Resist! Prohibition Era

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Ken Dowell

It is part of America’s legacy that we don’t have much interest in obeying laws we don’t like. That’s what the Boston Tea Party was about. And this national will to resist didn’t go away after independence.

Perhaps no law was as widely disrespected and disregarded as the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Commonly known as Prohibition, the amendment banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors. Even before it went into effect, there were protests in many cities, including one in Boston Commons that included 50,000 people One clue about how this law would be received could be found in the New York Daily News on the day Prohibition took effect in January of 1920. They published a citizen’s guide on how to keep drinking.

One of the ways that could be accomplished was to exploit loopholes in the Volstead Act, the legislation that was supposed to provide for enforcement of the Prohibition amendment. The legislation was passed a few months before it went into effect and distillers used that time to move their stock out of the country. One of the favorites destinations was the Bahamas. Then, when the law was in force, they loaded up floating liquor stores and anchored three miles offshore in international waters. Local fisherman would ferry customers out to the booze boats.

The law allowed for the sale of alcohol for medicinal purposes. (Sound familiar?) In Chicago alone, 15,000 doctors and 57,000 retail pharmacists applied for licenses to sell medicinal alcohol. Dentists and veterinarians got into the act as well. Thirty million gallons of “medicinal” liquor was consumed during the first five years of prohibition. Another way around the Volstead Act was by partaking in “sacramental wine.” Quite a lot of that passed through the hands of priests and rabbis during their 20’s as their Catholic and Jewish constituents where almost universally opposed to Prohibition. The 18th amendment also produced a boon in legal production of industrial alcohol which tripled in the first half of the decade.

Moonshine

(Image by Levi Saunders)

One other way around the law was to make your own. Breweries that were supposedly put out of business by the 18th amendment initially tried selling soda and something called near beer, but eventually found a more lucrative path to pursue – malt extract. With the addition of yeast and water you could home brew real beer. Malt shops opened up in many cities selling the malt, yeast and various paraphernalia like bottles, filters and bottle-stoppers. These were the predecessors of the head shops that would emerge later in the century.

In Last Call, Daniel Okrent tells the story of a product called the Vino Sano Grape Brick, produced by some California grape growers. The brick came with instructions to add water to produce grape juice. But it also came with a warning. Customers were cautioned not to “add yeast or sugar, or leave it in a dark place, or let it sit too long before drinking it because it might ferment and become wine.” He also tells the story of Bowdoin College students brewing their own beer in their science labs. Prohibition led to an increase in student drinking as drinking age laws meant little when alcohol was banned entirely.

Making your own and consuming it at home was within the law. But some, mostly working class families, went a step further and turned their apartments into “blind pigs,” offering up some of their production to their neighbors, for a price. Prior to Prohibition, in 1917, Americans consumed 70 million gallons of legal wine. In 1925, they were putting away 150 million gallons of the homemade stuff.

Prohibition hung in efficy

Prohibition hung in effigy. (From New York Public Library public domain collection)

Resistance to Prohibition was not confined to the moonshiners, rumrunners and bootleggers. In fact, it went all the way to city hall and the statehouse. Running for governor of the state of New Jersey Edward I. Edwards promised to keep his state “as wet as the Atlantic Ocean.” He was elected. In Chicago when Big Bill Thompson was running for re-election as mayor he promised “we will not only re-open places these people have closed, but we’ll open 10,000 new ones.” He won as well. New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia went one step further. He announced a plan to go to the drugstore and buy the ingredients to make beer and then make it, inviting Prohibition agents to come and arrest him. They didn’t show. In the courthouses, federal Prohibition agents found that local juries had no interest in convicting their peers of Volstead violations.

By 1924, the state of New York passed legislation rescinding its Prohibition regulations. There was essentially no local enforcement of Prohibition in New York, New Jersey, Montana, Nevada and Wisconsin. In cities there was a situation similar to the current day “sanctuary cities.” Federal Prohibition agents got little help from local police or officials much the way ICE agents today are shunned in their hunt for undocumented immigrants.

By the end of Prohibition, many, many Americans were drinking openly and very publicly. The mostly male working class saloons which were the target of the advocates of Prohibition were indeed closed. But they were replaced by speakeasies, patronized by men and women.  In New York City by 1927, there were 30,000 of them.

The resistance was ultimately successful, albeit 13 years later. The 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th Amendment, was ratified on December 5, 1933, Repeal Day.

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Sources:

The War on Alcohol, Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, Lisa McGirr, 2017.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent, 2010

Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America, Edward Samuel Behr, 1996

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Prohibition as Class Warfare

Posted on December 19, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Prohibition, America’s 13-year experiment with banning liquor, has been called the “War on Alcohol.” It could just as well be called the war on America’s working class.

New York Public Library imageIn the first decades of the 20th century, America was experiencing a new flood of immigrants from Europe. Industrialization concentrated these new Americans in its cities. Labor unions were growing and making themselves heard. Socialist, Marxist and anarchist ideologies were finding followers among the immigrants and workers. The folks that filled the tenements in our cities and production floors of our factories were no longer all Protestant, no longer all white and no longer all English speakers. And for many of the more comfortable classes, this was a cause for alarm.

