Palomino: Clinton Jencks and Mexican-American Unionism in the American Southwest

by James J. Lorence

Overview

The first comprehensive biography of progressive labor organizer, peace worker, and economist Clinton Jencks (1918–2005), this book explores the life of one of the most important political and social activists to appear in the Southwestern United States in the twentieth century. A key figure in the radical International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) Local 890 in Grant County, New Mexico, Jencks was involved in organizing not only the mine workers but also their wives in the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company. He was active in the production of the 1954 landmark labor film dramatizing the Empire Zinc strike, Salt of the Earth, which was heavily suppressed during the McCarthy era and led to Jencks's persecution by the federal government.   Labor historian James J. Lorence examines the interaction between Jencks's personal experience and the broader forces that marked the world and society in which he worked and lived. Following the work of Jencks and his equally progressive wife, Virginia Derr Jencks, Lorence illuminates the roots and character of Southwestern unionism, the role of radicalism in the Mexican-American civil rights movement, the rise of working-class feminism within Local 890 and the Grant County Mexican American community, and the development of Mexican-American identity in the Southwest. Chronicling Jencks's five-year-long legal battle against charges of perjury, this biography also illustrates how civil liberties and American labor were constrained by the specter of anticommunism during the Cold War.   Drawing from extensive research as well as interviews and correspondence, this volume highlights Clinton Jencks's dramatic influence on the history of labor culture in the Southwest through a lifetime devoted to progress and change for the social good.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252094804
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	05/15/2013
Series:	Working Class in American History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

James J. Lorence was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County. His many books include the award-winning A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West.

Read an Excerpt

Palomino

Clinton Jencks and Mexican-American Unionism in the American Southwest

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By JAMES J. LORENCE

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2013Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09480-4

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up Concerned

Childhood, Family, and the Formation of a Value System, 1918–1939

Origins of Commitment: Plotting a Life Course

Watching over the bustling resort community and mining town of Colorado Springs, the front range of the majestic Rocky Mountains provided the backdrop to where Clinton E. Jencks grew to maturity during the dark days of the Great Depression. The natural beauty of this environment, together with the dramatic story of its exploitation by first prospectors and then the mining industry, fired the imagination of a young man who as a child often explored the remnants of the mining boom and dreamed of the class struggle that could be dimly perceived in the history of the area. What Jencks learned as a result of study and exploration was the hard lesson that his region had been the site of sharp labor-management confrontation in the rugged mining districts of frontier Colorado. As his awareness of historical inequities sharpened, the trajectory of what was to be an eventful life as an advocate of social justice was set in motion; in short, Clint Jencks's long life in the human rights movement reflected these early perceptions of the world in which he lived and the culture of which he was a product.

It was also this regional growth that in the late nineteenth century had once attracted his forebears to a developing mining community, service center, health resort, and railroad junction. By the late 1890s Colorado Springs was well on the way to the transition from frontier boom town to trading community, industrial supplier, and transportation hub, emerging as a service center where, increasingly, permanent settlers like the Jencks clan established residence. Here in Colorado Springs, transplanted Yankees DeWitt Clinton Jencks and his wife, Sarah, found a home in 1888 when they resettled a growing family after spending their early years in the more staid environment of Wyndham County, Connecticut. Prior to their permanent removal to Colorado, the stability of comfortable New England childhoods and their strong religious upbringing had first led the pious young couple to spend ten eventful years of their marriage as missionaries in Japan.

In 1866 family patriarch Leavens Jencks, a successful carpenter, had gone to his final rest, leaving his widow, Esther, alone to raise a family of six children with assistance from two children employed as teachers and her oldest son, DeWitt Clinton Jencks, a bookkeeper by trade. In his youth DeWitt followed a religious vocation during the late Civil War years, working as a teacher in the South for the Freedman's Bureau. As Clinton E. Jencks's later journey into the Southwest demonstrates, DeWitt was the first but not the last Jencks to tread the path of moral responsibility in pursuit of social justice. After his father's death, DeWitt returned to Connecticut to assist his widowed mother, but the restless young man remained conscious of something missing in his life after his separation from the Freedman's Bureau. By 1873 he was again contemplating some expression of the religious life, driven by an impulse that brought him to Chicago for a meeting of the Home Board for Congregationalist Foreign Missions. It was here that he met Reverend Henry Bagg Smith, another native of Wyndham, Connecticut, and a man dedicated to spreading the word of God overseas. A proud parent, Smith introduced DeWitt to his daughter, Sarah Maria Smith, and in October 1876, shortly after his mother's death, DeWitt married Sarah in Greenfield Hills, Connecticut, thus cementing a union that drew him more closely into the religious community presided over by his father-in-law and liberally populated by the militant Congregationalists of his spouse's family. Genealogical, census, and family records make it absolutely clear, then, that Clinton E. Jencks's extended family history, which included a long line of morally driven New Englanders, was peppered with Congregationalist clergy, teachers, and religiously devoted laypersons. This background indicates that a tendency toward piety and personal moral imperative was a key element in the cultural baggage carried to Colorado by Clinton Jencks's Yankee forebears; it also foreshadows the deep religious commitment that would be displayed by young Clint in the 1920s and 1930s. It is evident that a sense of Christian duty and moral responsibility was his birthright.

