Scott Martelle

I've been spending some time on the road this summer -- one of my favorite things to do -- and have more travel to come. Margaret and I leave next week (burglars alert: Leaving our two six-foot plus sons and the dog at home) for a three week driving/cruise trip that will take us up the West Coast and into the lower Alaskan waters. Yeah, we're looking forward to that.

Part of the trip is work; I'm doing a talk and signing in San Francisco on July 20, and again in Seattle on July 31. Hope to see some of you at those events.

Meantime, here are some photos from my recent trip through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, which included my appearance at the annual Ludlow memorial gathering at the Ludlow Massacre site.

Enjoy. And let me know what you think.



 Read More 

You know, some of those guys could really make a political argument:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights,  Read More 

I'm still traveling, so not as tuned into news stories as usual, but two actions on Tuesday jumped out at me, and both are bad news for working people.

First, the Obama Administration finally struck a deal with recalcitrant Republicans over new trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. Though Congress may still kill the proposals. So what did Obama get for agreeing to pacts that would send more American jobs overseas to benefit corporate bottom lines? Some pennies sent to programs to retrain U.S. workers displaced by those newly off-shored jobs. Retrain to do what, is the question, since unemployment has been one of our most dogged problems for more than two years now.

So again, the U.S. government is picking corporations over people.

The second action was a veto by California Jerry Brown of legislation that would give farm workers the right to "card check" union organizing drives, which would make it easier for workers to join together to improve wages and working conditions in one of the most brutal industries in the country (you try working in a farm field in the triple-digit heat of the Central Valley). Brown's reason? He says the reforms contained in the bill aren't justified.

Agricultural jobs are some of the few that can't be readily sent overseas - hard to pick strawberries from Bangalore. Yet working conditions are horrific, and wages embarrassingly low. In part because low-income wage-earners have little clout in standing up for themselves; unions help balance out that power a bit. What's unjustified is Brown's vetoing this bill for reasons that are murky, at best (it seems he did it to appease Republicans angry over a budget deal passed by the Democrats).

The losers? The powerless. Again.

 Read More 

This just seems like the perfect video to drop on the blog today, ahead of this morning's memorial observation at the Ludlow Massacre site.

And it reminds me of the one that got away. During one of the battles on the plains outside Ludlow - a few months before the massacre - a Pathe cameraman captured on 1,000 feet of film the fighting between the coal miners and the National Guard. The film, unfortunately, seems to be lost to history. But wouldn't that be fascinating to see? We'll have to settle for this only known film of Mother Jones, the firebrand union organizer who played such a high-profile in the Colorado coal field strike. The video was recorded shortly before her death in 1930.

 Read More 

It was hot in Ludlow yesterday. Fortunately the United Mine Workers of America, which maintains the memorial site, built a roof over the picnic area a number of years ago. So for the 2 1/2-hour gathering we had shade, and a nice breeze. And more than 100 people.

I saw some familiar faces, and met folks I've come to know through Facebook. The themes of the speeches, as one might suspect, focused on labor, and the benefits of unions, and the continuing assault on the right to collective bargaining.

Among the speakers was Annaliese Bonacquista, the great granddaughter of a 1913-14 Colorado coal striker, who passed along some emotional stories about her family history, and the legacy of Ludlow. The keynote was by Marty Hudson, a key figure in the United Mine Workers, who talked about how the coal barons of the past aren't necessarily gone. His brother was among those underground when the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia blew up last year. The brother narrowly missed joining the 29 men killed that morning (I wrote an op-ed on that theme last April).

I talked a bit about the history of Ludlow, and how it remains relevant today -- even if most people have no idea what happened in Colorado nearly a century ago. My prepared comments are after the jump.


 Read More 

Yesterday's travels took me from Phoenix to Santa Rosa, New Mexico, though what should have been an eight-hour drive took closer to 10 hours. Construction in the mountains through the heart of Arizona (I took the scenic route where I could, through the Tonto National Forest) and then a wildfire outside Heber, Arizona.

It's not often you have a traffic jam caused by wild fire, but there we were, stalled by a police barricade, as they timed when they'd let cars go through, and only one direction at a time. When I went through, the fire was only 100 acres or so, but at last report had spread to more than 1,000 acres.

Amazing things, these wildfires, with which we're intimately familiar in Southern California. They're fast. And hungry. Glad I was able to slip through (some of the roads were shut down completely a little later), though also glad I was held up long enough to get some photos.

So to recap, on the first day I witnessed a chilling rollover accident. On the second day, it was a wildfire. Today's half over. Can't wait to see what it delivers. Read More 

So with The Fear Within launched and Detroit: A Biography safely in my editor's hands, I've been poking around for the next project while catching up on my general reading. I have a couple of ideas and am researching whether there's enough material available to make a book out of them, though at this stage I'm not too optimistic. Neither involves people who left much of a paper trail, which makes it nearly impossible to put flesh on the skeletons of their compelling stories. But we'll see.

