Ron Murrison

Faculty Essay, 2015-2016

In Homer’s Iliad, men die in agony, shrieking as their guts spill out onto the sand.  Horrendous blows of piercing bronze shatter skulls, splattering brains.  Heads are hacked off, and marrow bubbles up from the severed neckbones.  In each case, the shade of the miserable victim flees:

winging down to the House of Death,

wailing his fate, leaving his manhood far behind,

his young and supple strength. (16.1003-1005)

Women too suffer agony when their cities are sacked.  They are dragged off as slaves to draw water or labor at the loom by day and to serve in the beds of their masters by night.  (6.487-490, 533-553).  Children fare no better.  Hector’s son Astyanax, whose name means “lord of the city,” perishes along with Troy, the very city his father had hoped he would grow up to defend, when the triumphant Achaeans, rampaging through the city throw the infant from the walls that were intended to save him and others like him from such fury (24.852-877).  Agonizing and terrible death may strike in other ways.  Countless Achaeans die when Apollo rains down arrows of plague on the Achaean army for no other reason than that Agamemnon has spurned Chryses his priest (1.51-61).  The ineluctability of death hangs over the Iliad.

The Iliad is filled with gods.  They intervene often in human affairs.  They are an essential element of the poem, but it cannot be said that they temper the bleakness of the Iliadic world.  When Hector is prompted to challenge “Achaea’s bravest man / to duel in bloody combat to the death (7.58-59), Apollo and Athena settle together atop a towering oak “for all the world like carrion birds, like vultures” (7.67), eager to feast upon the spectacle.  Even the favor of the gods is not something in which to place great trust.  The fate of the minor character Pherecles is emblematic: Pallas Athena loved him dearly yet Meriones killed him, driving his spear through the unfortunate Trojan’s right buttock and bladder (5.59-68).  Even figures loved by Zeus, the most powerful of the gods, such as Sarpedon and Hector, meet similarly dreadful ends.  And Achilles knows that he too will soon die, even though he is the son of a goddess.  His mother can intercede for him with Zeus and thus sway the course of the war, but she can do nothing to divert his fate or save his life.  Even Zeus seems helpless.  When his heart is torn as he contemplates the imminent death at the hands of Patroclus of his son Sarpedon, “the man I love the most,” Hera protests that Sarpedon is no more than “a man, a mere mortal, his doom sealed long ago” (16.525-527), and Zeus, though he showers the earth with tears of blood, complies at once (16.543-548), and Sarpedon is struck down, “sprawled and roaring, clawing the bloody dust” (16.574), “far from his fatherland,” (16.548), a telling effect found throughout the poem, evoking the pathos of a warrior’s end (Griffin 104 -112).  The greatest and most powerful of the gods cannot or will not save his own son.  In the world of the Iliad, there is no salvation, no redemption.  Even Odysseus whose poem allows him a safe homecoming, recovery of his kingdom, and a tranquil death in old age, will go down to the underworld, the terrors and horrors of which are made manifest in books 11 and 24 of the poem.  Odysseus knows in advance what awaits him.  The Odyssey belongs to the genre of romance rather than tragedy.  Accordingly, it does not stress the tragic implications for us of Odysseus’s tranquil end, namely, that he will descend to the world of grieving shades, more fully aware than most of all the joys and wonders of life, and aware too that they must be lost for ever.  Even for the greatest of heroes Achilles, there are no rewards in the afterlife that could compensate in the least for the life that has been lost (11.547-558).

Millennia after Homer, Martin Luther composed a now celebrated hymn that embodies a very different conception of the human condition and of the relation between the human and the divine, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, “a safe stronghold our God is still” in Carlyle’s translation (Church Hymnary #526).  The hymn is a reworking of Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and our strength.”  The psalm assures us that the Lord of hosts, the God of Jacob is with us and reveals that the tutelary power of this deity is such that we need fear nothing.  Unlike the original, the diction of Luther’s version is distinctly martial in character.  Like a mighty fortress, his God protects us from all the dangers and vicissitudes of the world in a way that Troy’s walls never could.  This God is a “trusty shield and weapon.”  In the struggle against the forces of darkness, we may be easily overcome, but our champion Christ is not and will “conquer in the battle.”  And even though the forces of darkness succeed in taking from us the things that we value most such as “life, / Goods, honour, children, wife,” the very things that are most dear to Homeric heroes such as Hector and whose loss is a catastrophe, it would avail them little, because “[t]he city of God remaineth.” The allusion to Augustine’s city of God is Carlyle’s invention.  Luther wrote simply  das Reich muss uns doch bleiben (“Yet the Kingdom remains with us”). Nevertheless, the intent is the same in both text and translation.  The city of man will fall as Troy fell, but the city of God endures for ever.  God is our only secure refuge.  However, by Luther’s time after a millennium and a half of Christian theology, the idea of God as refuge and strength had acquired a deeper metaphysical resonance than is apparent in the original psalm.

The Christian metaphysics of life is providential in nature.  However incoherent, incomprehensible, and terrible the world may seem to be, it unfolds according to a plan.  God’s ways may seem inscrutable to us, but since God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, the history of the world must constitute a meaningful and a moral order.  Though the Iliad contains expressions such as “the will of Zeus was fulfilled” (Dios eteleieto boule) (1.5) and “fate” as in Zeus’s concern that the Achilles may lay waste the Trojan walls against fate (hyper moron) (20.30), there is not the slightest hint in the poem that Zeus has a plan that encompasses all space and time. Peter Green argues that boule refers specifically to Zeus’s promise to Thetis (25).  Theodicial thinking has no place in Homer.  The gods are not to be relied upon: they are no stronghold or refuge.  Nature, in turn, is utterly indifferent to our concerns.  

In a “famous and terrifying passage” (21.99-135), as Bernard Knox describes it in his introduction to the Fagles’ translation, Achilles first addresses the suppliant Lycaon and then slaughters him.  He seizes the corpse by the foot and throws it into the eddying waters of the river Scamander to be borne away eiso halos eurea kolpon (125), “to the wide gulf of the sea” (Green), “down the sea’s broad bosom” (Fagles), and thus to perish unburied without due funeral rites and to become food for fish.  The term kolpos, the primary meanings of which are “bay,” “hollow,” “depth,” can also denote the fold of a garment.  However, it has further connotations that inform the translations of Fagles and Green.  Fagles chooses those that suggest natural growth, nurture, and maternal care, namely, “bosom,” “womb,” while Green’s “gulf” is closer to the more literal rendering, “bay,” suggesting the indifferent depths of the alien realm of the sea, the “unharvestable sea,”  (pontos atrugetos) (Od. 2.370) compared to the” life-giving earth” (phusizoos aia) (Il. 3.243), upon which all human enterprise, including the provision of due funeral rites, rests and depends.

A few lines earlier Achilles has taunted the corpse of Lycaon, claiming that the fish will lick the blood from his wounds, akedees, (“quite indifferent to you” (Green) (21.123).  Fagles rendering, “so much for your last rites,” is freer, anticipating the later passage in which Lycaon, swept out to sea, will never be placed on a bier and receive proper funeral rites (21.141).  One might compare this scene with that in which the healer Machaon sucks the blood from Menelaus’ wound and applies epia pharmaka, “healing salves” (4.249-252). The essential contrast here, I take it, is between care and indifference, between the care that we devote to those dear to us, the essential fabric of human association, and the utter indifference to our concerns of the world in which we find ourselves.  To be swept out to sea, the fate Achilles envisages for the dead Lycaon, is to be removed from all possibility of human care or tendance, even in death.  

The sound of the sea as it is heard along the shore is associated throughout the poem with the forces of destruction, with the indifference of the natural world to any human concern, and with the utter solitude of each one of us in extremis. At the beginning of the Iliad, the priest of Apollo Chryses comes to the Achaean camp to beg for the return of his daughter Chryseis whom Agamemnon has taken as a prize.  He is brutally repulsed by Agamemnon, the anax andron, “king of men,” who has power and who revels in the use of that power.  Terrified, the old man turns away along the shore.  Apart from the fact that we know already that we are on a beach in the vicinity of Troy, the scene is not localized at all. Be d’akeon para thina poluphloisboio thalasses.  (“He went away along the shore of the loud-sounding sea”  (1.34). It could be any shore, anywhere, and that disconsolate figure walking away in grief and silence could be any one of us, then or now.  The echoing sound of the surf and the echoing of this line have troubled western thinking ever since.  Indeed, one might say that one of the central concerns of western thought has been to deny or hide from the stark objectivity and grim implications of Homer’s line and the metaphysics it implies  (Lewis 25) .  The line is unusual in that the principal caesura occurs in the second foot.  Chryses walks away, grieving and alone, and as he goes all that is heard is the sound of the surf beating on the shore utterly indifferent to the old man’s anguish.  The contrast is arresting, shocking even.  The entire realm of human concerns, the gedeutete Welt (“interpreted world”), as Rilke was to call it millennia later, means nothing in the world of nature in which it is embedded (130).  Nature is essentially alien despite all our efforts to make nature a part of the meaning of our lives by means of philosophy, religion, or literature.  Perhaps because of his profound Christian faith, C. S. Lewis seems to me to have been especially sensitive to this aspect of Homer’s poetry, noting that Homeric diction emphasizes the “unchanging human environment” (22) and the “permanence, the indifference” of the world of nature, “the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is” (23). In a particularly noteworthy passage, he suggests that while:

[m]uch has been talked of the melancholy of Virgil,  . . . an inch beneath

the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’

was the word Goethe used of it.  It is all the more terrible because the

poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually

in similes. (30)

I am not persuaded that “despair” is the correct word.  One despairs when one gives up hope of achieving that which had seemed attainable.  The devils who lost heaven might despair.  Their existential condition might have been very different, but never once does Homer suggest that the world in which we find ourselves could be different.  We must accept the unchanging, indifferent order of nature as it is.  There is nothing else to be done.

In summarizing the nature of Homeric epic, Lewis claims that:

its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against

this background of meaningless flux.  It is all the more tragic because

there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. (31)

For Lewis, Homer’s tragic vision must seem futile because it offers no possibility of transcendence, redemption, or purpose, no metaphysical consolation.  Lewis thinks of the Homeric world in a manner akin to such philosophical materialists as Richard Dawkins or Jacques Monod, who picture the universe as nothing but the meaningless interactions of matter.  We can, of course, conceive of the realm of nature in this way, and sometimes it suits us to do so, e.g. when we study physics, chemistry, or even biology.  But that is not the world we inhabit.  We live in Rilke’s gedeutete Welt, a cultural world woven of meanings, an intentional world, infused with all our conflicting goals, our hopes, our aspirations, our purposes, our dreams.  I can think of myself as nothing more than an assemblage of molecules or cells, deploying the latest vocabularies of the natural sciences, but to do so demands a degree of abstraction that must make one pause.  The fact that my biological death almost certainly means my extinction as the conscious being I am does not suggest to me the futility of my life as Lewis seems to imply.  On the contrary, the necessary finitude of my existence is a source of gratitude, awe, and amazement.  It seems to  me astonishing that I and others like me should exist at all, and that we should have been granted decades to experience and contemplate the endlessly fascinating realms of nature and culture, both the horrors we have perpetrated as a species and the countless small acts that sometimes, it seems to me, may redeem us.

