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BARBWIRE Contents
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by ANDREW BARBANO From the "Looking to the 21st Century" special section in the 10-28-98 Daily Sparks, Nev., Tribune |
 Central
Pacific Railroad planners opted for higher ground and Myron Lake's river
crossing eventually became hub of the valley.Southern Pacific subsequently
spawned Sparks, saving the area from one day becoming eastern Reno.When SP took over the
Central Pacific route, the company wanted a shortcut and moved operations
from Wadsworth to the swamp land which had scared CP away 30 years before.
Track was laid along basically the same line surveyed before the flood.Sparks was born in 1903
when SP held a lottery for its Wadsworth employees giving them homesites
north of the new railbed. The only stipulation was that the lots could
never be used for business purposes. Somehow, the Nugget casino and Victorian
Square evolved anyway.The story of Sparks can
be viewed as the story of the American century. She grew like a mushroom
after a gullywashing cloudburst. Perhaps her past holds clues to our future,
but you have to learn the code of the rails.The tracks will tell
a story of yesterday, today and tomorrow for those willing to lay down
an ear and listen to the rhythm of the dull, distant rumble.Bill McGee did so his
whole life. His father taught him to learn from the trains. |
BEEN
THERE, DONE THAT. Now 81, McGee came to Sparks at Christmastime, 1934.
He and his wife, Geraldine, raised three children and enjoy 12 grandchildren
and 14 great-grandchildren. In his retirement from the Brotherhood of
Locomotive Engineers, Bill McGee started a new career writing about what
he knew the best - railroads.The iron octopus changed
his life in 1922, when he was all of five years old.His father, William E.
McGee I, was then a young railroad worker for the Great Northern in the
state of Washington."During World War I,
the U.S. Railroad Administration had operated the interstate railroads
and negotiated wages and working conditions on behalf of employees of
various lines," wrote Nevada historians Phillip I. Earl and Guy Louis
Rocha in 1986.After the armistice,
"railroad officials claimed that wages had risen too high during the war,
although a 20 percent raise granted by the Railroad Labor Board in July,
1920, barely brought wages abreast of the cost of living," Earl and Rocha
noted."When Warren G. Harding
assumed the presidency in 1921, he substantially altered the composition
of the Labor Board by appointing men more favorable to management. In
April, 1921, a month after Harding came into office, the Labor Board abrogated
wartime agreements...(and) followed up in July with a 12 percent wage
reduction," wrote Earl and Rocha.The great strike of 1922
came one year later.HITTING HOME.
"Many railroad families had put money aside, and Sparks landlords offered
to defer rent payments if necessary," Earl and Rocha related from the
pages of the Sparks Tribune."Physicians and merchants
also offered extension of credit, and political leaders supported the
unionists," they wrote.The strike impacted every
corner of Nevada, even the whistlestop on the parched plane to south called
Las Vegas.Up in Washington, the
McGee family went through hard times with harder times to come. Railroad
officials announced that workers who did not return would lose their jobs.
Very few went back.In Sparks, Southern Pacific
tried to do the work of 700 with just 31 people.Back then, it was common
practice for companies to seek judicial injunctions as a way to break
worker solidarity. The railroads did so and forced an early end to the
strike by late September. |
| BLACKBALLED.
"My dad lost his job and seniority,"
Bill McGee remembers. Worse, he was blackballed from future work."Even in that day, federal
law forbade blackballing a worker," McGee remembers."Working men, then as
now, were entitled to a letter of referral to present to other prospective
employers," McGee says."The referral card had
a picture of a wrecking crane on the letterhead. The trick was that the
strikers card had the crane picture with a bent boom and the non-strikers
crane had a straight boom. That way, the railroads wouldn't hire the men
with the crooked neck crane," McGee wrote in a memoir."They were caught in
that move and (workers) had their records cleared by government order.
