Grave to Cradle

A few months back, I got sucked into a reading streak about the legacy of extractive industries. It wasn’t exactly calculated. It all started in February when I finally broke into Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town, a book I’d been wanting to get to since it came out in September. Then I broke into Jane Little Botkin’s Frank Little and the IWW, another book I’d been meaning to read after hearing it referenced and touted frequently throughout the first season of a podcast called Death in the West.

While one is closer to memoir and the other is more like a straight-ahead biography, I thought Arsenault and Botkin’s books had a few things in common. For one, neither shy away from the human cost of the industrial empires built within our capitalist system. Nor do they shy away from the deep irony in how we memorialize extractors when their most enduring legacy is generally not what they gave in terms of livelihoods, innovation, or philanthropy, but what they continue to take away in terms of poor health and shortened life expectancies — in both the human domain and the greater living world.

Botkin’s book left me generally fired up about how hard it must’ve been to unearth the story of her great-granduncle Frank, a labor organizer who worked across the West for several years before he was ultimately assassinated in Butte in August 1917. It’s one thing to scavenge for what scarce documents and records exist of working class people in this country. It’s quite another when the FBI has intervened by, shortly after a relative’s murder, confiscating and destroying all of their personal effects that a family would have otherwise. Because the federal government went to such extreme lengths to repress the IWW and erase Frank from the historical record, Botkin’s book feels like nothing short of a miracle. And beyond Frank’s story, I was pretty damn inspired by the foresight the IWW had in recognizing, over a century ago, that multicultural, multidisciplinary socialism was the only sustainable way forward for working people. In describing how the Western Federation of Mining (WFM) came to merge with the IWW in 1905, Botkin writes:

WFM leaders became convinced that one big union of all working-class people needed to be formed — one that attracted and included all crafts, ethnicities, and genders, a tenet that the WFM certainly had not embraced before. Its goal? To abolish the wage system and unite all workers as a single class.

Botkin’s book was one of a few pieces of IWW-adjacent content I spent some time with in February. And eventually, I decided to peruse the IWW’s webstore to see what books they kept in stock, and add some titles to my list for future radicalization reading. Several caught my eye, but none so much as one that I’m sure most anybody else would’ve passed over. It was Margaret Byington’s Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, the fourth of six volumes in The Pittsburgh Survey of 1907-08. The survey is considered a landmark sociological study on the living and labor conditions of the steel district in and surrounding Pittsburgh at the turn of the 20th century.

Prior to March of this year, all I knew of Homestead was that it’s where a lot of generations of my paternal kinfolk (five to seven-plus depending on which branch you start counting from) landed at times when they weren’t living upstream of the Monongahela in Pittsburgh proper. And just based on the description of another book about Homestead in the IWW inventory, it’s clear that a failed 1892 strike there over a proposed wage cut dealt a pretty crushing blow for unionism. The violent suppression by Carnegie Steel Company with the help of a few hundred Pinkertons and a few thousand state militia had essentially rendered Homestead Steel Works a right-to-work mill for decades following. So before even opening Byington’s chronicle of life in the area some 15 years after the strike, I could begin to guess at how shitty life probably was for my Brennan and McCallister ancestors of Homestead ilk.

After cruising the IWW site, I immediately submitted an interlibrary loan request for Byington’s book. Reading it mostly confirmed what the basic background on Homestead had led me to expect. But it also underscored some real nuances in the living conditions among steelworkers. It was kind of amazing what types of statistics the survey pulled from to give a sense of disparities between ethnic groups — certainly medians wages, but also household spending by category, household crowding for families that had to take on boarders to supplement their income, and dues paid to fraternal orders in the absence of any other form of life and burial insurance.

Nobody in a right-to-work gulag like Homestead had it good back then (except for management, most of whom lived on higher ground in neighboring Munhall). But the early 20th century in Homestead is interesting in that you start to see the social and economic advantages of being a native English speaker, even for those denied other privileges of being born in the States.

In breaking the sociological data out by ethnic group, Byington shows how disparities took shape around the American caste order that inevitably creates degrees of status and hierarchy within the dominant white caste. Specifically, everyone from central and eastern Europe who were generalized as Slavs and didn’t speak English fared about as poorly as, or worse than the families of Black mill workers in terms of wages, life expectancy, child mortality, crowding, and sanitation. Learning in some detail about what Slavic families in Homestead endured was sobering for a reason that I guess shouldn’t surprise me. Namely, the Slavs are largely who we have to thank for a Pittsburgh staple: the pierogi.

