Instructor's Guide to Packinghouse Daughter

by Cheri Register
Note to instructors
I find that I still experience the world as a working-class kid away from home. I walk the line between a feisty
fidelity to the people of my childhood and a refined repugnance for the work they had to do. If I count up
the meetings I attended, the protests I marched in, the feminist position papers I wrote, I have sound
enough credentials to qualify as a Sixties activist, but I can't recall the politically charged days of my young
adulthood without also remembering my ambivalence. When I look at the diploma on my bookcase, I still
read "Ph.D." as "Packinghouse Daughter." -from Packinghouse Daughter

In 1959, the normally quiet town of Albert Lea, Minnesota, jumped into the headlines. A violent strike at the
local meatpacking plant hit national news broadcasts, making author Cheri Register - then just fourteen
years old - realize that the excitement she'd always assumed existed only in larger, distant cities, was
suddenly on her doorstep.

The daughter of a Wilson & Co. packinghouse worker, Cheri Register vividly recalls this strike that
devastated and divided her hometown. Haunted by memories of her confused coming-of-age in the midst
of the strike, she embarks on historical research through newspaper items, state records, company and
union archives. Where no written account exists, she conducts interviews of participants on both sides of
the strike - all in an effort to understand when the rift between the company and its workers began and why
it ran so deep.

As Register probes this material, she finds that she can't always divide labor and class issues into the
simplified terms of her youth, and she struggles to acknowledge the complexities without dishonoring her
past. A personal and public memoir, Packinghouse Daughter brings character and passion to the subject
of social class and labor history. Register's journey reflects the inner conflict felt by a generation propelled
into the middle class by post-War prosperity, people like herself who feel "caught between the blue-collar
values of the communities we left behind and our new status as the 'rich' people we used to scoff at."

The story of Cheri Register's family and the strike that gripped her hometown, carefully researched and
related with honesty, will give students insights into the struggles that have taken place beneath the calm
surfaces of small towns across America. It raises questions about fairness and justice that now, more than
forty years after the Wilson & Co. strike, have yet to be resolved, and that will inspire strong responses and
opinions from today's students.

Questions for Class Discussion

1. In the book's opening chapter, Register recalls coming home and planning to buy a blue denim shirt
to wear back at college, making clear her allegiance to the campus radicals. Her father brings her one
from the meatpacking plant where he works, a shirt "soft to the touch, not so stiff that it would stand
out among my classmates' shirts as one newly acquired" (p. 9), but a shirt that when unfurled shows
the stain of blood from the hog kill. How does the blue workshirt embody the conflicts Register feels
both as the daughter of a blue-collar worker and as a young woman who aspires to higher education?
 What message is her father sending when he gives her the "work" shirt?

2. Register, a graduate with honors from the University of Chicago, notes that even now, she reads her
Ph.D. as "Packinghouse Daughter," realizing that "I still experience the world as a working-class kid
away from home" (page 10).Does Packinghouse Daughter support Register's observation that an
essential element of the American Dream is an abandonment of familiar places and values for
dreamed-of success?How does that sense of estrangement shape Register's worldview and that of
others like her?

3. Cheri Register prefaces her book with a quote from Pearl S. Buck: "The one irrevocable limitation is
that we cannot go back to where we were. We must face the new horizons." In what way is the
concept of "new horizons" central to the book? In what important ways does Buck's quote differ from
what Frank Schultz told members of Local 6 before they voted to end the strike: "This isn't really a
question of victory or defeat, but of facing the realities in front of us." (p. 232)

4. As a young girl, Register recalls at first having "only a vague understanding of how Dad spent his
days beyond the Safety First sign" (page 27) above the gate of the Wilson & Co. packinghouse. After
a school field trip to the plant, Register and her classmates spend "the rest of the day ridding
ourselves of the horror by telling one another, over and over, what we had seen and what we only
thought we saw" (p. 35). How can we show respect for this kind of work-"work that others revile and
that we would never choose for ourselves or wish upon our children?" (p. 17) How does Register's
father reflect the view of work held by many of those raised during the Depression? What does her
father expect from his work? Does the strike change the way he thinks about his job? What do Cheri
Register and her generation, and you and your generation, expect from their jobs?

