An interview with George S. McGovern on his new
book, labor history, and the Iraq war.
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HLF:
Our
next guest volunteered for service in World War II at the age of 19 and ended
up flying 35 missions over Nazi occupied Europe as a B-24 bomber pilot. After
the war he studied history and did his PhD thesis on the great coalfield war
leading up to the Ludlow Massacre. He was a history professor at Dakota
Wesleyan University. He served in the U. S. Senate and was the Democratic Party
nominee for President of the United States in 1972. When not traveling the
globe as a permanent representative to the United Nations for food and
agriculture, he divides his time between South Dakota, Montana, and Florida. I
spoke to George S. McGovern at his home in South Dakota in late September.
HLF: Mr. McGovern, I went to Trinidad,
Colorado, the Ludlow area, a little over a year ago, for a memorial service
that the United Mine Workers have every year for those that lost their lives at
Ludlow, and didn’t know much about it before I went there. And everyone I talked
to said “you need to read The Great Coalfield War by George McGovern’
and in response to the look I gave them, they said “yes, that George McGovern.”
I got the book and I was just fascinated with the story. Could you give us, for
those of our listeners who are not familiar with it, your brief description of
what the Ludlow Massacre was?
McGovern: Well, in 1913, ten thousand miners
walked off their jobs and were located by United Mineworkers officials in
tented colonies out in the hills and mountains of southern Colorado. For some
fifteen months they were engaged in a struggle primarily for one principle, and
that was to gain recognition of their right to have a union. The right to
belong to the United Mineworkers, their right to bargain for wages and improved
working conditions and improved mine safety. The owners, many of them absentee
owners of whom John D. Rockefeller was the most famous -- they resisted that
bitterly. They brought in strikebreakers. They brought in Baldwin-Phelps
detectives who harassed the miners, in some cases actually committed acts of
violence against the miners. They did everything they could to break that
strike. Finally in the spring of 1914, some fourteen months after the strike
began, a pitched battle developed between the strikers and the Colorado
National Guard which had been called in at the invitation of the mine owners
and operators, and it got so bad that the tents caught fire at one point, and a
dozen women and children were found dead after the battle -- young children and
their mothers belonging to the striking families. That led President Wilson to
send in fifteen hundred federal troops to put down this virtual civil war that
was raging in the southern hills of Colorado. It led to a federal investigation,
and I think for the first time public opinion shifted to the workers in a
nationally known strike, and it led to a number of changes, eventually
recognition of the United Mine Workers and their right to speak for the miners;
it led to improved mine safety, and it led to a better understanding by the
public of what was involved in these labor battles.
HLF: How is it that you came to find Ludlow
an important subject to write a book about?
McGovern: Well it began in the 1950’s when I was a
graduate student at Northwestern University. I was just finishing my class work
for a PhD in history, and I needed to get in a doctoral dissertation before I
was awarded the degree. My professor was Arthur Link, the great biographer of
Woodrow Wilson, and he suggested that I do a study of the Colorado coal strike
of 1913-1914, which occurred during the Wilson Administration. It was one of
the most violent strikes in American history. The big issue was whether or not
the coal corporations that were largely owned by out of state interests would
recognize the United Mineworkers to speak for the workers. So I dug into that
for a while and decided it was a worthy topic, and I wrote about a five hundred
page doctoral dissertation on the coal strike which culminated in the notorious
Ludlow Massacre and it was not until twenty years later that one of the book
publishing companies, Houghton Mifflin, decided that there was a story there
that ought to be published for wider circulation. And they offered to help me
find somebody to help take out some of the more academic parts and write that
story in a little bit more accessible way for the general public, and that’s
how that book came to be published in 1972, the year I was running for
President.
HLF:
And your co-author,
Leonard Guttridge, he was a mining expert?
McGovern:
Leonard Guttridge made
himself a mining expert. He worked very hard. He went to Colorado and went over
all the same ground that I did years before. He spent a lot of time talking to
me, and he interviewed people that we’d been unable to find in the earlier
version, but he depended heavily on the work that I had done for Northwestern for
my doctoral dissertation. He was not an expert as such on coal mining, but he
became a person that was widely recognized as a competent person to do that
work.