One of the primary forces behind the drive for Prohibition was the Women’s Christian Temperance Society. They were upper and middle-class women. Many of their leaders became known as heroes in the fight for women’s suffrage. But, as their name suggests, Prohibition was their primary goal and the saloon was their target. Their motives were indeed benign, improve family life, protect women from drunken husbands, children from inebriated fathers, free the workers from the evils of alcoholism, etc. But unmistakably this was a group of the privileged seeking to impose a way of life on the not so fortunate. They weren’t looking to cut off the flow of liquor in their husband’s posh clubs, just to shutdown the saloons.

They were joined by businessmen, industrialists, the hierarchy of the Protestant Churches and the descendants of the Southern landed gentry. The Anti-Saloon League, a Protestant church-based Ohio organization that became a driving force in bringing about Prohibition, didn’t get all their money by passing around the collection plate. John D. Rockefeller kicked in $350,000. Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie backed them as well.

There was no national referendum on banning alcohol and there is significant doubt as to whether any such referendum would have ever passed. But in terms of electing “dry” vs. “wet” public officials the odds were stacked against the largely disenfranchised immigrant and black populations. At the same time, women’s suffrage was viewed by some Prohibition backers, including the KKK, as a way to ring up more votes on the dry side.

Once the Prohibition amendment was ratified and became part of the Constitution it became even more apparent who this was aimed at. Congress passed the Volstead Act which established the rules and enforcement process for Prohibition (a piece of legislation substantially written by the Anti-Saloon League). If you were among the well-heeled, there was a pretty significant loophole right out of the gate. One of the provisions of the Act was that Americans could consume alcoholic beverages that they had purchased for personal consumption prior to Prohibition going into effect. Congress completed its override of President Woodrow Wilson’s veto in October of 1919, but the act didn’t go into effect until January of 1920. In his book Last Call, author David Okrent tells some stories of what happened in the interim. Charlotte Hennessy, a silent film actress and mother of the more celebrated actress Mary Pickford, bought up the entire inventory of a liquor store and had it transferred to her basement. In Arizona, department store magnate Baron M. Goldwater, the father of Barry Goldwater, bought the bar and the brass rail from his favorite saloon and installed it in his basement where his son made beer.

The experience for working class Americans, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities was very different. In the words of War on Alcohol author Lisa McGirr, “An unprecedented campaign of selective enforcement lurked beneath the surface glamour of the roaring 20’s that left the urbane elite sipping cocktails in swank, protected nightclubs…while Mexicans, poor European immigrants, African-Americans, poor whites in the south and the unlucky experienced the full brunt of Prohibition enforcements deadly reality.”

Home distilling

moonshine still

With no regulation, with the legitimate alcohol producers driven out of business, and with prices for black market beer and alcohol soaring, working class Americans often turned to dubiously produced moonshine, wood alcohol or other forms of industrial alcohol. Poisonous alcohol resulted in deaths, paralysis and blindness. The government itself played a role in this (The Chemist’s War). Frustrated by their inability to stop Americans from drinking the U.S. Treasury department ordered an increased use of methyl alcohol in the denaturing process used in producing industrial alcohol. The idea was that the added toxicity and befouled taste would keep people from drinking it. The impact was immediate. Some 700 deaths were reported as a result of poisoned alcohol in New York City alone that year.

Working class neighborhoods became crime scenes and were the site of gang violence. But it wasn’t the celebrated gangsters of the era that were showing up on court dockets. It was more likely to be a working class housewife busted for selling some homemade wine to her neighbors.  In Illinois, Italian-American homes were raided by Ku Klux Klansmen who were deputized in one Illinois county to help with the enforcement effort. And on the Mexican border some prohibition agents acted more like wild west gunslingers.

police action

The Volstead Act created new categories of crime and as a result U.S. prisons were filled to overcapacity with the addition of people who committed these new crimes. During the course of Prohibition, the number of inmates in federal prisons increased more than 350 percent. Some federal prisons were housing twice as many inmates as their maximum capacity. This foreshadows what would happen later in the century as American prisons were filled with non-violent drug violators, many of whom are held without being convicted of any crime because they are two poor to afford bail. And, as was the case in the 1920’s, it is minority groups that are vastly over-represented in the incarceration state. The NAACP reported that African-Americans and Hispanics made up 56 percent of the inmates in the U.S. in 2015, but only 32 percent of the overall population.

But there is one thing that both the rich and the poor had in common. They drank their way through the 13 years of Prohibition. In next week’s post I’ll look at how Americans resisted the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.

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Sources:

The War on Alcohol, Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, Lisa McGirr, 2017.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent, 2010

Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America, Edward Samuel Behr, 1996.