Whether or not futility pervades the Homeric tragic vision as Lewis implies, it is certainly a view that most in the West would subsequently shun.  As Robert Pogue Harrison observed in Forests, “the Christian era put an end to tragedy as the highest form of wisdom” (101).  The aleatory contingency of tragedy has nothing in common with the teleological optimism of Christian providentialism.  We should remember, however, that before Christianity, the development of philosophy in Greece, especially the philosophy of Plato, offered a very different conception of human beings in relation to the world in which they found themselves from that to be found in Homer..  In the two hundred years of Ionian thought from Thales through Pythagoras to Plato, we may follow the emergence of an unprecedented view of the world, namely, that it is a comprehensible unity, exhibiting an eternal rational order that may be apprehended by means of human reason.  The Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic is at once an epistemology, an ontology, and a sketch of an educational program that will lead the student toward grasping the true nature of things (514a-520a).  In Plato, or at least, in one aspect of Plato’s complex and ambiguous thought, we are told that the world is rational in its nature and that our minds, properly trained, can ascend to a vision of the eternal unchanging Forms.  Such a metaphysics necessarily entails a different way of living in the world, and, in Plato’s portrayal of Socrates, we are given a new understanding of how to live and how to face death.

In the Crito, Socrates contemplates his imminent death with an unnerving equanimity that continues to disturb, while Alcibiades’ account of Socrates in the Symposium establishes the latter’s courage and self-control as a soldier, his extraordinary ability to to endure physical adversity, and even suggests that he is the truest human embodiment of Eros (the god of Love), that Socrates, the philosopher, is the model of the true erastes (220a-221b; 203c-203d).  At the end of the dialogue, after drinking through the night with Agathon and Aristophanes, the representatives of tragic and comic poetry, Socrates leaves them both asleep and departs into the bright new dawn for the agora where, as is his custom, he will engage the young in philosophy.  I do not think it far-fetched to suggest that we have just witnessed a representation of the triumph of the new way of philosophy over the older forms of Greek wisdom (223b-223d)..  

This new philosophical wisdom is the expression of a rational optimism, perhaps unprecedented in the history of human thought.  In as much as we value science and reason, we continue to live within the horizon of that vision.  Plato’s own justified pessimism concerning the immediate political prospects of the Greek-speaking world and perhaps the fact that the Greeks had not learned to think in terms of la longue durée meant that the signicance of his insight, indeed, of his reconfiguring of the ways in which we think about ourselves, was not fully recognized in his own time.  However, over two thousand years later, a young German philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, would recognize the importance of what had occurred.

In Nietzsche’s “Attempt at Self-Criticism” added to The Birth of Tragedy (1871) in 1886, he looked back at his earliest reflections on Greek tragedy and sought to align them with his later thinking.  He argued that Greek tragedy was born from a psychology of strength, that the early Greeks were a people with “an intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence,” and that this predilection arose from “well-being, overflowing health, the abundance of existence” (3).  Here he attributes to the Greeks as a people the strength of soul necessary to affirm existence in all its aspects that finds its most memorable expression in his later doctrine of amor fati.  The Greeks, he claimed, were pessimists, but their pessimism was not a pessimism of resignation, which he attributes to Hinduism, nor the despairing nihilistic pessimism of his contemporaries.  It is rather a “pessimism of strength” (3).  While pessimism might be thought to be a symptom of decline, though why it should be so Nietzsche does not say, Greek pessimism, arising from joy and strength, is the origin of tragedy.  Thus, Nietzsche finds in the Greeks an existential attitude that is not nihilistic and that is also opposed to the optimism of Christian eschatology.  This view of the Greeks, which perhaps owes much to Nietzsche’s own psychological needs at the time, allows him to offer his first answer to a question that would concern him throughout his career, namely: what is the value of existence?  This is a question that may become pressing for those who no longer have faith in a divine plan.  Nietzsche’s answer is an extrordinary one.  The Birth of Tragedy identifies art and not morality as “the properly metaphysical activity of man” (7).  Hence, it is a mistake to seek a moral justification of existence.  There is none, as he learned from his teacher Schopenhauer.  Instead, “the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (8).  We see here an anticipation of his later thinking.  Only those who have the requisite psychic strength can bear a tragic view of things, and thus tragedy as work of art reflects back to them and celebrates their own strength.

It could not last, Nietzsche seems to think, and the emergence of philosophy put an end to tragic wisdom.  The death of tragedy was brought about by “the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, modesty and cheerfulness of theoretical man” (4), in other words, of the philosopher.  Socratism, Nietzsche suggests, is “a symptom of decline, fatigue, infection and the anarchical dissolution of the instincts” (4).  Henceforth, Dionysus god of tragedy will be set against the iconic figures of Socrates (philosophy) and Jesus (religion) in Nietzsche’s writings, the pessimism of strength against views of the world expressive of weakness and decline.

The curious presumption that existence must be justified, that we need a cosmodicy, indicates the degree to which Nietzsche’s thinking was always deeply rooted in the post-Darwinian debates of the later nineteenth century.  While Christian eschatology did provide such a justification and continues to do so for very many people, in its absence, there is no obvious reason why there should be any single mode of justification, and especially not of existence as such.  Nevertheless, as David McPherson has pointed out recently the problem of cosmodicy concerned Nietzsche throughout his life (41).

In developing his ideas on Greek tragedy and the justification of existence, Nietzsche seems to have sought to avoid the nihilistic implications of pessimism as he understood it, notably the nihilistic conception of tragedy that he found in Schopenhauer, namely that the tragic spirit consists in recognizing that “the world and life can give no true satisfaction and are therefore not worth our attachment to them” (10), which leads to resignation, and also what he believed were the delusory consolations of Christian eschatology.  However, neither Homer nor Shakespeare ever offered such a justification.

If one discounts the Renaissance reception of the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, which is anyway a pre-Christian composition, Shakespeare’s King Lear is the first major work of literature to bring into question the idea of a divinely ordained providential order that had dominated and shaped western thought since ancient times.  It does so by setting a providential view of existence against a tragic one within the same drama.  The play is not a philosophical treatise and offers no definitive answer as to which of these two competing visions is true, but it does capture our hopes and fears concerning what we wish the world and the course of our lives might be like  and what we fear they may prove to be.  In addition, as John Danby noted many years ago, the play contains two distinct views of nature.  The first envisages nature as a moral order so that we may rightly speak of proper or natural relations among human beings of loyalties and obligations that stem from one’s place in the hierarchy of nature.  Both Cordelia and Gloucester refer to this natural moral order when they allude to “the bond of nature” (I.i.102; I.ii.115).  Thus, this view of nature encompasses the personal, social and political realms.  The notion of a community is presupposed, and the entire fabric of society, which is hierarchically ordered, mirrors the hierarchical order of God’s creation, the Great Chain of Being.  These ideas were central in the vision of reality worked out in the Christian Middle Ages, (Dante’s Commedia is its finest expression) and were still powerfully operative in Shakespeare’s time.  However, in King Lear, Shakespeare was careful to locate this view in a drama set in pre-Christian times in which the gods, though referred to often, are never seen.  In fact, the play is striking for the absence of supernatural events of any kind.  The second view of nature anticipates the amoral world of Hobbes’ state of nature.  It regards social ties and obligations not as part of a natural moral order, but as mere conventions.  In place of the fabric of society, there are only individuals, such as Edmund, Goneril, and Regan, pursuing their own desires and interests at the expense of others.  The play’s admirable characters all embrace some version of the older conception of nature, but the action of the play frustrates their hopes, and perhaps ours too as we contemplate the bleakest, most terrible episode of the drama, the death of Cordelia.  In acts IV and V, Cordelia has the air of a redemptive figure, in her presiding over the restoration of her father’s shattered self and in their moving reconcilation as the two are taken away to prison, which A. D. Nuttall has called a “Christian commedia” (Shakespeare the Thinker 307).  At one point in the text, Shakespeare even allows Cordelia to speak in Christ’s own words (IV.iv.24).  And yet, Shakespeare deliberately destroys his commedia.  Cordelia’s death is a consequence of Edmund’s malice and political opportunism but also of contingency.  It might not have happened, it was not fated to happen, but it did, and neither her goodness nor the profound sympathy the audience has come to feel for her can save her.  So things are, Shakespeare seems to say.  We can create happy endings in works of art for a multitude of purposes, but when we do, we do not take full measure of the reality of our lives.

I have said that in King Lear, Shakespeare anticipates Hobbes’ brutal vision of human beings living in a pre-social state of nature as ruthlessly selfish, isolated, individual creatures for whom the notion of fellow-feeling or, indeed, any of the social virtues, would be incomprehensible.  The history of the last century furnishes so many examples of such treatment of human creatures by others of their kind that it is hard if not impossible to comprehend the enormity of human behavior.  Consider, for example, Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, Ian Kershaw’s To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands.  Yet despite the horrendous evidence, the Hobbesian view is implausible and inadequate as a depiction of who we are.  It is also, as Shakespeare shows us in King Lear, ultimately self-destructive.  Nevertheless, versions of this picture continue to play a disturbing role in our culture.  Think, for example, of Edmund’s first cousin, “economic man,” that embodiment of rational self-interest, or of the cluster of ideas that crystallized in mid-twentieth-century existentialism, descendants of the Nietzchean heroic individual in which the individual is viewed as fully formed prior to the existence of any society.  The most recent expression of this tendency is to be found in the work of certain biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers of a reductive cast of mind.  We are asked to accept the claim that “human beings are nothing but . . .”  Usually, this means that we are invited to consider ourselves as biological machines, or some such thing, and nothing more, with the presumption that the rich fabric of human existence is, if not an illusion, ultimately and in principle, reducible to and explicable in terms of the physiology of our brains (Midgley 1-18).

Like Nietzsche and indeed many others, the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrestled with the implications of what Nietzsche called “the death of God” (Gay Science 180).  In his most famous poem “Dover Beach,” he seems at first sight to endorse the reductive vision that I have just described.  He seems to deny many of the essential features of the human world.  The poem begins as a meditation upon the sound of the surf breaking upon the shore,

the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Unlike Homer, who gives us the simple invariant fact of the breaking surf set against Chryses’ anguish, Arnold seeks to direct our emotional response, to evoke a mood of gentle melancholy.  The speaker informs his beloved that Sophocles heard the same sound on the Aegean, and it brought into his mind “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery.”  “[W]e /  Find also in the sound a thought,” he tells his companion.  Thus, rather than an expression of the objective condition of the world and its tragic essence, as in Homer, Arnold finds in the sound of the surf a suggestion of his own concern, not simply a Sophoclean awareness of human misery, but the ebbing of the sea of faith, the very notion that for most of our history had offered us consolation in the midst of suffering and that seemed to imply that the tragic vision of Homer was mistaken.  The first two verse paragraphs refer to the ebb and flow of the sea, an unending cyclical process.  In the third, however, Arnold speaks of the “melancholy long withdrawing roar” of the tide of faith, going out forever.  As a result he concludes that  the world:

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

Faith for Arnold was the palliative or salve that made life bearable and gave it meaning.  Without it, the world seems emptied of all value.  Like many of his thoughtful contemporaries, Arnold contemplated the waning of the Christian age and wondered what the consequences would be.  