Given the Jencks family's religious history, it was no surprise that in 1877 the adventurous DeWitt Clinton Jencks embarked upon a new career as a missionary to Japan, where his skills in bookkeeping led to his appointment as business agent for the Congregationalist Church's Kobe mission. Here, three children, Anna, Mabel, and Philip, were born to him and Sarah, herself an active partner in church work. After a decade of missionary fieldwork for the Board of Foreign Missions in Kobe, DeWitt and his family returned to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1887 to await reassignment, but the following year they removed to Colorado Springs, where the birth of Horace Ebenezer Jencks, Clint's father, rounded out the family in 1891. While the rapid economic growth of the Colorado Springs area was a factor in this decision to relocate, it is also true that the reputed healing powers of the area's spring waters were attractive to them, because both Sarah and her daughter Anna suffered from a kidney condition known then as Bright's disease, which eventually led to the deaths of both daughter and mother.

As of 1906 the local city directory generously described DeWitt's occupation as "missionary," but by 1910 the census more accurately recorded a change in his status with the observation that he actually had no trade and was "running a rooming house" on Wasatch Avenue in Colorado Springs. Along the way, as early as 1901 DeWitt also began operating a shoe store and repair shop out of his house, an occupation that provided further evidence that for an unemployed missionary the shift to day-to-day economic survival back in the States was difficult to make. Despite the family's financial struggle, Sarah gradually became a leading figure in Colorado Springs society, devoted to the local Prohibition movement, active in church work, and president of the Colorado Springs East Side Women's Christian Temperance Union at the time of her death in 1911. Similarly, DeWitt was a prominent church figure, serving for twenty-five years as clerk of the city's First Congregational Church until he died in 1923. Although less motivated by religious fervor, young Horace resided at home after his graduation from Colorado Springs High School and his first tentative foray into the job market as a substitute mail carrier. Of considerable significance for Horace's future was the proximity in the neighborhood of his brother, Philip H. Jencks, who was working full-time as a postman for the U.S. Mail Service. It seems likely that Philip's employment was the key factor in securing Horace's position as mail carrier, a job he retained until his retirement in 1940. The closeness of the Jencks family ties became even more evident as DeWitt grew older, resulting in the formation of a bond confirmed when his son Philip became head of household in the Jencks home.

By the time he had reached the tender age of twenty-one, the restless Horace had courted and married Colorado Springs native Ruth Schideler, a deeply religious Methodist, who would soon become the predominant figure in the lives of her children. Ruth's father, Abraham Schideler, a German American worker originally from Indiana, migrated to Colorado Springs, where by the early 1890s he had become a motorman and conductor for the local rapid transit company. After his untimely death in 1896, his widow, Rose, became the effective head of the family, at least until her rema
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Excerpted from Palomino by JAMES J. LORENCE. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Clinton Jencks, Mine-Mill, and Biography as History Part I. Years of Preparation: Roots of Radicalism 1. Growing Up Concerned: Childhood, Family, and the Formation of a Value System, 1918-1939 2. The World of Work and New Opportunities for Social Action: Living Faith, 1939-1945 Part II. Building for the Future: Envisioning a New World 3. Coming Home: Veterans Advocacy and Renewed Political Commitment 4. Mine-Mill and Social Change: Economic Progress, Mexican American Activism, and social Justice, 19 Part III. Cold War Unionism: Progressives on Defense 5. Mobilizing for Mass Action: Social and Political Initiatives, 1948-1950 6. The Moment of Decision: the Empire Zinc Strike, Grassroots Feminism, and Mexican American Liberat 7. Telling the Story: Salt of the Earth as a Medium of Communication Illustrations follow page 130 Part IV. A Time of Peril: Public Exposure 8. Confronting Domestic Anti-Communism: The Jencks Case, Civil Liberties, and the Law, 1953-19547 9. The Web of Consequences: Life after Mine-Mill Epilogue: A Reflection on the Committed Life Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

"This authoritative and engagingly written biography makes a substantial contribution to the scholarship on the legendary labor figure of Clinton Jencks. A useful and welcome volume for historians of labor (especially in the southwest), communism, and Cold War anti-communism."—David Brundage, author of The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver's Organized Workers, 1878–1905
"As new scholarship on the long civil rights movement continue to incorporate studies of the American West and move beyond black-white racial binaries, Palomino rightfully speaks to both of these important historiographical developments."—Western Historical Quarterly



 
"An excellent biography that sheds light on numerous themes of importance to historians of twentieth-century American labor, Chicano history, and Cold War America. This historically rich and well organized study secures James J. Lorence's place as a foremost scholar of American labor history."—Zaragosa Vargas, author of Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America
"This biography of labor activist and scholar Clinton Jencks is an important addition to the work of James J. Lorence.  In telling Jenck's life story, Lorence reveals how the often-overlooked efforts of leftist activists in the region not only survived the reactionary years after World War II but managed to bring a mix of radicalism and pragmatic organizing to the labor movement, the Mexican American civil rights struggle, and even the otherwise conservative world of academic economists in the Southwest."—Southwestern Historical Quarterly

"This book is instructive for organizers as a catalog of campaign skills and as an illustration of "community unionism," whose revival is so loudly proclaimed today."—Labor Studies Journal

"This is a fine book, and Lorence is to be commended for the extensive research and attention to detail that went into it.  It is more than a biography of Jencks.  Rather, it is in many ways the biography of a movement and of a difficult moment in American history."—American Historical Review

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