Home > What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt

What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt

by Open-Publishing - Friday 27 January 2006

Un/Employment Trade unions Discriminations-Minorit. Elections-Elected Governments USA

by James Straub

It was a fittingly ironic end to an election full of grotesque twists: When George W. Bush was narrowly reelected president of the United States, it was the electoral votes of the state he had harmed most that gave him the final nudge across the finish line. Ohio went for the second election in a row to the Republican clown prince. But if the first Bush victory was tragedy, the one in 2004 was surely farce: has world history ever turned before on the artful elevation of gay bashing to an electoral tactic?

’In twenty-one years of organizing, I’ve never seen
anything like this,’ former trucker’s union organizer
Phil Burress told the New York Times shortly after the
election. ’It’s a forest fire with a 100 mile-per-hour
wind behind it.’ Burress was speaking not of the
efforts of unions and community organizations to
register and turn out hundreds of thousands of new
voters to the polls in Ohio to vote against Bush, but
of his crusade to mobilize even larger numbers to pass
a state constitution amendment prohibiting gay
marriage.

The demographics and causes of Bush’s slim victory in
Ohio and the country continue to be debated-for
instance, while 25 percent of Ohio voters identified
themselves as white evangelicals (and 78 percent of
them voted for Bush), the Washington Post’s number-
crunching later revealed that the percentage of
frequent church-goers voting in Ohio actually declined
5 percent in 2004-and Congressman John Conyers has
documented evidence of electoral fraud that indicates
Ohio my have been this election’s secret Florida.
However, it remains undeniable that Bush’s Ohio victory
did come in part from a massive outpouring of socially
conservative evangelical Christians to the polls. A
large majority of these Republican evangelicals were
blue-collar Ohioans voting against their self-interest,
many mobilized by Burress’s anti-gay marriage
amendment.

Karl Rove’s savvy manipulation of opposition to same-
sex marriage was mirrored, however, by a far stranger
picture at the state level in Ohio. The amendment,
which also prohibits legal recognition of any domestic
partnership short of marriage, was widely expected to
drive even more of Ohio’s young people (and even
businesses) away from the state-further hurting the
state’s economy-and thus it was opposed by most of the
state’s top Republican politicians and corporations.
Ohio’s Republican senators, governor, and attorney
general, plus the state’s Chamber of Commerce, all
attempted to halt Burress’s homophobic firestorm-with
no success. Few voters realized the amendment would
strip health benefits from even unmarried heterosexual
domestic partners.

The evangelical churches organized one of the most
energetic grassroots political campaigns in state
history. With the enthusiastic support of just a few
prominent right-wing politicians, like Ohio’s black,
evangelical secretary of state Ken Blackwell, the
amendment against same-sex marriage easily won an
electoral majority of 62 percent. Among white workers
over forty without a college degree (who make up a
majority of this mostly blue-collar state’s
electorate), the amendment did particularly well.

This working-class twist on the election immediately
led to one left-leaning pundit’s stock going through
the roof: Thomas Frank, who had diagnosed the malady
earlier in 2004 in his book, What’s the Matter with
Kansas? The book ponders the rise of a solid Republican
majority in Kansas, which was once the incubator of
American populism. After election day, Frank’s book
became required reading for endangered and desperate
American liberals. However, while Frank’s detailed case
study grounded the book’s insights in a fascinating
microcosm, it is worth remembering that Kansas itself
is far from the most pressing political battlefield in
the country. Kansas is part of the solidly Republican
heartland, and it will likely remain so for the
foreseeable future. However important rebuilding the
left in the heartland may be in the long term, neither
that state nor its neighbors will soon be a decisive
electoral battleground. Rather, as polls regularly
show, the region holding back the floodtide of
indefinite Republican supremacy is the northern
Midwest, Great Lakes region-otherwise known as the rust
belt. And the dike is about to burst.

By any pundit’s math, the grim truth of the 2004
election was that Bush was threatening Kerry in many
more ’blue’ states than was true for Kerry threats in
the ’red’ states. The states in the entire northern
Midwest rust belt-Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan,
and Ohio, a list that sounds like a roll call of states
that benefited most from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New
Deal-all stood within a percentage point of being swept
by Republicans, continuing a trend of becoming
inexorably red. Meanwhile, the poorest state of the
rust belt, and long the most militantly Democratic,
West Virginia, has gone entirely over to the dark side,
with Bush winning by a shattering 13 percent. If
Republicans begin to win decisive West Virginia­style
majorities in the rest of the Great Lakes region, they
can become a permanent ruling party-able finally to
legislate away what remains of the public sector,
unions, reproductive freedom, and minority rights. The
pressing question to be asked, from a tactical last-
stand standpoint, is this: What’s the matter with the
rust belt?