Nietzsche’s response was strikingly individualistic and strikingly grandiose.  McPherson notes that the doctrine of the will to power involves “an atomistic or individualistic mode of being related to others” (55 n52).  Since we have killed God, we must become worthy of that deed, and thus we must become gods ourselves.  We must embark upon a revaluation of all values; we must transform ourselves until we become Ubermenschen, we human beings who can bear the burden of creating the moral world anew.  The anguish and responsibiliity of moral legislation for humanity will fall upon those individuals who live truly authentic lives until we find in yea-saying and amor fati the justification of our existence.  Arnold’s response seems risibly limited in comparison.  “Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” he says to his beloved who stands beside him at the window, listening to the sound of the surf on the shore.  Nevertheless, Arnold’s modest plea seems to me incomparably more promising than Nietzsche’s strenuously heroic demand that the individual transform the moral universe through the transformation of himself.  Arnold invokes quite simply, and in a way that Nietzsche never does in his published works whatever his private longings may have been, one of the most important of our needs -- our need for each other, for community, for communion.  We are ineluctably social creatures and to deny or ignore that fact is to do terrible violence to the kind of beings we are.  In the history of our culture, it has been poets, in the fullest sense of that word, that is all whose making and creating is an effort to find meaning in the flux of our experience, who have shown us and reminded us of all the inexhaustible possibilities of our existence.  Poetry in this sense embodies a wisdom that cannot be replicated by the reductive sciences nor even by a philosopher with the literary gifts of a Nietzsche.  Let us call it, without seeking to define it further, a literary wisdom.

Arnold wrote simply, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.”  Poor lonely Nietzsche never had the opportunity to utter such words, and his ultimately inhuman philosophy is much the worse for that sad contingency.  It is all the more instructive and emblematic, therefore, that his last act as he descended into a madness from which he would never recover should have been the embrace of another suffering creature.  Around January 3rd., 1889, in a street in Turin, Nietzsche saw a coachman savagely beating a horse (Chamberlain, 208-210),  and in Milan Kundera’s retelling of the story in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Nietzsche went up to the horse, and before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears” (290). “And that is the Nietzsche I love,” Kundera continues, “the Nietzsche who came to ask the horse for forgiveness for Descartes,” namely the Descartes who had claimed that animals were merely machinae animatae without feelings or emotions (290).  At this point in Kundera’s novel, Tereza, one of his principal characters, has been thinking of the heifers she tends on a collective farm.  Once all the animals had names, but now there are too many.  She has named one only, “Marketa,” who has befriended her.  Forty years earlier all the cows in the village had names, and writes Kundera as narrator, “if having a name is a sign of having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite Descartes.” But now the nameless animals have become “mere machinae animatae.  The world has proved Descartes correct” (290).  At this same moment, Tereeza is caressing the head of her dying dog Karenin and thinking of the moral failings (défaillite) of humanity in relation to other animals.  Kundera links the two images, that of Tereza and Karenin and that of Nietzsche and the abused horse, whose name, if he ever had one, we do not know.  He imagines the two, Tereza and Nietzsche stepping away together from the road on which humanity, “master and possessor of nature” in Descartes’ phrase pursues its foward course, no doubt presumed to be one of progress.  

Among contemporary writers, Kundera is particularly attuned to the interweavings of literature and philosophy.  His brilliant, imaginative account of Nietzsche’s last moments as a philosopher and what they may signify in the cultural history of our species reveals that literature (poesis) continues to offer us the richest, sanest, most comprehensive view of what it can mean to be human.  Tereza’s Karenin has a distant ancestor.  His name was Argos.  The compassion, understanding, and wisdom of those few lines of the Odyssey (17.317-356) devoted to Argos’ death, following at once upon his recognition of his master Odysseus, composed in a culture utterly remote from our own, can somehow reach out across millennia and touch us as much as Kundera’s poignant accounts of Nietzsche’s tragic end and of the dying Karenin.  We should remember also, simply as readers, that the tragic world of the Iliad contains almost everything the absence of which Arnold lamented in “Dover Beach,”  joy, love, light, help for pain, and peace.  The exception is certitude in the providential religious sense in which Arnold uses the term.  Even the married couple true to one another are there.  One thinks of Hector and Andromache with their son.  That tender loving encounter between husband and wife is enacted within the tragic frame of Homer’s vision, and yet it is profoundly moving and profoundly human, in part for that very reason (6.556-589).  

Homer allows us to contemplate the essentially tragic circumstances of our lives with a degree of detachment and equanimity rarely afforded his characters.  The exceptions are among the most memorable episodes in the Iliad such as Hector’s awareness that he will die, that Troy must  fall and that his dear wife Andromache will be dragged away as a slave after he, her protector and the bulwark of his city, has perished, (6.534-555) and Achilles’ reflections at the end of the poem in the presence of Priam upon the nature and significance of the action at Troy and his part in it (24.591-646).  While Hector contemplates the inevitability of defeat and utter ruin, determined to fight to the last to avert that fate, Achilles reflects upon the significance of the poem’s events for those like himself who triumph and realizes that his brief and brilliant days at Troy are both a compelling imperative and ultimately futile.  It especially fitting that Achilles, the only character in the poem shown to be aware of poetry (9.223-230), and thus the only character who has an inkling of Homer’s true purpose in composing the poem whose subject is Achilles’s own rage, should be the character who is granted an awareness of the significance of the events of the poem that rivals Homer’s own.  Though his actions at Troy have won for him the undying kleos (fame or glory) that has resonated through western literary history down to our own time, the reflective Achilles at the end of the poem is troubled by the fact that being at Troy means that he neglects his father.  It is one of the great and stirring achievements of literature that the utterly self-absorbed warrior should evince his concern for others, for his companion Patroclus, for his guests at the funeral games over which he presides with an aristocratic grace that comes as a surprise, and for his neglected, aged father.  The poet of the Odyssey was likewise aware of the depth  of Achilles’ character.  When Achilles and Odysseus encounter one another in the underworld, Achilles has no illusions about the attenuated existence to which he is now condemned.  It is better to be alive as a slave rather than king over all the dead.  Even in the underworld, Achilles is concerned with events in our world and, in particular, with the fate of his father, lamed by old age, whom, he fears, must be oppressed by men who have descended on his household.  Beyond life, in the dreadful underworld of the Greek imagination, Achilles wishes that he might return to his homeland briefly to destroy with his “invincible hands” “all those men / who abuse the king with force and wrest away his honor” (11.562-574).   His words anticipate Odysseus’ own deadly reckoning with the suitors.  The great pathos, the tragic pain of Achilles’ condition is that he can imagine his father suffering and yet is powerless to act, though in life he was the most powerful and terrible of warriors.  His sole consolation is pride in his son of whose success as a warrior Odysseus informs him, and he goes away:

loping with long strides across the fields of asphodel,

triumphant in all I had told him of his son,

his gallant, glorious son. (11.614-616)

One can hardly imagine a poet more distant from Homer, more inward than Rilke, and yet one whose  poetic career, rooted in circumstances entirely unknown to Homer and presumably incomprehensible to him, led in the end to the realization of a vision expressed in terms that Homer might have recognized -- the sudden presence of Orpheus, the archetypal poet, a startling late epiphany that transformed his conception of both poetry and the nature of human existence.  The young Rilke had been fascinated by Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.  As Robert Hass has noted, in this work, Nietzsche had given a name to that yearning place that the young poet had already hollowed out in the heart of his being.  Nietzsche called it “the death of God.”  Rilke’s greatest work The Duino Elegies is fundamentally an expression of endless, unsatisfied longing, a poetic embodiment of the lived experience of the hollow at the heart of existence that follows from the death of God.  And yet, the old dichotomies of Platonic and Christian thought remain.   The angels of the poem symbolize all that we are not in our inadequate finitude.  They are, as Robert Hass says, “absolute fulfillment,” something we can never attain (xxxv).  Throughout the poems, Rilke seems to struggle to discover and articulate something that might assuage the emptiness that threatens always to overwhelm or annihilate him, an emptiness that is, as Hass notes, “a spiritual loneliness so deep, so lacking in consolation, that there is nothing in modern writing that can touch it.  The company it belongs to is the third act of King Lear and certain passages in Dostoevsky’s novels” (xxxv).  Hass’s comment alludes to some of the most harrowing expressions of existential abandonment in the long history of our literature, in other words, texts that reveal to us to some degree the ineluctably tragic conditions under which we must conduct our lives.

The composition of the Duino Elegies is one of the most extraordinary stories of creation in the history of western literature.  In the winter of 1911-1912, Rilke was staying at Duino Castle on the Adriatic as a guest of his friend Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.  In her Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria von Rilke (Memories of Rainer Maria von Rilke), the Princess recalls that one morning in January when a violent north wind was blowing over a sunlit sea, Rilke was walking back and forth on a path at the edge of the cliffs above the ocean, turning over in his mind how to deal with a tedious business letter he had received.  Suddenly, “it seemed that from the raging storm a voice had called to him: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?”).  He wrote down these words and some lines that “formed by themselves without his intervention.  He knew that the god had spoken.”  He returned to his room and answered the letter.  “By evening the whole of the first elegy had been written” (Rilke 315). The second followed almost immediately.  The third was begun around the same time and completed in the fall of 1913. The fourth was composed over two days in 1915.  Rilke worked on the short sixth elegy between February 1912 and late fall 1913, but it remained incomplete.  And then, the voice that had called to him on the cliffs at Duino seemed to abandon him, until after years of silence and depression, in February of 1922, Rilke experienced  the sudden irruption of an inspiration, the like of which has not been witnessed since the time of Homer, the Sonnets to Orpheus.  Far from Duino, he had arrived at his final dwelling in this world, the little Château de Muzot in the Rhône valley in Switzerland.  In the sestet of sonnet XIX of the  Sonnets from China (1938), W. H. Auden refers to the extraordinary gift received then by Rilke:

Who for ten years of drought and silence waited,

Until in Muzot all his being spoke,

And everything was given once for all. (194)

In Rilke’s own words drawn from letters to friends:

These strange Sonnets were no intended or expected work; they appeared,

often many in one day (the first part of the book was written in about three

days), completely unexpectedly . . . when I was, moreover, about to gather

myself for the continuations of those other poems - the great Duino Elegies.

