Peace with honour
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Princeton, NJ—They are cleaning up New York after the nine day sanitation strike and the only intolerable stenches at the moment (in my neighbourhood at least) are those provided by the Jersey marshes. Never very clean, never at all tidy, New York, less than any American city, can stand being swamped by its own `trash' and that fate has been averted. But at what cost? The old battle cry is revived that this is 'a new Munich,' that Governor Rockefeller has shown himself prepared to ignore a law barring such public service employees from striking, a law which was passed under his own leader- ship; and that other highly organised groups of municipal employees will imitate the sanita- tionists. They will ask for more.
The end is not yet, but the New York story has some implications for us. If the young Turk Tories are going to 'crack down on the unions,' a policy popular with more than Tories, how are they going to do it? Mayor Lindsay wanted the Governor to 'call out the national guard' i.e. the Territorials, to clear the garbage: but such a move, it was retorted, would cause a general strike. The 8,000 sanitationists would be joined by hundreds of thousands of loyal unionists for whom the dirtiest word in the political vocabulary is 'scab.' It was because the quite numerous removers of trash who were not em- ployed by the city refused to cross the union's picket line, that the authority of the union was made effective. There are very few jobs that cannot be 'scabbed' and garbage collecting is not one of them, but it is because the chant of `solidarity forever' bemuses the other workers, often worse paid, with far fewer fringe bene- fits and far less control of a special labour market, to observe the sacred picket lines like pious Jews refusing to enter the Holy of Holies, that a city can be held to ransom.
I don't know how this kind of strike can be controlled. The basic problem is the 'solidarity' of 'labour' in face of any strike, however un- justified, however based on privilege. To crack down on one small section of the 'labour' world is to stamp on one edge of the bull's hide and see the other parts rise—as Herodotus pointed out a long time ago. It doesn't matter that only \-a quarter of America's workers are unionised. What matters is if they are in the commanding depths of an industry. From that comes the `clout' that even a small union has.
Of course, a nuisance like the garbage strike annoyed many good proletarians. My taxi driver was furious. 'They retire on a pension of $7,800 a year. Why, that's all a college-trained RCA en- gineer gets when he retires. This country is in a mess.' I think it is, and I have just had evi- dence of it.
I went into my bank to cash a cheque, then went to the post office, then to a delicatessen to get some simple food. In that short time, a young man, I learned, had walked into the bank, had held up a pretty blonde teller and had killed her when she refused to be held up. He then disappeared. Dealing with British unions may be as difficult as dealing with American unions, but we are almost immune from the 'note' of the American way of life, which.is increasingly indiscriminate murder. We are so far, at least.
There was an early spring outbreak of violence in South Carolina (where I am destined to go in a few weeks) with the charac- teristic statistics of these outbreaks : one policeman (white) injured by a 'missile', three negroes shot fatally, fifty wounded. Order reigns for the moment. One could go on. But there is always Vietnam. The figures for Saigon, 12,000 Vietcong killed as against 700 Americans, strain credulity, unless, as some pessimists suggest, the 'body counts' are made impressive by including the hapless civilians who are being (a) liberated, (b) defended, according to doc- trinal bias. And, as HerblOck suggested in an already famous cartoon, what does it matter if the Viets capture embassies, palaces, GHQS if the mimeograph machine is safe?
The position of the licensed censors of Washington, Herblock and Art Buchwald, is hard. How can they compete with the non- sense emitted by the White House, by the Pentagon, by the chair-borne warriors of Saigon? A similar problem, so he told me, was one of the reasons Mr Muggeridge left Punch. When he couldn't compete for humour with the Radio Times, it was time to qpit. That the Radio Times wasn't trying to be funny made it all the harder to bear. So it is in Washington.
To turn to happier things, or to happier memories. The Old Madison Square Garden (opened in 1926) is closing down. The old Old Garden, designed by Stanford White, had a more general romantic appeal than the Old Garden. For it was there that Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, who had involved himself with Evelyn, the beautiful wife of the wealthy but foolish Harry. The story had everything; sex; murder; suggestions of corruption when Harry was found insane. But the oddest thing about the case for me was the widespread Glasgow belief that Evelyn Thaw came from Mount Florida and though no Glasgow girl should have behaved that way her brilliant career cast glory of a kind on a very respectable part of Glasgow. Alas, the fame was unearned. We have to be content with Madeleine Smith in the high annals of crime.
The Old Garden was the scene of a sporting tragedy when Rocky (Marciano, not Rocke- feller) knocked out the 'Brown Bomber,' Joe Louis, in 1951. The ending of the career of the most popular if not the greatest 'Champion of the World' since John L. Sullivan was universally regretted. We have not looked upon his like again. Reflecting on all this, I remem- bered staying with friends in Washington before the war and being asked if I minded their coloured cook coming into the salon to listen to .the return Louis-Schmeling fight on the radio? I didn't, and the cook (and we all) had the satisfaction of hearing how quickly Joe Louis redeemed his previous oversight and dis- patched Mr Schmeling with speed and effici- ency. His victory, of course, pleased more than the deeply involved negroes for, like the triumph of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, it was a blow against the Fiihrer. Alas, it didn't knock him out, any- more than protests in Trafalgar Square or boy- cott meetings in Madison Square Gardens did.
Mea Culpa. If as a critic suggests, I still can't manage 'shall' and `will' after living two- thirds of my life in England and being exposed to an English education (if Banjo' can be described as an English educational institution) can we believe that a drowning Scot, in his native land, would in periculo mortis try to say 'shall'? The defence rests.
I don't think the fact that MacArthur, be- trayed by his inbred hubris, rushed ahead to the Yalu alters the fact that his landing at Inchon was a masterpiece. I could argue other points. I don't think that Anzio, Salerno, Okinawa, Iwo Jima were remarkably brilliant uses of seapower. Indeed, I hadn't in mind the simple problem of invading an island, England in 1066 or Sicily in 1943, but the use of seapower to surprise and outflank a defen- sive army.
Mea maxima culpa. I have no defence for calling Charlie Brown Lucy's brother. As an indignant couple have pointed out to me, the brother is Linus.
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