Circuits of Solidarity

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We had no rational reason to move to Chicago. I’m from Minneapolis, but my partner is from New York City, where we both went to school, where all our friends have ended up. Yet, somewhere during undergrad, I began to understand myself as an exile, the then faraway Midwest my Promised Land. “I don’t think I’ll be allowed back there anyway,” I’d joke to friends, which wasn’t an original thought but rather a reference to E.K. Brown’s biography of Willa Cather, in which he references Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, to explain how Cather struggled to return to Nebraska once she’d left it. The novel’s protagonist, George Webber, writes his own novel about his rural hometown. Webber’s novel attains national acclaim, but he is shunned by his hometown for how poorly he has rendered them for the sake of literary clout. Webber “can’t go home again,” as the story goes, which Brown claims is the same for Cather, which I feared would be the same for me.

Sure, I hadn’t written a slanderous novel about the provincialism of my Midwestern upbringing, but I had put down roots on the East Coast, an act distant and elite in the eyes of many in my home region. Our reason for moving to Chicago was thus partially to prove I could return, partially to return but not entirely (i.e. not to Minneapolis), and partially to prevent myself from any future fall into Webber’s pattern of poor rendering. In a way that is perhaps overly American, I have always felt Midwestern trouble is my trouble, and I wanted to stay with it, in it. So we moved without jobs, with a signed lease for an apartment we toured on FaceTime that I swore was a phantom until we saw it in person. In the U-haul, I watched the Midwest from the toll roads, surrounded by semis and neon. This is it, I thought the whole way. Just like I remember it.

We arrived in the city. Our apartment was real. We spent the early weeks swimming through cardboard and newspaper and eating Thai food on the floor. I finished Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, which I was embarrassed not to have read already. Then, my partner and I began to scope out local bookstores, very aware that we would need reading material for the impending summer thunderstorms. 

I wanted to read about Chicago, and while living on the East Coast, it always seemed like no one was writing about it. At a used bookstore just ten minutes from our new Chicago apartment, I found enough local titles to retrospectively cancel out this Midwestern literary drought. The first book I picked up, and then the first one I started when those thunderstorms did come, had a recognizable title: Which Side Are You On? I’d never heard of the book or its writer, but I knew the tune and the book jacket promised an overview of labor history for beginners. I took it home.

Part-memoir, part-labor-history, the book was written by longtime Chicago labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan and published in 1990. However, when I picked it up off the shelf, I found myself remembering another book I read and loved: Ryan Lee Wong’s 2022 novel of the same title, Which Side Are You On? Wong’s novel is about Los Angeles, where he’s from though he lives in New York now also. The plot follows Reed, a Columbia undergraduate from LA whose immigrant Korean parents helped organize the Los Angeles Black-Korean Coalition during the 1980s and 90s. Reed comes home to visit his parents while he’s considering dropping out of school to fully commit to Black Lives Matter activism. Through a series of conversations with his mother, father, and childhood friend, he comes to see activism from a more historically-informed, mutual, cross-cultural perspective that leads him to question the more polarized approach—what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò would call “deference politics”—of his colleagues at Columbia. Notably, Wong’s novel came before the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments and the sophisticated activist culture on Columbia’s campus now.

This Which Side Are You On?, the novel by Wong which I read first, doesn’t include any additional references to the protest song it takes for its title. Multiple figures in Geoghegan’s memoir, however, sing the tune. In his labor origin story, a young Thomas Geoghegan, studying at Harvard Law, was persuaded by a friend to spend a weekend in Pennsylvania, working as an observer for the 1972 Mineworkers union election. This election would become one of the biggest events in US union history; the election had only been called because Tony Boyle, the Mineworkers union president, had (allegedly, at the time) murdered his 1969 opponent for the seat, “Jock” Yablonski, and his family. 

Geoghegan recounts his experience as an outsider, just being pretty much thrown into the mix. He observed for the polls that weekend, and though he went on to become a labor lawyer, he claims that he didn’t remember just how much that weekend with the Mineworkers changed him until he later stumbled into a cinema that was showing Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary, Harlan County, USA. The film, which recounts the events of the 1973 Mineworkers strike against Kentucky’s Brookside Mine a year after the union election, brought him face to face with the men and women he’d known at those 1972 polls. With sudden, emotional line breaks, he describes being chilled when an old woman’s voice took over the film, singing, “Which side are you on? Which side are you on?”

Wong’s West Coast novel and Geoghegan’s East-Coast-turned-Midwest memoir are both preoccupied with the experience of being just on the outside of a movement, not quite at the center but not quite separate from its concerns. On the surface, this ambiguity references the central demand of the protest song: there is no middle ground, so ambiguous players must take sides. Kopple’s use of the song in the 1976 documentary brings to mind the song’s origin in Harlan County about four decades earlier. As the story goes, Florence Reece penned the song the morning after her family, her home, and her husband Sam, a union organizer, were targeted by the county sheriff. The sheriff, J.H. Blair, was a lackey for the mine operators in Harlan County and would threaten the lives and property of union members in order to exert control during the Harlan County War of the 1930s. Florence Reece’s original lyrics reference this condition, 

“They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?”

