When I saw Joe Biden sitting at his new desk on TV Tuesday night, I couldn’t make out the new bust on the credenza behind him.
Bill Londrigan could. “It was a bust of labor leader César Chávez,” said Londrigan, the Kentucky State AFL-CIO president.
Chávez helped found the United Farm Workers. His likeness replaced an equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson, a big-time Trump hero.
A white supremacist slave owner, Jackson forcibly removed thousands of Native Americans from east of the Mississippi River, mainly to open more southern land to slavery. The atrocity went down in history as the “Trail of Tears.”
Biden’s booting of Jackson for Chávez is powerful symbolism. But the new president swiftly backed it up with a powerful deed, Londrigan pointed out.
One of Biden’s first actions as president was the firing of union-busting lawyer Peter Robb as NLRB general council. Londrigan called the removal of Robb, a Trump appointee, “President Biden’s first step in a long process to fix our nation’s labor relations so workers have a fair shot at organizing and achieving the American dream.”
Added Londrigan: “Elections have consequences, and with Mitch now in the minority — but a slim one at that — there is potential for many more opportunities to change the country so that the balance of power shifts to those who do the work.”
“César Chávez was a folk hero and symbol of hope to millions of Americans,” says the national AFL-CIO website. “In 1962, he and a few others set out to organize a union of farm workers. Nearly everyone told them it was impossible. But for a time they succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings. An ardent advocate of nonviolence, Chávez was one of the most inspirational labor leaders of the 20th century, with an influence that stretched far beyond the California fields.”
You can tell a lot about people from their heroes in history. Londrigan is a Chávez fan. Me, too.
It’s no wonder the boorish bigot Trump idolizes “Old Hickory.” (The statue on his credenza was a replica of the one in Lafayette Park near the White House.)
“Even by the standards of his day, Jackson displayed a notable passion for the institution of slavery, going so far as to prevent the distribution of abolitionist literature in the South,” Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine. “His administration’s central policy aim was the ethnic cleansing of large segments of the American South, driving out their native inhabitants for white settlement. Jacksonland, Steve Inskeep’s new history of the period, reveals that Jackson and his cronies personally grew rich from the policy of land expropriation that formed the core of his agenda.”
Meanwhile, Londrigan announced today that “the national AFL-CIO has graciously emailed a complete list of President Joe Biden’s executive orders issued thus far and links to each of them.” He said they show “the breadth and significance” of Biden’s efforts “to reverse the products of the previous administration.”
The executive orders, too, reflect “President Biden’s commitment to protecting workers and the public during the pandemic,” Londrigan said, adding, “I guess it simply bears repeating: elections have consequences.”
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Cross-posted from the Kentucky AFL-CIO web site.