Harold Meyerson

One hundred years ago next week, the water came to Los Angeles. On November 5, 1913, civic dignitaries gathered at the north end of the arid, undeveloped San Fernando Valley for the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a marvel of both engineering and chicanery. Five years in the making, the aqueduct pumped the water out of the Owens River Valley (to which the spring runoff from the melting snows of the Sierra Nevada descended) and carried it over 223 miles of mainly desert to the L.A. suburb. Raising his voice to be heard over the noise of both the crowd and the water cascading downhill, the project’s chief engineer, William Mulholland, proclaimed with epic succinctness: “There it is—take it!”

And the city did.

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This passage from a Tuesday Wall Street Journal article on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) eavesdropping on the phone calls of friendly foreign leaders could come from the files of Franz Kafka:

“The agency has been rebuked repeatedly by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for misrepresenting the nature of its spy programs and for violating the court’s confidential orders. In its defense, NSA officials have said the agency didn’t understand its own programs well enough to describe them accurately to the court.”

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In early 1953, a number of democratic socialist intellectuals gathered in literary critic Irving Howe’s living room to discuss the formation of a new political journal. McCarthyism was at its height in the United States, while Joseph Stalin still ruled over the Soviet Union. Howe and his guests knew what they wanted their new journal to be: A quarterly publication of ideas, criticism, and reporting from around the world—from de-colonialized New Delhi, from New York housing projects and Michigan auto plants—that illuminated and excoriated both the structural inequalities endemic to capitalism and the self-perpetuating tyranny baked into communism. The journal’s political perspective was clear: Capitalist economies and polities needed to be democratized and socialized so that human potential could flourish; communist totalitarian regimes needed to be democratized and socialized so that, well, human potential could flourish. At the same time, the magazine would eschew the turgid rhetoric that afflicted so much socialist writing. It would speak in plain, smart English, such as the sentence—“Socialist is the name of our desire”—with which Howe and Henry Pachter began the first issue’s ideological-definition essay.

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The story of the United Mine Workers of America is the story of the American labor movement as a whole. The Mine Workers were once the single most important union in the United States: the union that broke from a stodgy labor federation in 1935 to devote its resources to organizing the nation’s factories, the union that built such dynamos as the United Auto Workers and the Steelworkers; the union that sunk so much money into Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign that FDR didn’t raise a peep when striking auto workers occupied General Motors’ Flint, Michigan, factories and didn’t come out until GM had recognized their union; the union that had the strength and cojones to strike during World War II’s strike ban; the union that transformed industrial America. Today, with membership shrunk to perhaps just 10 percent of their peak strength numbers, the Mine Workers, like the labor movement generally, have a past that quite outshines their present. Their retirees outnumber their current members, and they would outnumber them by an even larger margin if coal mining, with its black lung and emphysema, didn’t shorten so many miners’ lives. Clustered in Appalachia, the union, like its industry, sometimes seems to inhabit a land that time forgot.

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The Republican Party has reached its Ninotchka period. Ninotchka, you may recall, was the eponymous Soviet commissar played by Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 MGM comedy, released one year after Stalin’s show trials resulted in the execution of all of the tyrant’s more moderate predecessors in the Soviet leadership. “The last mass trials were a great success,” Ninotchka notes. “There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”

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Michael Bloomberg has declined to endorse anyone in the race to succeed him as New York’s mayor. Neither Democrat Bill de Blasio, whose entire campaign is a critique of Bloomberg’s tenure in office, nor Republican Joseph Lhota, who is trailing de Blasio by a mind-boggling 50 points and who has been heard disparaging Bloomberg to boot, has endeared himself to the billionaire mayor.

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