Solidarity, Hope, and A Future Worth Living
A Feminist (and Contextual History) Approach to Salt of the Earth (1954)
Happy International Workers’ Day to everyone out there in the world actively working to keep our world running. May you enjoy the fruits of your labour and rescue them from those who would hoard them at your physical expense.
To celebrate International Workers’ Day (and your patience as I worked to finish my PhD dissertation draft (waiting for feedback before final submission)), I thought we’d have a film from the period I studied in that thesis that radically celebrates workers.
Note: You may or may not have heard of Herbert Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (1954), but I would encourage any of my readers who are interested in labour to check it out and read a bit about the labour history around it when you do. I’ll provide a bit of context, but the film is so much richer with a fuller understanding of just how impressive it was to be made at all in the mid-1950s. In essence, Salt of the Earth is a film about solidarity, labourers of different backgrounds and occupations, and human dignity.
To roll it back a bit, the late 1930s and early 1940s saw an overall rise in interest in Communism as an ideology in the US with membership in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) fluctuating in this period as US foreign relations with Russia fluctuated. General poverty in the Great Depression helped it rise, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 saw many withdraw from the CPUSA, and confusion over party sympathies set in when the US allied with the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945, with national membership in the CPUSA peaking at 75,000 total members in 1947. Obviously, this is a wildly condensed history of an extremely complicated period, but the significant note is that at its peak in 1947, of a population of roughly 95 million individuals of voting age, 75,000 of them were enrolled in the CPUSA (0.0789%). Active membership in a party doesn’t necessarily mean that only those card-carrying members are sympathetic of or supportive to a party’s line, but keep this perspective in mind for the rest of this review. If less than 0.1% of the population is declared Communist and in some national elections up to 100,000 people voted for a CPUSA candidate, were the claims of McCarthy’s threats of Communism overblown?
Anyway, the mid-1940s saw intense labour strikes and worker powered movements, especially in Hollywood. Ultimately, the strikes on studio lots amounted to fractured solidarity among Hollywood unions. For instance, October 5, 1945 is known as Hollywood Bloody Friday. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) was in a jurisdictional dispute with International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) while on strike. Many IATSE members refused to cross the CSU picket lines despite the strike lasting nearly seven months by October. On the 5th, police, strike breakers, and CSU members clashed, leading to at least 40 injuries and justification for Congress to pass the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 that would limit the rights and abilities of unions. Some studio heads such as Walt Disney saw the unions as hubs for Commie activity and leveraged the ensuing anti-Communism of the period to get back at the unions for their costly disruptions throughout the 1940s. The International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a union expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1950 due to fears of ties with known Communists, funded Salt of the Earth.
A pivotal year for may reasons, 1947 would also see the entrance of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) into Hollywood. In October of that year, HUAC would hear testimony from “friendly” witnesses including Disney, Jack Warner, and Ayn Rand, as well as “unfriendly” witnesses. Ten filmmakers refused to answer whether they were or ever had been members of the CPUSA claiming that it was a violation of their First Amendment rights, and the Committee, in response to their refusal charged them with contempt of Congress. These filmmakers are known as the Hollywood Ten and later sentenced to serve six months to a year in prison in 1950 before HUAC returned to Hollywood for a second round of hearings and investigations in 1952. Herbert Biberman, director of Salt of the Earth was one of the Ten.
In response to HUAC’s Hollywood focus and the publicity around it, Hollywood executives felt pressured to reassure the nation (and the government (and John Wayne)) that no Commies were making their films. In November 1947, the President of the Motion Picture Alliance of America (MPAA), Eric Johnston, introduced the blacklist in the Waldorf Statement, a policy that would wreak havoc on hundreds of lives in the entertainment industry and drastically impact our cultural outputs for, at minimum, 13 years before it was effectively obsolete with Kirk Douglas’s public naming of Hollywood Ten member, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo as the writer of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). Paul Jarrico and Michael Wilson, producer and writer of Salt of the Earth respectively, were both blacklisted around 1950.
So, that’s our little bit of context for coming forward to 1954. HUAC came and went, labour was equated with Communism, John Wayne in all his infinite horridness was happy as hell. What a time, what a time.
