Sabotage and Mustard Seeds 1

(a not very brief Lectionary reflection by Steve Orr ... in parts)

The first year of the Roaring Twenties was a pretty good bellwether for the rest of the decade. 1920 was a year filled with all sorts of conflicts, excitements, and problems. World War I had ended a scant 13 months earlier, Prohibition had been in effect for a year, and the Communist Labor Party of America was just four months old. 1920 was the first year women voted in a presidential election (overwhelmingly Republican), and it was a bad year for baseball; the now infamous Chicago 8---players for the Chicago White Sox baseball team---were indicted for taking bribes to throw the 1919 World Series. Sports writers took to calling the team the Chicago Black Sox. They we're later acquitted, but were still banned from organized baseball for life ("Say it ain't so, Joe!"). It was the year Sinclair Lewis published Main Street, and it was a year of particularly strong labor unrest.

Labor unrest was certainly not new in 1920. Workers and owners had been in conflict for centuries. What set this year apart was A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General under President Woodrow Wilson. Palmer wanted, more than anything, to be President. He wanted every American to believe unions were going to destroy our country, and that the only way to stop that destructive force was to elect him President. To this end he waged a relentless campaign against organized labor. Joe McCarthy must have been taking notes because it had all the earmarks of the 1950's Communist witch hunts. Suffice to say there was plenty of nastiness on BOTH sides of this conflict. This was long before civil rights, Miranda, probable cause, etc. Union members were treated badly, and many people at the time believed the behavior of Palmer's federal agents justified the retaliatory use of sabotage by labor supporters.

Sabotage. To most Americans in 1920 sabotage was a fairly new term. It was not very popular; mainly because the only context most had for it was that the Germans had employed sabotage in fighting the allies "over there." Union sabotages, however, while certainly destructive, rarely resulted in harm to people. The term itself seems to come from the French word for wooden shoe: sabot. Legend has it that the first use of sabot-age was among French workers early in the Industrial Revolution. A worker would throw one wooden shoe into the machinery as protest (against poor working conditions, against unemployment caused by machinery replacing humans, etc.). Like the proverbial monkey wrench, this shoe toss would bring the offending machine to a halt. Many an employer spent anxious hours "waiting for the other shoe to drop."

Perhaps you are staring to wonder what any of this has to do with mustard seeds, or, for that matter, with the Lectionary. Well, push on Pilgrim. Answers coming in future installments!

In the meantime, if you are in Waco Friday morning, join our little band at Cafe Cappuccino (8:00 a.m., downtown on 6th Street, near the Courthouse) for breakfast and a great time kicking around this week's Lectionary passages.

READINGS FOR THE COMING WEEK
Proper 11 (16) (July 17, 2011)
Genesis 28:10-19a
Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24 or Isaiah 44:6-8
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43