Never a City So Real (3 page)

When the old guard accused Sadlowski of being a communist dupe, he told a
New York Times
writer: “You can make it sound like any kind of revolutionary rhetoric you want but the fact is it's the working class versus the coupon clipper. The boss is there for one damn purpose alone, and that is to make money, not to make steel, and it's going to come out of the worker's back. . . . I guess maybe I'm a romantic, but I look on the American labor movement as a holy crusade, which should be the dominant force in this country to fight for the workingman and the underdog and make this a more just society.”

Sadlowski tapped a deep vein of worker discontent, and so faced deep hostility from the opposition. One Sadlowski supporter at a steelworkers' convention was beaten up by three old-line unionists. Another, while pamphleteering outside a Houston factory, was shot in the neck. (Marlene says the supporter resembled her husband from behind, and she believes that that's who they thought they were shooting.) In the end, Sadlowski lost the election, garnering forty-four percent of the vote. In hindsight, some say he should have waited—until he was older, until his politics had mellowed, until the world caught up with him. But Sadlowski was impatient, and not without reason, since he saw what was coming in America's heartland, a dismantling of people's livelihoods.

It wasn't easy for Sadlowski after the loss. He spent the next fifteen years working in various union staff jobs, and for some of that time drinking too much. (“I drank everything,” he says.) “In the end,” a friend observed, “he had to answer to guys who in every way were his inferiors, ham-and-egg guys, guys who should've been glad to hold his overcoat. They couldn't get rid of him, but they reduced him.” He retired from the union in 1992, the same year that U. S. Steel shuttered South Works, where he had begun. But Sadlowski has brushed himself off and started again. He has stopped drinking and is now involved with labor and with his community in a new capacity, as a guardian of their histories.

 

A couple of years ago, our mutual friend Tony Judge suggested that I spend a day with Sadlowski. Tony, a kind of intellectual entrepreneur, is connected to just about everyone in the city, and once a year, the two men drive around Chicago and visit sites that mean something to Sadlowski, like the gravesite of Allan Pinkerton, whose Pinkerton guards were frequently used to break strikes. Sadlowski, Tony told me, likes to urinate on Pinkerton's grave. “He sees the lineage stuff,” Tony says. “The old grudges are his grudges.” So, with Tony's introduction, I called Sadlowski, who growled and grumbled, and grudgingly agreed to meet.

We spent a day in Sadlowski's Ford Crown Victoria, which has nearly two hundred thousand miles on it, tooling around South Chicago (“Fucked-up nothingness,” he says of the graveyard of factories and forges along the Calumet River). Then, a few weeks later, he invited me to attend a play about a long-ago strike, which he and fellow steelworkers had written and now performed, and then I tagged along with him to a lunch of fried chicken and sausage for pensioners, where the men played poker and talked about the prescription drugs they were taking, and the women, widows of steelworkers, tried their hand at bingo. These people still come to Sadlowski with their problems. Pension checks that are late. Health benefits not kicking in. Sadlowski, who often runs into his former coworkers from South Works over early-morning coffee at the local McDonald's, says of them, “I'm not romanticizing when I say this, but they're some of the sharpest guys I ever met in my life. They knew the score.”

In fact, local history has been a bit more complicated than that. This is, after all, the same community that, over the course of seven months in 1953, threw rocks and bombs into the Trumbull Park low-rise public housing complex to keep blacks from moving in. It's also the same community that elected Ed Vrdolyak as its alderman for four consecutive four-year terms. In the 1980s, Vrdolyak led the white majority on a city council that reveled in its ability to block virtually every piece of legislation proposed by Harold Washington, who as Chicago's first black mayor was dismissed, if not reviled, by a portion of the city. But Sadlowski is a man of eternal faith. When looking, for instance, at something like the Trumbull Park experience, he points not to those who threw the projectiles but to the few courageous ones who challenged their friends and families to support the African-American family who moved in. (Sadlowski was also a big supporter of Harold Washington.) It's not blindness, just Sadlowski's inclination to buck the prevailing notion that the blue-collar worker in this country always shares the politics of Archie Bunker. “If you're a working stiff,” he says, “your history becomes distorted.”

