need you to go over and take a look around. And then come back here and tell me which pictures you like the best.

In the lead right now are:

Police guarding the Haymarket monument with 219 views

The Decatur, Illinois, ADM plant with 161 views (there is a similar image with 139 views), and

A crazy Chief Illiniwek bumper sticker with 144 views

In the historical document category, the current lead goes to

A cartoon from a 1951 CIO pamphlet advocating a federal fair employment law.

So take a look around, one hundred and seventy-five times, at Flickr.com.

Update: You did it, just barely.  Thanks!  Now back to your regularly unscheduled programming.

Tradition is Not Always a Good Thing

chiefbumpersticker.JPG
Originally uploaded by Tobias Higbie.

Tim beat me to the punch on this one, so go check out his post on History and Education. I don’t want to spill too much virtual ink over this so-called debate. Yes, I’m speaking of “Chief Illiniwek” the sports mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After years of protest, organizing, and reasoning by those opposed to the Chief, it appears that the U of I will finally retire the allegedly “honorable” tradition of sponsoring a white student to dress up as an “Indian” and dance around during sporting events.

I find it fascinating that two white students who have portrayed “The Chief” have filed a lawsuit to keep the university from retiring the Chief on the grounds that it violates their freedom of speech and undermines their future earnings (!). I’m not a lawyer, but I would point out that the retiring of the Chief as an official university symbol leaves the students free to practice their “tradition” on their own, without the backing of a state-funded institution.

The second charge in the lawsuit points to the self-serving aspect of all of this. According to the Chicago Tribune, the lawsuit claims:

“As has been the case for many former students who have portrayed Chief Illiniwek, many valuable employment and career opportunities and professional associations have been opened to those who have had the privilege and honor of portraying Chief Illiniwek.”

Okay, guys, is it an honorable tradition or a career opportunity? The problem is that these students cannot tell the difference. Perhaps it is so because there is nothing more American than making big money by “celebrating” the culture of others. At least Buffalo Bill Cody had the decency, if you can call it that, to cast actual Indian people in the role of themselves.

The students also assert that retiring the Chief will threaten their academic freedom because they get credit from the Music Department for portraying the Chief. Maybe they could pick up one of the excellent classes offered by American Indian Studies, the History Department, or better yet Anthropology?

And finally, I point to the pro-Chief bumper sticker at the head of this post. This, I submit, is the real tradition of the Chief. It is the nasty side of things that the University has refused to discuss. I know this will seem hurtful to those who sincerely love the Chief, but as a historian I cannot avoid the obvious connection.

The bumper sticker evokes, perhaps unconsciously but still quite clearly, George Wallace’s statements about segregation in his 1963 inauguration speech:

“Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”

Supporters of the Chief will say it is ridiculous to assert a connection between supporters of the Chief and supporters of Jim Crow. I reply simply: look in the mirror, and listen to your own words. History is not something you can wish away. Even George Wallace asked for forgiveness.

When the University finally ends its official endorsement of the Chief, the supporters will still be free to carry on their “tradition” in private. No doubt they will do so, and reap all the financial rewards they hope for. All we ask is that the university, as an educational institution, own up to the self-deception at the heart of the Chief worship cult.

Marching Down Memory Lane

Matrimonio Para Todos
Originally uploaded by Tobias Higbie.

Just last night I was saying to Loretta that I was going to put Bughouse Square on semi-permanent hiatus. After all, I only get around to posting about once a month. I have new projects, a new blog, and plenty of other work to do.

But today I got permission from the Newberry to upload a bunch of great protest pictures to my Flickr account. These were all taken in conjunction with the exhibit Outspoken: Chicago’s Free Speech Tradition that was up during the last quarter of 2004. They were taken by Ginger Shulick and by Jen Koslow. There are at least a hundred, probably more, so I’ll upload them a bit at a time. (I’ll leave discussion of the process of getting permission to my other blog, which is at least nominally about digital humanities issues).

