Labor Day and the American Alloy
This piece is also available on Michael Smerconish’s website and Twitter at https://www.smerconish.com/news/2020/9/4/labor-day-and-the-american-alloy
Labor Day offers an opportunity to consider a prospective re-set of the way we define ourselves as a Nation. We have long heard the venerable “melting pot” metaphor, which feels overworked even if it might still resonate to some degree. National leadership has not yet offered an introspective assessment to help and set the state for a visionary national future, as public messaging spirals down ever more into ad hominem attacks. On the eve of elections, this weekend offers a brief pause for us to try to frame a better image of who we can be — and preferably one that inspires hope, or at least affords a keystone reference for years to come.
There is such an image. What comes to mind is not the diversity that has gone into the melting pot, but the alloy steel that comes out of it. Stronger than other steel, alloys combine multiple different metal elements. Molecular bonding between the different constituents gives the resulting metal far greater strength and ability to resist corrosion. The American Standard for Testing and Materials has worked for years to ensure the high quality of American steel, with measurements reporting that alloy steel made from American labor is multiple times stronger than that of competitors. Alloys derive greatness from heterogeneity.
This weekend is the perfect occasion to explore this image. Just a few historical examples of American labor harden the national metaphor into a fitted mold. Americans of European descent — Italians, Germans, Poles, Brits, and many more — came by the tens of millions in the nineteenth century, and fortified a population that carried us into the industrial revolution. Millions from Ireland alone supplied workforces that dug canals and built railways. From Africa, we must reverentially account for the transcendent labor — dating longer and deeper throughout American history — of countless millions of Black Americans with ancestors brought here against their will. Recent data show that Americans of Hispanic descent now form a critical 17 percent of our national workforce, earning more than $1 trillion dollars annually and paying nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in income taxes. Countless Americans of Chinese descent pounded the transcontinental railroad into existence to help link us “from sea to shining sea.”
There is more. We recall that that the metal in planes, ships, tanks, guns, and munitions that fortified victorious Allied troops in World War Two came from riveting labor of millions of American women. Statistics and contributions from other Americans of myriad forms of Asian and Pacific descent likewise are seminal. Nearly three million Americans who immigrated here from all around the globe are front line healthcare workers battling the coronavirus at this very moment. In fact, we firmly acknowledge these are but a few examples that would extend from Native American history to today’s robust workforce. Only the limited space here restricts us from offering a more thorough catalog of kaleidoscopic American diversity.
On this weekend when we celebrate the American worker, we thus recognize that we are not and never have been homogenous. American greatness means to embrace the massive contributions from American grit over the centuries that have come from the toils of workers of pan-continental ancestry.
No doubt these are trying times. No doubt we have cause to be concerned by divisive effects of corrosive influences. But we should take confidence this weekend that differences among us ought to be a great asset. We can be stretched and pounded and hit from many sides (including the inside), but the bonds among our varied parts supply robust tensile strength to hold us unbreakably together. From an array of metals should come the hardiest of alloys, which can give immense cause for prospective optimism on Labor Day 2020.