Sadlowski now teaches a labor history class to carpenters and millwrights at a nearby Indiana college. “I just want to get them thinking about the working class,” he tells me. “They don't even understand that there is such a thing.” (He also was appointed to the Illinois Labor Relations Board, which helps resolve labor disputes involving public employees.) One Saturday morning, Sadlowski invites me to join him and his students, thirty-six men and one woman, for a field trip. All of them are in their twenties and early thirties, dressed in hooded sweatshirts and Carhartt jackets. Each has a cell phone on his (or her) belt. They wear baseball caps announcing their allegiances: Chicago Cubs, Bud King of Beers, Killian's, Rapala, and Rail Cats (a semipro baseball team that plays in a stadium called the Steel Yard). They look as if they'd rather be elsewhere, and early on, when Sadlowski, sitting in the front of the bus, starts rambling on about his days in the mills, a voice from the back hollers out, “Come on, Ed.”

“What do you think their attention span is?” he mumbles. “Half a commercial?” But Sadlowski loves these guys. Their lives are constrained by what they know and by where they live, but they know enough to recognize that getting by with what skills they have may not cut it as the world turns, and so have elected to come back to school, to figure out what's next. (One tells me he wants to become a nurse.) They've also had the good fortune to run across Sadlowski, and Sadlowski the good fortune to run across them; they're cut from the same cloth, and Sadlowski can tell them whence that cloth came.

At Sadlowski's direction, the bus driver turns off Burnham Avenue, over the curb, and along a stretch of cracked cement that wends its way through a large field of tall weeds and prairie grass. A quarter of a mile in, Sadlowski tells everyone to get off the bus. According to Sadlowski, the nearby Calumet River was at one time the most industrialized waterway in the world. Now, as the carpenters and millwrights stand there, chilled by the early fall wind, he gestures toward the river and rattles off the names of the companies that once lined its banks: “Interlake Steel. Valley Mold and Iron. South Works. American Shipyard. Calumet Shipyard. Wisconsin Steel. Republic. Acme.” It's to make a point. A few days earlier in class, one of his students had ripped into people living off the dole, people taking welfare handouts. “Too often, we point fingers,” Sadlowski tells his students. “How can people live like that? I'll show you how it can be. Forty, fifty years working in a steelmill, doing what society expects of you, and then . . .” He claps his hands together. He has their attention.

“So where do the guys go?” a young carpenter by the name of Joe Gilmak asks.

“That's my point,” Sadlowski says.

Sadlowski has taken his blue-collar protégés to this field because it's the site of the Memorial Day Massacre (not to be confused with the Valentine's Day Massacre, an Al Capone–ordered killing on the city's North Side); it's in places like this, Sadlowski tells them, that their lives and livelihoods are rooted. In 1937, the nascent steelworkers' union was attempting to win recognition at the smaller steel companies, and Republic Steel resisted, locking out its workers. The men and their families had gathered at a nearby tavern, Sam's Place, and decided to march on the company. As they approached the gates of the plant, Chicago policemen shot into the crowd, and then went after the strikers and their families with pickaxes supplied by the company. Ten men were killed, another eighty-four injured. It would be another five years before Republic recognized the union. Sadlowski takes his students across the street, to a former union hall (now a church-run community center), which still bears a plaque listing the victims and declaring them “Martyrs—Heroes—Unionists.”

This is a city of plaques and monuments, a city with a long memory, for the famous and not-so-famous, for the virtuous and nonvirtuous. Sadlowski has also led a contingent of steelworkers to the burial grounds (in the suburb Forest Park) of the anarchists hanged because of their alleged role in the Haymarket Affair; a century later, it's a controversy that still rages. On May 4, 1886, a few hundred men and women gathered at a corner just west of downtown in support of workers locked out at the McCormick Harvester Works (two workers had been killed by the police the previous day), and as the crowd was breaking up, someone threw a bomb into the police lines, killing seven policemen. Eight activists, seven of them foreign-born, were convicted on flimsy evidence, and five were sentenced to death, partly at the insistence of business leaders including Marshall Field, the founder of the department store of the same name. Field also supplied the National Guard with Gatling guns and urged the construction of nearby Fort Sheridan to hold off any future uprisings. Despite protests from around the world, four of the anarchists were eventually hanged. (One killed himself before going to the gallows by biting down on a dynamite cap.) An estimated two hundred thousand people—a quarter of the city's population—lined the streets to view the funeral procession. Seven years later, at the urging of Clarence Darrow, Governor John P. Altgeld, the first foreign-born man chosen to lead the state, pardoned the men posthumously, to which the
Chicago Tribune
responded: “Governor Altgeld has apparently not a drop of pure American blood in his veins.”

