By: Reverend Richard Beal
Labor was but one of many movements for reform in this country, and like other movements it had other benefits, in labor's case benefits beyond the sometimes mixed blessing of creating strong unions. Labor birthed the eight hour day, when people often worked six days a week from dawn to dusk for only a pittance in wages. It went a long way toward ending child labor, for it wasn't only adult miners who were blown to smithereens in the explosions and ceiling collapses, it was also children as young as nine and ten. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union almost ended the acceptance of sweat shops in the New York City garment district. Migrant farm workers were still trying to organize in the sixties and seventies. WalMart employees are fighting to unionize their shops as we speak.
Much was accomplished and a very great deal was left undone. No matter the power of the dream, or how beautiful the vision of working people's solidarity, almost everywhere that labor was able to resist government and management repression and strike-breaking to achieve some success, human nature and the aftermath of long struggle led to new forms of abuse. As the French Revolution ended in the Terror and the Russian Revolution wound up simply replacing one brutal autocratic regime with another, so too did American workers too frequently find themselves victims of arrogant union officials and sometimes criminal union bosses, rather than the rank and file policy makers and leaders of a democratic union they had struggled for.
As I said at the beginning of this service, Unitarians and Universalists have a long history in this country of being allied with reform movements. In the 1780s the Universalists went on public record as opposing slavery, and urging peace rather than war as a national tool. William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, the most important of the Abolitionist papers and probably the most significant individual – with the possible exception of Frederick Douglas – in the war of words that preceded the Civil War, was in his later life a Unitarian.
We're familiar with the names of many famous Unitarians and Universalists who shaped this country by reforming many of its institutions: Clara Barton in the Civil War and Florence Nightingale in the Crimea revolutionized nursing, Susan B. Anthony was not on the right side of every issue but she was a stalwart for Women's Suffrage, Margaret Sanger led the reform in family planning and sex education, Henry David Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to support the War to Annex Texas, Dorothea Dix was hugely important in modernizing and improving the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Most of these we've heard of, but there were many others. Charles Spear, a Universalist, was a major figure in the reform of American prisons. For years he published the first newspaper printed especially for the imprisoned, called The Prisoner's Friend. He toured Great Britain to lecture on prison reform and visited France to study the new prisons that were beginning there. Henry Whitney Bellows worked tirelessly to improve urban water and sanitary management. Frederick Law Olmstead altered the landscape of cities by designing and building the first great city park systems. And there were countless others even lesser known. I remember George Perkins, a bus driver in Biddeford, Maine and a member of the Universalist church there who, when the textile mills were closing to move to the South and there were blocks-long bread lines, would load his bus with foodstuffs he'd wangle from merchants and distribute to those in need along his bus route. Ann Brigham in Louisville, who'd studied with Jane Adams at Hull House. She ran a Settlement House with her husband in a now torn down neighborhood, and, in her spare time, organized a Children's Theater. There are thousands of other unknown Unitarians and Universalists who walked their talk and left the world a little better off by having done so. One of the unsung heroes of Universalism in Levi Powers, who was not only a Universalist minister but a full time union organizer. I found his biography in a dustbin, thrown out by the Divinity School when I was a student. Perhaps he was too obscure and his cause now in too much disfavor for the Harvard/Andover Library to keep it on it's shelves.
If so, shame on it. For even if it's "safely" on microfiche (which isn't very safe), the record of human good should be available for holding in human hands. And the reinforcement of tactile and olfactory and visual experience added to support what we can gain from intellectual experience is an important part of learning. It does us little good to know abstract facts unless we have somehow tasted them spiced and flavored by reality. Theories are helpful, but no where near as helpful as when we've tested and proven them by getting our hands dirty. Our history is replete not only with reformers but activists, not only with authors and philosophers but also with working people. By way of full disclosure, I'm a former member of AFSCME.
No matter how distant and separate the Unitarian and Universalist reformers and activists were in terms of wealth, class and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were bound together by a very similar faith and by a shared understanding of the importance of character. In religious education and from the pulpit it was taught and preached that the single most important part of a person, far more important than the particulars of religious faith and belief, was character. By it they meant personal attributes such as honesty, hard work, an appropriate-to- their-station degree of thrift, a decent respect for the thoughts and feelings of their families and communities (which meant a certain reserve and politeness), patriotism and civic-mindedness, self-discipline, and the kind of social justice their background and faith demanded of them. They were not, except perhaps for the latter, not all that different from most of the people in the country. These were essentially bourgeois values in an increasingly bourgeois culture toward which, in many respects, our Unitarian and Universalist traditions had helped to shape the nation, and which they continued to influence as the country grew and changed.
Our children and youth were taught and continually reminded of their obligations and duties to the United States and to the rule of law – including Constitutionally guaranteed personal freedoms – and to those less fortunate than themselves. It sounds very old fashioned, and in terms of what is happening in the United States today it is. But it had its real value then and still does. Those values were, and remain today, a major aspect of Unitarian Universalism. We have as many individuals involved in public and private policy making as we do, precisely because the values which support them are not only an inherent component of Unitarian Universalism, but still preached from many of our stronger pulpits and still published in our own press and those to which our members contribute.
Personally I believe it is not only my individual duty but the duty of our churches and of the UUA to, while avoiding purely partisan politics, make every effort possible to make the three traditional watchwords of Unitarian Universalism – "freedom, reason, and [a generous] tolerance" what we are about as a religious movement and in our individual lives and behavior. Margaret Mead told us we should "never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world," that indeed it is the only thing that ever has. Jesus spoke of the power of just two or three gathered together. And we are a small group! We're a relatively small group in this church, and have only a total of four or five hundred thousand in a nation of over two hundred million.
But I see no reason for us not to encourage each other to live out the faith we share by discerning where our values coincide and finding approaches other than party politics we can agree to pursue together to better spread our faith and make it again a significant factor in the lives and policies of our local communities and of our state and national legislatures. For these things can be accomplished as well by modeling (i.e. by walking our talk) what we believe and what we dream as by any other method. It is, especially in our families, but in every relationship we have (professional, social, cultural, ethical and moral) important to remember and to act on those duties we accept when we embrace this faith in the continued possibility of improvement in our shared world. We can move to make it a better, fitter, juster, and more loving world if we individually and collectively choose to do so and, in this case join with sisters and brothers who need a wage decent enough to decently feed, cloth, house, educate and have the where-with-all to practice preventive medicine in their families.
Yes, it will take considerable labor, a great deal of real work, initially on ourselves. We are here today to celebrate labor. Let us see it, not merely as part of our history, but also as part of our future. Let us hold the hands, however soiled or dirty, of all the men and women of the labor movement, who have much to teach us and to learn from us. So may this be. and Blessed be. Amen.