I could do nothing but submit, purely and obediently, to the dictation of

this inner impulse,

and

Even to me in the way they arose and imposed themselves on me, the

Sonnets to Orpheus are perhaps the most mysterious enigmatic dictation

I have ever endured and achieved; the whole first part was written down

in a single breathless obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February

1922, without one word being in doubt or having to be changed.  And that

at a time when I had braced myself for another great work and was already

occupied with it.  How can one help growing in reverence and endless

gratitude, through such experiences in one’s own existence. (Rilke 335-336)

Auden, great poet also, recognized the importance of that last sentence and wrote in the final tercet of the sonnet referred to above that:

Awed, grateful, tired, content to die, completed,

He went out in the winter night to stroke

That tower as one pets an animal. (Auden 194)

Rilke’s reaction upon completing his greatest work is strange but perfectly comprehensible.  Auden’s words imply that he saw the finished elegies as the achievement of his life’s purpose.  It seems to me fitting that his awe and gratitude should embrace the house that had sheltered him,  that final refuge in which he had been granted the most profound and transformative vision of his life, as if for a brief supremely charged passage of time, Muzot had become Delphi, as if the god had spoken.  In less than a month, Rilke produced the fifty-nine sonnets of the Sonnets to Orpheus and completed the Duino Elegies, the greatest works of his career, to be numbered among the supreme exemplars of poetry as vision and wisdom.

Orpheus represents something entirely new in Rilke’s poetry, a reordering of his perception and understanding of the world and our place in it.  When Orpheus sings, the animal realm is hushed, as in the ancient myth, but in Rilke’s version the animals attend to and hear the world in a new way.  In place of what he calls the makeshift shelter of their darkest longings in which to receive Orpheus’ music, Orpheus has built them a temple in their hearing, thus transforming their mode of experiencing the world (226).  The music of Orpheus means a new attentiveness.  The passionate music of unassuageable longing, characteristic of Rilke’s earlier poetry, should be forgotten because Gesang ist Dasein, (“Song is existence”), the true music is reality, this world as it is (230).  No longer does Rilke seek an escape from the transience of this life.  “Just let the rose bloom each year for his sake,” he writes. Denn Orpheus ists (“For it is Orpheus”) (232).  The task of the poet is not to dream of an elsewhere, but to attend to this reality around us and to praise it:

Rühmen das ists!  Ein zum Rühmen Bestellter,

ging er hervor wie das Erz aus des Steins

Schweigen.  Sein Herz, o vergängliche Kelter

Eines den Menschen unendlichen Weins. (234)

To praise, that is it!  One [i.e. Orpheus] summoned to praise

emerged like ore from the stone’s

silence.  His heart, o fleeting winepress

of an infinite wine for human kind.  (My translation)

The imagery upon which Rilke draws in this sonnet are of the everyday things of this world.  They echo ancient poetry, and yet their resonance seems deeper.  He evokes hills, vineyards, grapes, wine, and bowls of ripe fruit.  In a single quatrain, he delineates the essential task of the poet as it has been revealed to him -- to praise this world.  Like ore from the stone, the poet emerges from the natural realm of which he is a part, and his heart, the source of all he brings forth, though fleeting, will press out an endless wine for all humanity.  If we think of all the connotations of wine in our cultural tradition, then we must recognize in these lines Rilke’s realization that the poet is the one tasked with revealing to us, his fellow human beings, the wonder and splendor of the only world we know, or will ever know, and that the voice of poetry will outlive the brief transience of any poet’s life, as it has since Homer first voiced this insight for us.

The advent of Orpheus enabled Rilke to return to the elegies.  Between February 7th and February 22nd he completed the great work he had begun ten years earlier.  The “Seventh Elegy,” begun and largely written on February 7th, embodies the themes of the sonnets.  No longer will the cry with which the elegies began on the cliffs at Duino be a wooing or yearning for that which he does not possess, but rather like the pure song that a bird will sing in due season, almost forgetting that he is a suffering creature.  The bird’s song is a song of affirmation and acceptance of the way things are.  The bird sings, we may say, as Homer once sang.  As the elegy proceeds, Rilke finds the song everywhere.  It is the reiner bejahender Tag (“pure affirmative day”), the fountain, summer days, flowers and treetops, a late storm, deep-breathing freshness, lofty summer nights, and the stars.  It is our world as we experience it here and now, and it leads to one of Rilke’s greatest expressions of affirmation, the virtually untranslatable Hiersein ist herrlich (“Being here is glorious”) (188).  It is an experience in which all can share, even, writes Rilke, abandoned girls in the filthiest streets of the city.  They too experience for an hour or a moment this sense of everything (da sie ein Dasein hatte), and their veins are for a time filled with reality.  The lines are laconic, compressed.  He abandons the complexities of syntax, but he attributes to the girls, presumably prostitutes, that sense of belonging to something greater than themselves  that has been an essential element in western spirituality since the ancient Epicureans first developed what Pierre Hadot has called “spiritual exercises” to cultivate this state of mind (81-125).  However, as Rilke acknowledges in this passage, such moments do not last.  We are acutely aware of our transience in a way that  animals are not.  Where we see the future, the animal sees all time and itself within all time, forever healed (194).  Rilke appears to suggest that animals live in an atemporal or eternal present, unaware of transience, whereas we live here forever taking leave (so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied) (196).  Ineluctably we are transient beings: the world flows away inexorably from us.  At this point, toward the end of the “Eighth Elegy,” we seem to to have returned to the yearning with which the elegies began, but we have not.  In the astonishing “Ninth Elegy,” which seems to me to be the culmination of Rilke’s poetic thinking, he returns to the great insight of the Sonnets to Orpheus that Hiersein viel ist, “Being here is so much” (198), and yet more astonishing, and perhaps the supreme expression of Rilke’s vision, that this fleeting world needs us, the most fleeting of creatures (198).  

We, the most fleeting of all, are here just once, and never again, but (aber), and it is one of the greatest “buts” in all poetry:

Aber dieses

ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal:

irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar. (198)

But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

To have been one with the earth, to have dwelt fully in this world surpasses anything else we might hope for and cancels all dreams of transcendence.  Here Rilke recognizes, as Homer had, the essentially tragic condition of our existence and embraces it.  He does not attempt a cosmodicy in the manner of Nietzsche.  Rather, he has arrived at a place where he can simply accept the way things are, however horrendous they may be.  There is much wrong with the world as he knew.  The Duino Elegies are among other things a fierce anticipatory critique of the shallow consumerism that has been eating away at our souls for decades and lately at the wellbeing of the planetary systems upon which our existence depends.  And yet, he recognizes, this world is all we have, and it is glorious.  Though the registers and tones of Rilke’s verse differ from those of Homer, the metaphysics of experience expressed in the “Ninth Elegy” seems to me to approach Homer’s vision of what it means to be human.

Homer never attempts a cosmodicy.  Indeed, it is unlikely that the idea would have made any sense to him, yet he does claim that the events he depicts may be rescued from the flux of time to become the matter of song (Il. 6.423-426, Od. 8.649-651).  There is a presumption that song, the subject matter of which is the heroes and their deeds, will preserve their glory and transmit it to future generations so that their kleos will live forever (Il. 7.101-105).  Homer’s world was an unchanging one in its essential lineaments.  The seasons give way to one another in due course; the rivers flow in their appointed channels as they have since time began.  Nature is experienced as an unvarying cycle, in comparison with which, the grandest efforts of human beings are insignificant.  After the fall of Troy, Apollo and Poseidon sweep away the great rampart built by the Achaeans to protect their ships until no trace of it remains, and yet, at crucial moments in the poem, such as the harvest depicted on the shield of Achilles, Homer celebrates the joy that human beings find in a world that each one of us will lose soon enough to death (18.629-719).  Homer does not try to justify this state of affairs.  It is simply part of the world he describes. That fact is not surprising.  It is surprising, however, that Rilke, a keen student of Nietzsche who, as we have seen, was obsessed with the task of cosmodicy should have made no attempt to do so either.  In the late elegies, Rilke tells us that we are here to name the ordinary things of this world and to say:

Haus,

Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, --  (198)

House,

Bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window --

to be attentive to them, to bear witness to their being, to praise them and through them to praise our world, whatever we may suffer or endure.  As he observes:

Zwischen den Hämmern besteht

unser Herz wie die Zunge

zwischen den Zähnen, die doch,

dennoch, die preisende bleibt.  (200)

Between the hammers our heart

endures just as the tongue does

between the teeth and, despite that,

still is able to praise.

As we saw above, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had claimed that tragedy was born from “the overflowing health, the abundance of existence of the Greeks” (3) while C. S. Lewis had suggested that Homer’s vision “is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint” (30).  By the time Rilke composed the “Ninth Elegy,”  he seems to have worked through and beyond these claims to embrace this world as it is in all its horror and splendor.  No longer does he seek to escape or transcend it.  “See, I live,” he writes toward the end of the elegy, and in the final lines, he reveals to us what that living can mean:

Uberzähliges Dasein

entspringt mir im Herzen. (203)

Abundant existence

Wells up in my heart (Gass 215)

where once there had been an emptiness, a spiritual loneliness hollowed out at the heart of his being.

 In Gass’s translation of these final lines, we see how Rilke’s long journey as a poet and the unanticipated transformative visitation of the Sonnets to Orpheus, which must somehow have had its roots in the workings of Rilke’s psyche beyond our and even his apprehension, have led to an affirmation of this world akin to that which the young Nietzsche attributed to the Greeks, a  belated acceptance that one must affirm this world because there is no other for creatures who live according to our limitations.  Hiersein ist herrlich.  Homer’s epics are our greatest elucidation of this insight.  Thus, Rilke’s late poetry may be seen as a response to Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead,” a directive concerning how we may live in the absence of former Christian and providential certainties, and one that takes us back to the immediate origins of our culture to Homer and to the pre-philosophical tragic vision of the great dramatists, especially Sophocles.

In the Duino Elegies, Rilke created a work that is not a philosophical treatise, and not even a philosophical text in Nietzsche’s manner, but an endlessly resonant work of art, a matchless embodiment of what I have called literary wisdom, to which readers like myself, drawn by temperament and experience to a tragic view of our existence can return, time after time, to contemplate in an extraordinarily rich way what the possibilities of our lives may be. As Rilke  himself wrote,  “How can one help growing in reverence and endless gratitude, through such experiences in one’s own existence?” (335-336).  His readers may well think the same about the gift he has bequeathed to us.

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.

Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print.

Chamberlain, Lesley. Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography. 1996. New York:

         Picador USA, 1998. Print.

Danby, John F. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear. London: Faber, 1949.

         Print.

The Church Hymnary (Revised Edition). Oxford: Oxford UP. Print.

Friedländer, Saul. The Years of Exermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

         New York: HarperPerennial, 2008. Print.

Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. New York:

         Knopf, 2000. Print.  

Griffin, Jasper. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1983. Print.

Hadot, Pierre.  Philosophy as a Way of Life. Trans. Michael Chase. Malden: Blackwell,

         1995. Print.

Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Print.