Three years after the Haymarket incident, the city erected a monument to the police officers who were killed by the bomb. Nearly a century later, in 1969, during the tumult of that time, someone placed a stick of dynamite between the legs of the bronze policeman, which toppled it. The city recast it. A year later, someone blew it up again. So the city placed a twenty-four-hour police guard at the statue, and when that proved too costly moved it to the courtyard of the Police Academy, where it stands today, well protected. Memories die hard here. As William Faulkner once said, “The past isn't dead; it isn't even past.”

 

Sadlowski herds the students back on the bus and has the driver motor along the river, past what used to be Acme Steel; along the fence is a
FOR SALE
sign that notes the property's assets: “89 acres on Calumet River with dockage.” In the distance is the blast furnace upon which the company had painted a large yellow smiley face. “You work on the fuckin' thing, it wasn't smiles,” Sadlowski tells me. If there was a place close to hell, it was the blast furnace, where men would shovel coke and limestone into the furnace; it would get so hot that men had to wear asbestos-lined coats. During his 1976 campaign, Sadlowski had told the
Penthouse
interviewer that no one in this country should have to work in a coke oven, a place even harder on workers than the blast furnace; there, the tar was extracted from the coal, and noxious gases and fumes were spewed into the factory air. It was a remark that his opposition used in its campaign to suggest that Sadlowski would encourage plant closings. Sadlowski may be a romantic, but not about the work.

We then head west, across the river, to the preserved Pullman community, which at the end of the nineteenth century was built to be a workingman's paradise but soon became a workingman's prison. George Pullman made his money producing the Pullman Palace Car, the equivalent of a hotel on wheels. In 1880 he built the town, a collection of handsome brick townhouses with indoor plumbing, a luxury at the time. The town also had a European-style market square, an exquisite hotel (named after Pullman's daughter, Florence), and its own school and a church, which was meant to be shared by all denominations. Pullman's workers became unwitting participants in his ambitious—and misguided—social experiment.

During the recession of the 1890s, Pullman cut the wages of his workers, but their rents remained unchanged. “He was a ruthless son of a bitch,” Sadlowski tells his students. “But cunning. He'd cut the carpenters' wages two to five percent, and nobody would come to their aid. It's not me, they'd say. Then a few months later, he'd cut the tinsmiths two to five percent. Creating divisiveness among the workers. Some might ask why the workers didn't come together. Man doesn't work that way. Why do people react that way? A hope that it won't happen to them. But the unfortunate thing about man's reaction is he doesn't learn. Same goddamn thing today. That's a thing that should be taught in school, but it's the very schools that are teaching the bigwigs how to screw others.”

In 1894, Sadlowski tells his students, the Pullman workers finally walked out on strike. Soon after, Eugene Debs's Railway Union honored the walkout, refusing to work on any train that carried a Pullman car, which was virtually every train in the country. It was a defining moment for American labor—an industrial union bringing together these otherwise fragmented crafts, undergirding the notion that an injury to one is an injury to all. Clarence Darrow, a young lawyer at the time for the Northwestern Railroad, stopped off in Pullman to see what all the fuss was about, and he became so moved by the plight of the immigrant workers there that he quit his job and offered his services to Debs and the union. (Each year on March 13, the anniversary of Darrow's death in 1938, Sadlowski gathers with others at the Jackson Park Lagoon in Hyde Park, where Darrow's ashes were scattered; they read from his speeches and ruminate on matters of the day, as Darrow would have liked.)