To take Ohio, specifically-well, what isn’t the matter
with Ohio, these days? Throughout Bush’s first term,
the state constantly vied with Michigan for the dubious
honor of most jobs lost. The hundreds of thousands of
manufacturing jobs lost since 2000 were largely high-
wage, stable, union jobs, which served as employment
multipliers in the larger local economy. For every
plate glass factory or tractor plant that shuts its
gates, a locally owned grocery or barbershop goes out
of business too. Though poverty has been endemic to
Ohio since the great steel shutdowns began in the late
1970s, on Bush’s watch Cleveland officially became the
poorest city in America (with Toledo several spots
behind). And with General Motors on the brink of
bankruptcy, the state may be on the verge of another
great crash in industrial employment. Anonymous blue-
collar towns like Canton, Springfield, and Akron
continued to bleed jobs and people, while former steel
capital Youngstown has lost more than half of its 1950
population. Local teens there, savvier about American
political economy than most credentialed cultural
critics, call their town ’Yompton’-in reference to the
urban devastation of Compton, California as famously
depicted in NWA’s hip-hop album, Straight Outta
Compton. The comparison is telling-as the state
continues to deindustrialize, African-Americans bear
the brunt, stranded as an underclass in every dying
urban core. Indeed, in the past decade Ohio has
exhibited symptoms of a genuine 1960s-style racial
crisis, with the second-longest prison uprising in
America (at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in
Lucasville, 1993), the execution of a black inmate
widely believed to be innocent (John William Byrd Jr.,
in 2002, also in Lucasville), and a major race
rebellion sparked by police brutality (in Cincinnati,
2001).

The Compton of NWA, of course, weathers its woes in a
different statewide context than any Youngstown or
Akron. For Ohio lacks significant taxable resources-the
Mahoning Valley is no Silicon Valley, and there is no
housing bubble of note there. A list of today’s boom
industries (biotechnology, energy, computers, and
tourism) reads like a list of things Ohio largely or
wholly lacks. And with few economic opportunities
mixing with the state’s Midwestern patriotism, Ohio’s
blue-collar towns and small cities bear a
disproportionate share of the burden of their
president’s imperial adventures. The Ohio-based Third
Marine Battalion, for example, has had forty-seven
soldiers die in Iraq as of this past summer, seventeen
of whom died riding in an unarmored vehicle. The lives
of mere leathernecks from the rust belt are not quite
as expendable as those of Iraqi civilians to the
neoconservative world-shapers safely hunkered down in
air-conditioned Green Zones, but then again, what’s a
few less laid-off Ohioans to Paul Wolfowitz? Indeed,
such deaths are as close as Bush has come to decreasing
Ohio’s unemployment figures.

This landscape of poverty and brutality is all the more
bitter for Ohio, since it was the sweat and blood of
places like this that originally made the American
Dream a reality for many people. In countless coal
mines, steel mills, and industrial factories, Ohioans
have prided themselves on doing the arduous work of
actually producing the goods many saw as American
prosperity-and in just as many strikes and struggles,
assuring that those who produced would also have a
share of the wealth. For as long as Ohio has been an
industrial megalopolis, workers there have been
contentiously demanding their rights and their share.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, working people in
Ohio organized, struck, fought, and even rioted-from
machinists in Dayton to streetcar operators in
Columbus, on rails up north and in dockyards down
south. A frequent epicenter of both class conflict and
labor organizing, ragtime Ohio hosted the founding
conventions of labor federations as diverse as the
large, conservative American Federation of Labor, the
early industrial United Mineworkers of America, and
even the short-lived, Communist-led Trade Union Unity
League. Workers’ struggles in the state produced
socialist mayors in towns like Lima and Lorain,
outright mobs in Cincinnati and Toledo, and
intermittent unionization everywhere a worker drew a
paycheck.