HLF: And, at the time of your dissertation,
and later of your book, I imagine there were still a number of people still
living who remembered the Ludlow Massacre?
McGovern: There were indeed. An interesting
incident happened in 1950 when I was in Colorado doing research. “The March of
Time” newsreel in one of the large theaters in Denver showed highlights of the
first fifty years of the Twentieth Century, 1900-1950, and there flashed on the
screen in that crowded theater highlights from the Ludlow Massacre and the
strike of that earlier period. Half the audience cheered the miners, and half
the audience booed. It indicated to me that even many years after that strike,
feelings still ran high, pro and con, on the merits of the strike battle.
HLF: That offers a partial answer to a
question I was going to ask. In 1972 you were running for President, and I
imagine rather busy. And in your new book, The Essential America, you
also have a brief mention of the Ludlow Massacre in this current book. Why do
you think it’s worthy of discussion, even in 1972, years after it happened, and
in your current book? Why is this relevant today?
McGovern: Well, it reveals the fact that a great
many Americans are unaware of the struggle to gain recognition for collective
bargaining. Today I think you’d have to say that most Americans if asked this
question, “do you believe in the right of working people to bargain as an
association to secure adequate working conditions and wages?” most people would
probably say “yes.” But, I wanted them to know in writing this book that this
right didn’t come easily. It came only after the bitterest kind of struggle. I
think it’s fair to say that the strike of 1913-14, and especially the Ludlow
Massacre, gained a large group of people across this country who saw that there
was a need to even the balance between organized capital on one hand, and
organized labor on the other. And it was telling that story that probably
motivated me in the first place to select that topic as my dissertation, and
then to welcome the chance to publish it in a wider form.
HLF: Very few people in the United States are
in the dire conditions that coal miners and their families were in the early
1900’s, but we do see an erosion of labor unions -- the percentage of American
workers who belong to unions is way down, particularly in the last
twenty-twenty-five years. Do you see any parallels to these capital versus
worker relationships that you were talking about today?
McGovern: Absolutely. We’ve seen that unchecked
power at the top of the capital structures can lead to very harmful results –
witness the Enron case where the managers of that corporation, one of the
largest in the country, exploited their pensioners, exploited their workers,
even exploited their shareholders by utilizing corporate funds for their own
incredible enrichment; enormous salaries, enormous payouts at the time they
left employment with the company, insider unloading of stock at a time when the
company was in trouble, but nobody knew it but the managers. All of those
things indicate a need for an alert labor force in corporations that’s ready to
blow the whistle and is capable of bargaining for better positions for the
workers and the pensioners and others who work for that corporation. I think
there’s a desperate need for strong, alert, vigorous organized labor in the
corporate structure of the nation.
HLF: I never heard about Ludlow that I can
recall in high school or grade school history classes. You taught history at a
college level, yes?
McGovern: Yes
HLF: Do you think there should be more of an
emphasis on labor history in school curricula?
McGovern: I think so, because it’s an important
part of the American struggle to achieve the American dream, a good life for
everybody. And, part of that struggle has been the battles of working people to
improve the conditions for themselves and their families, so I think that story
needs to be told. I never offered a course in American History without bringing
in some of the highlights of that struggle and its significance for America today.
HLF:
Of the
heroes and villains of the Ludlow story, one of the names that stands out is
that of Karl Linderfelt, a Lieutenant in the Colorado National Guard. In The
Great Coalfield War, McGovern wrote: “Linderfelt enlisted in the Fourth
U.S. Cavalry, served in B Troop throughout the Philippine Insurrection of
1899-1900 and was later to boast that as a scout he participated in more fights
and skirmishes than the rest of the troop” and “The Philippine adventure may
have been Vietnam’s closest parallel in U.S. military history, a Victorian
practice run with its own equivalent of body counts, search-and-destroy
missions, and the dismemberment of the enemy dead by trophy-hunting victors.”