This particular image, Matrimonio para Todos,” is one of my favorites and was taken by Ginger Shulick. If you recall, the spring of 2004 was about the time San Francisco was embarking on its gay marriage experiment, and in Chicago activists were pushing the Cook County Clerk to recognize civil unions or gay marriage. In the exhibit, about 30 of the protest pictures were mounted on a wall that was at the entry/exit point. They included images of anitwar protests, anti-tax protests, union rallies, and anti-gay-marriage protests as well as pro-gay marriage rallies. We placed the comment book on a table in front of the images, along with a stack of cards printed with the phrase “I was outspoken when…”. We got some wonderful responses on these cards, everything from “standing up to a bully at school,” to being “in the Park in ‘68.”

By the way, I just started using Feedburner, and I see that History and Education is the top referring site for me, along with searches for “Oaxaca protests.” Thanks Tim! All three of my readers (besides Tim) should go check out History and Education right now. I promise to post comments, really I do.

A shout-out to Jen Koslow–working on Outspoken together was great fun! And Ginger–out there in the Big Apple–you have a great eye for photography. I’m looking forward to hearing more about your next project.

Two Years Blogging at Bughouse Square

Today is the second anniversary of this blog, and so time to reflect: Why do I write this blog?

I started Bughouse Square (originally bugclub.blogspot.com) a week after the close of an exhibition I co-curated with Peter Alter at the Newberry Library on the history of free speech activism in Chicago. Outspoken: Chicago’s Free Speech Tradition was my first big exhibition (and only one to date). It was a lot of work, and a lot of fun. The great thing about public exhibits–as opposed to scholarly books–is that people actually enjoy them. This was not a blockbuster exhibit, but it had an audience roughly 10 times the size of that for my book.

As I recently noted on my new blog, I finished editing the script for the exhibit at 9 pm the night before my wife went into labor with twins. I promptly went on family leave and left many of the worst headaches to the Assistant Director of my research center, Jen Koslow (she is now a professor at Florida State University). While I changed diapers, Jen negotiated the demands of our higher-ups to edit out of the script what they perceived as overly political (or polemical) phrases.

Not to accentuate the negative. The relevant point is that when the exhibit closed down on January 14, 2005 I was in desperate need of an outlet that did not require vetting by anyone else. The exhibit really just capped off years of frustration. Before working at the Newberry I had been an activist in a union organizing campaign. I was the press liaison for a good stretch of the late 1990s and enjoyed spouting off to reporters or anyone else who would listen. So after four years of enforced circumspection in my public pronouncements I wanted a soapbox, and I didn’t really care if I drew a crowd. I just wanted to sound off.

My wife was in an oddly parallel position. But while I was working in the public sphere, she was taking a leave from her job to raise the infant twins. Notice I don’t say “taking the year off,” because taking care of infant twins is extremely hard work. And isolating. With both of us badly in need of a public outlet, we hit on the idea of starting our own weblogs. I must have been influenced by all the publicity blogs were getting during the 2004 elections. So we started our Blogger blogs. Loretta actually started two or three. But she settled on one, which has become in her words, “a marginally successful humor blog written under a pseudonym.” Too modest.

Looking back over the 2 years of Bughouse Square, I realize I made a few key errors that were mostly related to my fear that blogging would somehow undermine my academic jobs. Thus the masthead:

“The Views Expressed Are Those of the Author and Not of his Employers Past or Present”

This created the cross-purpose of simultaneously promoting and hiding my blog. For instance, last year as I moved to a tenure-track job I redid my template a bit and cut out my blog roll. I will admit now that this was motivated in part because several of you on the blogroll regularly make liberal use of profanity–oh yes, and then there is the occasional piece of soft-core pornography that shows up on The Dude Minds. Maybe not so good for an un-tenured prof. to link to that. In the case of another blogger we reached a mutual agreement that the two of us should not link to each other, lest we blow this person’s “deep cover.” I also changed my url from bugclub.blogspot.com to bughouseblog.blogspot.com, just because I felt like it. That latter move I figured would be okay because, as far as I could tell only about 5 people were reading me. I emailed them all about it. But as it turned out, others were reading. Who knew?