 

 

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Prohibition: A Nation of Immigrants, a Nation of Xenophobes

Posted on December 12, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Statue of LibertyThe United States is a nation of immigrants. We have the largest immigrant population of any country in the world. One of the most iconic symbols of the American democracy is the Statue of Liberty with its inscription “give us your tired, your poor….” In 2015, 13% of our population was foreign born. According the Census Bureau, one out of every four children under 18 in the U.S. has at least one foreign born parent.

And yet time and again we have proven ourselves to also be a nation of immigrant haters. One need only watch the campaign of any present day right wing politician to see how he or she tries to scare up votes by fanning the flames of xenophobia. That is led by the president. His campaign promises emphasized things like building a wall on the Mexican border and banning Muslins from entering the country.

This type of immigrant hatred has at times been a significant influence on government policy in the United States. Prohibition was one of those times. In my previous post I noted that there were a lot of reasons why Americans in different walks of life supported Prohibition, but the final thrust that brought the constitutional amendment into being was based on the anti-immigrant sentiment that was fueled by the First World War.

The U.S. entered WWI in 1917. That same year, Woodrow Wilson submitted the 18th Amendment, banning alcohol, to the states for approval. It was ratified by the necessary three-fourths of states within a year and in early 1919, Prohibition was enacted by Congress. The campaign leading up to that moment had started in the 19th century and had always been tinged by reactionary attitudes toward immigrants. Edward Samuel Bahr, author of Prohibition , describes it this way: “Prohibition was the rearguard action of a still dominant overwhelmingly rural, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, aware that its privileges and natural right to rule were increasingly threatened by the massive arrival of the largely despised (and feared) beer swilling, wine drinking, new American immigrants.”

Twenty million people immigrated to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920. By 1910, almost 15% of the population was foreign born. In cities, that percentage was higher. Forty-one percent of New York City residents were foreign born. For many of these new Americans, Irish, German, Italian, Mexican, Slavs and Eastern European Jews, alcohol was a part of their culture. It was how they socialized, how they wound down after work. It was a part of their family gatherings and their religious services. They became the target of a broad range of Prohibition backers, ranging from moralistic reformers to vile bigots.

 

One of the primary focuses of Prohibition was the saloon, the largely male dominated local drinking hole.  It is estimated that there were about 300,000 saloons in the U.S. in the early 20th century and that 80% of them were owned by first-generation Americans. Their clientele likely reflected that percentage. The saloon was not just a place to go have a beer. For many new immigrants is was where they got their mail, where they looked for a job and where they found people who spoke their language. It was also a hub of political activity, a place where political machines set up shop. The primarily female progressive reform movement of the time, in its typically patronizing manner, saw the eradication of the saloon as a way to improve the lives of immigrant families. The name of the nation’s most powerful Prohibition lobbying group, the Protestant fundamentalist Anti-Saloon League, speaks for itself.

Those Prohibition advocates were high-minded compared to the outright bigots who saw immigration as a threat to both religious and racial purity. Last Call author Daniel Okrent notes, “Like the Catholics, the Jews peered behind the Prohibition banner and saw the white-hooded hatred of the Ku Klux Klan and foaming xenophobia of the nativist pastors who dominated the Methodist and Baptist churches.” And this despite the fact that in many Southern states there were hardly any immigrants.

Although Americans had been drinking somewhat heartily since the Mayflower arrived equipped with kegs of beer, Prohibition advocates saw the alcohol industry in the U.S. as an immigrant business. Germans had dominated the beer brewing industry since the second half of the 19th century and the distilleries were often owned by Jews. Henry Ford, an anti-Semite, decried the distilling industry as 95% Jewish controlled.

It was the German-ness of the brewing industry that finally pushed the battle to ban alcohol over the starting line. World War I gave rise to a wave of anti-German hysteria in the U.S. In Iowa it was illegal to speak German. Wisconsin burned German books. And in Boston you couldn’t play Beethoven, The Anti-Saloon League seized on this sentiment and put its considerable propaganda machine in motion associating alcohol with the enemy and positioning Prohibition as a patriotic act that would help win the war.

Once Prohibition was enacted it was immigrants that often bore the brunt of enforcement. Williamson County, Illinois, actually brought in the KKK to help with enforcement. They raided the homes of Italian-Americans and if they found wine, carted the men of the family off to jail. One noted Prohibition agent, Izzy Einstein, made a name for himself in New York by busting rabbis. And along the border, a government commission empaneled to study the failure of enforcement of Prohibition, concluded that treatment of Mexican-Americans was “unconstitutional, tyrannic and repressive.” Congress passed an Immigration Act in 1924 that limited the number of Europeans who could immigrate and outright banned Arabs and Asians.

One result of the way Prohibition was imposed on immigrant communities was a fundamental change in voting patterns in the U.S. that persists to this day. Urban, immigrant populations began voting in droves for the Democrats, starting in 1928 with the candidacy of New York’s Catholic and anti-Prohibition Governor Al Smith. While Smith was defeated, immigrants were a key block of the voters who elected Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and while the nationalities of immigration has changed, new Americans continue to support the Democratic Party to this day.

