LABOR DAY CONTEST!!!

Match these quotations with the famous labor leaders who spoke them. The first SF member to email selsi9901@gmail.com with correct answers will win 50 rating points.

"I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen."

"Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America."

"In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People."

"The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day."

"Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah."

"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore."

"We want a better America, an America that will give its citizens, first of all, a higher and higher standard of living so that no child will cry for food in the midst of plenty."

"We must advance wages, reduce the hours of labor, and cultivate a spirit of fraternity among the working people regardless of creed, color, nationality or politics."

"I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator."

Labor Leaders: Cesar Chavez / Eugene V. Debs / Samuel Gompers / Joe Hill / Sidney Hillman / Mother Jones / John L. Lewis / Peter McGuire / Frances Perkins

LITERARY CORNER

I Hear America Singing

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.
--Walt Whitman



Miners

There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal.
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.

And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number.
For many hearts with coal are charred,
And few remember.

I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace indeed lies.

Comforted years will sit soft-chaired
In rooms of amber;
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our lives' ember.

The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned.
But they will not dream of us poor lads
Left in the ground.
--Wilfred Owen



Olives

Sunlight creaks over the blackened hills,
just enough light to see ladders
angled against limbs. Enough to see
limbs angled against branches, to see buckets
placed among roots. The rising of hands,
the wringing of day. Skin and bark dressed with dew.
To see the harvest, the flesh, the bones, noiselessly
ascend, like doves on their winter flights
. The horizon spills, ripe with stonefruit. Green, hardened,
puckered. To the press. To be squeezed. To be drained.
So many lives threshed into that singular and rare flavor.
--Jordan Escobar



Two Ladies

They sit upon their shaded porch,
A respite from the day,
Living history under eaves,
There sitting on display.

They looked out on the fields and trees,
The land that held their soul,
Two ladies resting from their work,
The young of long ago.

Their apron stained with this and that,
Their gray heads both held high,
Memories of a hundred years
Relived there in their eyes.

The wrinkled hands that held the plow
In furrows long and straight,
Are hands that cooled a fevered brow
And filled a supper plate.

The lines of life are etched on them,
Their lives about complete,
Two ladies rest there in the shade,
A respite from the heat.

Their cradles rocked so long ago,
To tunes we'll never know,
Two ladies rest upon the porch,
The young of long ago.
--Linda Lee






"The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people."--Cesar Chavez