pieces of history

Some people who buy used clothing become fascinated by their previous owners. They want to know why the person originally bought the item and when he or she wore it.* I usually have no interest in the “personal history” of used clothing, but earlier this week, I had my moment of historical fascination.

After picking up prescriptions, I decided to browse in this thrift store on 19th street between Market and Chestnut. I don’t even know its name, but it’s one of those “real” “hole-in-the-wall” thrift stores. The stuff is cheap, it smells funny and there was a homeless man, or atleast a man who smelled homeless, sitting in the store, talking to one of the employees.

In any case, I bought three 100% wool skirts.** All three of them had ILGWU International Ladies Garment Workers Union “Union Made” “Made in the USA” tags on them.


Founded in 1900, ILGWU was one of the most progressive and important unions in the United States, reaching its peak of power in 30s and 40s. It began to decline in the 1960s and eventually merged with two other textile unions in 90s. Aside from being a union, ILGWU was also primarily a women’s union and given its start date, it was giving women economic and political representation even before they were allowed to vote.

So I feel like I’ve brought home three little pieces of history. (In fact, I feel reluctant to take out my scissors and do my usual round of alterations). I wonder about the women who produced them. Where did they work? What were their working conditions like? Did their union involvement make them feel like they had some control over their jobs?

It’s difficult these days to find union-made clothing. “Made in China” is a far more common label. Yet buying these three old skirts reminded me that this was once not the case.

Speaking of buying stuff, please refer back to last year’s entry for sources for buying fair-trade or ethically-produced gifts. I also seem to regularly rant about labour issues.

And speaking of the holidays, here's some light and pleasant reading suggestions. I actually haven’t read most of these, but they are all on my never-ending to-read list. The first book is political philosophy about community organizing. The next two are written by journalists about working conditions in America, either based on first-hand undercover experience (Ehrenreich) or interviews and research (Greenhouse). The latter three books are written by academics. Class Acts is, if I’m not mistaken, based on participant observation and research at a luxury hotel and is primarily concerned with the relationships that develop between the rich clientele and the hotel workers. The final two are more theoretical works about the organization and structure of labour.

• Reveille for Radicals (Saul Alinsky)
• The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Steven Greenhouse)
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (Barbara Ehrenreich)
• Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (Rachel Sherman)
• The Ownership of Enterprise (Henry Hansmann)
• Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Michael Burawoy)

Note: I actually wrote this entry in late November. I just haven’t had a chance to photograph the skirts and post the entry until now.
* I also hate it when people distinguish between “vintage” and “thrift” clothing. To me, used clothing is used clothing. Some items may be better quality than others and some may be older, but I don’t find clothing called “vintage” inherently more valuable than clothing called thrift. (Then again, it could be more valuable in that I could probably sell an old skirt called “vintage” for much more than thrift store skirt). It’s marketing. Vintage shop geniuses who make money off ugly 70s polyester dresses.
** I initially planned to buy two skirts, for a total of $14, but the cashier decided to give me one of the skirts for free. After buying these skirts, I noticed another skirt and decided to try it on. Unfortunately it had a small stain on the front so I decided it wasn’t worth the $10. The cashier was disappointed that I wasn’t going to buy it so he offered to sell it to me for $2. That wool fabric alone would cost me $20 to buy, so I bought the skirt. Three skirts for $8, the price of a Center City lunch. Nice! This is why I love *real* thrift stores, as opposed to pricey consignment shops.

I posted this excerpt from Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers a few weeks ago as a response to a comment on my entry on afflicting the comfortable. With Obama's inauguration coming up, it's been on my mind:

God did not create capitalism or socialism, but there must be some kind of economic system. The simultaneity of creation, fall and redemption means that God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more humane order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three.

whoever fights monsters...

... should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

~ Fredrich Nietzsche

~

Conquerors have all through history been conquered by those they conquer. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, proved either a shrewd student of history or a prophet when he reputedly said, “Even if we lose, we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”

~

World War II, many still feel, was a just, or atleast a necessary, war. Nonviolence as a means for settling international disputes is so recent—an international nonviolent movement (apart from the “peace churches”) dates only from 1914- that the means were simply not in place inside and outside Germany to mount an effective nonviolent alternative. It may well be that in ten or fifteen years we will be more prepared to respond to conflicts with an international outpouring of nonviolent resistance. So perhaps there was, tragically, no alternative at that time to war.

The point I am making is that even if a war does appear to be just, or atleast tragically necessary and unavoidable, it will inevitably require that relatively more just opponent (if there be such) to become increasingly molded into the likeness of its adversary. The greatest evils are usually perpetrated by people determined to eradicate an evil by whatever means necessary. War is not, then, a mere continuation of diplomacy by other means, as Clausewitz claimed. It marks the abject failure of diplomacy, and the adoption of means that have very little likelihood of achieving desirable ends.

~

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy”

~ Martin Luther King

~

Some of us engaged in struggles for social justice have been incredibly naïve about what has been happening to our own psyches. Our very identities are often defined by our resistance to evil. It is our way of feeling good about ourselves: if we are against evil, we must be good. The impatience of some activists with prayer, meditation and inner healing may itself represent an inchoate knowledge of what they might find if they looked within. For the struggle against evil can make us evil, and no amount of good intentions automatically prevents it from happening.

~

No wonder so many people, gentle and kind people, quiet and unaggressive people, find themselves saying at long last: “There’s only one way to deal with the Marcoses and Enriles. There’s only one way to deal with the Khmer Rouge. There’s only one language these people understand – we say it not joyfully, but reluctantly and sadly—the only thing they understand is the gun.”

To such people I say: Welcome home, welcome to the largest consensus the world has ever known: a consensus between east and west, between capitalist and communist, between mosque, church and synagogue. All agree that there comes a time when it is just to kill each other. Welcome home to the consensus on which our world is built.

Ultimately we are faced with two choices: to accept the “myth” of the just war, that as a last resort killing is moral, or to accept the ”myth” of nonviolence: we have no last resort, killing is never right. In the first case, we will come to the moment when the conditions for using violence are verified, when we reach the “last resort”. In the second case, believing in our “myth”, that violence is never justified, having no “last resort,” human beings come up with alternatives from the depths of their creativeness… We can and we will learn to live together, but only when we have closed off that escape route known as the last resort”

~ Niall O’Brien, “Making the Myth Real”

~

All of the above text, including quotes, are from the chapter “On Not Becoming What We Hate” in Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers (Published in 1992). (Is the history of the world but a narrative of violence where right and wrong is determined by the victors? I suppose the answer is not so simple.)

is this still an exercise in hope and cynicism?

Just yesterday, I rediscovered this passage from Thomas Merton tucked in between some of my old papers. A man I respected very much gave paper copies to me and two others while we were volunteering at the Woodstock Family Center in the summer of 2006. (Tim also posted it on his blog early January of this year.)

Somehow the weight and the wisdom of the passage did not quite register for me in the past, but when I read this yesterday, Merton's words were such a gentle yet truthful reminder of the futility of my half-hearted efforts and the hope that is to be had in my God.

Letter to a Young Activist

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

...[T]he big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour our your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments...

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand...

Enough of this...it is at least a gesture...I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best in Christ,
Tom