Hass, Robert. Introduction. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Ed. and Trans. Stephen

         Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1982. Print.

The Holy Bible (KJV). Oxford: Oxford UP. Print.

Homer.  The Iliad. Trans. A. T. Murray. 2 Vols. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1978. Print.

Homer.  Odyssey.  Trans. A. T. Murray. Revd. George E. Dimock. 2 Vols. Cambridge:

         Loeb-Harvard UP, 1998. Print.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print.

Homer.  The Iliad. Trans. Peter Green. Oakland: U of California P, 2015. Print.

Homer.  The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print.

Kershaw, Ian. To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949. New York: Viking, 2015. Print.

Knox, Bernard. Introduction. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin,

         1996. Print.  

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. 1984.

         New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Print.

Lewis.  C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. 1942. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961. Print.

Luther, Martin. “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.”  Klassiche Kirchenlieder. Youtube. 22 Oct 2007.

         Web. 26 Mar. 2016.

McPherson, David. “Nietzsche, Cosmodicy, and the Saintly Ideal.” Philosophy 91.355 (2016):

         39-67. Print.

Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. 2001. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich.  The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. New York: Penguin,

         1993. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. New York: Vantage, 1974. Print.

Nuttall, A. D.  Shakespeare the Thinker. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.

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Plato. The Republic. Trans. Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin, 2012. Print.

Plato.  The Symposium. Trans. Christopher Gill. 1999. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

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         Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1982. Print.

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         Print.

Ellen Baker

Faculty Essay, 2014-2015

A Crisis in the Union

            Word spread fast. On the afternoon of June 12, 1951, sheriff’s deputies came to the union hall with an court injunction: officers, agents, and members of Mine-Mill Local 890 had to stop picketing the Empire Zinc Company or face immediate arrest.[1] This court order, coming just a day after a fight between striking miners and sheriff’s deputies at Empire Zinc, electrified the mining district in this southwestern corner of New Mexico. Phones rang, cars threaded their way to the picket, women hurried to tell their neighbors. Men starting their shift in other mines told those workers just leaving. That night, crowding into the biggest dance hall that could be found, hundreds of union members and supporters confronted their dilemma: if the union obeyed the injunction, replacement workers could enter the mine and the ten-month-long strike would be lost; if it disobeyed, all of the picketers could be arrested—and the strike would be lost.

            Everyone agreed that the stakes in this strike were high. The late 1940s and early 1950s were a period of fierce class conflict in the United States, and companies used anticommunism as a battering ram against left-wing unions like Mine-Mill.[2] Elsewhere, and in other industries, companies had succeeded; in Grant County they had thus far failed. Confronted in 1948 by companies willing to negotiate new contracts only with “good Americans,” for example, Mine-Mill Local 890 successfully used walkouts, sit-downs, and strikes to force companies to the bargaining table.[3] Local 890 challenged the dual-wage system that kept Mexican Americans in “Mexican” jobs, and it pressed a similar agenda beyond the workplace by entering local politics. Mine-Mill members and leaders believed that the district’s other mining companies were colluding with Empire Zinc to destroy the militant, left-wing union.[4] Thus the Empire Zinc strike of 1950–52 was understood as a showdown. From October 1950 to March 1951, the company tried to outlast the strikers, but even the shrinking strike funds did not drive strikers back to work. Then Empire Zing launched a back-to-work movement, which failed to lure strikers back to work. The court injunction was the company’s next step: using the power of the state to force the strikers back to work.

            At the union meeting on June 12, men wanted to stay on the pickets and hold their ground against the sheriff. But then they heard an unexpected alternative from three women. Aurora Chávez, Virginia Chacón, and Virginia Jencks had met ahead of time and arrived at the meeting ready to advance an unusual strategy.[5] The injunction referred only to union officers, agents, and members, they pointed out. Perhaps women, then, could picket with impunity. Surely no judge would think women belonged to the union? Surely no union man could object to a way to obey the injunction and simultaneously circumvent it?

            But union men did object. “What are you gonna do with the children?” they asked. “I’m sure not gonna take care of them!”[6] Some men were afraid their wives would be injured on the line, and others thought that “shenanigans” would take place on the line—that their wives would run off with other men.[7] But most of the women were soon fired up by the chance to take over the picket, eager to help defend the union.[8] The “stronger” women, in Anita Tórrez’s words, were not stymied by the problem of childcare. They would “do [their] own problem-solving [if] the men didn’t want to share in solving the problem.”[9] Braulia Velásquez commented later that “we had a hard job convincing the men but we finally did it by a vote.”[10] Around 2:30 the next morning, with women voting alongside men—a provision granted them by the International union—Local 890 decided that women would take over the pickets.[11] The women started planning their shifts.

            Early the morning of June 13, scores of women arrived at the Empire Zinc picket lines in the small town of Hanover. Sheriff Leslie Goforth may have been among those county officials who “opined that the women were not technically union members and therefore would not be affected by [Judge A.W.] Marshall’s order.”[12] In any case, Goforth chose to watch carefully rather than act hastily. His twenty deputies harassed the women, but scabs could not pierce the women’s barrier and enter the mine.[13] Women were thrilled by their victory and swept into the next union meeting eager to tell stories of the pickets. It was hard “catching the sneaking scabs crawling through the pine trees,” Braulia Velásquez reported. But “no scabs were crossing our lines,” declared Aurora Chávez. “We don’t need men.”[14] More women were needed on “our line,” and Elvira Molano and Daría Chávez exhorted them to come to the pickets the next morning.[15]

            The hundreds of women who answered the call came from all over Grant County. Dolores Jiménez, for example, carpooled with neighbors for the twelve-mile drive north from Hurley. Her husband Frank worked at Kennecott’s smelter, not at Empire Zinc, but she had heard about this strike and had been encouraged to join by her friend, Clorinda Alderette.[16] Elvira Molano, married to an Empire Zinc striker, was several years older and fearless in the face of the deputies. Before the women’s picket, in fact, she had walked the men’s picket and been arrested in the fight that prompted Empire Zinc to seek the court injunction.[17] All of the women found the pickets an exciting place to be. On the line they sang, they danced (with their husbands playing guitars on the hillside), they laughed, they crocheted. And they often wanted to stay beyond their shift.[18] Away from the line, women staffed all of the strike committees except the negotiating committee; they wrote publicity materials, spoke on the union’s weekly radio show, persuaded local newspaper editors to publish union letters, and divvied up the strike relief funds. They tightened their own organization, meeting regularly on their own and electing picket captains and other leaders.[19] “The way people are moving now,” Evelina Vigil predicted, “shows that we will win this strike. I’m ready to be there any time.”[20]

            But perhaps Vigil should have said, “the way women are moving now,” for the men were not always moving alongside them. Physically, perhaps, they were, for men stayed near the pickets; but many were stalled in their moral support for the women’s action, uneasy over their wives’ willingness “to be there any time.” While both women and men believed that the union needed to be defended, their different reactions to the women’s picket came out of gendered understandings of the union that needed this defense and of the families who could provide it.

            Two models of unionism had coexisted until the injunction crisis forced the differences between them into the open on June 12. One model was based on a brotherhood of men—and exclusively men—who protected one another against the dangers of mining and exploitation by management. This was a brotherhood of equals, whose equality rested on their shared status as breadwinners in their individual families. By interrupting the normal workings of the family, the women’s picket appeared to threaten male authority and power, which in turn cast doubt on the breadwinner system that defined men’s purpose in the workplace and cemented union solidarity. The other union model was based on a larger union family, whose members endured sacrifices during strikes for long-term economic security, and who helped consolidate the union’s power beyond the workplace, partly through the activities of the ladies’ auxiliary. Taking over the picket followed logically from women’s recent auxiliary work and, most importantly, promised to defend the union against the latest company assault. Those who thought in terms of the union family saw the threat to normal family life as merely temporary and saw men’s resistance as divisive precisely when unity was most needed.

            The vote on June 12 was a victory of the union family over the union brotherhood, and this decision set the parameters for the events to follow. But the vote did not wipe out the underlying differences that had generated the two visions. To the contrary, it simply set those differences in sharper relief once the implications for families became clear: women would let their household duties take second place to their picket duties, and men would not willingly take on women’s work. Out of that juxtaposition came a new situation that demanded attention to gender relations. Individual homes and the union hall became the spaces in which new arrangements between men and women were hammered out; the picket lines and courthouse became the places where women developed a new political consciousness and solidarity that they brought to these household negotiations.

            Women did not begin their picket with gender relations on their minds; they aimed only to defend the union community. But their husbands’ resistance looked childish given the stakes of this union battle, and the story of the women’s picket thus became a story of women’s rebellion, not just against the Empire Zinc Company, but also against their own husbands. What grants this story even greater significance is that it became the theme of a remarkable movie made in 1953—Salt of the Earth—starring these same union men and women; indeed, making Salt of the Earth reveals their effort to make sense of what had happened to them.

The Union as a Militant Brotherhood

            Men resented the women’s picket because they sensed its threat to the “natural” order: their wives expected them to move to the sidelines of their own strike and even to take on women’s work, both of which publicly eroded men’s status. But there was more to union men’s resistance than a defense of male authority for its own sake. This authority was also a dimension of the masculinity that shaped Mine-Mill Local 890’s structure and infused its battle for workplace power. As miners built their union in the 1940s, they used, deliberately or not, models of the family to shape their relationships with one another. Already familiar with the horizontal and vertical relationships inherent in families, union men drew upon three sets of relationships—those of brothers, husbands, and fathers—in structuring the union. The union became a brotherhood made up of equals bound to one another by mutual needs and reinforced by the exclusion of women; the workplace danger that required mutual help also required individual courage, and women’s absence from mines and mills ensured that this courage would be associated with men.

            Union men’s fraternal equality (the kind of brotherhood they felt) was itself partly based on another set of family relationships: these men were equals not only because they had the same experiences at work, but also because they each headed their own household, or aspired to do so. Male breadwinners exercised their authority over the women and children in their private families, away from this fictive family in the union hall; yet men achieved the status of breadwinner, from which their authority at home derived, in the workplace. The democratic structure of the union was rooted in this brand of social equality. Still another dimension of their fraternity was its grounding in shared ethnicity and, at the same time, its capacity to transcend ethnic barriers, to attract Anglo workers to a brotherhood that affirmed the social equality of Mexicans and Anglos.

            The miners’ union was much more than a fraternal club, of course. Its central purpose was to deal collectively with a powerful adversary. Here, too, family relations and masculinity came into play, but with a twist. Management insisted that a family relationship structured the workplace. As Kennecott labor relations expert James K. Richardson instructed the New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, “[l]abor negotiations should be, in my opinion, family affairs.”[21] As in any industry, it was common for managers to speak of the company as one big family, working together, headed by a father; this corresponded to a notion that any differences between labor and management were “merely a misunderstanding by each party of the aims of the other. Each has a basic willingness to promote a free enterprise system.”[22] In exerting paternalist control, management assured workers that it knew best what workers’ interests were (because they were the same as the company’s) and how best to protect them. Managers were parents and workers were children.