5. Although the town of Albert Lea, as Register recalls, did not have many wealthy inhabitants, there
remained subtle divisions of class. Register writes that "a child who wants to learn where she fits in the
social scheme has to listen and watch carefully" (p. 119). How does she first become aware of class
as a child? In what ways did class divisions make themselves clear in Albert Lea? Discuss how class
divisions are drawn in your community or school.

6. In telling of the 109-day strike at the Wilson & Co. packinghouse, does Register successfully
supplement her less objective and less reliable "emotional memory" with hard facts? How does the
rush of emotional memory "steady and fervent and nearly obsessive at times" (p. 20) color her retelling
of events? How does her naïve experience of the strike as a fourteen-year-old girl add depth and
color to her account? Is her emotional memory of "powerless workers up against a heartless
adversary" (p. 163) challenged or confirmed by the research she does later on the strike?

7. Register reprints two letters (pp. 213-15) from the files of Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman. Both
relate to the strike but are written from very different points of view. How do the letters add to the story
of the strike? What perspectives do the letters offer that Register's own memories lack? Is participation
in a strike enough to cause somebody to be labeled a "radical person," as Mrs. Tuberty, the author of
one letter, fears? How do Tuberty's dreams for her children echo those of Register's parents for her?

8. Although most workers at the Wilson & Co. packinghouse were rehired after the strike, the plant has
gone through many changes in ownership and has struggled to remain open. (On July 8, 2001, just
after the paperback edition went to print, a fire destroyed half the plant and forced it to shut down
indefinitely, leaving 600 people out of work.) In recent years, while there is nearly full employment in
 the town, Register notes that nearly thirty percent of schoolchildren qualify for subsidized meals. Are
stable, working-class American communities like the Albert Lea of 1959 a thing of the past? How has
industrial globalization changed the face of small-town America and the kind of work that is available
there?

9. On the night he closed the Wilson plant and called the National Guard to Albert Lea, Governor
Freeman wrote some notes to himself in which he asked, "what of community, who can speak for
community and people who live there?" (p. 262) How would you answer this question? What are the
community's interests during a labor dispute, and who should represent those? What role do you think
government should play?

10. At several points in Packinghouse Daughter, Register adopts the image of a spaceship losing its
booster rockets as it hurtles higher to illustrate how she feels leaving her blue-collar working-class
roots behind to join the white-collar middle class. In her own upward mobility, what aspects of her
upbringing does Register seem to reject and to hold onto? How does the fierceness with which she
holds onto certain values-such as her belief in the value of work and the dignity of those who perform
difficult jobs-relate to the traumatic events of the 1959 strike?

11. What cultural markers does Register refer to in order to give readers a sense of the time in which
these events take place? How does her portrayal of the 1950s and early 1960s resemble or differ from
others you are familiar with, either from popular culture, literature and the arts, or historical
scholarship?

12. Packinghouse Daughter is subtitled A Memoir, yet it does not follow a chronological narrative pattern,
and it includes material derived from research into public history along with personal memories. In
what other ways does the book depart from or adhere to your expectations of a memoir? Is there a
more accurate way to subtitle it?

13. What techniques of craft does Register use to create a coherent work out of such disparate forms as
personal memoir, historical data, documentary material, recorded interviews, and essay-like
commentary? Does the book actually cohere?

14. In the chapter called "A Dream of Joe Hill," Register follows a flight of fancy and creates, within her
non-fiction work, a scene that is entirely fictional. Why do you think she does this? What is
accomplished in this scene? What would readers miss if it were deleted?

Topics for Research and Writing Projects

1. Ask students to research the history of the meatpacking industry in the United States and explore the
ways in which it has changed as America's economy has shifted from agriculture- to industrial- to
information-based. How do wages, benefits, working conditions, and job security for meatpacking
workers compare in each era?

2. Ask students to compare Register's experience of being among the first in her family to go to college
and to enter the middle class with the experience of a child of immigrants as he or she becomes part
of American culture. Students might write about their own experience, or interview fellow students
whose parents have little formal education.
 3. Have students interview family members about their experiences as managers of or workers in union
or non-union shops. Some students may have relatives that helped organize or tried to organize
unions in their workplace. Some may have relatives who crossed the boundary between labor and
management during their worklives.