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Sources:

The War on Alcohol, Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, Lisa McGirr, 2017.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent, 2010

Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America, Edward Samuel Behr, 1996.

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Prohibition: The Left and the Right Collaborate, Produce a Fiasco

Posted on December 6, 2017 by Ken Dowell

One is tempted to think of Prohibition as the last stand of a Puritanical, moralistic 19th century ethic imposing its rigid behavioral standards on the whole country. And surely there were lots of folks of that sort pushing the issue. The Anti-Saloon League, a key influencer in both enacting and trying to enforce Prohibition, was built up through Protestant church communities.  But the story of Prohibition is more complicated than that. The issue spurred a division in American society similar in intensity to what we are experiencing today. It was urban vs. rural, Protestant vs. Catholic and Jew, black vs. white, woman vs. man. native born vs. foreign born. But it was not simply left vs. right.  Consider the fact that the women’s suffrage movement and the Ku Klux Klan were allies in this fight.

 Lisa McGirr, author of The War on Alcohol, describes the coalition that led the fight against drinking as “a mighty alliance of moralists, progressives, suffragists and xenophobes.” Preachers of what today we would call the religious right railed about how just a drop of alcohol would lead the drinker down the road to destruction. And the pseudo-scientific community chimed in with such gems as the claim that drinking made the body susceptible to spontaneous combustion.

To be fair, late 19th and early 20th century Americans drank. A lot. And apparently they have since the first Europeans hit these shores. In his book Prohibition , Edward Samuel Behr, traces the roots of American drunkenness to the very beginning. He adds “Eighteenth century Americans, whether rich or poor, slaves or free men and women, appear to have gone through life in a semiperpetual alcoholic haze.”

suffragettesMany of those who supported Prohibition were the progressives and reformers of their day.  One such group was the Women’s Christian Temperance Society, a key influencer in the “dry” movement. Their agenda was not just about turning off the taps. They also campaigned for women’s suffrage, prison reform, child welfare, free kindergarten, an 8-hour work week and an end to prostitution. For the most part they were upper and middle class white women who genuinely thought of themselves as working to improve the lot of their less advantaged countrymen (and women).

KKKTheir allies on the right had some very different reasons for supporting the cause. Today we think of the KKK mainly in terms of their despicable racism. But these spooks hated everybody. They hated the Irish and Italian immigrants because they were Catholic, they hated the Mexicans because they were Mexicans and they of course hated blacks. Since alcohol and the saloons where it was consumed were so much a part of the lives of these minority groups, racists and xenophobes were strong advocates of Prohibition even though many probably had no intention of giving up alcohol themselves.

What is especially curious is the link between women’s suffrage and Prohibition. The KKK wasn’t backing women’s suffrage based on their passion for equal rights. Instead they assumed that giving women the right to vote would swing the scales to electing pro-dry officials. Conversely, the brewing and distilling interests campaigned hard against women’s suffrage for the same reason.

Frances Willard

Frances Willard

Considering that from our perspective Prohibition was pretty misguided, it is astounding to read the list of names of prominent early 20th century Americans who supported it. That list includes Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, muckraking authors Upton Sinclair and George Kibbe Turner, women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Amelia Bloomer, social welfare pioneers Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, suffragist Frances Williard, civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, former heavyweight champion boxer and drinker John L. Sullivan, Orville Wright, Coca-Cola founder Asa Chandler, Broadway theater owner Lee Shubert, education reformer Horace Mann and novelists Jack London and Booth Tarkington.

There were many reasons behind their support of Prohibition. Ford thought it would increase productivity in his plants. Chandler figured he could sell more soda with beer off the market. Shubert envisioned the guys who spent all their time in saloons heading for the theater instead. But one issue above all else carried the day. Hatred of immigrants. And specifically, those immigrants who taught us most of what we know about beer, the Germans. In next week’s post I’ll look at how xenophobia led to this 13-year long fiasco.

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Sources:

The War on Alcohol, Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, Lisa McGirr, 2017.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent, 2010

Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America, Edward Samuel Behr, 1996.

(Photos from New York Public Library Public Domain Digital Collection.)

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Tess McIntyre Foundation: Abandoned, Mistreated Dogs Get a Second Chance

Posted on November 30, 2017 by Ken Dowell

They came from Korea and from Turkey. From South Carolina and Southern California. One lost an eye. One lost a leg. Another lost most of his coat.

What all these dogs have in common is they have all become happy, healthy animals living in safe, loving homes. And they have one more thing in common. Each benefitted from the donations made to the Tess McIntyre Foundation (TMF) as we used those funds to support their medical needs and recovery.

Working with our partners Home for Good Dog Rescue in Berkeley Heights, N.J., and Southern California Golden Retriever Rescue (SCGRR) in Los Angeles, here are a few of the dogs we have assisted:

AdamiAdami

Adami was saved from the meat market. Literally. He was rescued from a cage in the back of a butcher shop by a South Korean animal rights activist who got in touch with SCGRR and arranged to get him transported to Los Angeles. Adami had a severe case of heartworm and his treatment lasted for several months. TMF’s donation helped offset some of the cost of Adami’s extensive medical bills. During this time, he stayed with one of SCGRR’s foster families. It’s safe to say he graced their home with his presence, because with his health recovered he was put up for adoption and it was the foster family who decided to take him in permanently.