After that, my father and the other union men were able to hire out again,"
McGee states.Some Nevadans were able
to return to their jobs at the cut back rates of pay which had caused
the strike in the first place. The fortunate ones lost no pension rights
or seniority.Others returned at reduced
wages with seniority and pensions lost."Railroad operations
were back to normal by Christmas, 1922," Earl and Rocha wrote."The Railroad Strike
of 1922 demonstrated the uselessness of the Railroad Labor Board in settling
labor-management disputes; the failure of union leaders to achieve their
aims led to a crisis of confidence for them; and the decline in Nevada
railroad union membership paralleled that of unions in the state's mining
industry," the historians commented. |
REFORM
AND RENEWAL. "Congress adopted the Railway Labor Act in 1926. It created
effective mediation and arbitration machinery...the Norris LaGuardia Act
of 1932 restricted the power of federal courts to issue injunctions against
unions engaged in peaceful strikes...in 1935, Congress passed the National
Labor Relations Act, which outlawed unfair labor practices and interposed
significant obstructions to the organization of company (controlled) unions,"
Rocha and Earl note."Organized labor in Nevada
benefited from this legislation. Craft unions...made a comeback in the
southern part of the state, and construction of Hoover Dam early in the
1930's and growth at Las Vegas accelerated labor's recovery...locals in
Reno were also revitalized, but unions never regained the power and political
influence they enjoyed in Nevada prior to World War I and the Railroad
Strike of 1922," Earl and Rocha concluded.INSTANT REPLAY.
In 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)
strike caused a replay of 1922. As with Warren Harding, the election of
Ronald Reagan ushered in an era of unfettered, heyday capitalism. The
rich got much richer at the expense of everyone else.PATCO had endorsed Reagan,
feeling it could get a better deal from him than Jimmy Carter. Reagan
fired all 13,000 of them within three months of his coming into office,
sending a signal to employers nationwide that it was open season on pesky
unions.As Harding appointed
company-friendly people to the Railroad Labor Board, Reagan did the same
with the National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights. By the middle of the Reagan years, union and civil rights leaders
were calling for abolition of the perverted forms of these once-hallowed
bodies.The anti-government and
anti-tax speeches of Ronald Reagan were basically rewrites of the diatribes
of Harding's treasury secretary, Andrew W. Mellon, who felt the rich should
not pay taxes. His descendant, Richard Mellon Scaife, is the principal
funding source for Kenneth Starr and the extreme right's campaign to remove
President Clinton. |
TRENCH
WARFARE. Voters are angry at the railroad's refusal to pay a fair
share for the safety improvements. Continuing a
tradition more than a century old, the company has offered cheap band-aids
such as additional pedestrian bridges.If the badly needed school
bonds fail next Tuesday, the railroad will have played a pivotal role
in damaging support for education at a time when improvement is critically
needed.
Our principal industry
pays the lowest gambling taxes in the U.S. and is likely to remain that
way. As Sparks was once a railroad company town, Nevada is now a gambling
company town.Like the railroads which
hurt Bill McGee's family, casinos today blackball disfavored employees
in the normal course of business. It's still illegal, but it happens all
the time.It took the ascension
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to win
comprehensive rights for American workers. Today, U.S. labor laws rate
as the weakest among western industrialized nations. The country's standard
of living has eroded along with people's paychecks.DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN.
The parallels between the 1920s and 1980s are almost complete, save for
the catastrophic economic disruption which, for two centuries, has always
followed decades of capitalistic excess. Perhaps the recent collapse of
Asian economies underscores the lesson we have apparently forgotten from
the Great Railroad Strike of 1922.He who does not remember
history is condemned to repeat it, as we did, beginning in 1981.If you would understand
your community, test its railroad ties. The steel bloodstream tells no
lies. |
|
2009 UPDATE
In
Search of Geraldine McGee
Barbwire
/ Daily Sparks Tribune/ 3-8-3009
Copyright © 1982-2009
Andrew Barbano
Andrew Barbano is a 40-year Nevadan, editor of NevadaLabor.com and JoeNeal.org, former chair of the City of Reno's Citizens Cable Compliance Committee and serves as second vice-president, political action chair and webmaster of the Reno-Sparks NAACP. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us.
He hosts live news and talk (775-682-4144) Monday through Friday, 2-4:00 p.m., at Barbwire.TV and Reno-Sparks-Washoe Charter digital cable channels 16 and 216, high-definition channel 80-295. Barbwire by Barbano premiered in the Daily Sparks (Nev.) Tribune on Aug. 12, 1988 and has originated in those parts ever since. Tempus fugit.
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