During the Colorado Strike, Linderfelt, by his own
admission, broke a rifle stock over the head of one of the strike leaders, and
likely was also the one who shot him in the back. Guardsmen detained strikers
and made a joke of having them dig their own graves before releasing them, a
practice echoed by the mock executions of Iraqi detainees we have recently
heard about. With the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Vietnam much in the news lately,
I ask Mr. McGovern to comment on Lt. Linderfelt and how war creates situations
where such abuses occur.
McGovern: Well, Linderfelt was a brutal bully, one
of the most obnoxious characters that I encountered in my studies of this
strike. He’s the kind of guy that could have been involved in the My-Lai
Massacre, he’s the kind of guy that could have been involved in the extreme
brutal measures that were used on the Iraqi prisoners by some of the people in
charge of those prisoners. He was an embarrassment to the armed services. And
we still have people like that on the loose. Fortunately, they’re in the
minority. Most service-people are honorable individuals, they don’t abuse
prisoners, they don’t engage in illegal and brutal tactics of that kind, but
there are always a few around in every war and in every circumstance, in every
strike and other areas of human conflict. We can only hope that they’ll be
exposed, but yes, there are repetitions of that kind of behavior even today.
HLF: In your current book, The Essential
America, Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition, you quote an Israeli,
Avraham Berg, as saying, “It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right
versus left, but right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable.” As this
nation seems to be sharply divided in this election year, much as you described
your audience at the newsreel relating to Ludlow, do you see some issues that
are sort of painted as right versus left, but should really be regarded as
right versus wrong?
McGovern: You know the Palestine/Israeli conflict
that has raged on now for half a century and more, that is clearly a case of
not one side being entirely right and the other side being entirely wrong.
They’re both basically right. The Israelis are entitled to an independent,
free, democratic country of their own, which they have, and so are the
Palestinians entitled to an independent sovereign state of their own. There’s
plenty of room for both countries. But to bring that about, the Israelis are
going to have to withdraw from those settlements that they’ve established on
the disputed territory that was taken away from the Palestinians in the 1967
War. I don’t know of a head state or a foreign minister anywhere in the world
that disagrees with that solution, and it’s one that the United States should
press with all the vigor that we can. And that’s the point I’m trying to make
in our book. Obviously, there are issues in the world where there’s clearly
right on one side and wrong on the other side. The Iraqis were wrong to invade
Kuwait twelve years ago when President Bush senior was in the presidency, and I
think that President Bush was right to rally the world to get the United
Nations, the Europeans, the Latin Americans, even the Arab League to join with
us pushing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. But, this war we’re waging today is
not that kind of a conflict. The Iraqis didn’t so much as stick a big toe
beyond their borders over the last ten years since they were pushed out of
Kuwait. We had American planes flying overhead every day providing surveillance
on what was going on below. We had the U.N. weapons inspectors in there for
years to try to discover whether they had any nuclear, chemical, or biological
weapons or were producing any, so there was no reason for this present war. It
was clearly wrong for the American army to invade Iraq, smash the ancient city
of Baghdad, and break up their water supply, break up their electrical supply.
They’ve been in the dark and without running water in many of the homes in villages
and towns there ever since, and that’s wrong. It was a big mistake on our part,
and now these young Americans that we have there are being picked off by
insurgent rebels across Iraq with no end in sight. So, I think this is a case
of the wrong war at the wrong time against the wrong people. We never should
have gone in there.
HLF: Stephen Ambrose in his book The Wild
Blue which is about B-24 bombers in World War II, and really is largely
about you and your crew, I believe he said somewhere in the book that you could
have used your military service to more advantage in your presidential
campaign. What do you think about that now, as we look back to George Bush
landing on the Abraham Lincoln and parading around in his flight suit?