 

AidenAiden

None had a tougher start in life than Aiden. A mixed breed who was found alone in the woods in southern Georgia, Aiden was starving, suffering from heartworm and mange, and had wounds that suggested physical abuse. TMF made a donation to Home for Good to sponsor Aiden as he was taken to their Aiken. S.C., facility, nursed back to health and socialized with other dogs. A volunteer pilot brought Aiden with a group of other dogs to New Jersey where he was adopted. A short while later his new owners reported that this guy, who had to struggle to survive on his own in Georgia, was the hit of his new neighborhood and that their teenage children’s friends were coming over to play with him regularly.

CarolinaCarolina

We don’t know how Carolina ended up as a stray. But at 12-weeks old she was found in Edgefield, S.C., malnourished, with severe mange and with a leg damaged from being hit by a car. Home for Good moved her to the care facility in Aiken, S.C., where she recovered from her mange but her leg had to be amputated. TMF pledged to match $1,000 in donations in order to cover the $2,000 in medical bills for this dog. By the time Home for Good brought her up north, Carolina was an energetic, playful and happy puppy. She was adopted by a New Jersey man as a 1-year anniversary present for his wife.

DariusDarius

Darius was four years old when he was found abandoned in Turkey. Blind in both eyes, his right eye was painfully swollen when he was flown to Southern California and turned over to SCGRR. TMF also set up a matching fund to help pay for the surgery to remove Darius’ right eye and relieve the pressure. Following the surgery, he was lovingly cared for by one of SCGRR’s foster families and when fully recovered adopted by a Southern California couple that had previously owned a blind dog and knew what to expect and how to take care of him.

In getting to know these brave dogs we have been amazed at their resilience. Some were abandoned by people they trusted, others were subjected to outright cruelty. But that never stopped them from welcoming their caregivers, their foster families and their new owners into their hearts. Nor did they hesitate to offer companionship and warmth to people who took them in.

In addition to working with these dogs, TMF pitched in to help during hurricane season. We purchased a generator for HFG’s medical care facility in South Carolina and donated to the Red Cross in Houston after the hurricane there.

About 1.4 million dogs are adopted in the U.S. each year. Another 1.2 million are euthanized in shelters. The number that we are able to reach is less than a drop in a bucket. But each one represents a happy, and in some cases an inspiring story, and with the help of our donors, we hope to be able to be a part of more and more stories like these in the future.

The Tess McIntyre Foundation is a 501(c)3 charity located in La Quinta, Calif. The foundation has no employees and we cover all administrative costs ourselves. One hundred percent of the donations we receive go toward helping these animals. Donations can be made at the foundation web site.

 

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(The author, Ken Dowell, is a trustee of the Tess McIntyre Foundation.)

 

 

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Work in America: Why is Full Employment So Unfulfilling?

Posted on November 21, 2017 by Ken Dowell
Steel mill

Photo by Jean Beaufort

Economists in the U.S. describe full employment as an unemployment rate that is between 4 and 6.4%. In October the unemployment rate was 4.1%. It had hovered around 5% throughout 2016. Depending on which economist’s definition of full employment you subscribe to, we have been at full employment for 2 or 3 years. In fact the unemployment rate has dropped every year since 2010 when it was nearly 10%.

And yet there is an underlying feeling amongst many Americans that the economy isn’t working for them and that the job outlook is something other than what these stats suggest. We are just a year removed from a presidential election that was in large part decided on economic pessimism. That was fueled by Trump’s demonizing of immigrants as taking American jobs, raging about American companies (like his daughter’s) that outsource manufacturing oversees and refuting the very idea of climate change so as to remove all restrictions on polluting and contaminating business operations.. And enough voters bought into this to elect Trump even if he was on the short end of the popular vote.

Pollution

Photo by veeterzy

Why is full employment so unfulfilling?  There are some real reasons that go beyond campaign rhetoric. Here are six of them.

1.       The gig economy. The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that a whopping 40% of American workers are contingent workers. That means they are temps, freelancers, independent contractors, part-timers or consultants. What they don’t have is the safety net of benefits and regulations that was built up around the concept of full-time employment. They likely have to buy their own healthcare insurance and set up their own retirement plan and for most there’s no guarantee their job will be around this time next year.

2.       All the folks who don’t count. The unemployment rate is based on individuals who have worked or who have looked for work in the past 12 months. There are 95 million Americans who are not considered to be part of the labor force. Ten years ago that number was 79 million, so more than 15 million Americans have dropped out of the work force over that time period.  Most of these people are retired, disabled or are students of some type. But an estimated 5% of them have given up looking for a job because they can’t find one that matches their skills or they just don’t have employable skills. We have also flooded our jails with non-violent offenders. A large portion have not been convicted of any crime but can’t come up with the bail money. Others are sitting in jail for crimes like possessing marijuana for recreational use. What all of them can’t do is get a job.