            In the Southwest, paternalism took on another dimension: Anglos were parents and Mexicans were children. Companies had long characterized Mexican workers as docile, prone to laziness, and indifferent to work conditions that “American” workers would not tolerate; lazy workers needed the firm, fatherly governance that a mining company provided. Thus when miners joined Mine-Mill, demanded better wages, and pursued grievances, they challenged both the cultural definition of Mexicans as ethnically inferior and the paternalistic labor relations in local mines and mills. Their combative, militant stance vindicated both their manhood and their Mexican ethnicity.

The Union as a Larger Family

            Women drew on a competing vision of the union, one that also came out of the “militant” tradition but existed in some tension with it. In the late 1940s, Local 890 began to campaign against segregation in local schools, businesses, and housing. The impetus to expand the union’s activism beyond the workplace came from Mine-Mill organizers Clinton and Virginia Jencks, who moved to New Mexico from Denver in 1947. Having studied the history of mining struggles, the Jenckses believed that without women, the union was acting with one hand tied behind its back.[23] Moreover, the Jenckses belonged to a left-wing tradition that, in the 1940s, criticized male chauvinism and theorized the political significance of housework.[24]

            Inspired by these views, and experienced from years of political organizing, Virginia Jencks pushed hard for the union to hold regular family meetings. She walked house to house and struck up conversations with miners’ wives, encouraging them to come to union meetings where families would eat and then play games, watch a movie, or talk about political issues. Virginia Chacón, who soon joined Jencks, found that “some women were interested, but it sounded like they were scared” of their husbands.[25] Indeed, it took some doing to get men to invite their wives to union meetings, but Mine-Mill’s structure and political orientation made these invitations a bit easier to extend. The Mine-Mill International allowed women to vote, which very few male-dominated unions did and which probably came in tandem with the union’s move toward the Left in the 1930s.[26] Miners’ wives further developed the union family model when they formed a ladies’ auxiliary in the summer of 1948. Like other union auxiliaries, Auxiliary 209 was based on the principle that anything affecting a male breadwinner necessarily affected his family. With a wife in the union, a union man like Juan Chacón could come home and say, “this and this is happening, we’re gonna do this, you gotta help.” The auxiliary would be the backbone of the union, just “like a wife [was] the backbone of [her] husband.”[27]

            Gender functioned, albeit differently, in the two models of unionism, serving to unify the “brothers” and marking out appropriate realms of action for union “family” members. The auxiliary was the realm in which women joined the union effort. Many women’s historians have interpreted auxiliary activities along axes that stretch from the “domestic” to the “social” and then to the “political,” or from the “traditional” to the “non-traditional.” Traditional activities projected women’s domesticity onto the union community; they included organizing socials and dances, cooking, offering medical care to wounded strikers, and buying only union-made products and services. They were often associated with domestic life and, importantly, with countering the “nagging wife syndrome”—the hostility of wives toward their husbands’ union, and especially toward strikes.[28] Non-traditional, political activities, by contrast, could broaden women’s perspective and make women into staunch unionists; these activities included demonstrating, speaking in public, picketing, and joining political campaigns. Auxiliary 209 can be understood this way, for it took up the typical tasks of a union auxiliary; through raffles and enchilada suppers, women aimed to nourish the union family. And auxiliary members became more politically active over time, in registering voters and boycotting discriminatory businesses, as well as during each strike that Local 890 conducted.

            But another way to consider gender in the union is to look at which issues the union considered within its purview. That is, apart from the gendered composition of the union and women’s own activities, we can see gender in the sorts of issues that became union business. From this perspective, it is clear that before the Empire Zinc strike, the auxiliary was precisely that: an auxiliary, always ancillary and subordinate to union men. Women believed, in fact, that it was this union family that they were defending when they stepped onto the Empire Zinc picket line. But by inverting family responsibilities, the women’s picket forced union members to confront the thorny question of male dominance in families. No longer did gender function only as an organizing principle for the union’s composition and activities. Now gender relations themselves became a union issue.

Household Conflict

            The union had to deal with those power relations because couples immediately began to argue about the picket. Aurora Chávez, for instance, had a big fight with her husband, even though (or perhaps because) she had been one of the women to propose the picket. He “didn’t like it at all,” she recalled. “He knew how it was gonna be and he didn’t like it.” Aurora was pregnant, and Agustín feared the violence that his wife would face.[29] As a husband and father, he took seriously his responsibility to protect his wife and children. A married, pregnant woman facing down a leering, armed deputy could mean only that her husband had failed: either he would not or could not protect them, and either way he looked bad. Agustín Chávez also feared—correctly—that he would have to take care of their three children, all under the age of ten.[30] The women’s picket meant, then, not only that he would be failing to meet one of his responsibilities, but also that she would fail to meet hers.

            Fighting over the performance of duties, Aurora and Agustín Chávez nonetheless agreed on how a family should be run. Any family is, in some respects, a unit with clear objectives, bringing together cash and non-cash resources to feed, house, clothe, educate, and discipline its members. In the breadwinner model—widely accepted by working-class families at the time and especially powerful in mining districts, which were built around an industry whose workforce was male—husbands provided wages and security while wives cared for children and kept house.[31] These responsibilities complemented one another and corresponded to realms of authority, particularly over children.[32]

            But necessity often demanded flexibility of the breadwinner model. Every miner’s wife faced the possibility of her husband’s absence, whether by injury, death, or desertion. Approximately seventeen percent of Hanover’s households in 1930, for example, were headed by women, three-quarters of whom were widows and most of whom were in their forties with children.[33] In these instances women had to find ways to support their families, usually by taking in laundry or boarders; women with sons old enough to work in the mines could rely on that income. As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has shown of colonial New England women, under extraordinary circumstances a wife could become a “deputy husband” who performed men’s work and exercised a husband’s power.[34] Local 890 women saw their picket in a similar light: if men were incapacitated by the injunction, it fell to women to sustain the union effort.

            Yet while the Empire Zinc strike circumstances were extraordinary, there was one key difference: these husbands were alive, they were present, and they were not interested in assuming the role of a “deputy wife.” There was, in fact, no deputy wife that mirrored a deputy husband. This discrepancy results from the critical asymmetry of family power relations; while husbands’ and wives’ duties complemented one another, they were not commensurate, nor interchangeable. A household may share goals, agree on the way to reach them, and allocate power to do so, but it nonetheless comprises distinct people with distinct interests exercising different kinds of power, and the apparent unity of the family results from struggles of power. In systems of male dominance, male authority can override female authority at critical moments, by virtue of cultural prerogative or physical force, although women are not without resources of their own.[35] In the Chávez home, Aurora prevailed over her husband, but not because Agustín took on childcare: her father sent her teenage sister Rachel to help out while Aurora walked on the line.[36] Neither husband nor wife had to give in because their extended family was on hand to make up the difference.

            Not all families resolved this conflict the way the Chávezes did. Chana Montoya, for example, appealed to a different kind of authority: the union community. Just two days after women began their picket, she insisted upon “more help from men on the jobs off the line. More help on the job we cannot do at home while we are doing this job.”[37] Montoya spoke with some authority. She was married to Local 890 President Cipriano Montoya, so her words probably carried weight in a union meeting. But her comments stand out even more when we learn that she regularly suffered abuse at her husband’s hands. Many people knew this; no one discussed it. She was probably speaking from her own experience at home, and for her even to hint at domestic conflict is astonishing. Perhaps her call was made easier by Cipriano’s absence from that particular meeting.[38]

            Cipriano Montoya presided over another important union meeting, though, and hinted at his idea of women’s duties. In October 1951, Local 890 celebrated the first anniversary of the Empire Zinc strike. While strike committee chairman Ernesto Velásquez praised the women as “veterans,” a term fully laden with masculine honor, Cipriano Montoya first congratulated the entire membership and then commended the women for “knowing that they have . . . work to do at home.”[39] At this meeting, meant to reflect upon the difficulties they had faced and the victories they had won, Montoya chose to remind women of their household duties. His praise extended only so far as they met those obligations. Chana Montoya did not speak at this meeting.

Solidarity on the Picket Line

            When women and men confronted one another at home, men brought the force of their customary authority. Women brought the strength of the solidarity they generated on the picket lines and the new light it shed on their husbands’ behavior. Their recent history of auxiliary organization and the tremendous energy unleashed by the unusual strike conditions together forged the solidarity that enabled women picketers to respond to threats, the most important of which were direct violence and unfair treatment at the hands of local law enforcers. Successfully meeting those threats changed their understanding of local political economy and of their husbands’ claims to authority.

            More than anything else, women created solidarity by resisting law enforcers. Sheriff Goforth was ordered to break up the roadblocks on June 16, and he found himself in an ordeal that strengthened the women as it left him helpless. When a deputy pushed Virginia Chacón aside to let strikebreaker Francisco Franco through, a crowd of women pushed Franco’s car right back down the road.[40] Other women threw rocks. The scabs were angry, Chacón reported, and “began calling us names, and were just dirty to us.”[41] Into this tense scene one of the deputies lobbed a tear-gas grenade, which “skewered and rolled among the pickets, spewing the white gas and dispersing the screaming women.”[42] But the wind favored the women, who soon reorganized their line, cursing the sheriff and jeering at his deputies. Deputies arrested dozens of picketers and sent three carloads to the county jail in nearby Silver City. The arrests did not destroy the picket line, though, for three hundred women remained on the line in Hanover. “We can keep arresting them,” Undersheriff Lewis Brown commented, “but they keep moving in.”[43]

            In all, fifty-three women were arrested that afternoon, many taken to jail with their children in tow. Few had seen the inside of a jail before, and all were nervous until the sheriff made a critical mistake. He promised to release them if they agreed not to return to the picket. Instantly, they announced that they would not “go home, [they would] go back to the picket lines,” and after that the women “had a very good time” playing cards, singing, and making “all kinds of noise.”[44] Only the filth, and a miserable lunch of cold beans, dampened their excitement. The women made such a racket in the county jail—“the worst mess” that jailer Jim Hiler had ever seen—that Goforth released them that night. “It looks like an endless job,” he admitted. And indeed it was, for the women returned to the picket that night, building a “picket tent” that housed food, a stove, and cots.[45] High spirits continued during the arraignment of forty-five women on June 18. Over a hundred women filled the corridors of the county courthouse. “It’s like a picnic,” one woman declared. “We’re having fun—and we’re going to stay on the picket line, too.”[46] Goforth’s effort to intimidate the women succeeded only in uniting them.