The song lived many iterative lives after events in 1930s Harlan County. Beyond its constant use by unions and labor movements throughout the country, Pete Seeger popularized the best-known version of the tune with the Almanac Singers, a folk music group that was known for its catchy, universal labor songs in the 1940s. As Tom Maxwell argues in Longreads, the tweaking of lyrics done by Seeger in the Almanac Singers version was aimed at making the song more widely applicable to a diverse range of listeners and situations. Seeger’s version includes more direct addresses to the audience and his fellow Singers, addressed as comrade “boys” by the song’s chorus.

When Geoghegan reflects on his experience as an observer in 1970s Harlan County, the presence of this song is a kind of historical clove hitch, binding together the rough times of the 1930s and 40s labor movement and the rough times of deindustrialization and Reaganomics in the 1980s and 90s. Though on the surface, the song is a call to take sides and hard stances in local political conflict, the spirit of the song across all its iterations is that of solidarity and comradery in the face of life-threatening difficulty. The song doesn’t proclaim a “you’re either with us or you’re against us” imperative but instead leaves the listener, the “you,” in the open terrain of a positional question. The agency is given to the “you” to decide and declare which side he has chosen, the implication being that the asker of the question truly wants the answerer to be able to stand by whatever he says. The asker is not coercing the answerer to take a particular side; he needs the answerer’s response to proceed with his own work. Both the asker and the answerer take their roles seriously. The circuit of the question, of the reciprocal movement between asker and answerer, will result in only one of two outcomes: great, immediate polarity from being on different sides or great, immediate solidarity from being on the same one.

These real-world friend-or-enemy stakes are visible frequently in the 1990 memoir. Geoghegan announces repeatedly that he’s writing an account of his disillusionment with labor law, and this tension fundamentally begins where the song’s question ends: what does it mean for all different versions of this “you” to claim solidarity with labor? Geoghegan is haunted by the specters of the “real” rank-and-file workers he encountered at the 1972 election, the non-bureaucrats who used to run the unions for the sake of better life conditions alone and who would use violence to earn this when necessary. For Geoghegan, this willingness of rank-and-filers to put their bodies on the line was the spirit of the labor movement in the 30s and 40s. His book is self-critical—at times, overly so—as he calls into question his place as a bureaucratic figure of law among these real laborers. As his career progresses, he is also increasingly critical of the unions of the 80s and 90s, which he finds increasingly filled by laborers-turned-union-bureaucrats who no longer strike or use noble violence because they no longer feel the stakes of brotherhood in the same way. These new union men run for union office because union officers get to become bureaucrats themselves. They then continue to stay in office in order to avoid returning to rank-and-file life, Geoghegan claims, rather than to change the lives of their rank-and-file brothers. Brotherhood is not felt with the same viscerality that it once was. As Geoghegan writes, union letters used to begin with “Dear Brother” but now begin with “Dear sir and brother.” “It is a complex fate, in labor these days,” he writes, “to be ‘sir’ and ‘brother.’”

Wong’s 2022 novel contains a resonant scene, also clustered around the word “brother.” Reed’s Korean mother refers to a Black waiter who serves her and Reed as a “young brother,” which Reed then critiques as her using AAVE in an inappropriate way. His mom, annoyed, tells Reed that this was just how they talked when she was younger and in multi-racial activist circles. Having just immigrated from Korea as a young adult, she used the language of these activist circles in order to build connections and prove to skeptical members that, though she was culturally different, her values and language were the same as those of existing radical movements. Reed shoots back that the waiter isn’t actually her brother, and his mom says, “If we can’t be familiar with each other, how the hell are we going to organize together?” Reed reflects that perhaps, in a time before social media and the attached identity appropriation, sharing language and slang was a way of expressing solidarity, not of possessing the identities of others. Here again, the word “brother” is a locus for the shifting definitions of brotherhood and the growing distance between those who were once capable of tight-knit coalitions.

Geoghegan occupies a position that is almost the inverse of Reed’s young mother; rather than coming from elsewhere and learning vernacular to form new bonds, Geoghegan feels that the rousing vernacular he’s accustomed to has lost its power and bite. The image of radical union solidarity that drew him to labor in the 70s no longer functions as the 80s progresses. Union busting is down to a science, scabs are everywhere, and the glorious image of a single, unified rank-and-file is no more. He expresses feeling somewhat like a fossil, being one of the last few who remember the Wisconsin Steel factory, but he is also unlike those former steelworkers who couldn’t find new jobs, who were cheated out of their pensions, and who died of health issues from working on the line. On a personal level too, he cannot discern where he fits in, being legally on the side of the laborers but with a personal lifestyle more similar to that of the bureaucrats, living on the North Side and not the South.