It was not until the 1930s, however, when a structural
disaster in American capitalism (the Great Depression)
coincided with a new form of labor organization-
wholesale industrial organization of the mass
production industries-and workers in Ohio changed not
just their paychecks but the world. Mass unionization
swept outwards from the Great Lakes region, all the way
to traditional anti-union strongholds like the south’s
textile mills and Hollywood’s sound stages. This
Depression-era birth of an ’American Dream’ social
contract came via the labor pains of often
insurrectionary upheaval against the forces of property
and government.

The year 1934 in the Ohio cities of Toledo and Akron
provides salutary examples. The northwest-Ohio city of
Toledo was in the grip of a comprehensive local banking
crash that put a greater percentage of the city’s
residents on public relief than anywhere else in the
country. Across the state in Akron, widespread tax
fraud by property-holders cut the city’s revenue base
so drastically that public schools were forced to close
their doors, while the city’s huge rubber companies
protected their multimillion-dollar annual profits by
enforcing wage cuts with the outright violent
terrorization of their workers.

Such draconian expressions of top-down class war
confronted local workers who had previously tried union
organization and strikes, only to fail bitterly.
However, growing radical movements in both cities
refused to cry uncle. In Toledo, socialist organizers
were key in mobilizing large crowds of thousands of
unemployed to join picketers on strike outside an auto
plant-battling the National Guard and trapping scab
workers inside the factory. Meanwhile, in Akron, a
strike of rubber workers resulted in the spontaneous
invention of the ’sit-down’ strike, where workers
occupied their factory, thus threatening the bosses
with the destruction of expensive equipment in the
event of violence. In both Toledo and Akron, such
tactics-support from mass crowds and ’sit-down’ factory
occupation-heralded their use in hundreds of successive
labor battles. They also resulted in victories that
gave unions a foothold in the new mass-production
industries: collective bargaining at the Auto-Lite
plant in Toledo, and industrial union recognition at
the Akron rubber plants. In imitation, workers at a
Cleveland General Motors plant several years later
began an angry sit-down strike that sparked a multi-
state wave of workplace occupations that culminated in
the victorious Flint GM sit-down-the victory that
unionized GM and paved the way for a social contract in
American workplaces.

Despite all this left-led industrial conflict, Ohio
never developed the kind of mass counterculture or the
left-wing third parties that unions birthed in places
like New York City or Wisconsin. Instead, Ohio’s class
struggles simply gave the state an exceptionally blue-
collar self-identity and left pockets of radical
workers scattered across its industrial hinterlands.
This is the ideologically varied class sentiment that
brought modern Ohio such diverse populists as Dayton
talk-show host Phil Donahue, Cleveland left-wing
politician Dennis Kucinich, Youngstown’s flamboyant
oddball James Traficant, and Cincinnati’s Jerry
Springer (a little bit of all the above). As a state
that was heavily industrialized and unionized, but
always seen as a bit of a cultureless manufacturing
backwater, Ohio, like neighbors Michigan and West
Virginia, has remained a singularly working-class
place, with deep reservoirs of economic resentment.

It was this smoldering blue-collar spirit that brought
a trickle of New Left radicals to Ohio in the late
1960s and early 1970s. Searching for white working-
class support for rebellion during America’s Vietnam-
era upheavals, young revolutionaries of all stripes
began to see the factories of the Midwest as their
Petrograd. When New Left intellectual Staughton Lynd
met a handful of ordinary, meat-and-potatoes Youngstown
steelworkers who were also anti-war radicals, he
thought, ’On this rock shall I build my church,’ and
teamed with local ’mill hunks’ John Barbero and Ed Mann
to build a labor left in the Mahoning Valley. Members
of their Worker’s Solidarity Club formed rank-and-file
caucuses in the United Steel Workers of America (USWA)
and led wildcat strikes in steel mills; sent
electricians and steelworkers to revolutionary
Nicaragua to help build similar industries; and created
a vibrant blue-collar antiwar movement (steelworker
John Barbero, whose parents were Italian and Czech and
whose wife was Japanese, used to explain in meetings
that he was antiwar because in any conceivable war he
would have to fight a relative).