            Throughout the summer of 1951, violence continued between the picketers on the one hand and the sheriff, his deputies, and strikebreakers on the other. On July 11, deputy Robert Capshaw tried to arrest Antonia Rivera and immediately found himself the target of rocks and red pepper. “The whole bunch ganged up on about seven deputies,” Sheriff Goforth reported. “The battle wound up as a standoff.”[47] The next day, deputy Marvin Mosely tried to drive his car through the picket line. He hit fourteen-year-old Rachel Juárez, crushing her foot and sending her to the hospital.[48] Juárez “deliberately threw herself on the left fender of my car,” Mosely explained. “I stopped to get her off and she cussed me.”[49] And an even more serious conflict flared on August 23, when five cars of strikebreakers approached the line of forty women and children. Everyone waited, tense and uncertain. Then the cars began to move slowly, “bumper to bumper,” into the line.[50] Bone and muscle strained against steel and engine as the picketers tried to hold the cars back, but one car and a pickup truck made it through and injured two women.[51] A call to the Kennecott company hospital at Santa Rita, which the public had often used for emergencies, met with stony refusal to send an ambulance. “If this call is for the pickets,” the hospital operator allegedly declared, “we have no ambulance. The pickets will have to take care of themselves.”[52] And for the first time the deputies’ guns were used for more than brandishing. Denzel Hartless “jumped out of a car” and “shot about five shots, apparently wildly, during the peak of the fracas.”[53] He wounded Agustín Martínez, a young veteran discharged from the army just nine days before.[54]

            The cumulative effect of this violence was not to inure picketers to it, to make them dismiss it as the normal course of events, but rather to discredit the police. And encounters with the local judiciary furthered this process. One June afternoon, for instance, strikebreaker Jesús Avalos discharged his rifle near the pickets. Lola Martínez confronted him at once and was told that he was only out “shooting rabbits,” an account that Assistant District Attorney Vincent Vesely credited when he declined to prosecute Avalos. Martínez angrily declared that “justice was not for the working people” in Grant County.[55] Elvira Molano was also radicalized by her experience with law enforcement. She was repeatedly injured by deputies—shocking enough to a law-abiding woman, but compounded by being charged with crimes while her attackers went free. “I had never in my life been involved in courts or the law until the Empire Zinc strike,” she declared after deputy Marvin Mosely was acquitted of assault charges. “I thought the law of Grant County was to protect us, not throw us in jail like animals and beat us with blackjacks.”[56] Some deputies keeping “order” on the picket line even did double-duty as strikebreakers. Daría Chávez was outraged to see Mosely and Robert Capshaw sneaking to work at Empire Zinc on the morning of August 10. “It certainly seems funny to us women on the line,” she said, “to see these so-called peace officers, who are supposed to be neutral, now working as scabs. And these are the men the court told us we should respect. They have gone from one dirty job to another. What could be lower than a scab?”[57]

            Experiences on the line gave women a taste of power. Not only did they resist physical assault, but they usually did so without any help from men. And they were exhilarated by it. Moreover, acting in two settings—the picket lines and their own houses—and crossing from one to the other placed both sets of actions in relief. This perspective enabled women to question why issues of justice and equality were limited to relations between the union and the company. Throughout the summer and fall of 1951, in short, women undertook two kinds of defensive actions. The first was to defend their community against the company and its allies; the second to defend their actions against the resentment and active opposition of their husbands, who believed that domestic relations and gender roles should stay constant lest the community be fractured. Convinced that their motives and actions were just, women bristled at their husbands’ antipathy and insisted that the real threat to unity lay in men’s “backward” ideas.

Uneasy Change

            Over time, and through struggle, men accepted being sidelined on the picket lines. Local 890 officials Bob Hollowwa, Clinton Jencks, and Cipriano Montoya explained the union’s involvement in this process to the Mine-Mill’s International Executive Board in August:

In the past few weeks considerable improvement has been made in organizational problems which have come up from time to time. Some problems such as the participation of strikers in helping the women with work in and around the picket line—such as hauling water, chopping wood, furnishing transportation to women pickets, carrying out the numerous odd jobs required at the picket line. Solving these problems have [sic] been accomplished by and thru ‘frank’ discussion of all the people involved.[58]

Some men went even further, accepting changes in their own households as well as at the picket lines, but they did so equivocally. Ernesto Velásquez provides a good example of the complexities bound up in men’s experiences of the women’s picket. An employee of Empire Zinc since 1948, he quickly assumed leadership within the Empire Zinc unit of Local 890 and chaired the strike negotiating committee. In this capacity he addressed the September 1951 convention of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Joking about the role reversals effected by the women’s picket, Velásquez revealed some of his discomfort and, perhaps, his way of easing it.

We will see what my wife says—and I hate to be calling her a wife now—she’s the boss of the family. It so happened the 13th of June she took over the household. We have a little baby and she said you go home and wash the dishes and change the diapers. That puts me in an embarrassing situation. I have washed the dishes and I have swept the house, but one thing I cannot get myself to do and that is change a diaper. Let’s see what Sister Velásquez has to say.[59]

            Sister Velásquez had nothing to say about “taking over the household”; instead, she described the picket and her time in jail. There are any number of reasons that she may have remained silent on the topic that her husband had so clearly and so publicly raised. Perhaps she believed that nothing of substance had changed, or that the changes were too touchy to be aired in this public setting. Perhaps she felt that Ernesto had used humor to trivialize the extent and meaning of changes in gender relations and had thereby won over the largely male audience to his own perspective. For what could be more ridiculous than a female “boss of the family”? And how could a man boss the family if he had to change diapers? What, indeed, could changing diapers represent, if not the debasement that necessarily accompanied wifehood?

            Still, Ernesto Velásquez proved one of the women’s most consistent supporters. Unlike Cipriano Montoya, who generally referred to the strikers as “brothers,” Velásquez acknowledged women as full-fledged union members. He frequently and publicly encouraged women to participate, and his own wife’s steady participation speaks to his sincerity. On the strike’s anniversary, he described how he felt “as a newborn, . . . good as to how solid everything has been over the past year. . . . The women . . . knew nothing about strikes but [now] they are veterans. The women were tear-gassed, jailed, these women have suffered.”[60] In stressing women’s suffering, Velásquez did not dwell on men’s failure to protect their wives. Instead he cast it as women’s strength in the face of company assaults. His picture drew on an unassailable cultural value, that of women’s patient strength, and imbued it with the masculine honor accorded veterans. His comments are quite remarkable for their imagery, too. He felt “as a newborn”—interesting, given that he and his wife Braulia had a newborn at home; perhaps he was imagining his own child’s future in a more equitable society.

            Prodded by comrades like Ernesto Velásquez and, most importantly, forced by their wives, men ultimately stood behind the women’s picket even if they remained ambivalent. This unsteady commitment proved enough for the strike to succeed. In January 1952, the Empire Zinc Company finally returned to the negotiating table and agreed to a contract that granted many of the union’s demands. Some weeks later, the company quietly agreed to add indoor plumbing to all of its company houses—a demand raised as early as 1949, but one which the male negotiating committee had quickly abandoned when challenged.

Carrying the Struggle to a New Level

            It was the dramatic conflict between wives and husbands, in the course of a heroic fight of workers against management and against racism, that attracted blacklisted filmmakers to southwestern New Mexico in the summer of 1951. Recently expelled from Hollywood studios for refusing to disavow a Communist past, they wanted to project “real stories of real working people” onto the silver screen. And no better story appeared than the strike going on at that very moment in New Mexico. Salt of the Earth (1953) resulted from an unusual worker-artist collaboration in which screenwriter Michael Wilson consulted the families and changed the script in response to their reactions. The film was shot in Grant County, where a committee consisting of six representatives each from the film company, Local 890, and Auxiliary 209 managed the daily production work. The cast featured seven union members in leading roles and hundreds more in group scenes.[61]

            Mining families’ contributions to the movie took place at a moment when they had space to reflect on the strike; working on the film allowed them to work out what the women’s rebellion meant and to resolve, through an artistic medium, the contradictions and conflicts that still faced them. This process took place on an organizational level, too: in choosing two sets of representatives (from Local 890 and Auxiliary 209), union families recognized that no single perspective could claim to represent the whole community.

            Salt of the Earth tells the story of a fictional married couple, Ramón and Esperanza Quintero, who are driven apart when Esperanza joins the women’s picket. Ramón does not care to see women on the picket line. Not only does he disdain “hiding behind women’s skirts,” but he cannot bear having his authority eroded as Esperanza transforms herself from a meek housewife into a vibrant union activist. In the movie’s climax, Ramón confronts Esperanza after she returns from jail. They cannot “go on in this way,” he insists. Esperanza agrees, but concludes something quite different.

The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it. “Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican”—that’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, “Stay in your place”? Do you feel better having someone lower than you? . . . Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower then I am. I’m low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go.[62]

Ramón is furious and raises his hand to hit her. But Esperanza stands defiant, and he lowers his hand. “That would be the old way,” she tells him icily. “Never try it on me again—never.”[63]

            Salt of the Earth carried a powerful feminist message and prescient analysis of what later feminist theorists would call the intersections of race, class and gender. It owes much to the men and women of Independent Productions Corporation, especially screenwriter Michael Wilson, who marveled at the “battles for equality taking place there on so many levels [that he could] hardly unskein them” himself.[64] The movie’s opening scenes, for example, visually established the equal dignity and worth of women’s housework and men’s wage work, a perspective that probably came out of Wilson’s own discussions with fellow Communists about “the Woman Question.”[65] But the strong feminist message owes even more to the mining families’ own understandings of the changes they had undergone, and gender was the lens through which they wanted viewers to see them. If Wilson had Esperanza bravely confront her husband, it was because the women in Grant County told him to do so. His script reflected their recent history and the leverage they had gained in representing their strike. Performing the story of the strike—re-enacting more than acting, in Clinton Jencks’s words—allowed a cathartic and triumphant conclusion that settled the power relations between men and women, regardless of how such changes played out in real life.

            For the nature of the union community was not, in fact, a settled issue. Some women sensed a genuine and a permanent change; others found the changes between themselves and their husbands only temporary.[66] Ladies’ Auxiliary president Mariana Ramírez noted “a certain respect for the ladies” after the strike.[67] Dolores Jimenez continued to suffer abuse from her husband, yet she felt that the strike had made her “ten feet tall.” She stayed in her marriage for the sake of her children, and she always appreciated that her husband Frank was a good provider, even as he was having an affair with another woman. When Frank left her after the boys were grown up, she went to beauty school and opened her own shop.[68]

            The story of Chana and Cipriano Montoya shows some of the heartbreaking complexities of these changes. In 1954, Chana Montoya divorced her abusive husband, although they continued to live together off and on for several years. She finally broke off from him by moving to Los Angeles with their children in 1955, and soon she landed a job in a hospital. Cipriano was unhappy to see her go, and he followed her to Los Angeles. She did not want to return to New Mexico with him, and she quickly got a restraining order against him.[69] Then the story took a tragic turn. He waited for her at a bus stop one morning in July 1961, and he shot her dead when she approached. She was thirty-three years old. His defense: that his wife was a Communist, and he wanted to save his seven children from such an upbringing. He accused her of joining the Communist Party in 1948 and leading him into it as well. And from that moment, he said, “we had a very sorrowful marriage.” He resented her joining the Empire Zinc picket, attributing her participation entirely to a supposed Communist Party order. It made him angry, for “it was no job for a woman.”[70] Moreover, he claimed that authorities at a Party school had charged him in the mid-1950s with “exercising undue ‘masculine control’ over his wife.” Montoya was convicted and imprisoned. Upon release he told Virginia and Juan Chacón that he had been forced to testify in that manner. He ended up committing suicide.

