Today is Labor Day in the U.S. In practice, for most Americans, the primary significance of the day is as the unofficial last day of summer. I just went for a long swim in my outdoor pool, which closes today.

There are also political and union activities on the labor theme, marking the official reason for the holiday. Thus, President Obama gave a speech today in Detroit to a union gathering, previewing the themes of his long awaited address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, addressing the concerns of organized labor.

This September date as a workers holiday was originally chosen by the Central Union of New York in 1882. It is strange that the rest of the world celebrates May 1^st as the international day of labor, marking the Haymarket Affair of 1886, a scandalous labor conflict in Chicago. During the cold war, the U.S. even officially designated May 1^st as “loyalty day.” The contrast with the practice of the Soviet Union and its allies was essential. The American Labor Day, though, has an equally serious origin. It became a national holiday after the violent events surrounding the Pullman Strike of 1894. American indeed has an important and rich labor history.

I think it is unfortunate that American labor’s celebration is out of sync with the rest of the world. We commemorate alone, which weakens the power of the ritual. Nonetheless, especially now, when labor issues are so central, as President Obama indicated in his speech, it is important to take notice. I recall some previous Deliberately Considered posts.

Rachel Sherman’s “Domestic Workers Gain Visibility, Legitimacy” noted an advance in labor legislation in the state of New York. She highlighted the achievements of the Domestic Workers Union to agitate and achieve some fundamental rights in the new legislation, concerning overtime, vacation leave and protections against sexual and racial harassment. As she also observed the place of American domestic workers in the global economy and the connection between class and gender, she celebrated the work of the union in empowering its members, through educational programs, research and protecting them from abusive employers.

In her reflections upon her play commemorating another key moment in labor history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Cecilia Rubino commemorates the role women workers played in the early American labor movement, mourns the deaths of the victims of the fire and notes how following this catastrophe the citizens of New York demanded and helped enact significant labor, health and safety legislative reforms.  Further, “public outrage over the event galvanized the progressive movement and women’s suffrage, and went on to instigate many of the most important reforms of the New Deal.”

These two posts remind us that unions have played an important role in our history and are still playing the role. There are powerful forces seeking to forget this, as Vince Carduccci’s post on the murals in Maine’s Labor Department explains.  Governor Paul LePage, the Tea Party Governor of the state of Maine, really did remove murals commemorating key events in Maine’s labor history because he viewed them as being biased, i.e., pro labor. Even more striking, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, along with other Republican governors, has actively tried to disempower public employee unions.  We had a first row seat view of the early rounds of the political conflict over labor rights in Madison, Wisconsin, in reports by Anna Paretskaya and Chad Goldberg. One of the most important issues in the upcoming elections will revolve around this conflict.

And as we think about this issue, we can turn to some “new music.” In his two posts thus far (more coming soon), Daniel Goode reflects on the problematic status of new music in our cultural landscape. But by analyzing this, he works against the trend. And I am happy to report that in his “We’ve Been Demoted – Part II, you can find not only his reflections on the struggle of new music composers to find an audience, but you can also listen to his composition, which confronts Wisconsin labor politics. Note that the audio file of this work is now available on the post, and can also be heard below.

In my next review post, I will address the issue of cultural freedom, as it appeared this past week on music and politics. Here we close with a video of the President’s speech in Detroit, more on these issues later in the week.

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In recent posts, Vince Carducci examining the urban environment in terms of psychogeography, derive and detournment, and the gift and potlatch, explored the art of Detroit, the city at the epicenter of Fordism and ground zero of post – Fordist devastation. While I think his inquiry is illuminating, showing art playing an important role in democratic society, I am skeptical about his political utopianism, as he stands on the shoulders of Marx and the Situationists and Ken Wark’s account of them. I don’t think that the full power of the artwork is captured as a critique of capitalism or that the full political significance of the work is in its message. We disagree, once again, on art as propaganda and how art becomes politically significant.

Artwork, and the world it creates when appreciated, is, in my judgment, more important than context. The art, its independent domain, is where the action is, which is then related to a variety of different contexts. To be sure, Carducci shows how this works. Detroit artists don’t only speak to each other, creating work that communicates for themselves and their immediate audience. They speak to the de-industrializing world, providing insights, suggesting an alternative way of living. But this can work in many different ways, not necessarily tied to political programs of the left or the right or the center.

Take an example drawn from two past posts: Ivo Andric novelistic depiction of The Bridge on the Drina inspired Elzbieta Matynia to reflect on the way that bridge, connecting Serbia and Bosnia, provided a space for interaction between people from elsewhere, at the kapia, the public square on the bridge, enabling civility. Her account, in turn, inspired me to reflect upon the bridges I observe on my daily run through the public park that was the Rockefeller estate, and provided me with critical perspective for thinking about the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year. Andric’s novel informed Matynia’s cultural theory, which gave me insight into everyday life, helping me confront a major natural and man made catastrophe in Japan, which, of course, was far from the world of Andric’s creation. The metaphor of the bridge opens up an imaginative field that moves freely.

I think it is this opening that is key to the role art plays in a democratic society. Art as art, art for art’s sake without elitism, is about the development of imagination, in form. It informs opinion, which potentially makes democratic deliberations more fruitful.