Wall Street
Photo by Alex Van

3.      Wall Street’s narrowvision. Wall Street analysts are, with few exceptions, evaluating companies based on their short-term profitability. That means public companies are being managed for short-term profitability not growth. One of the fastest ways to achieve greater profitability is to cut staff. That not only means outright layoffs but also the replacement of older more experienced workers for younger inexperienced ones who will work for less. It also means that technology will be viewed in terms of automation that can reduce staffing costs rather than as a way to enhance businesses. Venture capital companies often do a similar thing. Some are looking to flip companies much the way real estate investors flip houses. Buy a firm, cut its operating expenses to improve profitability and turn it around on the market. Another common tactic of VC firms is to put together compatible or competitive businesses and take advantage of “synergies.” Those synergies are usually people, the goal being to run the two concerns with the staff of one, thus boosting profitability, and unemployment.

4.       Working for next to nothing. According to the Pew Research Center there are 20.6 million people who are “near-minimum wage” workers. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour  No cause for optimism there. In addition, a survey by PayScale.com found that 46% of Americans consider themselves to be underemployed. That would equate to 22 million workers. Underemployment may mean doing a job that doesn’t reflect a worker’s skills and abilities, working part-time instead of full-time and/or being underpaid.

5.       The retail sector is failing. Credit Suisse has put out a report predicting that one in four or five malls will be closing down in the next five years. This year alone they expect 8,600 stores to close. Nearly a half million retail jobs have been lost in the last 15 years. And the online retail sector that is largely responsible for the disruption of physical stores only adds about one job for each four lost in brick and mortar stores. And even those jobs, such as the warehouse order pickers at Amazon, are threatened by the biggest employment issue of all, automation and technology.

Robot

Photo by Alex Knight

6.       The invasion of the robots. None of the candidates in either of the dominant political parties in the U.S. address what is likely the most impactful issue on the future of work in America.  Technology. Robots replacing humans. AI replacing HI (human intelligence). Likely they have no clue what to say. This is nothing new. For years now we’ve been talking to voice recognition auto-attendants whenever we call the banks, utilities, insurance companies and just about any other sort of business of scale. Most experts expect the future of manufacturing to be done almost exclusively by robots. So we might well be bringing manufacturing back within our shores, but not the jobs that left with it. There’s a company making robots that replace room service staff in hotels. Driverless cars may well make one of the biggest employment opportunities of the gig economy obsolete. And there are self-driving trucks in development that will eliminate those jobs.

While the numbers continue to tell us we are at full employment, add the numbers of the labor pool dropouts, the underemployed, the people in dying industries and the folks who are looking over their shoulders at robots and it’s not hard to understand why we are so insecure about our future of work.

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On the 50th Anniversary of a Summer of Urban Warfare in America

Posted on November 14, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Fifty years ago, 1967, urban warfare broke out in cities throughout America. It happened in Milwaukee and Chicago and Buffalo. It happened in Cincinnati and Atlanta and Boston. And most notably, it happened in Detroit and Newark. Depending on your perspective these were either riots or rebellions. Either way it was street warfare between black inner city residents and white police and troops. Invariably it was over-aggressive policing that set the fire and usually it was over-aggressive policing that ended it.

Harlem stores damagedI was a teenager at the time growing up in an all-white middle-class town not too far from Newark, living with my blatantly racist father.  He and people like him processed this as blacks looting stores and burning buildings until the National Guard came in and restored peace. That narrative conveniently leaves out the cause, both the short-term cause and the long-term cause. To acknowledge either would have skewed his oversimplified vision of the world.

Movie poster for DetroitOn this 50th anniversary I saw two movies about the urban chaos of that summer. One, Detroit, is a fictional account of an individual act of police brutality, although police brutality may be an understatement. It was really murder, two unarmed black men killed by police for no crime other than being black in Detroit in the neighborhood where the disturbances were taking place. And, oh yeah, for being with white women.

The other, Revolution ’67, is about Newark before, during and after the riot/rebellion. Made by lifelong Newark residents this movie is 10 years old and has been shown on public TV, but was screened locally on this anniversary year. It covers police brutality as well but focuses on much broader issues like poverty, housing, education and jobs.

I think of the urban chaos of 1967 as a turning point. It represents the end of the civil rights movement and the beginning of the an angrier, more militant and more demanding era of black activism: Black Power, Black Muslims and Black Panthers. It wasn’t going to be enough to be able to sit in any seat on the bus, not if you didn’t have any money to get on the bus or any job to take the bus to.

