Excerpted from Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Beneath the University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City. unpublished phd dissertation, New York University 2015. pp. 424-425
Yale Law School students Hillary Rodham
and Bill Clinton were both members, alongside future Connecticut senator
Richard Blumenthal and Bill Clinton’s eventual Secretary of the U.S. Department
of Labor Robert Reich, of the Yale Law School Students Committee for Local 35,
and signatories, during the week before the strike, to a statement asserting
“WE BELIEVE THE UNION DESERVES THE SUPPORT OF YALE STUDENTS AND FACULTY.”[1] Bill Clinton was even, John Wilhelm would note
decades later in his eulogy for Vincent Sirabella, the Voter Registration
Chairman of the Sirabella for Mayor Campaign.”
And yet, on her first date with classmate Clinton, Rodham would later
recall:
We both had wanted to
see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor
dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were
closed. As Bill and I walked by, he
decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had
accumulated in the gallery's courtyard.
Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness
in action. We had the entire museum to
ourselves. We wandered through the
galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in
and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from
Arkansas. We ended up in the museum's
courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Drape Seated
Woman While we talked until dark.[2]
The
relationship between Rodham and Clinton, two instrumental figures in the
decoupling of the Democratic Party from the priorities of the mainstream labor
movement, thus began with the crossing of a picket line. [3] When Rodham and Clinton picked up the garbage
strewn about the art gallery courtyard, (if, indeed, they ever did so,) they
were doing exactly what everyone from Vincent Sirabella to the Black Student
Alliance at Yale had asked students not to do – they were performing –or at the
very least offering to perform -- the work that members of Local 35’s Grounds
Maintenance division, had refused.
Rodham and Clinton were offering themselves as replacement labor,
blunting, if only temporarily, the effects of the strike on the university. The two law students then bartered their
litter pickup, which was, in essence, scab labor, (or maybe just the promise
thereof) into access to a struck buildings.
The art gallery and other nonessential buildings were closed because the
university did not have enough managers to keep them open during the
strike. They were closed because the
people who usually cleaned and repaired them, whose labor helped make the
university’s display of art possible, had been forced to absent themselves by
the necessity which fueled the ongoing strike.
For Rodham and Clinton, the workers concerns were at best
secondary to the romance of the empty museum, the sophistication and
transgressive pleasure offered not only by the modernist art, but also by the
act of violating the strike. Hillary
Rodham Clinton offers this anecdote in her 2003 memoir Living History not in her discussion of how her time in New Haven
affected her understanding of urban politics and life, but rather in a distinct
chapter devoted entirely to the origins of her relationship with the “Viking
from Arkansas.” The “labor dispute,” not
even named here as a strike, is not only abstracted from the very spaces the
future Clintons inhabit in this narrative, it is made incidental to them, an
obstacle which has to be sidestepped in order for the art to be viewed and the
date to acquire its romantic ambiance.
[1] Law School Students
Committee for Local 35, “Could YOU Raise a Family on $88 a Week?”, leaflet,
Yale University Manuscripts and Archives RU 86 YRG 41 accn1971-A-004 Box 4
Folder 1. April, 1971.
[2] Hillary Rodham
Clinton, Living History. New
York: Scribner: 2003. 53. I thank Dan Gilbert for alerting me to this
incident.
[3] The campaign, notes
Wilhelm, was “not a high point for Vinnie.
It persuaded him that the careers of aggressive labor leaders and
politicians were not compatible.” John
W. Wilhelm, “Eulogy for Vincent Sirabella,” 1995. Reprinted in Frank R. Annunziato et al, Greater New Haven Labor
History Association, 1995 Labor History Almanac. 1995. recovered by Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the
webpage of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association https://web.archive.org/web/20070313192745/http://www.laborhistory.org/almanac_dedic.html accessed 1/30/2015
