Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [73]
Those used to be important symbols of self-respect: shined shoes.
Whistler began his speech by making fun of his bandages. “The Spirit of Seventy-six,” he said.
Everybody laughed and laughed, although the occasion was surely not a happy one. All the members of the union had been fired about a month before—for joining a union. They were makers of grinding wheels, and there was only one company in the area that could use their skills. That was the Johannsen Grinder Company, and that was the company that had fired them. They were specialized potters, essentially, shaping soft materials and then firing them in kilns. The fathers or grandfathers of most of them had actually been potters in Scandinavia, who were brought to this country to learn this new specialty.
The rally took place in a vacant store in Cambridge. Appropriately enough, the folding chairs had been contributed by a funeral home. Mary Kathleen and I were in the first row.
Whistler, it turned out, had been injured in a routine mining accident. He said he had been working as “a robber,” taking out supporting pillars of coal from a tunnel where the seam had otherwise been exhausted. Something had fallen on him.
And he went seamlessly from talk of such dangerous work in such a dark place to a recollection of a tea dance at the Ritz fifteen years before, where a Harvard classmate named Nils Johannsen had been caught using loaded dice in a crap game in the men’s room. This was the same person who was now the president of Johannsen Grinder, who had fired all these workers. Johannsen’s grandfather had started the company. He said that Johannsen had had his head stuck in a toilet bowl at the Ritz, and that the hope was that he would never use loaded dice again.
“But here he is,” said Whistler, “using loaded dice again.”
He said that Harvard could be held responsible for many atrocities, including the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, but that it was innocent of having produced Nils Johannsen. “He never attended a lecture, never wrote a paper, never read a book while he was there,” he said. “He was asked to leave at the end of his sophomore year.
“Oh, I pity him,” he said. “I even understand him. How else could he ever amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the basic rights of workers—those are loaded dice. The policemen who will protect his property rights but not your human rights—those are loaded dice.”
Whistler asked the fired workers how much Johannsen actually knew or cared about grinding wheels. How shrewd this was! The way to befriend working people in those days, and to get them to criticize their society as brilliantly as any philosopher, was to get them to talk about the one subject on which they were almost arrogantly well-informed: their work.
It was something to hear. Worker after worker testified that Johannsen’s father and grandfather had been mean bastards, too, but that they at least knew how to run a factory. Raw materials of the highest quality arrived on time in their day—machinery was properly maintained, the heating plant and the toilets worked, bad workmanship was punished and good workmanship was rewarded, no defective grinding wheel ever reached a customer, and on and on.
Whistler asked them if one of their own number could run the factory better than Nils Johannsen did. One man spoke for them all on that subject: “God, yes,” he said, “anyone here.”
Whistler asked him if he thought it was right that a person could inherit a factory.
The man’s considered answer was this: “Not if he’s afraid of the factory and everybody in it—no. No, siree.”
This piece of groping wisdom impresses me still. A sensible prayer people could offer up from time to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: “Dear Lord—never