The Fall of the House of Labor AtD.93 Republicans?

[alice wellintown]

I've dismissed Robin's reading of the passage for a very obvious
reason; Webb is pissed off at the Rupublicans, and specifically the
Republican Radicals  because he believes, and he is right, he has been
betrayed by them. We need to read the passage in the context;
otherwise it doesn't make sense. The Left vs. Right language is
useless for two reasons. 1) It smears the complex political and
historical details that Pynchon has gone to such trouble to delineate.
2) It reduces the most complex labor novel of the last 100 years to a
political soapbox railing against the current political insanities,
inanities, injustices, in-Bush-we-trust & Co. Not that the novel is
silent on current bloody affairs and betrayals, and not that an
excellent and sensitive reader keen to discover Pynchon's specific
condemnations of current political policies and events, or of policies
and events anachronistically embedded in the narrative, but these are
substrative commentaries and not sermons or screeds blurted from the
mouths of characters. Like any historian these days, Pynchon, as
Nabokov advices, is an active reader of historical texts, he fondles
details; he then fills his novels with details:  what was happening in
the mines, in the union hall, in the office. He shows how engineers,
craftsmen, machine operatives, and common laborers developed separate
codes of job conduct related to their backgrounds (immigrants from
every corner of the globe, a Pequad doomed to extinction) and
neighborhood cultures, anf families, and how big companies adopted
management styles designed to weaken unions, while radicals competed
with unions, how and why the labor movement retreated as radical
movements were discredited, and workers de-unionized and un-organized,
and how much of this occured from the inside, that is, Organized Labor
was Dis-Membered by Organized Labor. And, in the passage, the Radical
Movement in the Republican Party, from New England where it sprung up
and where is was always a fragile movemen, begins (as I noted in the
Beecher Bibles and Rifles post) before the Civil War proper, in the
battle over the Western State, in the example I gave, Kansas, but
other States as well, to fall apart. After the Civil War, the Radical
Repulican movement, still determined to Reconstruct the Nation, fails
to. This is the Radical Republican story that Webb is talking about.
Remember, Lincoln claimed, Labor was both "prior to" "independent of"
and "superior to Capital."  The Self-Made man idea was a Republican
ideal. Remember too, that the leader of Melville's Kingly Commons is
Jackson:

But this August dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and
robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou
shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike;
that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from
God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of
all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark...then against all
mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which
hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out
in it, thou great democratic God!...Thou who didst pick up Andrew
Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who
didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty,
earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the
kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick