inkbluesky

old cottages, england  

Remembering Norma Rae

“Unionized” isn’t a word you hear in many American movies. “A decent wage,” now there’s a phrase that doesn’t crop up too often. As for the evocative “your lives and your substance,” poetic descriptions of the human condition aren’t generally found in contemporary entertainment.

This speech is from Martin Ritt’s classic 1979 film Norma Rae, delivered in an impassioned sermon by Ron Leibman in the role of an organizer for the Textile Workers Union of America, a real union at the time and a predecessor to the current trade union UNITE HERE. Norma Rae is an aberration in recent Hollywood history. The movie portrays a realistic union-organizing campaign and the fierce corporate response at the fictional O.P. Henley textile mill in the fictional town of Henleyville. As everyone knew at the time, the mill and the town were unambiguous stand-ins for J.P. Stevens and its sixteen-year war against union organizers in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and the movie accurately depicted the state of American labor in 1979.

The situation has not improved much since. The only remaining Stevens factory in the United States (owned by its successor company, Westpoint Home) is a unionized blanket mill in Maine. In other industries, union organizers are battling adversaries as unyielding as any in the days of Norma Rae. According to the labor advocacy group American Rights at Work, last year more than 23,000 Americans were fired or penalized for legal union activity.

Unions do seem to be having hard times especially in America. That may change over the next few years as India and China take away more factory jobs and the jobs of those professionals with college degrees who thought they didn’t need unions and were immune from major shifts in the economy.  – Unions are so despised by some that they’re glad to show off their hypocrisy about national security by scuttling the new anti-terror legislation. In the south there’s an old saying that some people are so stubborn they’d cut off their noses to spite their face.

The Modernism That Failed?

The first reason for modernism’s failure is that America in 2007 looks nothing like inter-war Europe where modernism began. The modernist’s world was one of poor, carelessly planned cities where cheap density was a real blessing. America ended up being rich and filled with cars. With all that wealth and all that mobility, Americans moved to car-based suburbs and chose to spend a little extra for ornamentation. Who can blame them? The end result was that modernism ended up being a bad fit for postwar America.

Mr. Glazer is more interested in modernism’s failure in delivering public buildings and his analysis is trenchant. Modernism moved from being a social movement into an elite style, and part of appealing to elites is being inaccessible to the rest. Self-referential buildings that require lots of inside knowledge to get the joke are a way of separating the cognoscenti from hoi polloi. Those who cared about such things came to control the production of public buildings, and the result was overly abstract monuments and drab towers that appeal to the artistic elite and no one else.

Pretty high hat stuff here and some points are well made within the context of major city centers across the country. In small to medium sized city their isn’t so much a resistance to innovative modern architecture as their is scale of costs. Up and down the south-east the major highways in and out of cities all look about the same – generally ugly – dotted with small businesses  such as fast food restaurants, muffler shops, office parks and stripe malls made mostly of cinder block covered with cheesy facades because the plans are cheap and they’re cheap to build. It does speak to a certain snobbery to say that money should be spent on eye candy rather then job creation. On the other hand it is sad that our major thoroughfares don’t look better. For the time being modernists architecture hasn’t failed in middle America it just got pushed aside by economic reality.