--for Dorothy   

By Rudolph Lewis

Thanks ever so much for your interest in "Last Man Thinking." Keep in mind all this writing is being done because Bea has not been properly waked. We hope this will substantially wake her.  You're right, yes, in a way, the poem is obscure, and intentionally so. I suspect fear more than love is the midwife of artistic production. A way of saying things one cannot ordinarily say. 

And, maybe, I have taxed "Last Man Standing" with too much to do. Shifting passages about, however, will not solve the problem of obscurity (in the sense of meaning). But you have destroyed the form of the poem,  by your break up of the five-line stanzas (about the same length in duration by eye or ear).

The poem is a lyric, not a narrative, which would be needed to make the story apparent. In a lyric I'm not sure whether obscurity is indeed a fault, especially if other elements work. That is, if the poem is sufficiently expressionistic, dramatic. The poem is about Nick, "the last man standing." How he has been sketched out is not obscure, at all. I'm almost certain you can come to conclusions about Nick.

There are many signposts for conclusions, sometimes at odds, about the character Nick, the object of the poem, which suggest some complexity of person and situation  The poem also has a setting, characters, and conflicts (personal and institutional), and a resolution -- death and a continuity of right actions, "passing out [union] cards."

Maybe the revised version might be less obscure, in that the conflict has been reinforced with the word "split." Check it out -- Last Man Standing.

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The subject of the poem is Henry Nicholas, a national union leader. Well known and well respected. His vehicle for greatness was 1199, a union founded by New York Jews, for Jewish pharmacists. It became a black union of hospital and nursing home employees, especially in certain cities, Baltimore and Philadelphia, in 1969-1970. Organizing so many blacks and Latinos everyone knew Jewish leaders would be displaced and that a black would be the leader.

Nicholas became the head of the Philadelphia local back then and later, after some quarreling with Doris Turner, became the National Union president.

New York eventually took a third path.

And in ways people also concluded that leader would be a black man, because such men led the organizing drives,  Fred Punch in Baltimore and Henry Nicholas in Philly. Both were charismatic. The times were ripe, linking civil rights, black consciousness, and unionism. Punch and Nicholas loved power and both were overbearing. 

Such men create enemies. But Nicholas was more staunch and mystifying than the other black male organizers sent out initially by the Elliot Godoff and Leon Davis. Still Nicholas created his share of enemies, often because he was feared and he had the peculiarity of not letting black males get too close to him, he surrounded by either white men and/or black women -- one advises him his limits, the other his possibilities.

One who became Nicholas' enemy was a friend of mine, Robert Moore , who in 1990 was the president of the Baltimore local. He didn't trust Nicholas, but rather his SDS friends. The SDS friends, mostly white (communists, socialists) helped Moore get in office, several years before. He was in their debt. Nick had supported Holly his opponent, then the sitting president of the local. Nick didn't trust revolutionaries. I was in Louisiana teaching writing as this "realpolitik" takes place.

So Robert plotted against Nicholas in the discussion of choosing an international for 1199. The SDSers opted for SEIU, a west coast labor union and mostly white. The president of the international then was John Sweeney, now the president of the AFL-CIO. SEIU wanted Nicholas' union, at any cost. 

The 80s had whupped labor's ass. And so labor leaders wanted workers by any means, even if they had to steal them. The internationals (SEIU, AFSCME) promised to bring more money to the national union for organizing and organizers.

Of course, if you always looking over your shoulder, you can't organize, especially when your folks ain't with you because they lost your heart a long time ago.

Nicholas felt that AFSCME, an east coast union with a substantial black membership, would provide the money and would not threaten the independence of 1199, or his control of it. The SDSers thought that SEIU would provide them with more security and more power. And they would get Nicholas, that is, put one over on the great organizer and magician of Philadelphia.

Moore had been a friend of mine. But he was no longer the same man. He had become rather a bundle of complexes, which reflected itself in the need personally to control the Baltimore local, and with a rational fist, in a way his predecessors had not. After the 70s, he had gone his way and I had gone mine. He struggling his way back up the 1199 hierarchy, after he lost his office as Treasurer of the Baltimore local. He had won the office while in prison for anti-war activity.

(So much of this history I relate is retrospective.)

When I rejoined 1199 in 1987 I had no sense of the treachery that was afoot, and Moore had not been open with me when he hired me on staff for the National Union, technically I worked for Nicholas, who was financing an organizing drive in Baltimore.

When I knew him in 1967 and 1968 Moore was a radical, a revolutionary. And I followed him, dropped out of Morgan and we opened a SNCC office at 432 E. North Avenue. From community organization to unionism was a small leap. And we organized in 1969 with 1199 5,000 health care workers in Baltimore in less than six months.

In consciousness raising and putting money in sisters pockets and fighting for respect and dignity in the workplace, we made a difference.

But institutions are naturally conservative, and often become corrupt with jockeying for power and the holding onto power. All lead eventually to the misuse and abuse of power. Nicholas was right: Moore owed him allegiance. And Moore knew that the black membership loved Nicholas, who was honest and got things done, however treacherous and dangerous. 

Bob opted for Sweeney and Stern of SEIU.

His wife Beatrice Crockett, for without her support at Hopkins his winning would have been impossible, was torn between her love for her husband and her fealty to Nicholas. She refused in effect not to take any side, SEIU or AFSCME. In short, she could neither claim victory nor defeat, neither booty nor blame. By hook or crook, SEIU won in Baltimore.

Sweeney's first act was to order Moore replace his wife. And Robert followed orders. Beatrice and Bob split with the splitting of 1199 locals between SEIU and AFSCME. And I understand that those fifteen years were years of misery for her. She wanted to have a wake while she was alive. She felt that her husband had used her and tossed her aside as if she was nothing.  

In any event, this perspective is held by women in Philly who love Nicholas and some who’d follow him to the grave if he asked.

This March 2005, 15 years later SEIU removed  Moore from his position as president of the Baltimore local, and has placed him on international staff, as a black figurehead. In effect, he’s been de-balled, or de-fanged, however you’d have it.

Nicholas saw it coming six months before it happened, and told Bea. Beatrice lived to see the white folks (SEIU) give Moore the shaft, as she feared. I suppose she felt that she had seen it all, and died.

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update 20 June 2008