All of this paranoid activity violated the basic ecology of the blogging community: the post-link-comment cycle, which is like photosynthesis in this world. But the past two years have been an interesting education in blogging–and common sense communication. I don’t seem to have much of an audience, but still I write. It must fulfill some need.

I’ve learned a little about “genre” in the blogosphere. These days there are many “academic blogs.” In fact one of the more prominent academic bloggers just called it quits. He was always ahead of the curve, and probably is still ahead with this move. But Bughouse Square is not an academic blog. I never had the desire or determination (or stamina) to write definitive statements or pronouncements here. The problem is that it is not-an-academic-blog written by an academic. It’s hard to disconnect virtual and professional identities, for practical and psychological reasons.

Lately I’ve been thinking it’s time to disentangle the connection between this blog and it’s author. I asked a friend if he wanted to guest post–I can tell he needs a place to rant. No response yet. But there is space on this soapbox for more than one, if anyone feels the need to hop up and start shouting.

Great Spoken Word Audio

Via the AFL-CIO blog I found Writing from a Kindred Voice: The Workers Writing Project, and I highly recommend the audio section.

In particular, check out the two by ex-steelworker Jeff Maines. “Appalachian Apologia” is about an older worker–a “hillbilly”–at Inland Steel, and “Thirty” is a staccato rap-like poem covering Maines’s 30 years in the mill. I also liked “Indiana Harbor Jones” by Bill Corrigan.

I hope to use these at this years Steelworker Summer Institutes.

Sometimes They Tell the Truth on TV . . .

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: The fact is, the American effort in Iraq is essentially a colonial effort. We’re waging a colonial war. We live in the post-colonial era. This war cannot be won because it is simply out of sync with historical times.

That was tonight on the PBS News Hour

He also predicted a future Bush administration motto, “cut and blame” as the Iraq government fails to meet benchmarks for progress.

Local Struggles, Global Symbols

The American election results made the headlines in Mexico, even if US media have for the moment forgotten not only about Oaxaca, but the rest of the world as well. Cautiously welcoming the Democratic victory, Mexicans hope for a more nuanced, less strident discussion on immigration and “border security.”

No doubt there will be a change in tone from the US Congress. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), cheers the election as well, headlining: “IMMIGRATION FAILS AS WEDGE ISSUE FOR GOP” citing a survey of election results from Immigration 2006.

“Our preliminary analysis of last night’s results strongly suggest that very few toss up races were won by Republican candidates who attempted to exploit immigration as a voter motivator. Democrats that back comprehensive immigration reform mostly won their races. And the Republican Party is likely to get smaller as its hard line on immigration drives away Hispanic voters.”

A bit over optimistic to my way of thinking. But the new political landscape in Washington will make a difference. We will probably see the new leadership move to pass the previously-stalled “comprehensive” reform package that includes amnesty for some, deportation for more than a million, and a guest worker program that will cycle millions of disenfranchized workers in and out of the US economy. The guest worker program is favored by Bush and leading Dems (it is supported by SEIU, but opposed by AFL-CIO), so it’s an obvious choice for those seeking to prove their bipartisan cred.

I am not so sure that guest workers will go down well with the American workers who just put the Dems in office, and that dynamic will be interesting to watch. Take a quick look at what union folks are complaining about at the Fox Valley Labor News: the spectre of a Canada-US-Mexico superstate that would throw out the US Constitution. This conspiracy theory is being pushed by a group of ultra-right wingers, and it came up among a group of Steelworkers I taught last summer.

If the Democratic leadership simply pushes the Kennedy immigration bill for swift passage, I think it will backfire. Instead, the Dems would be wise to foster an honest dialogue on immigration, free from the shrill racism, jingoism, and demogogery of the last few years. After that, maybe we can have new laws, new programs.