It’s not an exaggeration to say pierogies enjoy mascot status in Pittsburgh. The fifth inning of every Pirates home game is followed by what’s called the Great Pierogy Race, and the concept is exactly what it sounds like. I say it shouldn’t surprise me that pierogies are endemic to Pittsburgh culture nowadays because it seems like a lot of the aspects of multiculturalism we come to enjoy and commodify over time are from cultural groups we’ve historically pathologized or fucked over outright (this is textbook cultural extraction). And so, it seems only predictable that Pittsburgh would ultimately get its signature food item from people who lived and worked in some of the most deplorable conditions for Andrew Carnegie to be able to build his steel empire.

By the time I finished Byington’s book, it was really hard not to be overwhelmed by not only the irony with the pierogies, but also the meta-ironies I had already seen laid out by Arsenault and Botkin. That is, our institutions continue to memorialize extractors who built their fortunes on the backs of so many of our ancestors who didn’t really see much in return during their material lifetimes. Byington even devoted some space to describing how this grift actively played out in Homestead at the time of the study by talking about the most overt manifestation of it.

Homestead’s extravagant public library underwritten by Andrew Carnegie himself was constructed in 1896 in Munhall, visible from Homestead but some distance away, and a decent uphill climb from where most of the workers lived — not especially accessible placement for people emerging from unforgiving 12-hour shift work. The situation with the Carnegie library in Munhall (which I confess is an impressive French Renaissance building) was all I could think about when I finally returned Byington’s book to my own local Carnegie library.

The window into life in Homestead at the time made me want to pull out some public records I’d previously found and cached on some of my ancestors, and specifically the ones who were in Homestead when Byington would’ve been there. The document that immediately jumped out was my third great-grandfather Peter McCallister’s death notice, which appeared in the Pittsburgh Daily Post in March 1911:

Knowing what we know about Homestead post-1892, I suspect deaths due to injuries sustained on the job were fairly common. However, I do not know how common it would be to call that out in a death notice. If that was standard, great. If it wasn’t, and that was the choice of Peter’s spouse or another surviving family member, fucking awesome. Of course, public death records kind of famously have a wide margin of error — a phenomenon Kerri Arsenault addresses more than once in Mill Town. But supposing the information in Peter McCallister’s death notice is factual (except for the last name misspelling), it’s honestly a relief to see the occupational cause cited somewhere in what scarce documents are out there and available to me three time zones away from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

It’s tempting to bring some other records from my McCallister ancestors into this while I’m on the topic, and maybe I will some other day. But for now, I think it’s probably most relevant to mention a trend that I think my ancestor’s short death notice speaks to. Aside from census records, I’ve noticed that death records are often the only documents we have to show for the existence of poor people.

I’m no archivist, but I do work with one at my day job. I’m also not formally trained at much of anything, but I think I’m not a half-bad researcher. With all those disclaimers, I have to say that a theme that’s emerged in my own experience that also seemed to bear out for Arsenault and Botkin is that most of us have to work in the reverse of the typical biographical format to figure out who our people were. We start from the grave — or whatever is left of someone who existed — and if we’re lucky, we might approximate the cradle.

It can be frustrating just from the standpoint of wanting complete information about somebody’s terrestrial lifetime. To, at minimum, have a time range of when somebody supposedly had a pulse is kind of comforting. It makes it feel like somebody cared enough (or at least cared enough to do their job and sign a document) to prove that somebody existed. Maybe it’s a little bit of a tangent to say so, but one of the more devastating things I’ve read recently is a story in which a Chinook woman named Elizabeth Pickernell was sent to a settler-colonial boarding school as a child and later told by the federal government that she needed to “find witnesses to verify her birth” in order to sign up for Social Security as an adult.

Pickernell’s experience feels worth mentioning not only because Anna V. Smith wrote about it in a damn good High Country News story earlier this month, but because with Indigenous communities, exclusion and absence from vital records is often not limited to those who’ve already passed. I imagine it makes this whole labor of excavating family history that much more difficult and complicated, if it’s even possible.