Nor was such mainstream radicalism confined to
Staughton and Alice Lynd’s work in Youngstown. Across
the state in Dayton, for instance, the 1960s saw women
from progressive churches and unions join
counterculture radicals in a prominent local women’s
liberation movement. This group, Dayton Women’s
Liberation, achieved local prominence by starting
abortion clinics, women’s centers, and clerical labor
organizations. Given the fundamentalist assault on
reproductive rights today in Ohio, who would guess that
in Dayton in the 1960s those rights were won by groups
founded by churchwomen! While such labor-New Left
hybrids never brought any Ohio cities to wholesale
rebellion the way Detroit’s League of Revolutionary
Black Workers did, such radical moments in places like
Youngstown and Dayton reveal a political space in the
heartland that was once open to the left.

Yet this small door would slam shut in the 1980s, and
not just from the general rightward shift of the time.
Deindustrialization itself did as much or more to
terminate the Ohio left. In Youngstown, after years of
being the rank-and-file opposition in their
steelworkers’ union, radicals John Barbero and Ed Mann
assembled a winning coalition of black and progressive
white steelworkers to win the presidency of their
steelworkers’ local in 1973. But shortly after they had
been reelected in 1976, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube
Company announced plans to close the great Brief Hill
steelworks. Barbero and Mann (along with the Lynds and
their fledgling Youngstown labor-left group) fought a
brave and innovative campaign to stop the shutdown, but
they were ultimately unsuccessful. Far from leading a
revolution by halting steel production at a key moment,
radicals saw the company cease steel production on its
own, in the face of cheaper imports and lower wage
competition abroad-leaving Mann to spend his remaining
years haunting the bankruptcy courts of Youngstown,
continuing to courageously protest the foreclosures and
evictions of laid-off steelworkers from their American
Dream.

The economic catastrophes of the 1980s laid waste not
just to the seeds of a new labor left, but also to
Ohio’s cities and industrial areas. In Cleveland, where
the labor-left politician Dennis Kucinich had become
the youngest mayor in America, plant shutdowns and
white flight destroyed the city’s resource base,
causing social chaos easily blamed on the radical kid
mayor. The local banking elite, eager for a
confrontation with Kucinich, ordered him to privatize
the city’s electric utility. He refused, and the banks
called his bluff by calling the city’s loans into
default. In the ensuing economic meltdown, Kucinich
lost his reelection bid, making local government safe
for capitalism again.

Ohio’s cities, manufacturing industries, and unions
have been on life support ever since. The old
interlocking forms of New Deal social democracy-urban
machine/social safety net/unionized mass-production
industry-are on a terminal slide to extinction. As all
over America, they are gradually being replaced by a
new comprehensive social organization-nonunion Wal-Mart
jobs/antisocial exurban sprawl/hyper-individualist
consumerism-whose value system is as oriented towards
the Republican right as the old New Deal was to FDR
Democrats. In this equation, the role of ideological
prime movers has switched: just as left-wing CIO unions
used to be the instigators and organizers of the
discontent that created the rest of the social
structure, now it is the equally (but oppositely)
ideological evangelical churches that stoke the fires
of blue-collar anger in Ohio. Wal-Mart has replaced the
steel companies as the state’s largest employer; the
sprawling exurbs of Columbus and Cincinnati have
replaced Cleveland as its fastest growing areas; and
the Assemblies of God and Church of the Nazarene are
the new Steelworkers and Autoworkers.

Ohio has always been a devout place-there are more
Methodist churches than post offices in the state.
However, as all over the country, more liberal, old,
mainline denominations like the Methodists have lost
parishioners just as the industrial cities have bled
jobs. Taking their place is a mass movement of largely
fundamentalist, right-wing Protestant churches-the born
again, or evangelical, movement. And while not every
born-again Christian is a fundamentalist or a
conservative, there is no denying that this
conservative evangelical movement is leading to both a
growth in adherents and a shift to the right for
mainstream Christianity. Such churches operate as a
more decentralized network than their proprietary
forefathers, and their common denominator is not just
traditionalist social conservatism. It is a missionary
zeal for spreading the word, recruiting in large
numbers, and developing members’ emotional commitment
and ability to further proselytize. This is, by the
way, a classic grassroots organizing model, one that is
unused not just by the dwindling mainline churches, but
also by the dying industrial unions and the left in
general. Stepping assertively into a vacuum of
grassroots organization in so many communities,
evangelical churches have flexed awesome political
muscle, and they have become the political foot
soldiers of a far-right Republican new world order in
the same way unions used to secure the New Deal. In an
episode of the television show Frontline about Karl
Rove’s Republican organization, Dana Millbank of the
Washington Post said, ’Now, where Karl’s interest is,
is in the mechanics of this. And I think it’s fair to
say that religious conservatives, evangelical churches,
have become sort of the new labor unions.’

