Doing the People's History

All's quiet on the internship front, but last week brought a teachable moment in public history, at a union gathering organized mainly to push back against the draconian human service cutbacks envisioned in the draft Commonwealth budget.

These are dog days for labor. Membership continues to fall, from a peak of 35 in the mid 1950s to less than 12 percent of workers today. Collective bargaining is under well-financed and unrelenting assault, and public sector employees are being blamed for everything from climate change to the instability of the European Union.    

Like other unions, the one to which I belong, the Service Employees International Union, is seeking ways to reach a new generation of workers, who often have no previous personal or family experience of union membership, almost certainly have no knowledge of labor history, and may believe that the 40-hour work week has been the norm from time immemorial. Someone decided that a painless way to introduce a labor history lesson into the proceedings would be to intersperse capsule profiles of labor leaders, in the form of "Blasts from the Past."

The notion intrigued me, and I volunteered my way, at the 11th hour, into the lineup. I was given a choice between portraying Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a labor organizer who helped to run successful strikes at textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts and Paterson, New Jersey, and Helen Keller.

Labor activist Lucy Parsons, portrayed by
SEIU Local 668 Secretary-Treasurer Roni Green

Well, that was a no-brainer, especially after I discovered that the legendary blind child painstakingly introduced to language by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, had grown up into a Wobbly, a suffragist, a supporter of birth control and the NAACP and a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. (If that weren't enough,the book Helen Keller in Love, historical fiction about the romance thwarted by her family, was published this year.) Other luminaries to be portrayed by my colleagues included Cesar Chavez, Lucy Parsons ("more dangerous than a thousand rioters"), Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow and Rosie the Riveter.

My aha! public history moment came as I researched Keller and discovered the disconnects and colorations in our collective historical memory of this storied woman.  The airbrushing of her radical politics is thought to be attributable at least in part to her role in later life as a fundraiser and spokeswoman for the staid American Foundation for the Blind, as well as her stage and film biography,"The Miracle Worker," which froze her in childhood for a generation of American audiences.

Helen Keller greets Winston Churchill, circa 1953.

Courtesy of the American Foundation for the

Blind, Helen Keller Archives

The left-leaning websites had their own takes. For example, the website of the old-line industrial union, the International Workers of the World (aka Wobblies) features a newspaper interview in which Keller asserted she joined the IWW after finding the Socialists "too slow."  The educational website sponsored by the Spartacus League, a Marxist faction, gives full-throated emphasis to the Socialist cast of Keller's remarkable career as advocate and writer.

The Zinn Education Project a website giving pointers on teaching history from the "bottom up," as pioneered by the late Boston University professor Howard Zinn, contends that "it's time to start telling the truth about Helen Keller." It calls for replacing sanitized children's books on Keller with a fuller, more honest portrait of the woman, her causes and her accomplishments.

Harder to find, but still numerous, are sources focusing on her spiritual life and writings. Keller was a Swedenborgian, an adherent to a mystical, universalist religious faith that influenced the visionary poets William Blake and William Butler Yeats. 

In encountering American collective memory of Helen Keller, I'm reminded about the anecdote of the blind men and the elephant (sorry!), each one describing the whole beast as having only the characteristics of the particular part he is touching. When we we limit, whether voluntarily or unwittingly, the range and depth of our historical vision, we impoverish our shared memory and distort our shared future. We owe the subjects of our trained attention, and our audiences, as full and fair an accounting of their lives and times as we can muster.

An Interview with the T

At our last meeting, the exhibit design team, sculptors Bruce Lindsay and Kate Graves, had invited the rest of us to their studio to view the T in situ. On the appointed Saturday, I headed out to the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, to meet up with Bruce and Kate, only to turn around when I saw the line of cars waiting to enter the Grounds for the family-friendly event scheduled that day.

My visit was rescheduled for April 24, primary election day in Pennsylvania, and a work holiday for me because it's a holy day of obligation for many in the county government that employs me. So, on Tuesday afternoon, I again drove to NJ to visit the T in its temporary lodgings in the Johnson Atelier, the workshop for the Grounds for Sculpture and for artists who rent space there. I was greeted with a bloodcurdling squawk by an albino peacock.

The Grounds for Sculpture occupies 42 acres on the former site of the New Jersey State Fairgrounds.

 

I reverently viewed the T, a truly imposing 10-foot letter of white metal. Bruce pointed out where the mounting brackets had been and displayed a transformer box that had been removed from the T. New, larger letters now spell out “TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES” on the Lower Trenton Bridge, and they are illuminated by LEDs, which are cheaper and easier to maintain than the old neon.  The history of the removal and replacement of the slogan seems to be hazy, and would be an interesting topic to research.    

Richard Hunter, the project manager, and his colleague, Patrick Harshberger, the bridge maven, had been there the day before.  Patrick reportedly had waxed eloquent on the subject of the Warren truss, a device that looks like a "W" composed of equilateral triangles, which is one of the devices that holds the Trenton Makes bridge together. As recounted by Bruce, the Warren truss is an effective means of buttressing steel, but not wood or wrought iron, because it requires simultaneous compression and tension to function.  

Warren truss diagram

Double Warren truss bridge over the Delaware River at Washington Crossing, PA

Designing the T

The ship at long last has sailed for the Port of Trenton.

On April 12, we had our first meeting toward putting together what will heretofore be known as the “Traveling T” exhibit. The T is the best of four salvaged from the iconic and now ironic neon signage: TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES, that for so many years hung on the Lower Trenton Toll Supported Bridge spanning the Delaware River between Trenton, New Jersey, and Morrisville, Pennsylvania. The sign has been donated to the incipient Port of Trenton Museum, and most of the rest of it now lives in storage somewhere in this struggling city.

The salvaged T is to be incorporated into a large armature that will hold artifacts and other historical content documenting Trenton's past as a great Delaware River port city. The exhibit will travel to various sites to publicize the museum and the city.

This evening’s gathering was largely devoted to examination and explanation of the tabletop model of the T. It was cunningly constructed of balsa wood, at unspecified scale, and basically consists (surprise!) of a large capital “T” buttressed by beams and trusses. Or some kind of supports. I’m still learning the lingo.

The beams will frame a couple of Plexiglass panels holding content—objects, maps, narrative and the like. The actual structure will be about 10 feet high and 6 feet wide, built of aluminum, finished in green powder coat, except for the T, which will retain its original worn white finish. Echoing the neon of the original, the traveling T will be illuminated by a string of red LED lights on a timer. Since it will be sitting in public places where physical stability is essential, it will need to be vetted by a structural engineer.

The project team is on board with the design, and with each other. The creators of the model T are a pair of sculptors, Bruce Lindsay and Kate Graves. They’ve been working together for 15 years, and Kate had moved from California to New Jersey to apprentice with Bruce. Richard Hunter, an archaeological consultant, and Mark Feffer, a writer and editor who chairs the Port of Trenton board, have known each other for a like period, with a similar level of personal and professional regard.

As someone more accustomed to crafting paragraphs and shuffling papers, I’m struck by the materiality and intricacy of the T, by its ability to distill into physical form the essence of this emblem of Trenton’s past.  It will be a challenge to do the same with other parts of the city’s heritage. 

I'm also struck by the similarity between the Trenton T and the Temple University logo.  One possible venue for the T is Waterfront Park, the home of the Trenton Thunder, a farm team of the New York Yankees.  Maybe we can get it for a gig at Lincoln Financial Field, too.  

                           Temple T                     Trenton T