All said, I’m one of the lucky ones. My ancestors weren’t specifically targeted by the “slow-motion genocide” of colonial policy that Anna V. Smith wrote about, and as far as I know, their records were never raided and destroyed by federal authorities as Frank Little’s had been. Still, I’m discovering that the process of learning about ancestors is not linear. And I’ve kind of begun to feel like there’s something sort of beautiful and more faithful to reality in that. Working backasswards or in a recursive way to retroactively bear witness to somebody or something feels a lot more akin to the way we experience life.

The effort feels like it adds up to something like love, respect, or at least a sense of responsibility to somebody you never knew. For me, particularly on the paternal side of my family, I know most of my ancestors worked most of their lives for Carnegie Steel Corporation, or its various iterations after its namesake steel magnate sold it. Learning their individual names feels like a small way of correcting the record sometimes. They weren’t just nameless employees of a robber baron whose name subsumed an entire U.S. industry. They were people, and maybe they weren’t terrific people that I’d ever choose to be pals with today. But the IWW ethos of One Big Union — all workers of all ethnicities, cultures, and genders, united in solidarity as a single class of people just trying to live an okay life — that makes me feel like I’m always going to have common cause with my ancestors.

More than just appealing to my Marxist sensibilities and general distrust toward the wealthy among us, the whole reading journey with Arsenault, Botkin, and Byington struck a personal chord that I didn’t really see coming. I’ve always been basically aware of my proletarian breeding. I’ve somewhat recently begun describing myself as a person who comes from peasant stock, but almost as a way of managing people’s expectations. In my mind, it’s a shorthand for telling folks I’m not too housebroken and they shouldn’t expect much from me in the way of wit, talent, charm, or credentials. And maybe I kind of like that it calls to my mind the image of a fishmonger, a modest social station that I could see myself holding while moonlighting as a witch if I’d been alive in the Middle Ages (before eventually dying of plague or being burned at the stake, of course).

But what I never really considered until recently are the literal implications of coming from peasant stock. Not because the designation is misleading — it’s definitely the case that I don’t come from propertied or fancy people. I think I had just never realized that it’s a wonder any of us peasant spawn are in this world at all. Byington’s book especially felt like a glimpse into what my kinfolk had to survive for me to even be around long enough to get curious about who they were.

It feels significant to get to that point for personal reasons. But it also feels like a generational inheritance on a more universal scale. On the personal side, finally being up to the task of living enough that I can appreciate rather than begrudge my ancestors for existing feels like a small miracle.

I’ve spent a lot of my life kind of obsessed with the fact that I didn’t choose to be alive as a human being, and struggling to understand why I have to be. If I didn’t enjoy being alive, if life just felt oppressive and tiresome, why did I have to keep going through the motions? Why had I ever been born? It all seemed so unfair, and it was easy to scapegoat everybody who had anything to do with me being born in Livingston, Montana in December 1992. And as an empath, I’ve always been sensitive that there’s not really an Irish exit option, as it were, for ducking out of life. There’s not really a discreet way to leave without traumatizing people who know you.

My preoccupation with the why do I exist? question has never been resolved. I don’t think it can be, at least not head-on. At this point, I think it’s one of those questions Rilke would counsel us to learn to love instead of toiling for some transactional answer to. It’s hard to boil down the whole psychic progression I had to go through to arrive at this mindset, but only within the past two years have I kind of started to frame the inquiry around this whole enterprise of being alive to one of how I will live my life since I’m already here.

I guess that somehow satisfies the relentless part of my brain that gets off on the proverbial why question because I don’t necessarily need to have that answer to decide how I want to exist in society and what I want to be about as an individual. Anyway, that’s all a pretty recent development, and it’s made it possible to feel something I never thought I’d have for my ancestors. It’s more a feeling of responsibility than gratitude, and I think that’s valuable because that seems more self-determined in a way — a reflection of values that I’ve opted into. Learning about them feels like my own small, active way of sabotaging the capitalist ritual of memorializing extractors.

Besides being an act of will, the non-linear nature of trying to unearth my kin’s vital records appeals to me for another reason. I think the concept of intergenerational trauma is familiar to a lot of us, but I’m more convinced by the day that the labor of healing can take on an intergenerational quality as well. I’ve kind of been experiencing this in real-time with my mom.