While it may appear that evangelical traditionalism has
cleanly stepped in to fill a void in working-class
organizations left by the decline of both unions and
the urban-industrial social contract, the reality is
more complex. Evangelicals, even Pentecostal Holiness
churches, are no longer the singularly working-class
religion they once were. The fortunes of some 1970s
evangelicals were boosted greatly by the Texas oil boom
and the economic growth of the Sun Belt-creating the
conservative nouveau riche that work in the energy
industries, pray in the fundamentalist churches, and
run for office in the Republican Party. The growth of
industries in suburban sprawl, armaments, agribusiness,
and energy has a symbiotic relationship with other
social meta-processes, like the move from rust belt to
sun belt, the decline of urban cores and growth of
exurbs, and de-unionization. Superprofits in those
sectors, meanwhile, fatten more Republican campaign
coffers; through conservative movement groups and
church collection plates, they provide the resource
base for the organizing work evangelicals do. The
evangelical churches could thus be seen as a cross-
class movement where super-profits in Republican-
dominated industries are tithed out to fund
sophisticated grassroots organizing by the
fundamentalist cadre.

The presence of this kind of money allows these
churches, especially the enormous megachurches that
dominate the political landscape of America’s
burgeoning exurbs, to provide the kind of material
social programs the New Deal once stood for. As Barbara
Ehrenreich pointed out in an article on the religious
welfare state earlier this year,

[At] McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Senator
James Inhofe and other prominent right-
wingers...dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a
low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred
unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at
the ’Career Ministry’; divorced and abused women
gather in support groups. Among its many services,
MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people
a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-
risk youth in DC and operates a ’special needs’
ministry for disabled children.

While McLean is an archetypal exurb megachurch,
Ehrenreich notes that also

many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar
array of services-childcare, after-school programs,
ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention
the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in
Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving
bouts of destitution: ’First, you find a church.’ A
trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that
he often turned to his church for help with the
rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a
wayward child, a bill due? Find a church.1

What separates these evangelical social programs from
those of liberal churches or even resources provided by
the left is that they implicitly and explicitly harness
loyalties to the Republican Party, which seeks to
destroy the hard-won public sector that is supposed to
provide such safety nets in the first place. Of course,
here the Republicans are well-aided by the Democratic
Party, which no longer even pretends to legislate for
such material gains. With the pro-business Democratic
Leadership Council firmly in control of the party,
anything that smacks of old New Deal social spending is
jettisoned for vain appeals to the copious cash (and
few votes) of the entertainment, finance, and
information industries.

The economic benefits of evangelical faith, however,
are not the prime motivators for most peoples’ church
membership. In an essay challenging the idea that
liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis can offer the
devout a progressive version of their religion, radical
former fundamentalist Roxeanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out
that the current evangelical movement was born first as
a mixture of Protestant fundamentalism and Cold-War
anticommunism, that was later energized to mass
political action by the women’s and gay movements. ’One
thing I know about Protestant Christian fundamentalists
from having been one, however, is that it cannot be
substituted by ‘spirituality.’...The system rests on
quite simple assumptions: you have heard the word of
god personally calling you; you have been ‘born again’
or ‘saved’; you recognize that Jesus is the true son of
god who died for your sins; the Bible is literally the
truth, the word of god.’2 These churches all have
complex mixtures of passion and patronage at their
core-where traditionalist protection of the symbolic
cultural status of straightness, whiteness, and
maleness mixes with both genuine religious conviction
and genuine religious-based social programs.

In his analysis of Kerry’s ominous drubbing in rust-
belt West Virginia, Mike Davis points out that local
Democrats still won the governorship and two
congressional seats in that state by equally large
margins, partially because they pandered to social
conservatism, but also because they crusaded vocally
for government action to reduce unemployment and create
high-wage jobs while the national Democratic Party did
the opposite in supporting the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade
Organization (WTO). ’I am inclined to believe that
literal ‘false consciousness’-embracing purely
imaginary solidarities with one’s exploiter or
oppressor-is not common. I am not denying the existence
of symbolic wages and imaginary demons, but the
cultural war rages most fiercely when it is able to
mobilize material self-interest, however ignorant or
short-sighted.’ Davis continues,

The ’latte liberal’ libel-visceral blue-collar contempt
for the urban knowledge-industry elites-is, after all,
grounded in a real historic defeat, in actual
humiliation. Male workers of all races, without college
education, have suffered dramatic erosion of their
wage-earning power and cultural status. With union
halls shut down and the independent press extinct, it
is not surprising that many poor white people search
for answers in their churches or from demagogues on the
radio. Or that they equate the decay of employment
security with the decay of family values.3

This world of blue-collar religious conservatism is a
mixture of real and perceived benefits, more akin to
the concept of white-skin privilege than, say, a simple
urban patronage machine.

