Pat Buchanan's sneaky rewrite of labor history

[Enrique]

his revisionist history takes the same form as so much conservative revisionist history (they do it with civil rights too), telling us that the conditions we enjoy today just happened, they are part of "the American idea".

Bullshit! People had to fight for the rights we have now, and they were opposed bitterly, and the people that opposed them bitterly were the conservatives, and if you look back at their rhetoric it sounds very similar to what we're hearing now.

http://www.creators.com/conservative/pat-buchanan.html

(...)

The American idea was that the 50 states and their citizens should compete with one another fairly. The feds set the health and safety standards that all factories had to meet, and imposed wage and hour laws. Some states offered lower wages, but there was a federal minimum wage.

What especially gets me is his "the American Idea". Throughout the entire struggle, the opponents of labor rights have wrapped themselves in the flag and accused the people fighting for those rights as "unamerican".

Here's Massey Energy's Don Blankenship talking at a Tea Party rally

[byeya]

1. Remember the Molly McGuires in PA and Blair Mtn in WV to see that the mine owners

drove the workers to a life or death situation. There are several baseball Hall of Famers(Hughie Jennings is one) that had to go to work in the coal mines at age 12(Jennings was 11) as breaker boys, breaking shale off of the mined coal. The trams would dump the coal down a 2 or 3 story chute and the boys would be breathing coal dust, and getting black lung, all day.
The workers, internationally, had to fight for a 40 hour week - down from 60 - and living wages. Everything wage earners have gotten has come after confrontations with capital.
Buchanan seems to need an introduction to the concept of truth.

[Enrique]

2. i actually don't know about those events

i'm going to look them up. We keep hearing how schools are indoctrinating kids with leftist propaganda, what a joke. To the extent that I know the part of history your post is about, I can tell you where I didn't learn it: school

[byeya]

3. Thanks for the reply. While you're looking up Blair Mtn, also in WV, look up the Hawks Nest tunnel

where workers were hired to dig a tunnel through this mountain. The rock contained so much silica, the miners were rapidly coming down with silicosis, some dying within a year. The corporation found it cheaper to hire a mortuary than outfit the workers with the needed safety equipment to save their lives.

Once again, Blair Mountain needs to be a National Monument.

[byeya]

4. Pat's rewrite is probably the only way he can bring in some money and keep himself in the

public eye. Certainly everything he's stood for is bogus and most is failing before his eyes.