McGovern: Well, Stephen Ambrose and I got to know
each other when I substituted for him one year at Louisiana State University in
New Orleans. I took his classes while he was teaching abroad for one year. We
were friends since then, and he told me several times that he was disgusted
that I didn’t make more of a story of my days as a bomber pilot in the second
world war -- I flew a full string of thirty-five missions over some of the most
heavily defended targets in Europe, and he thought I should have made more of
that story. But, you know, there’s a feeling on the part of most World War II
veterans that I served with that you don’t talk a lot about your war record.
But because I was an intense critic of sending American troops into that
Vietnam jungle, and I strongly opposed that war almost from the very beginning,
he felt that that left the impression with some people that I was weak on
national defense, and that I should have countered that with stories about my involvement
in a war that I believed in and still do to this day. And he’s probably right
about that. I probably should have talked about it more, and made it clear that
I had had a record that I was very proud of in time of war, just as I’m very
proud of my opposition to that miserable war in Vietnam and now the one in Iraq
that we never should have been involved in. You know, people ask me when I
criticize the war effort, either in Vietnam or in Iraq, don’t you support our
troops? And, I say you’re damned right I support our troops! That’s why I don’t
want them sent off to die in wars that are unnecessary.
HLF: Also in your current book you lay out
four items of prescription to really fight the war on terrorism. Number one is
to get the army out of Iraq. How do you suppose we could do that?
McGovern: People ask me once in a while, well
maybe you’re right, we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, but how do we get out of
there? I always tell them the story of the guy who walked across the border
into Illinois one evening and he saw a local native standing there in this
little town and he said, “Sir, could you tell me how I get to Peoria?” And the
guy says, “Look, if I was going to Peoria, I sure as hell wouldn’t start from
here!” But we are here. And now the question is how do we get to Peoria? I
think what we have to do is accelerate the effort to turn over political and
security authority in Iraq to the Iraqi people. We can’t just walk out
tomorrow, but we can accelerate the effort to make clear to the Iraqis that
we’re not there indefinitely; we’re going to take our troops out of there
gradually and try to shift the security responsibility to them. We’ll help them
in that process, but this is their country. We recognize that, we don’t want to
stay any longer than is absolutely necessary now that we’ve torn up their
military forces and pretty well disbursed their security arrangements, and we
ought to be able to do that, I think, in a few months time, and then we come
home.
Maybe
we need old Senator Aiken, a Republican, a Republican senator from Vermont,
when I was in the Senate. He listened to the administration at that time
talking about how good things were going for us in Vietnam, and Senator Aiken
said, “Let’s declare victory and come home.”
HLF: Mr. McGovern, you are currently the U.S.
permanent representative to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Could
you tell us just a little bit about what you’re doing with that?
McGovern: Well, for four years I was the United
States Ambassador to the U.N. agencies on food and agriculture and to the world
food program. Now, that assignment ended about a year after the present
administration came into office. But I was then appointed by the United Nations
itself, not by the American government, to be a roving ambassador on hunger.
And, that means that I work without pay and I work on a spot assignment basis
in dealing with problems of hunger in different parts of the world. I’ll go
into those parts of the world where we have an especially acute situation such
as Africa, for example. I’m also continuing to work on the universal school lunch
program that I proposed in concert with former Senator Robert Dole, and I’ll be
doing that indefinitely, as long as the United Nations wants my services.
HLF: Well Mr. McGovern, I’d like to thank you
very much for talking to us today, and I recommend your book, The Essential
America, Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition. Thanks again.
McGovern: It’s been my pleasure. I think I’ve
written nine books now, and I think this current one, The Essential America,
is probably the best one I’ve done, so I recommend it to my friends and others
around the country.
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Comments
Re: An Interview with George McGovern
25 Dec 2004
If I'd been a killer for US imperialism in WWII, I wouldn't be proud of it.
US/UK -- OUT OF IRAQ! OUT OF IRELAND!
Re: An Interview with George McGovern
04 Apr 2005
As for McGovern, some say his defeat proved the last "final blow" to the 60's progressive movements.
Re: An Interview with George McGovern
16 May 2005