Evangelical conservatism is no all-white backlash
phenomenon, however. For the modern evangelical
passions have their roots in the poor, multiracial
early Pentecostal churches of southern California.
Evangelical religion maintains an enormous presence in
the spiritual life of African-American and Latino
communities in the United States, and the Republican
Party is making its electoral inroads into those
communities through the pulpits. Not only did the
Republican Party dominate among white working-class
people this last election, it won a majority of
Protestant Latino votes. And in Ohio, where the black,
evangelical secretary of state campaigned vigorously
for Bush (in blatant conflict with his election
supervising duties) and megachurch pastors like Rod
Parsley speak (hypocritically but convincingly) to
multiracial congregations about challenging racial
prejudice and promoting a black middle class, Bush won
14 percent of the state’s black vote. This is not a
relationship equivalent to that of white
evangelicalism, of course; the grass-roots born-again
Christianity that produces Chicago’s Kanye West or LA’s
Tommy the Clown bears little connection to the bigoted
zealotry of Tom Delay and James Dobson. But the
Republicans are increasing their electoral showings in
communities of color almost exclusively through
socially conservative evangelical religion, and
continued success could give them permanent majority-
party supremacy-a fact they lustfully comprehend.

This is exactly the intention of the Bush
administration’s office of faith-based initiatives, a
promise to direct eight billion dollars to religious
social service groups. Anecdotal evidence indicates
that the money is largely being funneled to evangelical
churches in African-American and Latino communities
that badly need the services. Two examples from
Philadelphia give a sense of the breadth of this
little-noticed repositioning of Republican theocracy:
In one New York Timesarticle, the Baptist minister Rev.
Luis Cortes was featured parlaying a friendship with
President Bush into several million dollars in federal
grants for a youth employment program, housing
counseling, and AIDS education. His growing network of
Republican-funded social service programs now
encompasses Latino communities in half a dozen poor
cities. The article noted,

For a glimpse of one of the political currents
running through the program, consider the after-
school effort run by Mr. Castro, where a group of
schoolchildren recently convened for what might be
described as a Pentecostal poetry
slam....’President Bush is Christian,’ said Sade
Melendez, 10, after a recent rehearsal. ’He doesn’t
believe in abortion, and the other man does.’ ’John
Kerry believes in lesbians,’ said Jorge Granados,
10. ’He said if the baby was in the stomach, you
could kill the baby,’ said Krystalie Ocasio, 9. ’He
stinks,’ Sade said.4

Meanwhile, a mile east in North Philadelphia, the Bush
administration has used millions of dollars in federal
aid to court the ’praying tailback,’ Rev. Herb Lusk, a
former Philadelphia Eagles running back turned preacher
at Greater Exodus Baptist Church. Lusk heads People for
People, Inc., a church-based social-services empire
that has broken ranks with the mostly Democratic
Philadelphia black clergy to support Bush, claiming his
bottom line is halting gay marriage. Beyond mobilizing
election-day support for the president (in another
rust-belt swing state), Lusk has also given Bush
political cover for his treacherous abandonment of the
Global AIDS Fund by hosting Bush to speak on AIDS at
Greater Exodus. Such a location and betrayal are
particularly ironic in Philadelphia, since it was
largely African-American mass protests on global AIDS
led by ACT-UP Philadelphia, working with existing
HIV/AIDS services and drug recovery houses, that helped
win the creation of the global fund in the first place.
The effective, progressive and socially activist
network of AIDS programs and addiction-recovery centers
that united in these protests, however, starve for
funds while well-connected gay-bashing tailbacks build
fiefdoms next door.

