Fight Like Hell for the Living

An Essay by AFT-Wisconsin President Jon Shelton

Hello friends,

This is Kirk Bangstad, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company.

Today, my good friend and AFT-Wisconsin President, Professor Jon Shelton from UW-Green Bay, tells the story of Mother Jones and how she never backed down when fighting for the rights of workers.

I needed to be reminded that throughout history, working class fighters bent the arc of history towards justice, because it didn't bend by itself.

We're paying Jon for his article today through the sale of our Progressive beer, including our newest release--"The Gulf of Mexico" Mexican Lager.

If you want to keep reading articles from Jon and our cadre of great journalist-activists, please consider buying our beer online for delivery in 39 states.

Now without further ado, here's Jon.

Fight Like Hell for the Living

Anyone reading this essay doesn’t need me to tell you that every day we careen a little bit further toward authoritarianism. We’ve all been watching what has been happening in Los Angeles over the past couple of weeks, but it needs to be repeated, over and over, that we are witnessing something truly unprecedented: an out-of-control presidential administration sending troops to a state whose governor doesn’t want them, all to intimidate a population rightly protesting the terrorist tactics of ICE. Then, on Saturday, there was the military parade for the authoritarian-in-chief’s birthday, a show of force worthy of tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un. And, there is the escalation of war between Israel and Iran, which could engulf the entire region.

There was indeed a lot of awful news in the media cycle over the weekend, but certainly nothing was worse than the cold-blooded attacks on two Democratic legislators right across the border in Minnesota. We mourn for Rep. Hortman and her husband and hope that Sen. John Hoffman and his wife survive the senseless attack.
We don’t have all the information about the gunman’s motives, but make no mistake about it: it is not an accident that the targets were Democrats. Rep. Hortman and Sen. Hoffman were part of an extensive hit list of Democrats, including, we’ve now learned, a number of Democratic officeholders in Wisconsin. I’d like to be wrong, but it is difficult to understand this attack as anything other than an effort to intimidate those of us who oppose extreme far right ideology.

How we respond—and by this I mean not just those who identify as Democrats but everyone in this country who oppose rightwing authoritarianism—is very important. Two days ago, I drove from Wisconsin to Mississippi to visit my elderly grandparents, a pilgrimage I do every summer to see my two favorite people.
Every year, I drive through Mount Olive, Illinois, where a modest highway sign advertises the Mother Jones monument. Every year, I consider stopping, but I’ve always been trying to get to Mississippi or to get home (anyone who knows me knows that I am a notoriously fast driver), and so I’ve never found the time. Well, this year, I made the time.

If you don’t know who Mother Jones is, she was an Irish-American woman (an immigrant, actually!), whose husband and four children died in a yellow fever epidemic when she was thirty years old. Following that awful tragedy, Jones, rather than start a new family, moved to Chicago. She started a business, which was wiped out by the Chicago fire in 1871, and then joined a labor union. A gifted and driven organizer and public speaker, she became nationally renowned for pushing workers, especially miners, to engage in militant action to improve their dismal working conditions: to go on strike and to maintain their resolve in the face of strikebreaking goons hired by anti-union companies. A West Virginia district attorney once called her the “most dangerous woman in America.”

I sought to commune with Mother Jones on my trip down south because I wanted a reminder of how I know we have to approach the authoritarians who want to destroy our democracy. Mother Jones never backed down from a fight, and we can’t either. I wanted to be reminded of the solidarity we share with Americans from our past who fought their own version of authoritarianism.

Amidst all of the human tragedy this presidential administration and his backers have unleashed, the legacy of Mother Jones reminds us that we absolutely cannot back down, and we have to stand together if we are going to win. We must mourn those who give their lives fighting, and we have to show that we will never give up because our country is worth fighting for. As Mother Jones said it, we have to “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

What that phrase means is, to put it simply: we honor those who have lost a great deal in this fight by making certain we don’t let these monsters take the world we’ve worked so hard to build away from us and from our children.

The protests over this past weekend show that we have the will; the huge turnout at No King’s protests in hundreds of cities would have certainly made Mother Jones proud. But we are missing one key ingredient in building the kind of resistance that will not just topple authoritarianism but also wipe out the conditions—social isolation and civic degradation, for instance—that allowed it to thrive in the first place.

We have to start organizing to shut things down, to begin disrupting the economy and other institutions the way Mother Jones and so many other union activists did in the early 1900s. We have to fight back in a way that forces the authoritarians to back down, and that puts the needs of working people at the center of our democracy in a way they haven’t been in at least a generation.

My brother Kirk has been writing about this already, and I hope we can start to get folks who are participating in protests to get comfortable with the idea of walking out on their jobs, too, obviously in conjunction with hundreds of thousands of other workers. As Mother Jones understood, everything functions in this country because of the work we all do every day. Authoritarian demagogues don’t make our economy work, and billionaires like the president’s former BFF only exist because of the millions of workers who have built every institution in this country. Once we all realize that power, the authoritarians are done. Fight like hell indeed.

Jon Shelton is a professor and chair of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of The Education Myth and Teacher Strike!, which won the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and more. Shelton has served as Vice-Chair of Green Bay’s Equal Rights Commission and sits on the boards of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He is also Vice-President for Higher Education of AFT-Wisconsin.