The question these movies raise is are we really better off now than we were 50 years ago? In Detroit, the movie ends with an all-white jury finding the sadistic cop not guilty in a courtroom half-filled with other cops, showing their support though surely some of them know what happened. That of course is the same verdict delivered in the case of the Baltimore cops who killed Freddie Grey in the back of a police van. It is the same verdict delivered in the case of the Cleveland cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice whose crime was to play with a toy gun in a public park. And it is the same verdict delivered to the cop who strangled Eric Garner to death in Staten Island after he was caught selling loose cigarettes. One of the many disconcerting scenes in Detroit is when a Michigan state trooper comes upon the scene where the Detroit cops are holding and terrorizing a group of black men. He sees that something very wrong is going on and tells his men to get the hell out of there so they have no part in it

Many attribute Newark’s continuing problems to the events of 1967. But the city was suffering from a loss of people and jobs even before that. Some 400,000+ lived in Newark in 1960. The population was down to 277,000 in 2010. The migration to the suburbs started after World War II. The unrest of 1967 exacerbated an already existing trend. Those who could afford to and who were not restricted by discriminatory lending policies headed out. The city became progressively poorer and blacker. We didn’t have legal segregation in New Jersey, but when it comes to housing we have been and continue to be a substantially segregated state.

 

One of the commenters in Revolution ’67 points out that in the mid 60’s there were no black faces in city hall, no black police chiefs, you couldn’t even find a black store clerk downtown or a black bank teller. Well now the city has had black mayors since 1970, there is a black police chief and lots of black faces behind the registers in downtown stores. Yet some 30% of Newarkers are living in poverty, a rate that is up from 25% in 2007 when the movie was made.

Newark is seen by some as enjoying something of a renaissance. That is happening downtown where a Whole Foods just opened in an old abandoned retail building. It joins a Starbucks and a Nike Store on Broad Street. Prudential has a new downtown headquarters building and Audible and Panasonic have moved operations there. The city boasts a performing arts center and an NHL hockey arena. New housing is being built downtown and a hotel opened for the first time in decades. It has provided some jobs and it is bringing more people into downtown Newark thus opening up some opportunities for small businesses.  But many residents will point out that all of this downtown development is doing nothing for the neighborhoods. Nothing to address the substandard housing, under-achieving public schools and the crime and drugs associated with poverty.

There is a larger trend in America of cities growing and of younger people who prefer an urban environment to the suburbs. That’s really easy to see if you watch people pouring into cities like Denver and Nashville. It’s maybe not as clear that cities like Detroit and Newark will benefit as well.

Finally there is the issue of our federal government. In 1967 Lyndon Johnson was president. LBJ was a foreign policy disaster and the commander in chief who sent tens of thousands of Americans to their death in southeast Asia, including an overrepresentation of poor, city kids. But on the domestic front, he was a champion of civil rights, of voting rights and a staunch opponent of segregation and discrimination. By all accounts he truly believed in this. Who knows what our current president truly believes in, aside from maybe accumulating wealth. But it has become pretty clear that we have a racist attorney general and that white supremacists have been welcome in the White House. And the ruling Republican party is actively trying, in several states, to restrict voting rights.

So as I think back to 1967 and watch these both fictional and documentary stories of that time, I’d like to think it was a different era and that we’ve moved past that summer of urban warfare. But when you take a long look at the underlying problems that triggered it, it’s hard to make that case.

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Sunday in the (Sculpture) Park

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Ken Dowell
Seward Johnson sculpture

God Bless America, Seward Johnson

Far Out, Seward Johnson
Dejeuner Deja Vu, Seward Johnson

Peacock Cafe

Grounds for Sculpture

Hamilton, N.J.

Seward Johnson

Seward Johnson’s sculpted self portrait. Part of the larger work, Were You Invited

Seward Johnson sculpture

Chamber of Internal Dialogue, Seward Johnson

Shewmaker sculpture

Vita, Michael Shewmaker

Rat's Restaurant

Rat’s Restaurant for Sunday brunch

Joyce Scott sculpture

Araminta with Rifle and Veve, Joyce C. Scott

Hatcher sculpture

Time Reversing, Brower Hatcher

Seward Johnson sculpture

King Lear, Seward Johnson

Sculpture garden grounds

Newman sculpture

Skyhook, John Newman

Johnson Sculpture

Mystical Treasure Trip, Seward Johnson

 

Seward Johnson scupture

My Sixteen Year Old Jazz Dreams, Seward Johnson

Folded Circle Ring, Fletcher Benton
Frame Construction #5, John Lash
Two Face Telescope, Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas
Doubles, George Sugarman
Space, Conquer or Die – Swiatowid. Andrzej Pitynski
Teatro XI, Herk Van Tongeren
Seward Johnson sculpture

Redon’s Fantasy of Venus, Seward Johnson

Seward Johnson sculpture

Double Check: Makeshift Memorial, Seward Johnson

 

 

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(Guest Post) History of Halloween: Six Weird Facts

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Ken Dowell

A Guest Post by Sandra Larson

Yes, it is here – one of the most anticipated holidays of the year, Halloween. Thousands of people around the world are happy to celebrate it, but only a few are aware of its roots and why it is even celebrated at all.  Even the most informed  may not know these six weird facts about the history of Halloween.