Thus, as Paul A. Kottman draws upon the works of Shakespeare to gain insight into the character of presidents past, he seeks to understand the birthers’ convictions about President Obama. “Just as nothing is going to count for Othello as evidence that Desdemona loves him, nothing will ‘prove’ to the ‘birthers’ that Obama and the civic world he represents are trustworthy.” Shakespeare is not a Republican or a Democrat, obviously, but he can inform democratic judgment, about the destructive power of skepticism of the other.

And Cecilia Rubino uses theater to remember and commemorate in a theater piece, dramatically confronting the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, while Judy Taylor uses mural painting to remember and commemorate Maine’s labor history. Taylor was commissioned to do this work. Rubino is committed to the political project of labor. For one, the work is a result of a market transaction, for the other, a matter of political commitment. But in both, the work speaks beyond the market and commitment. It opens imaginative space. The removal of the Taylor’s mural from public display is a scandal because banishment closes. It is repressive, beyond left and right.

The opening of imagination that is art is sometimes tied to a political cause and sometimes it has little or nothing to do with politics. But the opening itself serves democratic ends. It battles against cliché.  It enriches public life and human capacity. Sometimes, this has immediate political meaning and consequence. Vince and I are different, but not really in opposition, in that he seems to especially value the immediate and I prefer distance.

In upcoming posts, we will explore art that informs public imagination more slowly, less directly: Daniel Goode on listening creatively in New York. What I find most striking about his mini-reviews is that they show how listening is a way of thinking, providing insight. The insight is politically significant, even without any specific political end. And this is not about elitist institutions and sensibilities, high art as the grounds for philistine status acquisition, as I think a post or two on the rap scene by another new DC contributor, Lisa Aslanian will show.

“We heard an explosion, through the shattering glass

We looked up at the Asch building

A bundle of cloth came flying out the window

On the way down it opened up in the wind

It was a girl, it was girl.”

(From the Fire)

Today is May Day, “el Dia del Trabajo,” a day in which work and workers are honored around the globe. Today in particular, five weeks after the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, we remember the 146 immigrant workers, most Jewish and Italian girls, who died trying to escape flames that roared through the upper floors of the Asch building, a garment factory near Washington Square. Trapped behind locked doors, many never had the chance to escape. Others jumped out the windows, some hand-in-hand, their hair and clothes aflame.

Saturday, March 25, 1911 was a clear, early spring day. Crowds of New Yorkers strolled in Washington Square and on the streets of the lower East Side. Suddenly at 4:45, many looked up and saw smoke billowing from a ten story building on Green Street and Washington Place. Hundreds rushed to the scene. One observer said he thought the factory owner was trying to save his best cloth by throwing bundles of fabric from the ninth floor. He and so many others realized in horror that they were seeing not bundles of cloth falling from the windows but girls — girls in flame, girls who were landing in broken heaps on the sidewalk in front of them. The fire which lasted less than half an hour, made these invisible immigrant workers suddenly starkly visible.  Photographs of the mangled bodies were printed in the morning newspapers but still thousands came to view the open coffins lined up in rows on ‘Misery Lane,’ the makeshift morgue set up on the peer at 26^th Street.  Some were family and friends desperately searching for missing loved ones but most wanted to just see the dead with their own eyes. Ocular proof.

New Yorkers felt that they knew these shirtwaist makers. They were the girls who dared to strike, the girls dared to stand up for themselves by standing in the streets through the bitter winter of 1909/1910 to advocate for better working conditions. Everyone in the city felt implicated and responsible for these preventable deaths at Triangle. One in ten New Yorkers lined the streets of Manhattan to watch the procession of the horse drawn caskets with the last unknown victims on a rainy April morning.

There are so many tragedies, so many workers die everyday, why remember this one event from 100 years ago? We remember the tragedy at Triangle because it directly followed the Uprising of the 20,000, the first significant strike by women in history. Many of the girls who died at Triangle were the same teenagers who took to the streets of Manhattan. They had the same simple demands as workers in Chicago who filled Haymarket Square in 1886 on May Day, calling for a 52 hour work week and decent wages. And both of these viral, impromptu strikes continue to be echoed in the current uprising by young people in the Middle East, young people who have nothing to lose, who simply know they have the human right to seek equity and justice.  We remember Triangle because the people of the City of New York, many of whom saw the tragedy unfold in front of their own eyes, said this can never happen again here, and they passed laws in the state legislature, which created real labor and health and safety reforms. Public outrage over the event galvanized the progressive movement and women’s suffrage, and went on to instigate many of the most important reforms of the New Deal. There’s so much inherent injustice that we all know needs to change, and we need to keep examining moments when the gears of history actually shift. What’s inherent in the story of Triangle is that every individual human life is more important than anything we can produce. It’s a story that needs to be told again and again, and one that every generation encounters in its own way.

In honor of the centennial of Triangle, I had the privilege of creating a new performance piece called, FROM THE FIRE, with the wonderful composer, Elizabeth Swados, the poet, Paula Finn, and set designer, Bonnie Roche. A century later, workers continue to face perilous conditions in an unregulated global market place, and our hope was not to romanticize the tragedy but to again honor and celebrate the lives of these very ordinary, working women and men who instigated so much change. The piece, which performed at Judson Church in March and will be featured today on WNET Channel 13’s Sunday Arts Program at noon. (It can also be seen online here.) And it will travel to the Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival in August, though we’ve been asked, ‘Why Scotland? This should go to Wisconsin!’

For more information see trianglefromthefire.com