At the time of his writing, the question of “which side” feels irrelevant to Geoghegan. What does being on the side of the workers even look like in the late 80s? Does a declaration of brotherhood mean anything anymore, or must he too die of Black Lung in order to be on the workers’ side? During the Reagan years, any worker who is openly a part of a union gets fired, any lingering worker elected to union office is a bureaucrat, and those labor lawyers like Geoghegan who remember the old rank-and-file workers aren’t actually like those workers at all. For him, it seems the sides have disappeared altogether. These days, there are only bureaucratic unions and bureaucratic bosses, and even being on the side of the workers is being, in a way, on the side of the state. The question rings hollow, for there is no one left to ask it, no rank-and-file worker to put out the rallying cry. Both sides have been subsumed by the pervasive state and its bureaucratic shadows.

Wong’s novel takes us much to the same ethical place, but he proposes an alternate ending. While Reed is in LA, his activist friends in NYC are organizing in support of a Black family whose son was killed by an Asian American police officer. After talking with his mother about her challenges working cross-culturally on the LA Black-Korean Coalition, Reed questions his friends’ desire to jail the officer, finding that it conflicts with an abolitionist perspective of cross-community accountability. In an attempt to save his relationship with one activist friend, Reed tries to clarify his position as still anti-racist but complicated by the needs of multiple communities: “Doesn’t solidarity flow both ways?” The friend is too busy to respond, and the more a reader thinks about the question, the more others arise. Like in Geoghegan’s memoir, the state has a way of turning marginalized people against each other. On one hand, it’s reprehensible that a police officer should be able to murder a Black civilian without consequences. On the other hand, the Asian American police officer’s career choice can come from his community’s own feeling of powerlessness at the hands of the state. If, as Reed says, solidarity should flow both ways in this situation—towards the oppressed Black community of the victim and towards the alternatively oppressed Asian community of the perpetrator—then which direction is the state? Is there another way to utilize solidarity that would heal and empower both communities, rather than the state incentivizing the use of bureaucratic power to support one community at the expense of the other? 

This, ultimately, is the impasse of Wong’s novel that Geoghegan’s memoir doesn’t quite locate: the question for Wong and his protagonist is not only “which side are you on?” but “how are we determining which sides there are?” Both books do not present a simple mine workers versus mine operators dichotomy, which perhaps is why they’ve chosen to summon the Harlan County refrain in the first place. Geoghegan traces how the divide between workers and operators has been subsumed by larger state forces that have disabled the revolutionary power of choosing distinctive sides. Wong’s novel presents the question as useful in a more complicated way which preserves difference but also creates an ongoing circuit of solidarity that the state cannot infiltrate. 

Where Geoghegan’s solidarity is fossilized by the rising sediment of bureaucracy, Wong closes the circuit and leaves the state out of it altogether. The protest song becomes a way of sorting within rather than without, of maintaining difference between Black and Korean brothers but keeping them connected to one another in the space of the question. The old Harlan County sentiments of trust and agency are maintained but with a more intersectional, sophisticated understanding of insidious state power and the difference inherent in coalitions. This new version of the tune replaces the dichotomy between brother and enemy, discerns their difference and establishes trust immediately. It eschews short-term solutions that utilize state power because those solutions embolden the state’s future reach. In other words, Wong keeps solidarity in-house among the diverse communities the state disavows. The answer to “which side are you on?” still offers a choice to the “you,” but however the “you” answers, the “you” is still positioned as a brother, located within the circuit of ever-flowing solidarity.

It’s funny to have read Geoghegan’s memoir after having just moved to Chicago. I live on the North Side. I both cringe and lean in at his endless self-reflection about where exactly he fits in this region’s long history of labor and crises and migration and sudden loss. Is that tone of his Midwestern cynicism, developed over years with the Rust Belt rank-and-file? Is Wong’s novel’s loving conclusion a coastal cruel optimism that can’t survive in the middle of the country, where one leaves and “can’t go home again?” Now that I’ve moved back to the Midwest, a region I haven’t lived in since I was a child, I’m plagued by a voice that asks if everything is like I remembered it or not. What if I too have misrendered the region while I was away and created a false story about good, honest people, a story that will one day catch up with me? I don’t know local politics. I almost considered staying in New York when Zohran was rising in the polls. 

All this to say, I don’t think I even know which sides there are to be on here, and I’ve spent my first month since the move researching an old labor song rather than finding out. Wong’s novel is useful in this respect. If the question is truly a relation, I’ve started to believe it’s better to be the asker of the question than the answerer, at least at first. From that initial difference, it seems easy to proceed, since everybody you’ve asked is already your brother.