the police riot during the Democratic convention, the campus takeovers and ensuing student expulsions, the emergence of the Black Panthers, the emergence of gays from the closet and women from the kitchen, the organization of revolutionary black caucuses in the UAW, these developments divided new left and old, white radicals and black, reformers and revolutionaries. Many stalwarts of the left became bitter, dismissing all young protesters as authoritarians. Most campus protesters condemned the old left as bourgeois traitors.
In this angry, divided landscape, Carl Shier was a remarkable figure. His passion for justice and solidarity never dimmed, but at the same time, he refused to embrace sectarian righteousness or anti-authoritarian individualism.
Carl was mature and humble, educated and hungry for knowledge, the very antithesis of the macho left-wing romantic hero who would rescue working people from their victimhood. Carl did the hard, steady work; arrived on time for meetings; distributed literature; respected all political actors; considered consequences as well as motivations.
Carl taught me, and a generation of activists, not only about the labor movement, socialism and democracy, but about what it is to be a teacher, a father, a mature human being. Only when I became a father myself did I come to understand how remarkable Carl Shier was. His generosity allowed his political children to grow and mature as independent, loving people. Carl Shier was a rare, remarkable, utterly wonderful human being.
--David Bensman (05/21/07)
I WAS ONE of the lucky ones. I wandered into DSOC (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) in my mid-twenties because the politics seemed right and because Michael Harrington inspired me. What I had no way of knowing was that I was about to meet an amazing collection of mentors who’d fought the battles and built the institutions that mattered most to me, people from whom I learned all manner of history and lore, from whom, more important, I learned how to think, how to persuade, and, above all, how to lead an engaged life. A joyous, outraged, driven, purposeful, crazy and deeply sane, and eternally engaged life.
Which is to say, I got to know Carl Shier.
My first memories, I suspect, typify those of a generation of DSOCers who today, 30 years later, can’t believe how fortunate we were to have fallen into the world of Carl and Mike and all those many mentors. We’d walk into these meetings in union cafeterias or Unitarian churches, into a cacophony of intense, impassioned, funny, serious, eloquent and stumbling deliberations on the eternal (and eternally difficult) question of how we, how the left, how socialists, could make an impact in America. Our mentors each had a distinctive style. Carl could be the flat Midwestern voice of common sense—if you thought it would fly with the unions, he’d tell you, you’d better think again. He could bark in indignation, leaving me to wonder how loud he must have been during the union wars of the Forties. And he could cut through a debate stranded in subtleties to remind us that there were real people, real workers, who needed help, and that we had damn well figure out our action plan and start the organizing now, immediately, before we adjourned for dinner.
Carl was a genius at integrating urgency into his routine. Yesterday, by coincidence, I had lunch in Washington with Eliseo Medina, one of the four vice-presidents of SEIU. When Eliseo first met Carl, however, he was no union muck-a-muck, but a kid, not yet out of his teens, whom Cesar Chavez had sent to Chicago to start a boycott of grapes there. Fortunately for Eliseo, and for the grape boycott, he met the one guy in Chicago who could produce the resources and the activists and the introductions to all the other key players in town. He met Carl Shier. “Carl,” Eliseo said yesterday, “was the heart and soul of DSOC.” But then Carl became the heart and soul of every campaign he threw himself into.
Carl’s youthful involvement with the Goldmanites—a Trotskyist splinter group, whose chief claim to fame, paradoxically, seems to be its obscurity—was always a point of fascination for some of my buddies, but not for me. What interested me far more was that Carl had been a cadre in the single most effective group of social democrats that America has ever known – the Reutherites. As I got to know Carl and his cohort, the people who built and ran the UAW from the ‘40s through the ‘70s, it was easy to see how that union did so much to build a decent America. Urgency was the Reutherites’ routine; they had the vision, the smarts, the persistence, patience and impatience that you need to organize the plant, the city, the movement, the nation. It was who they were. It was all in a day’s work. It animated their lives. It animated Carl Shier.
One of the joys I discovered in covering elections in the 80s and 90s – covering elections in places where people mattered, as I did every four winters in New Hampshire—was to behold the mobilization of those aging shock troops, the UAW retirees. Nobody canvassed a precinct as well as they did, or provided a better education to young volunteers on matters ranging from canvasser etiquette to the global economy. Better than any group I’ve encountered in American politics, the Reutherites understood the world and understood how to change it—and understood that this was, without any grandstanding or histrionics, their mission.
Nobody understood that better than Carl. As everybody here knows, he realized—decades before the Internet, before anybody had even thought up the idea of the link—that he could disseminate the stuff that leftists needed: articles that you may have missed on causes large and small, at times complete with copies of letters he banged out on his typewriter, in which he made you privy to important strategic debates and the goings on of aunts and uncles whom you, the reader, had never heard of. Before desktop publishing, before instant messaging, Carl was a blogger before his time—building a national, even a global, left network through the hi-tech miracle of the U.S. mail. Even as he built a civic left network in Chicago through the miracle of the annual Debs-Thomas-Harrington dinners.
Among the subversive tracts that Carl moved through the mails were my own articles. Once, when I was writing for the L.A. Weekly in the early ‘90s, I was visiting Washington and walking through the halls of Congress where I ran into a Los Angeles-area congressman who told me he’d recently read a piece I’d written on the L.A. police. I replied that I hadn’t known he got the Weekly. “I don’t,” he said. “I read it in one of Carl Shier’s care packages.”
Carl’s mailings, of course, kept coming right up until the time he died. It was a part of his routine he was able to keep going right to the end. He mailed out my articles for 20 years, and it’s a close call as to whether more people have read me in The Washington Post or in Carl’s care packages. I mean no disrespect to Washington Post readers when I say that the highest-caliber readers I’ve ever had were the ones on Carl’s list.
He was indefatigable. He banged out letters, and put out mailings, and put on the dinner, and built his union, and assembled the forces for a progressive Chicago, and sustained a socialist movement, and inspired two generations of activists. When the causes and movements to which he gave his life ran off-course, he’s say so in no uncertain terms. But his commitment was unflagging. And deeply important. And deeply moving. At the end, as when we first met him, he was our mentor.
I was one of the lucky ones. I got to know Carl Shier.
-- Harold Meyerson (05/20/07)
Photographs: Gretchen Donart
