Now That's What I Call A Young Adult Book!

It's a dream come true. You know how there's a book you know exists but somehow you can never find it? Well, I am thrilled to say that thanks to the magic of Teh Intertubes and the vagaries of US copyright law, I have finally been able to read The Boy Troopers On Strike Duty, and it's a corker.

Let me back up and take a running start. Have you ever read any of the old Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books, the originals I mean, not the weak tea retreads from the '60s and later? You may recall that the villains were generally swarthy "Dagos" or perhaps sinister Slavs, and our plucky WASP protagonists would best them with grit, strength and ingenuity.

There were scads of similar series, some a bit more proletarian in flavor, I have before me here as I type a copy of one of the volumes in Allen Chapman's Railroad Series, which starts with the delightfully titled RALPH OF THE ROUNDHOUSE Or, Bound to Become a Railroad Man.

I read, back in my teen years, one of the Boy Troopers Series, by one Clair W. Hayes, about two fine young fellows who serve as valued allies of the Pennsylvania State Troopers, one of the first such forces. The other titles in the series were listed and one was The Boy Troopers On Strike Duty. Decades passed and I never came across a copy of this promising title, until last night. An idle search for one prompted Comrade Google to direct me to a very nice scan of the original 1922 edition, all set up for quick reading, full screen.

My heart sank when I saw on the cover and again on the title page The Boy Troopers On Duty. What happened to the Strike part?  Happily, when the story starts on page 3, the title is there again with the fateful word restored and the second paragraph takes us to the streets of a Pittsburgh suburb, Wilmercairn, streets crowded with "foreigners."

Until the day before, these men--or a good many of them, at least--had been apparently faithful employes of the Wilmercairn Steel Tube Company.

Today they were strikers--a small fraction of the steelworkers in the Pennsylvania-Ohio-West Virginia Districts--who had joined a walkout for more money and shorter hours. The total number of men on strike in these districts ran into the millions.

I doubt I'm spoiling anything for potential readers when I say, with regret, that despite this promising start, the working class does not seize state power in the region by the end of the book.

However, the strikers make a good run at it, planning an armed attack to seize the main mill and deploying a couple of machine guns in carrying it out. Not, mind you, that these foreigners could have come up with this on their own. (And generic foreigners is what they remain until page 123, where we finally learn that the "firebrands" are "composed entirely of Hungarians, Slovaks and other foreigners.") No indeed, they were stirred up by homegrown American "professional agitators":

These walking delegates were enlarging on the supposed grievances of the foreign strikers.

Alas, we are introduced to only one of these splendid gents and get no idea of his organizational affiliation or political views.

The factory managers, however, come up with a strategy better than their initially planned army of strikebreakers with the help of the heroes, Dick and Ralph: pitting true blue American workers against the foreigners by promising them much better pay and benefits. Although "there are a hundred 'Hunkies' in the mill to every American," the lads succeed in breaking the strike, with the aid of their state trooper buddies, after any number of fist fights, gun fights and narrow escapes. And the boss's daughter for romantic interest.

Even so, it is a close thing and one can dream (even if one is not among the "Boys 12-16 Years of Age," who were the author's target audience).

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A Bit of Nautical History & The Battle of Wisconsin

Duke Besozzi is a guy Dody and me were in first grade with. He’s a Thoreauvian and a logger in NW Connecticut where we grew up and, like Dody’s son Jay, he’s survived the ongoing building crash just fine. A lot of loggers in the Northwest Corner have had to sell their skidders and hang up their saws.

Duke wasn’t hurt much because he has a fascinating specialty business, New England Naval Timbers. He cuts wood to order for the boatyards that turn out new yachts or rehabilitate old ones for the capital-R Rich and sometimes for historical renovations. (Urban treehuggers—kindly check this video prior to getting all up in my grill about logging.)

These days Duke’s been walking the woods looking for good big old white oaks to cut and saw for spars for the team working on the restoration of the Charles W. Morgan, the last remaining wooden whaling ship in the world.

And that’s what triggered this article. After talking to Duke, I did some reading on the Morgan, which was launched in 1841, during the heyday of the whaling industry.

What I learned turned my mind to the current onslaught against unions in Wisconsin and across the US and to the kind of country the Koch Brothers and Gov. Scott Walker and their ilk would have us to return to.

Let’s look first at what a sailor’s life on one of these vessels was like. On the Morgan’s eleventh trip, which took her to the South Atlantic from 1868 to 1871, the ship’s cook was a guy named John Harding. He signed on for a 1/145th lay--a share of the profits when the voyage was over.

One of the perks of being the cook was keeping half of the slush fund. This term, still used today, referred to money made saving the leftover grease from boiling salt beef or pork and selling this slush as lubricant whenever the ship made harbor. That earned Harding $18. His lay, when the Charles W. Morgan returned to New Bedford, MA after 1028 days at sea, amounted to $328.19.

Unfortunately, that was before money was taken out to repay his advance and for expenses on shipboard. Like clothing, which tends to wear out during three years at sea. At the end of the voyage and 147 weeks of grueling labor, Harding owed the shipowners $432.91!

There, in a nutshell, is the world the capitalists dream of returning us to.

But their dream also has an answer in the history of the Charles W. Morgan. Back in 1841, when the vessel was being built at the Hillman Brothers shipyard in New Bedford, the Morgan family who commissioned it were pressing for a quick launch.

That was when the shipwrights downed tools. Rejecting Hillman Brothers’ dawn-to-dusk work schedule, the workers struck for the 10 hour day. The strike pushed back the scheduled launch by a week, then two weeks. The shipyard bosses caved and a deal was struck that the workday thenceforth would be 10 hours and a half long.

And that’s the capitalists’ nightmare—the united power of the people who actually do the work.

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