Labor Day 1995 - 8 September 1995

It used to be that there were four or five dates on the calendar that automatically required a certain talk. George Washington's birthday was an obvious one. Though he's not celebrated in lonely splendour anymore. Since his birthday falls so close to Lincoln's, they now lump them together and call it Presidents' Day. Presidents in the plural. A rather raggedy title but it does allow the government to pretend they're roping in any other president people might prefer. Jefferson. Roosevelt the first. Roosevelt the second.

Christmas is an even more obvious occasion for a regular talk and of course the trick was to find some impressive or entertaining American angle. One year I did it from Hollywood and totted up the expense to movie stars' families who wanted to do right by their children. The expensive laying down carpets of cornflakes or of hiring snow machines from the studio to make your lawn achieve on Christmas morning the proper deep and crisp and even look.

The Fourth of July inevitably provoked a talk giving a new spin to the origins of the War of Independence. Or why it was always celebrated with fireworks and the ringing of bells – because John Adams, the second President said it ought to be.

Thanksgiving always produced a piece about the first harvest in Massachusetts and the introduction of the first English settlers to the novelty of the turkey and to what was to become the staple American crop from the Canadian tundra to the tip of Argentina: corn. Or as it's called in England, maize. I've sometimes wondered if cornflakes would have been as popular a breakfast cereal in Britain if they'd rechristened it maize flakes.

Well, this past Monday, the first Monday in September always produced an annual talk about Labor Day. How it started, and the growing power of organised Labor, why it preferred, long ago, to remain a big bargaining chip between the two political parties instead of becoming a political party of its own, a preference never doubted by generations of American Labor leaders, in spite of the spluttering protests of a visiting Briton, "Nye" Bevan, that they were naive, behind the times, a quarter of a century out of date and so on. Even without the historical appendage, Labor Day was always a big ceremonial day in all the cities, and even in small towns, the occasion for parades and respectful tributes to labour from local worthies and in the evening of Labor Day, the president of the United States usually gave a rousing speech before a great rally of Labor unions, or, better, after the invention of radio, did a broadcast as solemn as a prayer.

I gave up doing a regular Labor Day talk when the power of union labour began to weaken and wither. The parades and ceremonies stopped when eventually, as now, 77 Americans in 100 did not belong to a union. We won't go into the accumulated reasons why this is so, except to mention the main one: that after the ferocious Labor management battles of the 1930s and '40s, all the familiar practices once fought for, from the early dole to pregnancy leave, from sickness insurance to stock sharing, have been taken over by business big and small. And this year there were, so far as I can see, very few, if any Labor Day addresses given as such by governors of states, by the party leaders. There was one, given in California, no wonder. It has lost about 300,000 jobs from the closing of military and naval bases alone. Its general unemployment rises as, if you want to be mean, the rate of immigration and illegal immigration rises. Now this is a false referent. One didn't happen because of the other. But if you live in the cities close to the American border, it is tempting to believe so when you hear that the moment a poor Mexican family crosses the border it's entitled to the health care and public education of the citizen and the legally resident alien, a fact of life the California voters rebelled against in the last election.

And who do you suppose was making that only Labor Day speech? An impassioned one it was too. The president of the United States. The New York Times which did not otherwise notice Labor Day remarked about Mr. Clinton's speech that it resembled a Labor Day campaign kick-off. Of course, he was campaigning, for the presidency, it's the thing he does best. His problem is how he performs when he gets to be president. Mr. Clinton took up the great California grievance, illegal immigration, and declared it was not responsible for the economic distress of the middle class. What was? Mr. Clinton's favourite slogan came out, "Jobs! Jobs!" He then went to the oldest, the most dependable magic the Democrats can invoke – either old Democrats or new ones – higher minimum wage. A guarantee, his opponents always say, of swift inflation.

This must be the possibly the thirtieth time that Mr. Clinton has visited and speechified in California since he was elected. Because California is the most populous state, has most congress members, has the largest block of voting delegates to both conventions, it is not conceivable – and Mr. Clinton knows it better than anybody – that the presidency can be won by a candidate who loses California next year. And when you hear too that the Democratic Party is in such disarray in New York State, so muddled and divided in its leadership that it cannot just now guarantee that Mr. Clinton will carry even New York. And, yet another Democratic senator has announced that he will not run in 1996, thus making it easier for the Republicans to get two-thirds majority on anything they're determined to bulldoze through. You'll appreciate the jubilation of the Republicans returning this week to work and the truly powerless state of the Democrats as the party in opposition.

The Democrats plight is so bad, their fortunes so low, it almost makes one lay an immediate whopping bet that the next President of the United States will be Bill Clinton. Things, party morale and power, were never so low – 1883, 1908, 1930, – that they didn't go galloping back into life and victory. Well, that may be going too far the other way but I do remember in 1964 when Barry Goldwater swore to lead the Republicans into the Promised Land. Instead, in the election, he was driven into the wilderness by the Texas Moses, Lyndon Johnson. There followed a running stream of articles by the most thoughtful of American commentators saying we had probably seen the end of the Republican Party. Ah so.

Four years later, Richard Nixon went sweeping back and the Republicans were in the White House again, and again in 1972, a Nixon landslide. There was, you may recall, a blip, or stutter, in 1976 with a fella named Carter, and then the Republicans were back in the groove in 1980 and '84 and '88. So the question is, was 1992 another blip or a trend? But, with Congress bustling back into session, its business was not I think yet the horse race it will become.

Two topics pushed their way into public curiosity. One foreign - Mrs. Clinton's visit to Beijing, the consequences of which are not yet over – and one domestic. The domestic theme was one I haven't talked much about, since I guessed in January, facetiously, that the OJ Simpson trial would not be over until Labor Day. Well, Labor Day's come and gone and, as I speak, the defence says it will close its case this weekend. Well, perhaps next week or who knows the week after that. What is certain is that in the past two weeks the trial has taken an ugly turn that may affect the city of Los Angeles, and, by extension, cities with large black populations, in a more menacing way than the trial itself. For one week, the court was assaulted every day, with the jury absent, by the showing of the texts of some taped interviews given over several recent years, by a witness for the prosecution, who has turned into perhaps the most powerful, involuntary witness for the defence: Mr. Mark Furman, a now retired police officer who swore on the stand that he had not, in 10 years, ever used the word "nigger".

Well, in those tapes, he not only used it pejoratively, sneeringly 42 times, but expressed unbelievably foul-mouthed advice about how to cheat, beat up and set up arrested blacks for guilty verdicts or frightening them into never appearing in court. This appalling discharge of bigotry and obscenity made the defence's charge suddenly believable. That this very police officer did not discover the incriminating bloody glove, but planted it, and in other ways set up OJ Simpson for the double murder charge. But the more frightening result of the publicising through, I must say, riveting television, is that the tapes have spread throughout Los Angeles's seething black community, renewed fears and disgust over incurable racism in the city's police force. Probably very few blacks identify with OJ Simpson as a typical black underdog like themselves, he was seen from the beginning as a privileged exception. But many, many blacks will identify Mr. Furman as the enemy.

And I really come back to the thought I mentioned at the very beginning of the trial, it's unlikely that a jury with eight blacks, thinking back to the riots after the Rodney King case, and now having its thoughts reinforced by Officer Furman's filthy talk, it's unlikely that whatever their private opinions, those eight would qualify for sainthood by finding Mr. Simpson guilty. It seemed unlikely in January. Less likely than ever now.

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