Big Muscle, Big Bucks
EVER YTHING THA TMOVES A Documentary Novel by Budd Schulberg '36 Doubleday, 1980. 251 pp. $10
This novel, the seventh by Schulberg, tells of the rise (and fall) of an opportunistic, macho labor leader, who heads a union, the International Brotherhood of Haulers and Truckers, that sounds suspiciously like the Teamsters. Indeed, the fictional labor leader's name, Joey Hopper, has more than an echo of Jimmy Hoffa to it. To continue the parallel, Joey Hopper disappears from the public view, bludgeoned to death and tidily encased in swimming pool Gunite, ironically at a site being readied as a summer camp for the children of IBHT unionists.
On the way to this unusual tomb, Joey Hopper rises quickly from oil-rig driver through the hierarchy of the union to become its head, stepping on a neck here, a sensibility there. Under his impetus the union branches out, sucking up gas-station attendants, juke boxes, whatever and is not loath to play footsie with big business, or the mob. Joey Hopper gets the power and, of course, gets the corruption.
Toward the end of the book, a younger incarnation of Joey surfaces, Tommy Nielsen, a visionary, a reformer from Joey's old home town. He forms a splinter group from the IBHT called Return Our Labor Liberties (an acronymically too apt ROLL). His motto is "If you quit, you die."
At novel's end, it is not entirely sure (as it never is in life) whether the Nielsen forces of good will triumph over the entrenched forces of evil, but there is just the hint that Schulberg thinks they will. Or, at the very least, hopes they will.
Schulberg, whose past track record has shown him to be very knowledgeable about the intricacies of union life (On the Waterfront) and the Byzantine nature of ambition (WhatMakes Sammy Run), continues to show his wisdom in these areas in this book. At times, the twists and turnings require close attention, as he uses the device of italic inserts giving testimony before a Senate committee investigating the IBHT, which interrupt the narrative line. But, on the whole, these are used skillfully, as one would expect from a writer of Schulberg's attainments.
On the whole, though, I came away from the book feeling that it is somehow thin, that it is not worthy of its author. An unabashed admirer of Sammy, The Harder They Fall, and The Disenchanted, I felt let down by this one. (A slight cavil, and it is admittedly that: Schulberg's use of phonetics to imitate trucker, and tough guy, conversation is an irritation. The elisions, the dropping of the final "g" on participles do not have the cadences of true dialogue.)
Yet there is this, one of the corrupt big businessmen talking: "This isn't an age of ethics. It's the age of big muscle and big bucks, and what works is what's right." And then, the hard-working idealistic Senate investigator musing to himself: "... he guesses he'll go back to the office after all. Keep pushing that stone up the mountain."
That, I think, is what Schulberg is trying to tell us. And, after this election year, the Sisyphean adjuration couldn't be more right.
James Farley is a longtime journalist andfrequent reviewer for the ALUMNI MAGAZINE.