Meanwhile, I've dusted off a mystery I've been nibbling away at for a number of years now, which is fun to work with, and has me contemplating the different requirements of writing history, and writing fiction. I was at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago for the launch of Adam Hochschild's new book, To End All Wars, his history of the antiwar movement in England surrounding The Great War, and he made a comment to the effect that fiction writing differs from history writing in that with a novel, what you write only has to be plausible. With history, what you write has to be true.

Adam was talking about some of the characters in his book, including a brother and sister who found themselves in key positions on opposite sides of the war, the kind of dramatic tension that would make you roll your eyes if it appeared in a novel. Yet here they were in real life. In the novel I'm working on, I keep encountering a similar friction. Not between plausibility and truth, but between what a character would do, and what a character should do.

It's a subtle, yet crucial, distinction. Making sure actions are true to character is obvious. But as I frame a scene, I keep stumbling over the issue of should my character do this? Is this action necessary? Does it help the reader understand the story, or reveal a subtle dynamic? Or am I just indulging my imagination?

So 40,000 words in, with the victims dead, the two main plot lines firmly established, and the characters in full dress, I find myself becalmed by second-guessing. I know where the story lines go, and how the threads come together at the end. I just don't know where the characters go in the next few thousand words. It is the difference between writing what happened, and creating what happened.

Ah, writer's block. Nice of you stop by unannounced. A short visit, I hope?

 Read More 

Sixty years ago this coming Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the convictions in the Dennis v. U.S. case, which is the focus of my latest book. The Los Angeles Times was kind enough to print an op-ed I wrote on the subject (or will be kind; it's available online now and is to be printed in Monday's paper).

The case was one of the major stories of the year (1949), though it has faded into obscurity, overwhelmed in our consensus memory by the Hollywood 10, McCarthyism, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. Yet the Dennis case was the most troubling of all those events. For a time, the U.S. government in effect outlawed a specific political belief, undercutting what it is that we tell ourselves sets our democracy apart. This story displays exactly how fragile these basic civil liberties are.

The piece summarizes the case, and then concludes:

"Sixty years later, it might be hard to build up much sympathy for a dozen communists at the peak of the Cold War. But in this era of Patriot Act-permitted warrantless searches, surreptitious surveys of library and bookstores users' records, and extralegal rendition of terrorism suspects to secret interrogation sites, we would be wise to recognize that the rights we deny others out of fear, we eventually deny ourselves."

I encourage you to head over to the article and read it, and invite your comments there or here.

 Read More 

 Read More 

Some years ago – okay, a lot of years ago – Margaret and I went to Europe, a zip-around trip to France, England and Ireland. It was part vacation, part work, as I did a series of stories on “sister cities” to Rochester, N.Y, where I was working for the Times-Union afternoon paper.

A trip like that spawns a lot of memories, but one that sticks out persistently was near Rennes, France, where we visited a war memorial. I remember it as a large colonnaded building, and when you walked inside, the white marble walls were covered floor to ceiling with the engraved names of the dead.

It was an impressive monument, the kind of place where people default to hushed whispers. We walked around, scanning the names, overwhelmed by the sheer volume. Then I noticed near one wall a low white marble monument best described as an ark, about thigh-high and the dimensions of a coffee table. I walked closer to read the inscription, and discovered that this little box-like thing was the memorial to the dead of World War II. The names on the walls, I realized then, were the dead of World War I. Two massive wars within a generation, the first so devastating that the dead of the second were treated almost as an after-thought.

Few American families have not been touched by war (in our case, the service of relatives, though fortunately no deaths in the modern era). But not like this, where a generation of young men from one geographic region were, for the most part, exterminated over the course of a few years of folly and political hubris.

War is about winning, and the way you win is to kill enough soldiers fast enough on the other side that they give up before your side does. Sometimes they give up quickly; sometimes they don’t. And it is those who died in the process whom we properly focus on today.

We should focus more on why they were there in the first place. I’m at heart a pacifist, though not so beholden to it that I can’t recognize that some wars are necessary. Those have been few and far between. Stopping the expanding Nazi empire was necessary. World War I, with its convoluted politics and Wall Street investments, was not. Korea and Vietnam were also questionable ventures. Afghanistan was a conundrum going in, and I’m still arguing with myself over whether that was a morally defensible action. Iraq certainly was not.

Here on Memorial Day, we think of the dead, and why they died. They are men, mostly, who did the bidding of their political leaders. And as I think of the ruptures in families, and the countless agonies large and small, I think, too, of the people who sent these men and women to their deaths. As I remember the soldiers for their bravery, and for their devotion, I also wrestle with questions about the wisdom of national leaders who, over the years, have reached so cavalierly for a military solution to a political problem.

In the end, I realize, the dead bear more integrity than the living.

 Read More