It’s hard to know the exact number of resources and references that inspired me to start asking my mom questions about her dad, but I started to earlier this year. The man died at 46. My mom, the second-oldest of his four children, was 17 at the time. And I guess doing my own homework around trauma and healing has kind of given me some tools to deconstruct the facts of his death, and get the sense that there’s probably a lot of unprocessed trauma around it for my mom and her siblings. My mom’s dad, Garth Morris, was a pipefitter for Westinghouse (named for yet another industrial baron with Pittsburgh ties) for 23 years at the nuclear complex in the eastern Idaho desert. He and my mom’s mother had been divorced for some time by 1976, so he was living alone when he died in his apartment in Blackfoot of an apparent heart attack on July 21 of that year.

He’d been pretty ill in the final weeks of his life. My mom recently shared his last letter to his kids from July 1, 1976 with me. In it, he mentions he had gone to stay with his own mother, Gertrude, for a few days toward the end of June. He describes having a “stomach flu” and being “so week [sic] all I wanted to do was stay in bed.” Behind the scenes, a journal entry from Gertrude that my mom also shared with me says that during that visit, Garth passed out and cut his head when he fell, requiring a doctor’s visit for stitches.

Knowing that Garth was near the end of his life, there are two sentences between Garth’s last letter and Gertrude’s journal that I think are particularly devastating:

It’s possible that there was more going on with my maternal grandfather’s health than his family was ever aware of. Indeed, if there were a way to prove that he was dealing with some type of cancer, that would possibly be within a covered class of illnesses tied to occupational exposure at the nuclear site that would qualify his surviving children for a legal settlement from the Department of Labor. As I’ve been learning, that’s really difficult to prove retroactively. And that would just be money. It wouldn’t extend the life of somebody who died at a relatively early age. That’s to say, there are certainly limits to the practical recourse or vindication that records can get us for people who are long-dead. But for me, there has been something approaching remedial, and definitely validating about getting familiar with how some of these people I’m connected to lived, and how they left the material world.

There’s a lot in Garth’s last letter to his children that makes me suspect the guy was lonelier and in a lot more pain than he let on. There is a point in which he explicitly addresses my mom, saying he wishes she could’ve gotten summer work out in Blackfoot because he would’ve enjoyed the company.

Something about how brief and subtle that bit is just comes off as deeply sad to me. At the same time, I feel a strange sense that just reading that almost 45 years later somehow rescues Garth’s experience from isolation and obscurity. This might be the craziest statement you read all week, but I really do wonder if this whole exercise makes our ancestors less lonely in their suffering if their disembodied spirits have set up shop somewhere beyond our dimension of space and time. And, I don’t know, for those of us who get invested in the hard, ongoing work of healing, I wonder if it’s kind of why we’re even here.

Something that made me start thinking of this more broadly as what I referred to earlier — a generational inheritance — was a natal chart reading I had done back in March. The reading consisted of two components, a report done ahead of time and then a long Zoom conversation based on it. I wasn’t surprised by how much the concepts of truth and healing made it into the conversation — the two have been closely linked for as long as I’ve been on this little soul journey of trying to live a life I’m not ashamed of. I was surprised, however, when the astrologer who put together my natal report talked about the concept of the wounded healer, somebody who can help others with similar struggles as they learn to heal themselves.

While it’s perhaps not a role that I’ve sought out, it certainly feels like one I’ve begun to lean into. And while it shows up in very specific ways in my own natal chart and day-to-day life, something I share with everyone born between November 1983 and November 1995 is a Pluto in Scorpio. The significance of that is it’s supposed to be something of a generational trait to be obsessed with operating from a place of truth — often from a kind of death or annihilation — to transform our healing and pain into something powerful that can serve others and sustain us through our various evolutions.

Much like all the reading about the legacy of extractive industries, that Pluto in Scorpio business appeals deeply to my Marxist streak and the One Big Union ethos that makes me feel a cosmic alliance with my ancestors and everyone else who can claim peasant breeding. There are a lot of us. And the idea of collective, intergenerational healing born out of death or annihilation makes it seem only proper that we have to work in the inverted grave-to-cradle direction to find ourselves and each other.

I guess the timing of this is intended to be a small nod to that trajectory. My mom’s dad was born on April 20. By my mom’s account, the guy wasn’t necessarily religious in his adult life, but he was born to southeastern Idaho Mormons, so I doubt he had much of a relationship to cannabis in his 46 years. Nonetheless, if you see 4/20 as an excuse to celebrate counterculture and reject capitalism, then I don’t know…maybe it makes sense to not just me to use what would’ve been his 91st birthday as an occasion to talk about intergenerational healing as a Marxist venture that has my full-throated support.