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, the university's blue-collar worker union, and signatories, during
the week before the union went on strike, to a statement asserting “WE BELIEVE
THE UNION DESERVES THE SUPPORT OF YALE STUDENTS AND FACULTY." Bill
Clinton was even, former UNITE HERE President 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 in 1971, 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.
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.
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 building.
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.
Excerpted and adapted from Beneath
the University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City, an
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is an
independent scholar who writes about universities and labor. He received his
Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University in September
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