Only Partly Visible

Abstract

In Only Partly Visible, David F. Scrivner seeks to paint a rich, complex, and historically informed portrait of workers and their experiences in America in the twentieth century. This work of historical fiction touches on four major moments: The Ludlow Masscare of 1914, the struggle for equality in post-WWII Las Vegas, the strike and decertification of PATCO in 1982, and the dwindling of the automotive industry in Youngstown, Ohio in the last decade of the century. Only Partly Visible also includes a short Postscript, set in the near future, that adds one more voice to the larger conversation and lays out some ideas about the logic and purpose of this collection. In this work, Scrivner considers the struggles workers faced, the moments of triumph they engineered, and how drastically the specific historic realities of their time shaped their lives. It attempts to show how government, unions, management, and other people and institutions did and did not support those workers striving for equality and seeking to make better lives for themselves. It asks us to see ourselves in people who don’t look like us, live in a different time and place, and do different work. Only by doing this, Scrivner suggests, can we ever achieve a meaningful sense of class consciousness. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, kahualike.manoa.hawaii.edu.Kahualike. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to David Scrivner.