The Edmund Fitzgerald

As I sit in front of the fireplace and I write this piece, it is almost exactly 50 years, to the hour, that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank beneath the waves and took 29 men with it. Gordon Lightfoot's incredible memorial song has meant that the tragedy has lived on in the popular conscience. Every year the song surfaces in the early days of November as a reminder of the loss of those men’s lives. 

Lightfoot’s song, for all of its power and beauty, leaves out an important part of the disaster: capitalism. These 29 men were charged with carrying 26,000 tons of Iron Ore for the Oglebay Norton Corporation. This corporation has since been bought by Carmeuse Lime and Stone, INC. A Belgian multinational mining corporation with presence on 5 continents. Carmeuse’s activities in North America have resulted in environmental degradation in Alabama, a worker’s death in Georgia, and a proposal to burn trash in Ontario. The boat itself is named after the chairman of Northwestern Mutual. Northwestern Mutual in part funded the construction of the boat

It should not be lost that the 29 men died while on the job. They were workers, toiling away as so many other workers have been when their lives were taken from them. The most immense example being the transatlantic slave trade, wherein many enslaved workers chose a death in the seas rather than a life of enslavement. Mortality rates of roughly 20% meant that millions of enslaved African workers met their ends on slave ships en route to the Americas. 

It should not come at great surprise that mineworkers, toiling in conditions notorious for the death and endangerment, drew parallels to those workers of the seas. The mining labor song “Miner’s Lifeguard” begins with asserting that “A Miner’s life is like a sailor’s/Board a ship to cross the waves/Every day his life’s in danger/Still he ventures, being brave.” The dangers of the sea and of work deep in the soil are not identical, but the existential risk remains. The environment around the worker could take that worker’s life at any moment. 

It is not the miner nor the sailor who sees the great mass of riches their labor produces. The worker bears the risk, the worker sets out in dangerous conditions and provides profit for the capitalist. To borrow the words of Bill Haywood: “The Mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!" 

It is not the owner of Oglebay Norton that had to pay the price for the storm on lake superior. When Amazon workers are held to work through a tornado warning, it is not Jeff Bezos who dies in the wreckage when a tornado tears through a warehouse. It is not Kelly Ortberg who goes down in a plane crash when Boeing cuts corners on safety in production. It is not Warren Buffet who is killed by a BNSF train while at work. 

Rather, it is the crew of the Edmund Fitgerald who are memorialized with 29 rings of the bells at the Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral. It is low-wage workers who are killed in disaster after disaster at Amazon facilities. It is the crew and passengers on airline flights who are killed in plane crashes. It is a railroad conductor who does not come home at the end of the workday. 

There is no small part of me that thinks the popularity of the song along with its revival in popular and internet culture is because of a certain class kinship that many have with the lost sailors. Lightfoot’s song, which is the center of popular engagement with the wreck, tells a story of brave sailors, lost at sea through no fault of their own, fighting against the immense might of all of nature. 

The covid-19 pandemic brought many millions of workers face to face with the reality that the interests of global capitalism were antithetical to their own lives. Workers were thrown out into a disaster of immense proportions and told to do their jobs. And many died for it. And many were changed forever by the lasting effects of a disease. 

Woody Guthrie sang of the death of workers in a different way than Gordon Lightfoot. Guthrie stated that “Every new grave brings a thousand members” to the union movement. The labor movement, much like Lake Superior in Lightfoot’s song, never gives up our dead. As Utah Phillips puts it: “If there’s one thing that’s characteristic of the labor movement, it is that we never forget our heroes. They continue to teach us through their songs and through their lives and through the things they said.”

It perhaps can not be said that the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald are “heroes” of the labor movement. But they are martyrs of the working class. They are workers who were returned to Mother Earth while in the conduct of their labor. 

May the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald rest in peace. And may we build a world where no worker must sacrifice their life for the profits of capital.