This is the geography of religion, homophobia, and
money-an inextricable Gordian knot of political power
not just in Thomas Frank’s Kansas, but also spreading
from the blue-collar suburbs and prosperous exurbs of
places like Ohio to poorer African-American and Latino
neighborhoods of cities like Philadelphia. These are
the deindustrialized swing states; places where
Republican dominance could mean that party’s control of
the presidency for decades. The left has all but
abandoned these places where the factories closed and
unions died. Here in the rust belt, a right-wing
network of churches and businesses offers exactly what
the CIO once did: bothshort-term material gains for
members and a militantly transformative vision of the
world. Their vision is reactionary and fundamentalist,
of course, but it remains in every sense a
comprehensive moral judgment on a crass, decadent
twenty-first century America. As former union activist
and current evangelical crusader Phil Burress said in
closing to the New York Times (in language that might
have come right from an old CIO militant): ’our
movement is not concerned necessarily with Republicans
or Democrats; people who are in positions with those
parties do what they do because it serves their self-
interest. Our movement will be something more, to
change this world with our moral vision.’5

Thus a trip to the dying industrial cities and vapid
sprawl suburbs of Ohio can bring America face-to-face
with the answer to so many liberals’ plaintive, hung-
over question last November third: ’Who are these
people?’ Snapshots of those who likely voted for Bush,
against their interests, and tragically paid the
ultimate price for the madman’s ambitions can be found
in the brief obituaries the New York Times published in
an article about the Marines of the Third Battalion.
’Lance Cpl. Eric J. Bernholz, 23, was a devoted member
of the Grove City Church of the Nazarene, and poured
his energy into acting in its plays and coaching church
youth sports. He graduated from Grove City High School
and sometimes talked of wanting to be a firefighter.’6
Grove City is a blue-collar suburb of Cleveland,
largely populated by folks like retired steelworkers-in
a municipal area that lays off, not hires,
firefighters. Another obituary spends a sentence
recounting a life from a small town south of Columbus
continually menaced by the possible closure of the
paper mill that supports the local economy: ’Lance Cpl.
Aaron H. Reed, 21, a long distance runner on cross-
country and track teams, was the president of class of
’01 at Southeastern High School in Chillicothe, where
job opportunities are few and the military is a popular
option. He has a brother serving in Afghanistan.’

This is the 51 percent of voting America that will not
be swayed from the Republican far right (back to a
center-right Democratic Party?) merely by a different
’framing’ of issues. Indeed, the activists of both the
left and the Democratic Party have seemed equally
befuddled since Bush’s reelection, as well they should
be. If the answer is not as simple as a different
’messaging’ or more blog-organizing, it is also not
just another teach-in or protest in another college
town or chic progressive ghetto. If the political
loyalties of ordinary Ohioans were to be flung against
the power structure in a progressive movement, it would
likely only happen the only way it ever has happened in
the state’s history-by a reinvigorated labor movement
at the grassroots. The mass growth of unions not only
organizes the membership of a social movement, it also
begins to redistribute resources and power from the top
down. In places like Ohio, the only feasible short-term
economic gains for most people lie in unionizing the
state’s remaining industries (those that physically
cannot leave and are unlikely to shut down)-just as the
only feasible long-term prospects for a revitalized
left in the exurbs and church turf is in the workplaces
that still bind people together. Fortunately, for this
article seeks not to dwell in cynical pessimism, Ohio
is home to some of the most unnoticed, but exciting,
grassroots labor organizing in the country.

Two unions that offer some hope in Ohio are the Toledo-
based Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC, which
represent some 6,000 farm workers in northwest Ohio and
southeast Michigan) and the Columbus-headquartered Ohio
District 1199 of SEIU (which encompasses some 25,000
health care and social service workers in Ohio, West
Virginia, and Appalachian Kentucky). These unions have
had little-noticed but important organizing
breakthroughs in recent years-in different, and key,
working-class demographics. FLOC’s farm-worker
membership base consists almost entirely of immigrants
from Latin America, and the union’s successes are a
rare foothold to greater economic and political power
for the culturally invisible army of Latino
proletarians who increasingly do the farm work,
meatpacking, and construction labor in the Midwest.
District 1199 WV/KY/OH, on the other hand, is
overwhelmingly female and multiracial, along the
contours of health care employment in the region
(largely African Americans in battered urban cores like
Cleveland and Akron; and blue-collar whites from the
steel suburbs to the foothills of Appalachia). District
1199 in particular has an unmatched record of new
organizing in Ohio, winning almost all of the many
union elections it files for and devoting more of its
resources to organizing (some 50 percent) than almost
any other union.

