An Affair To Remember

By Emily Mitchell +

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

by Thomas Geoghegan

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

287 pages; $19.95

Brooding over a romance gone awry, Thomas Geoghegan wanted to get away from it all. Joining the French Foreign Legion was out, but a roommate talked him into volunteering as an observer at a dissident Mine Workers election. That was in 1972, and the beginning of Geoghegan's love affair with a "dumb, stupid, mastodon of a thing," a creature that shambles around "with half its brain gone." The object of his passion: organized labor.

Raised in the suburbs and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Geoghegan, 42, could easily have turned out to be like others of his generation, wanting, as he says, to go into real estate and cappuccino. Instead he ended up as a labor lawyer in Chicago, working for outfits like the Steelworkers, the Teamsters and the Autoworkers. Along the way, he also became a writer and has produced a fine first book that blends an unswervingly honest account of labor's history with his adventures as a modern-day Don Quixote of the legal profession whose battles take place in union halls and around bargaining tables.

The union movement seemed unstoppable in the 1930s, but by the time Geoghegan came along, it was developing, as he aptly puts it, "a nice, rosy, tubercular glow." He wonders about his own political commitment and why he is obsessed with labor and its ghosts. It may even be rootless, he thinks, to still be for something like "solidarity" or "community" during the Reagan era. In one moving passage, he describes the scene at a Wisconsin plant closing that marked the end for the Autoworkers local. Standing outside the plant, not knowing what to do, the members decide to scream. It was, said the papers later, a yell that could be heard in the Loop, 60 miles away. To Geoghegan, it was a scream Edvard Munch could have painted. One day that scream will be commemorated with a plaque, he writes, "and people will walk past it and remember. And they will think: This was the last scream they screamed before they left organized labor." If Geoghegan is right, his book is an eloquent epitaph.