How Unions Gave My Redneck Family a Chance at the American Dream

By Joe Bageant, AlterNet. Posted June 22, 2009.

My daddy ran the eastern seaboard in a 12-wheeler -- there were no 18-wheelers yet. It had polished chrome and bold letters that read "BLUE GOOSE LINE." Parked alongside our little asbestos-sided house, I'd marvel at the magic of those bold words, the golden diamond and sturdy goose. And dream of someday "burning up Route 50" like my dad.

Old U.S. Route 50 ran near the house and was the stuff of legend if your daddy happened to be a truck driver who sometimes took you with him on the shorter hauls: "OK boy, now scrunch down and look into the side mirror. I'm gonna turn the top of them side stacks red hot." And he would pop the clutch and strike sparks on the anvil of the night, downshifting toward Pinkerton, Coolville and Hanging Rock. It never once occurred to me that his ebullience and our camaraderie might be due to a handful of bennies.

Yessir, Old 50 was a mighty thing, a howling black slash through the Blue Ridge Mountain fog. A place where famed and treacherous curves made widows, and truck stops and cafes bloomed in the tractor trailers' smoky wakes. A road map will tell you it eventually reaches Columbus and St. Louis, places I imagined had floodlights raking the skies heralding the arrival of heroic Teamster truckers like my father. Guys who'd fought in Germany and Italy and the Solomon Islands and were still wearing their service caps these years later, but now pinned with the gold steering wheel of the Teamsters Union. Such are a working-class boy's dreams.

I have two parched photos from that time. One is of me and my brother and sister, ages 10, 8 and 6. We are standing in the front yard, three little redneck kids with bad haircuts squinting for some faint clue as to whether there was really a world out there, somewhere beyond West Virginia.

The other photo is of my mother and the three of us on the porch of that house on Route 50. On the day my father was slated to return from any given run, we'd all stand on the porch listening for the sound of air brakes, the deep roar as he came down off the mountain. Each time, my mother would step onto the porch blotting her lipstick, Betty Grable-style hair rustling in the breeze, and say, "Stand close, your daddy's home."

And that was about as good as it ever got for our family. Daddy's heart later gave way to a congenital defect, and he lost everything. He was so scrupulously honest about debts, he could never recover financially. Unable to borrow money, uneducated and weakened for life, he set to working in car washes and garages.

After his union trucking days were over, we were assigned to the margins of America, a million miles from the American Dream, joining those people never seen on television, represented by no politician and never heard from in halls of power.

Now it was only a little house by the side of the road with not enough closets and ugly asbestos shingle siding. But it was ours, just like the truck and the chance to get ahead that it offered. And we had felt like we were some small part of America as it was advertised. All because of a union job during the heyday of unions in this nation.

It was also a period of Teamsters Union corruption, replete with criminal moguls such as Dave Beck, George Meany and Jimmy Hoffa. Yet the history of the few top lizards on the national rock of greed is not the history of the people.

If a few pricks and gangsters have occasionally seized power over the dignity of labor, countless more calculating, bloodless and malevolent pricks -- the capitalist elites -- have always held most of the cards, which is why in 1886, railroad and financial baron Jay Gould could sneer, "I can always hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." And why a speaker at the U.S. Business Conference Board in 1974 could arrogantly declare, "One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II." And why that same year, Business Week magazine said, "It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow -- the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. Nothing in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept this new reality."

The new reality is here, and has been since 1973, the last year American workers made a wage gain in real dollars. Hell, it's been here so long, we accept it as part of America's cultural furniture. Only about 12 percent of American workers are unionized, and even with a supposedly union friendly Democratic Congress, unions are still fighting to exist (although government employees are unionized at 36 percent, because the Empire allows some leeway for its commissars).

See more stories tagged with: labor, unions, teamsters

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his Web site.

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