Both 1199 and FLOC are extending their Ohio gains
outward from the state. FLOC, after waging a campaign
against Mt. Olive Pickle Company for years, recently
won a landmark organizing victory over them in North
Carolina for 9,000 workers (which marks the single
biggest collective bargaining victory ever in that
Southern, right-to-work state). District 1199 WV/KY/OH,
while sticking to its three-state region for
organizing, has become a ’flagship local’ for SEIU
nationally as that union attempts to gear its entire
structure towards such an organizing focus. In the new
Change to Win union coalition, SEIU and the similarly-
focused UNITE-HERE are now reshaping union organizing
entirely to rebuild union density before it drops to
zero, and it is bypassing the AFL-CIO (and it’s slavish
devotion to the Democratic Party) to do so. Such
extensions of success outwards from Ohio to new terrain
follow what must be labor’s path to rebuild power:
consolidate strength in those regions and industries
currently possible, in order to later take on the
juggernauts of Wal-Mart and the non-union South.

Despite a reinvigorated labor movement, many
progressives (and certainly top Democratic politicians)
have simply forgotten about unions as a unifying social
movement of blue-collar people. In such a post-labor
left, many social-justice activists wonder,
legitimately, if it is even conceivable anymore that
worker organizations could bring progressive values
back into the hearts and homes of rust-belt evangelical
communities. Certainly, fighting for a voice at work
does not automatically imply an organizational
challenge to broadly felt anxieties about abortion or
homophobia. But the lasting effect of a mass fight for
unionization can be seen in Akron and Toledo, the two
Ohio cities that experienced virtual insurrections
against established authority in 1934. While much of
the rest of Ohio has tilted rightward with the times,
those cities have remained overwhelmingly progressive
and Democratic. Indeed, Akron, which contemporary
journalist Ruth McKinney noted during the Great
Depression was an ’almost 100% native-born white
city...with one of the highest percentage of veterans’
organizations in the country,’4 was notorious for being
a conservative Republican town prior to 1934. After
cataclysmic sit-down strikes against the rubber-factory
tyrants, however, the city gained a broad swath of
institutional progressive blue-collar organization.
Compare this to Cincinnati, where some unionization
occurred in the 1930s but certainly no transformative
social struggle, and most working-class white people
today vote Republican (indeed, such conservatism
supports an out-of-control racist police force, whose
multiple murders in the black community sparked riots
in 2001).

But can unions today, like FLOC and 1199, operating in
such a different political context, possibly pull off
similar unionization that leads to a mass changing of
loyalties among ordinary working-class people? Indeed,
these unions’ memberships encompass a wide range of
political viewpoints about issues like abortion and gay
marriage, and although they both certainly marshaled
large majorities of their memberships to oppose Bush in
2004, it is debatable if many of those members also
supported the initiative against same-sex marriage or
Bush’s Iraq war. Any changing of consciousness will
only happen through hard work and patience, individual
by individual, in the communities and workplaces where
different kinds of people are brought together by the
material conditions of their life. But to close on an
optimistic note, 1199 took two important votes at a
statewide delegates’ assembly two years ago. The
delegates assembly is made up of shop-floor
representatives of each workplace-the grass-roots
leaders of small groups, usually the people who carry
union drives through management threats and firings
with their personal bravery and integrity. The
delegates’ assembly, meeting to oversee the continuing
organizing work of the union, voted by a large majority
to oppose the war in Iraq. They also voted-narrowly,
after passionate debate by both sides-to support the
right to same-sex marriage.

James Straub is a writer and union organizer in Las
Vegas.

Notes

1. Barbara Ehrenreich, ’The Faith Factor,’ The Nation,
November 29, 2004.
2. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ’Being a Protestant
Fundamentalist,’
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dunbarortiz110805.ht
ml.
3. Mike Davis, unpublished manuscript, undated.
4. Jason Deparle, ’Hispanic Group Thrives on Faith and
Federal Aid,’ New York Times, May 3, 2005.
5. James Dao, ’Flush with Victory, Grass-roots Crusader
against Same-Sex Marriage Thinks Big,’ New York Times,
November 26, 2004.
6. John Kifner, ’Death Visits a Marine Unit, Once
Called Lucky,’ New York Times, August 7, 2005.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0106straub.htm