  1. Halloween Has Nothing to Do with Satanism

The holiday dates back thousands of years to the Samhain festival that ended the crop season. It was believed that during this period, the bond between the living and the dead was becoming thin, and spirits walked on the land to visit their former families. The night of 31 October was connected to the Catholic holiday of All Hallows Eve – the night of honoring the dead. Yes, there are a lot of scary things for Halloween, but they have nothing to do with Satanism.

  1. Halloween Is Even More Irish than St. Patrick’s Day

Though the most massive celebrations take place in the United States, Halloween is originally from Ireland. Yes, Halloween was discovered by Celts, and it was  Irish Celts that invented the Jack-o’-lantern. Then how did it become that popular in North America? Well, it took place in the 19th century when the massive Irish and Scottish immigration started. The immigrants spread the tradition to the masses, and this is how it became that popular.

Halloween pumpkins

(image by Beth Teutschmann)

  1. Jack-o’-Lantern Was Once Made of Turnips

Yes, the first Halloween Jack-o’-lantern was made out of turnips and even beets and potatoes. Where does the tradition of Jack-o’-lantern come from? Well, there is the story about the man named Jack who was unfortunate to play a trick on the devil himself. He was punished by having to walk on the land for eternity. The only thing to guide him was the burning coal in the turnip. The Irish people started carving scary faces in the turnips, beets, and potatoes and placed them on the windowsills to scare Stingy Jack away.

  1. You Might Have Had to Wear Animal Skins as a Costume in the Past

To scare the evil spirits, people in the past  wore animal skins and heads as costumes. You could not visit a website and order the costume that you like, so people had to create costumes with their own hands. The outfit had to look scary so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. That is why to avoid being recognized, the people would wear the costumes that would scare even the contemporary person.

  1. Trick-Or-Treating Tradition Has a Celtic Origin

In spite of the fact that trick-or-treating is connected to many different traditions, it, in fact, originates from the Celtic one. It evolved from the custom to put out treats and food to appease the spirits roaming the streets (just like putting out a Jack-o’-lantern to scare them). People used to wear the scary costumes impersonating the spirits and go mumming, namely performing short scenes in exchange for the food and drink. Today, children do not really do anything except ask for the treats, but adults cannot but give some candies to them after all.

  1. Weird Traditions

Halloween witchWe never tried, but there is the belief that if you wear your clothes inside out and walk backwards on Halloween, you will see a witch. Another superstition is that you might be followed by the death itself, and if you turn around to look who is following you, it will be your end. Another tradition which seems to us really weird and kind of dangerous is to hold a candle in one hand and a mirror in the other and walk backwards down the stairs. It will allow you to see your future husband. However, these superstitions were created in the past, and no one really believes in them now. But as all the things for Halloween, they create the required atmosphere.

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(Sandra Larson is a freelance writer who recently graduated from the Journalism Department of the University of Memphis.)

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Did the Environmental Movement Start in the Swamps of Jersey?

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Ken Dowell

Great Swamp

Great Swamp signThe Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge at one time had been designated by the Port Athority of New York and New Jersey as the preferred site for a fourth New York City area airport. The swamp is in Morris County, New Jersey, about 25 miles west of Manhattan. It was the late 50’s when the PA put forward its plan and at the time there wasn’t a great deal of understanding about the importance of this natural oasis to the surrounding ecosystem.

Residents in and around the site fought for nearly a decade to stop the airport plan. They saved the swamp by raising more than $1 million dollars which they used to purchase nearly 3,000 acres of the land. It was then donated to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services which designated it as a national wildlife refuge. The issue was finally put to bed in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson signed a bill designating the Great Swamp National Wildlife Wilderness.

River through Great Swamp

I learned the story of the Great Swamp by watching the documentary Saving the Great Swamp. The film, produced by Scott Morris Productions, has had some screenings at film festivals and is expected to be available on DVD and online soon. The movie interviews some of the descendants of the local residents who successfully fought off the airport plan.

While I would recommend this documentary, I did have to hold my nose as they interviewed U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen. While his father Peter Frelinghuysen did work to preserve the swamp, Rodney, who apparently inherited the seat, is a GOP congressman who strictly votes party line. He stands with the climate change deniers and the folks who would like to eliminate all environmental controls, thus opening the land for the frackers, the strip miners and the drillers.

blind

View from inside a blind in the wildlife observation area.

The Great Swamp Committee, which was formed in 1960 to fight off the Port Authority plan and to educate the public on the importance of the swamp, was an organization that was ahead of its time. Most date the start of the modern environmental movement to the late 60’s or early 70’s. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wasn’t created until 1970, the same year that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection was founded. By then we were finally starting to notice that it was getting a little harder to breathe in some of our cities and that the byproduct of American industry was being dumped into and despoiling our waterways and the very water we were drinking.

The Great Swamp Committee itself later expanded its focus and became the New Jersey Conservation Foundation. The group has worked to preserve many other natural lands throughout the state, has been an advocate for environmental legislation and has counseled and mentored other local environamental organizations.

River through Great Swamp

Passaic River

Sign on bench

 

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