Turning to the film itself, even though I knew of the film and had read about it as a Left-leaning outlier politically in this period of increasingly conservative idealism in films, Salt of the Earth surprised me. I was hoping the lens would be Contextual History, but the Review Roulette wheel had better plans and landed on Feminism as our theoretical approach. Unbeknownst to me, Salt of the Earth isn’t just a film depicting real workers’ struggles with corporate disregard for their safety in a racist system already stacked against the majority of the striking workers who themselves are of Mexican descent; it’s also a radical film about the underdiscussed domestic labour of women, perhaps even more so than those layers concerning the wage labourers.
Salt of the Earth has three distinct labour categories: management, wage earners, and domestic labourers. The film follows Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas) and her husband Ramon (Juan Chacón) who works in a zinc mine in New Mexico. The Quinteros live in a house on company land, attend the company physician when permitted, and owe a debt to the company store when the company withholds pay for indefinite reasons. At the start of the film, Esperanza is pregnant and speaks a thought she deems as “evil”, admitting to a votive of the Virgin Mary that she wishes her child would not be born into this world of hardship, company exploitation, and pain in her marriage caused by the adverse working conditions of Ramon.
When an Anglo worker is injured by management’s negligence to heed Ramon’s warning of dangers in the mines, the union of miners organise a strike. Over many months of growing solidarity between the white and Mexican American wage labourers in the mines, the community is visibly stronger, and the strike is holding power despite the severity of the financial situation bearing down on the families of the strikers. Local and international branches of unions in solidarity with the strikers provide aid and hardship funds to support their pursuits until the company invokes the Taft-Hartley Act, issuing a warrant that workers may not picket. What could have been a final blow to the wage workers on strike becomes an opportunity for solidarity beyond economic and social lines and into the domestic lives of the home as the wives of workers – alongside a widow of a miner killed in a previous and more violent strike – band together to take up the picket for their husbands.
This is what becomes truly radical about the film. We have already seen how this Left-leaning film funded by a blacklisted union and producer, written by a blacklisted writer, and directed by an original member of the Hollywood Ten is clearly echoing strikes in Hollywood and the callousness of studio heads throughout while also tackling this real story of zinc miners striking in 1951. At this point in the film, Salt of the Earth flips the gender roles and has the women stand in for the men having cleverly thought of the loophole in the company’s use of the Taft-Hartley, and as a result, the men have to take care of the children at home.
Early in the film, Ramon dismisses Esperanza as having an easy life compared to the hard labour he endures in the mines. He does not understand the mental load of running a household and waves off her pleas that the union add hot running water to their list of demands so that the women in the company housing can keep their families healthy and safe in sanitary conditions. When Ramon is required at home for just a few days, he immediately regrets his dismissal of his wife’s needs and has a strikingly radical (in the 1950s) conversation with another househusband about the similarities between “wage slavery and domestic slavery”.
1950s Hollywood films drifted into social conservatism, reflecting the wider culture of domestic containment (as Elaine Tyler May names it in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (amazing read if you got the time)). Domestic containment refers to this concept of turning inwards to the family unit in the 1950s as a method of controlling what you can control as the world outside of the suburban white picket fence spiralled into chaos, terror, and daily threats of nuclear annihilation. The cultural result of this idea was largely a reinforcement of traditional gender roles and the shift into social conservatism more widely in mainstream cultural outputs.
Salt of the Earth absolutely demolishes those traditional roles. Just rips them to shreds in one of the most beautiful expressions of solidarity between romantic partners, community members, and colleagues I may have ever seen. By all technicality, if you care about that, the film isn’t perfect with some stunted lines and simplistic shots, whatever. The heart of the film, however, is about understanding the interconnectivity between every role in life, perhaps best exemplified in the title itself. In the last few words of the film, Esperanza finally says the title in reference to the children of the workers. Having turned around completely from her earlier lamentations that her then-unborn baby would not have to suffer the world as it was with the harsh conditions prior to the strike, Esperanza dedicates the world she, her husband, and the community of workers in solidarity with one another are working to build.
Salt of the Earth is a very worthwhile watch (and short at only 94 minutes!), and if you have any interest in labour history, women’s history, Mexican American history, or even Hollywood history, I do think there’s a lot there for all of us to find something of value with a lasting message that the world you want to live in is at the fingertips of a community working together in unshakable solidarity.