4. Governor Freeman's decision to close the Wilson plant was highly unusual and created a national
outcry. Have students look into other strikes that have drawn national attention and see how the state
and federal governments have intervened. How did the government officials justify their intervention?
What was the outcome of this government action for each of the parties involved in the labor dispute?

5. Register's ancestors owned land and enjoyed a higher status, but the family "fell" into the working
class during the farm recession of the 1920s. Ask students to trace the mobility and occupational
history of other families who lost farms at that time, and/or to compare that era with more recent
changes in the agricultural economy, such as the decline of the family farm and the growth of
agribusiness.

6. Demonstrations and public campaigns against well-known corporations such as Nike, Wal-Mart and
The Gap have raised awareness of sweatshops among many Americans. Ask students to place the
current debate on sweatshops in the garment industry in a historical context and explore the complex
factors that contribute to their existence today in the United States and abroad.

7. Using Packinghouse Daughter as an example, ask students to write about themselves, their families,
and their hometowns when they were fourteen or at some critical juncture in their lives. This project
should be a mixture of memory, interview, and research.

8. Ask students to write about and discuss their perceptions of people from small towns, rural areas,
cities, suburbs, the Midwest and other regions. What values and behaviors do they associate with
each of these groups? Does Packinghouse Daughter confirm or challenge their perceptions of
smalltown Midwesterners? If the students are familiar with Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion,
have them compare the Albert Lea of Packinghouse Daughter with Keillor's Lake Wobegon.

9. Have students find and read Cheri Register's other publications and look for common themes and an
identifiable "voice" within the variety of subjects she writes about.

Suggestions for Further Reading

American Social History Project, Who Built America v. I & II

Carol Bly, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World: Reading and Thinking about Ethics.

C.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from
the Working Class

Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed in America.

James T. Farrell, Chicago Stories

Deborah Fink, Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest

Paul Gruchow, Grass Roots: The Universe of Home

Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their
Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality

Ben Hamper, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line

Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

Bill Holm, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth: Minneota, Minnesota

Meridel Le Sueur, Crusaders: The Radical Legacy of Marian and ArtLe Sueurhur

Mary Karr, The Liar's Club

Joyce L. Kornbluh, editor, Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology

Michael Moore, Downsize This!: Random Threats from an Unarmed American

Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles, editors, Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life.

Peter J. Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement

Lillian B. Rubin, Families on the Faultline: America's Working Class Speaks about the Family, the Economy,
Race, and Ethnicity

Lillian B. Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family

Sebastiao Salgado, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age

Scott Russell Sanders, The Paradise of Bombs

Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure

William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Don J. Snyder, The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found

Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman, Unionizing the Jungles: Labor and Community in the Twentieth-
Century Meatpacking Industry

Donald D. Stull, Michael J. Broadway, and David Griffith, Anyway You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-
Town America
Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do

Reg Theriault, How to Tell When You're Tired: A Brief Examination of Work U.S. Department of Labor,
Important Events in Labor History

Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

Other Resources
Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot, script by Lee Hall (feature film)

William Duke, Killing Floor (made-for-TV movie on video)

Barbara Kopple, American Dream (documentary video)

Michael Moore, Roger and Me (documentary video)

Michael Moore, The Big One (documentary video)

Bo Widerberg, Joe Hill (feature film) www.lawcha.org, web site of Labor and Working Class History
Association www.as.ysu.edu/~cwcs/, web site of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State
University

About the Author

Born and raised in Albert Lea, Minnesota, Cheri Register now lives in Minneapolis, where she is a writer and
a teacher. Her previously published books include Are Those Kids Yours?: American Families with Children
Adopted from Other Countries (Free Press, 1991) and The Chronic Illness Experience: Embracing the
Imperfect Life (Hazelden, 1999, previously published as Living with Chronic Illness: Days of Patience and
Passion, Free Press, 1987). She is also known for her earlier work in Swedish women's literature and
feminist literary criticism. The opening essay in Packinghouse Daughter, "The Blue Workshirt," was cited as
a notable essay in Best American Essays 1996. Excerpts from Packinghouse Daughter have appeared in
Hungry Mind Review (now Ruminator Review) and other literary magazines. Packinghouse Daughter
received a Minnesota Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir in 2001 and an American Book Award
from the Before Columbus Foundation that same year. A former professor at the universities of Idaho and
Minnesota, Register teaches courses in writing literary nonfiction at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.