Way back when calculators were the size of netbooks, I was in my last year of a prolonged Bachelor’s of Arts program.
In the same amount of time it took me to hammer out a degree in English, school friends of mine had graduated from medical school and others were practising lawyers. But I digress.
I took a graduate level seminar on “The Essay”, a class where I obviously spent most of the class either at Java Jive nearby or sleeping through. Yes, that is a dangling preposition and one of the lessons I did retain from that class was dangling is not a hanging offense nor is splitting an infinitive.
There were only 8 of us in the class–I know, you’d think with other summer course
offerings like “Rocks for Jocks” and “3 weeks in Greece pretending to care about early Spartan culture”, there’d be a line up around the block for this one. Anyway, as we went through our study of the various forms of the essay–expository, narrative, descriptive and…oh crap, um….persuasive–we were required to write an essay in each style.
For my expository essay I decided to look into the events behind Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath . As is usual with a mild case of ADD, the “oh look, something shiny” effect tends to turn any research into a variety of fascinating side trips leaving the initial topic back at the first or second turn of the maze.
Mary "Mother" Jones
So my final paper was on the Industrial Workers of the World.
2 things ended up surprising me as I researched and presented the paper.
The first thing I learned was about a protest march that took place in Edmonton in 1913. The building of the railroad had brought thousands of men westward. What everyone seemed to overlook was that in the winter these men had no employment, no income and, as the rail camps were closed, no place to live.
Enter the Wobblies. They rounded up several hundred of these homeless men and marched into 2 downtown churches during Sunday service and requested a place to sleep. Eventually, when it was apparent these folk were taking the Christian concept of sanctuary quite seriously, pressure was brought to bear on the civic authorities to open a public shelter and find temporary employment for the men.
And then World War I broke out and the riffraff suddenly became invaluable as lead catchers on the front lines.
The second surprise I had was the reaction of my educated classmates to
the paper. One of the events I related was the “suicide” (coroner’s report) of IWW organizer Wesley Everest who was dragged from jail, beaten with a rifle, castrated, lynched, dragged to another tree, lynched again and then strung up a 3rd time before his corpse was liberally (pardon the pun) riddled with bullets.
A woman sitting across the table from me yawned and asked, “why’d they bother to castrate him if they were just gonna string him up anyway?”…. Have I mentioned that I attended university in Alberta?
Ginger Goodwin
My dad knew about the occupation of the churches in Edmonton. From the way he spoke, I suspect my grandfather may have been involved. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part.
For some reason, all of this came back to me when I first heard about the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Funny how things work, eh?