Back in Oaxaca, the fire burns on and Ulises Ruiz’s hold on office gets more tenuous. No doubt he’s just holding on until December 1st. If he resigns before then, there will be a new election–which the PRD will probably win. After December 1st, the PRI-PAN alliance can name a replacement.

There is a very nice analysis by Laura Carlson of the International Relation Center that takes in the whole situation and its relation to neoliberalism, free trade and globalization. This is one of those rare articles that is measured, historically informed, and forward looking. And this is what inspires the title of my post:

If the movement for global justice were a territorial battle, Oaxaca would be a tiny point on a very large map, of little consequence except to the people involved. But symbolic battles, although very real for the combatants themselves, are the true terrain of the movement for global justice. They offer an opportunity, even when lost, to defeat the myths that uphold the system.

And why does this strike me so today? Because I’m reading James Green’s excellent new book on nineteenth century American class society, Death in the Haymarket so I can teach it to a group of union leaders. (If you need a quick version of the Haymarket story, go to the Encyclopedia of Chicago). As a historian who lived in Chicago for five years, I have to admit I had grown a little tired of Haymarket. After a few hundred retellings, it gets old. But if it lost something in the telling, the story has always captured something visceral in me whenever I have encountered one of the spaces and memorials of the event.

Green sets the story of the bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, within a rich context of immigrant working class life and class warfare that took on an intensely personal character even as it symbolized wider struggles. The Chicago anarchists certainly understood the symbolic, and they saw themselves as part of a trans-Atlantic, if not quite global, movement. And ironically, over time the Chicago martyrs became much more known outside of the US than they were inside.

As Oaxaca is today, Chicago in 1886 was a local conflict on the cutting edge of “globalization.” A very different form of globalization, and a different form of struggle, but both are local struggles with global symbolism.

In a sense, the two came together last May 1st when a huge march of immigrants–largely Mexicans and other Latin Americans marched through Haymarket Square. The new, powers-that-be-approved memorial wasn’t the focus of the march, as it was of the CFL-sponsored labor day rally later the same day. But it was also more than just something passed along the way. The organizers clearly understood the symbolism of May 1st, and they chose their path to connect their struggle with the Chicago martyrs.

These are my rather jumbled thoughts on this, November 11, the anniversary of the hanging in Chicago of Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel in 1887.

Calderon squeaks ahead for now

With most of the precinct-by-precinct count finished, the conservative candidate is now ahead by a mere 0.39%, according to La Jornada. Lopez Obrador (a.k.a. AMLO) held a press conference this morning to say he will contest the count before the Federal Electoral Tribunal, and has called for a mass meeting in Mexico City this Saturday.

As in the past two American elections, the conservative “winner” and various media are calling for unity and worrying about how the lack of finality will damage Mexico’s “young” democracy. There is a persistent implication in the American press that the PRD’s challenge of the election is part of the long political hegemony of the PRI (i.e., the now discredited policies of the past) and the PAN’s posture of defending the preliminary results signifies that it is the forward-looking defender of democracy. Unfortunately, this is closer to the PAN’s campaign rhetoric than it is to reality. The Associated Press is helping all of this along with its “exclusive” interview with Calderon, which conveniently makes him sound presidential (he offered AMLO a place in his cabinet, called for calm, etc.).

In the American case we learned that the challenge of winning a closely contested election has less to do with counting the votes and more to do with staking out an unassailable public position of victory. Once you have achieved the latter, any effort to achieve the former plays as sour grapes or worse. But this isn’t Florida or Ohio. So we shouldn’t expect the outcome to be the same. Hold on for a bumpy ride, and our old democracy might learn a thing or two.

Update: Calderon’s lead increased to 0.53% according to El Universal, which by the way loads more quickly and consistently than La Jornada. The LA Times is running a really good example of what I am complaining about in this post–treating the election as a done deal. But they also have a photo gallery with one image of AMLO supporters showing ballots allegedly found in a dump (see my previous post).