Conclusion

            The Empire Zinc strike and Salt of the Earth together show how gender mattered in the power structures that operated both across class lines and within the working class, and in the union whose mission was to transform those structures of power. Gender served as an organizing principle for the union’s activities until an unusual situation, the injunction, propelled women to the center of the strike. Mining wives’ awareness of the interdependent nature of the family, and their appreciation of the contributions they made through the work that defined each day of their lives, proved essential to their ability to imagine, contemplate, and eventually insist upon playing an active and ultimately transformative role in the Empire Zinc strike. Men’s sense that their family authority was linked to the union’s power made it hard for them to picture even a temporary inversion of family responsibilities as anything other than an irreversible diminution of men’s authority; men’s reaction ensured that this inversion brought gender relations into focus for union men and women. It was this story that strikers wanted to share with an audience, and making Salt of the Earth was an unusual opportunity to reflect on changes that had taken place and to imagine a “new way” in which men and women could regard each other as equals.

Originally published in Mining Women: Gender in the Development of a Global Industry, 1670–2000, ed. Jaclyn Gier and Laurie Mercier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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[1] Silver City Daily Press (hereafter cited as SCDP), June 13, 1951.

[2] In 1947 Congress passed, over President Truman’s veto, the Labor-Management Relations Act, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Taft-Hartley affirmed workers’ right not to join a union, made it easier to get a court injunction against strikers—a return to the years before the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, which had limited such injunctions—and specified unfair labor practices thenceforth forbidden to unions. It required all union officials to sign affidavits stating that they did not belong to the Communist Party. Those unions that did not file non-communist affidavits lost access to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leaders refused to sign these affidavits for over a year; Mine-Mill and other left-wing unions held out even longer. Anticommunism was more than a weapon of the companies; political battles over communism and anticommunism tore many unions apart during this period. For this process in Mine-Mill, see Vernon H. Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, 1932–1954: A Story of Leadership Controversy, Cornell Studies in Industrial and Labor Relations, vol. 5 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954.)

[3] Mining companies operating in Grant County refused to negotiate with Mine-Mill and fostered “independent” union organizing, hinting that its workers should be “good Americans.” (The term good Americans, of course, referred both to non-communists and non-aliens.) Letter from Clinton Jencks to Maurice Travis, June 26, 1948, Western Federation of Miners/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Collection, box 868, folder 9, Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder (hereafter cited as Mine-Mill Papers), box 867, folder 1; SCDP, June 24, June 30, and August 20, 1948; Arthur Flores, B.G. Provencio, José T. Morales, and Clinton Jencks to W.H. Goodrich, July 10, 1948, in Mine-Mill Papers, box 870, folder 7.

[4] Clinton Jencks, telephone interview by author, May 10, 1997; Lorenzo Tórrez, interview by author, tape recording, October 4, 1995, Tucson. Grant County’s biggest operation was Kennecott’s open-pit copper mine in Santa Rita, accompanied by its smelter in Hurley. American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), Peru Mining Company, U.S. Smelting, Refining, and Mining Company, and Empire Zinc all ran lead-zinc mines in the towns of Hanover, Vanadium, and Bayard.

[5] Braulia Velásquez, quoted in Proceedings of the 48th Convention of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Nogales, Arizona, September 10-15, 1951 (Denver: International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers), 64; Aurora Chávez, telephone interview by author, May 9, 1997. Chávez was married to Empire Zinc striker Agustín Chávez; Chacón to Hurley worker Juan Chacón, and Jencks to union organizer Clinton Jencks.

[6] Anita Tórrez, interview by author, tape recording, Tucson, Arizona, October 4, 1995.

[7] Aurora Chávez interview; Virginia Chacón, interview by author, tape recording, Faywood, New Mexico, September 30, 1995.

[8] Historian Jack Cargill reports that the discussion split along gender lines, with International representatives Bob Hollowwa and Clinton Jencks joining the women. Jack Cargill, “Empire and Opposition: The ‘Salt of the Earth’ Strike,” in Robert Kern, ed., Labor in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 203.

[9] Anita Tórrez interview.

[10] Braulia Velásquez, quoted in 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 64.

[11] Ernesto Velásquez, quoted in ibid. A few women and children had already begun picketing casually with men even before the injunction, but women’s picketing on a large scale presented quite a different picture to men’s (and women’s) imaginations.

[12] SCDP, June 13, 1951.

[13] Cargill, 204.

[14] Minutes of Local 890, International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, June 14, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 868, book 9.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills, March 2, 2003, Santa Fe, N.M.

[17] SCDP, June 11, 1951.

[18] Anita Tórrez and Lorenzo Tórrez interview; Elena Tafoya and Daría Chávez, interview by author, tape recording, Hanover, New Mexico, March 14, 1996.

[19] Local 890 minutes, June 14 and 28, 1951; and Local 890 press and radio release, July 24, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 873, envelope 1.

[20] Local 890 minutes, June 28, 1951.

[21] James K. Richardson, Address to 1946 Meeting of New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, reprinted in New Mexico Miner and Prospector (June 1946), 4. Richardson was a labor relations specialist at Kennecott’s Utah operations, and in the early 1950s he was transferred to New Mexico.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Clinton Jencks interview.

[24] In general, the Communist Party held that women’s oppression would evaporate under the enlightened conditions of socialism; “feminism” meant one thing—the bourgeois feminism that masked real class relations and sacrificed working-class women for their bourgeois “sisters.”

[25] Virginia Chacón interview.

[26] Mine-Mill Auxiliary women from the United States and Canada reported that women in other auxiliaries were astonished by, and jealous of, women’s voting rights in Mine-Mill. See Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 1942 and 1944. Women probably exercised this right only in circumstances that already favored it and on issues already deemed to concern them; that is, it was a formal right that only occasionally, and imperfectly, became a substantive right.

[27] Virginia Chacón interview.

[28] Patricia Yeghissian, “Emergence of the Red Berets,” Michigan Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies 10 (Winter 1980), 1-2.

[29] Aurora Chávez interview.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Miners’ wives daily felt the power of companies, which often controlled housing, utilities, and social institutions like schools. Every aspect of their own household work bore the marks of class and ethnic injustice. Only the “Anglo” houses in Kennecott’s two company towns, Santa Rita and Hurley, had running water; Mexican American tenants had to haul water from wells. Hanover, the site of the Empire Zinc strike, was similarly segregated. As Anita Tórrez complained, “Empire thinks us second class citizens—no plumbing as in Anglo houses.” Anita Tórrez, letter to editor, Silver City Daily Press, April 5, 1951.

[32] Children did whatever chores they could handle; teenagers went either to school or to work depending on their family’s situation and their parents’ decisions.

[33] Manuscript Census, Precincts 11 and 16, Grant County, N.M., Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, in National Archives Microfilm Collection T-626-1395. 1930 is the most recent date for which the manuscript census is available, and the statistical abstracts for 1940 and 1950 do not indicate the sex of heads of household for Grant County or its subdivisions.

[34] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982).

[35] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penguin, 1988), v-vi.

[36] Aurora Chávez interview.

[37] Local 890 minutes, June 14, 1951.

[38] Domestic abuse was rarely on the public radar screen, but it set the terms for many families’ power relations. Dolores Jiménez, for example, dealt with Frank’s violence by running out of the house. She did not want to leave him permanently, even though she knew he was also unfaithful to her, because he was a good provider.

[39] Local 890 minutes, October 17, 1951.

[40] El Paso Herald-Post, June 16, 1951; Virginia Chacón, quoted in 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 63.

[41] Virginia Chacón, quoted in ibid.

[42] SCDP, June 16, 1951.

[43] New York Times, June 17, 1951, 26; SCDP, June 16, 1951.

[44] New York Times, June 17, 1951, 26; Virginia Chacón, 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 63.

[45] New York Times, June 18, 1951.

[46] SCDP, June 18, 1951. All forty-five women pleaded not guilty to the charge of unlawful assembly and were released pending trial. Not charged were children under the age of sixteen. One girl complained: “But I fought the sheriffs. I fought ‘em good. I hit one real hard and I spit in another’s eye.”

[47] SCDP, July 12 and 13, 1951.

[48] Juárez was none other than Aurora Chávez’s sister, who had been sent to Hanover by their father to help Aurora with the children.

[49] SCDP, July 13, 1951.

[50] SCDP, August 23, 1951.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Local 890 press and radio release, August 23, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 873, envelope 1.

[53] Ibid., and SCDP, August 23, 1951.

[54] Local 890 press and radio releases, August 23 and 25, 1951; SCDP, August 23, 1951.

[55] Local 890 minutes, June 28, 1951.

[56] Local 890 press and radio release, July 27, 1951.

[57] Local 890 press and radio release, August 10, 1951.

[58] Bob Hollowwa, Clinton Jencks, and Cipriano Montoya to Maurice Travis et al. re: Empire Zinc strike, etc., August 19, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 294, folder 11.

[59] Ernesto Velásquez, quoted in 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 64.

[60] Local 890 minutes, October 17, 1951.

[61] Juan Chacón, Henrietta Williams, Angie Sánchez, Joe T. Morales, Clorinda Alderette, and Charles Coleman played seven of the eight leading roles. Rosaura Revueltas, an award-winning Mexican actress, played the lead female role, Esperanza.

[62] Michael Wilson and Deborah Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1978), 81-2.

[63] Ibid., 82.

[64] Herbert Biberman, Salt of the Earth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 39. Biberman directed the movie, which was in many ways a family affair: his sister-in-law, Sonja Dahl Biberman, served on the production committee; producer Paul Jarrico was Wilson’s brother-in-law, and his wife Sylvia worked on the film production as well. The Jarricos had first discovered the Empire Zinc strike in the summer of 1951, when they met the Jenckses at a ranch in northern New Mexico.

[65] The Woman Question was Wilson’s first title for the screenplay, and hardly anyone besides Communists continued to use this nineteenth-century term. Based on her interviews with several of the people involved with Salt, Deborah Rosenfelt suggests that the Hollywood Communist Party clubs were more likely to discuss women’s issues, including housework, than were CP clubs elsewhere. Wilson and Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth, 102.

[66] See Deborah Rosenfelt’s interviews with women picketers in Salt of the Earth, 142-43.

[67] Mariana Ramírez, quoted in Deborah Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth, 142.

[68] Frank’s reputation among men was hurt—not by his infidelity, or even his leaving a wife, but for taking the furniture and cutting her out of his insurance; the breadwinner ethic had hardly disappeared, but it took on new aspects. Dolores Jiménez interview.

[69] SCDP, July 26, 1961.

[70] Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1961; SCDP, August 25, 1961.