Today is the anniversary of the execution of Joe Hill, iconic poet-warrior of the Industrial Workers of the World, convicted on false charges of killing a policeman in a trial orchestrated by a mining company in which all the records disappeared, whose songs will inspire resistance and the solidarity of workers so long as the dream of liberty lives; freedom from coercion and the social use of force, but also equality and fairness in our share of the products of our labor, which is nothing more than a reckoning of the value of our time.
Ideologies of human relations, societies, political institutions, systems, and structures, especially those anchored to economic theories, can be a vast rabbit hole from which little of practical use emerges, but for this; how shall we assign values to our time?
This question is the Occam’s Razor I use to simplify the issue of who will do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us, and at what cost. To me an hour’s work is an hour’s work, no matter who is doing it. And no matter what that work is; the time of an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer is of no more intrinsic worth than that of a janitor or any other worker; all are equally human and all are using the same span of time.
There can be no basis or justification for assigning different values to different persons or tasks, and the achievement of a free society of equals requires equal shares in the wealth of our society. A just society would mandate one universal wage.
But this is not the great lesson of the life of Joe Hill; a life of Resistance and Solidarity, and of speaking truth to power, but also one of creating beauty to balance the horror of an unjust world and its systems of oppression and unequal power, of bringing joy to banish fear, love to break the bonds of the Ring of Power, and hope to balance the terror of our nothingness.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Here are the lyrics of one his songs, written in 1914:
Today we celebrate Labor Day and all the victories of solidarity and resistance to brutal repression of the labor union movement that followed in the wake of the great Pullman Strike which founded it.
In this moment of heroic resistance to commodification in the resurgence of labor unions in Resistance to subjugation by the Fourth Reich and the Party of Treason under Traitor Trump and other forms of solidarity, mass action, and seizures of power by workers in an increasingly exploitative society as capitalism and with it our civilization begins to fragment and collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, we may ask; why unions?
Why are labor unions crucial to any defense of our humanity and our universal rights, and to democracy? Here I look to the origins of Labor Day, and its place in the glorious history of liberation struggle.
On Labor Day in 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain ended the largest armed revolt since the Civil War, and branded the meaning of Labor Day and unions forever into the soul of America.
A union, like a democracy, is nothing more or less than a band of brothers who refuse to submit to enslavement and labor exploitation, or to abandon their fellows. Here is the essence and instrument of a free society of equals; liberty, equality, fraternity.
Our labor unions are a national treasure and a firewall of democracy which must be defended and celebrated.
Today we remember, and rejoice.
As written by Samuel Fleischman in The Nation; “Heading east from here, County Road 17 snakes up and down craggy hills for several miles before crossing an unremarkable intersection. A deserted church sits on one corner. On the other, a small bronze plaque recounts the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor dispute that saw almost 10,000 miners face off against a union-busting sheriff, several thousand deputized locals, and the US military. It was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. This year marks the 100th anniversary, yet hardly a soul today remembers it.
The origins of the battle can be traced to the Matewan Massacre, when gun thugs working for Baldwin-Felts—an infamous strike-breaking “detective” agency—got into a shootout with a group of miners and Sheriff Sid Hatfield. After Baldwin-Felts agents murdered Hatfield in revenge the following year—on the steps of the county courthouse—his death became a martyrdom that roused miners to battle.
Coal life was already hard enough. Dangerous conditions (the Monongah Disaster alone killed upwards of 400 people, not to mention the long-term effects of breathing in coal dust), low wages (mine owners had been convicted of war profiteering during World War I), and exploitative credit systems were par for the course.
The situation only escalated in the summer of 1921 after hundreds of striking workers were arrested and held indefinitely. Hatfield’s death was the final straw. By August, thousands of miners were marching toward Matewan, intent on freeing their comrades and bringing their guerilla version of class warfare into action.
When the bombs started falling on the slopes of Blair Mountain—on Labor Day, 1921–many realized the gravity of their situation. For almost a week, miners numbering in the thousands had been battling machine-gun nests commanded by Don Chafin, sheriff of Logan County. They had already refused the pleas of President Harding, who feared their struggle might inspire the nearly 2 million unemployed Americans across the country to launch a full-scale class revolution. Thousands of leaflets bearing Harding’s message calling on the miners to disperse, were dropped by plane—and summarily ignored.
By nightfall, after the rumble of machine-gun fire and whir of biplane engines had dissipated, the miners must have looked around from where they were perched in trees or stretched out in hastily dug trenches and seen the numbers missing from their ranks. Still, they fought on.
Their fight was the culmination of a decades-long struggle. After coal companies rejected every effort by the UMWA to win representation, armed struggle took hold. By the end of the week somewhere between 50 and 100 miners, among them Appalachians, Italian immigrants, and African Americans, were dead.”
To all those whose struggles have won for us the freedoms we now enjoy, and whose continuing resistance to unjust authority, dehumanization, and exploitation by those who would enslave us holds our hope for the future of humankind in which the bold claim of our Declaration of Independence, wherein Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776, “all men are created equal,” may at long last be made real, I salute you.
The origins of Labor Day are recounted by Tim Goulet in Jacobin; “On September 5, 1882, socialists, the Knights of Labor, and various left organizations associated with the Central Labor Union (CLU) organized a march calling for shorter hours, higher pay, safer working conditions — and a labor holiday.”
“Ten thousand workers took an unpaid day off and marched from City Hall through Union Square to Forty-Second Street.
This event would soon become annual, spreading to other cities, states, and municipalities as the movement for a labor day grew. In 1885 and 1886, various American cities declared the first Monday in September to be a workers’ holiday, and on February 21, 1887, Oregon became the first state to recognize Labor Day. Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, and New Jersey followed later that year.”
“But it wasn’t until 1894 that Grover Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, declared Labor Day a federal holiday. Not coincidentally, his announcement came at the close of a mass strike.
In June of that year, workers who built Pullman railroad cars had joined Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union (ARU). They were angry that their steep pay cuts were not matched by rent reductions in their company town. As a result, 125,000 railroad workers refused to move any trains that had a Pullman car attached to it.
Cleveland called out the National Guard to police the railways but could not convince the strikers to resume work. Claiming that it was interfering with the postal service, Richard Olney, former attorney general, forced the courts to issue the first federal injunction against a strike.
When Debs refused to call the work stoppage off, he was jailed for six months. At least thirty workers were killed during the government’s violent suppression of the strike. This violence was openly condemned by New York’s Central Labor Union, who stood in full solidarity with the ARU.
Six days after it ended, Cleveland made Labor Day a national holiday, hoping it would defuse class anger and deflect attention away from the more militant May Day. But the president had other concerns too. It was a midterm election year, and Cleveland — serving his second nonconsecutive term — did not want to appear an enemy of organized labor. Yet he miscalculated: legalizing Labor Day could not make up for smashing the Pullman Strike and jailing Debs. He lost his reelection campaign, and the labor movement didn’t stay quiet for long.
Cleveland did not simply invent Labor Day, as we are often led to believe. The holiday represents a partial victory that reflects the labor movement’s strength, which pressed its weight on the scales of politics and forced a federal reform.
Like most reforms, it had a dual character: on the one hand, it absorbed and nullified some worker militancy; on the other, it ceded ground to the unions and put them in a better position to win future demands. Seeing it merely as a weapon instituted from the top down obscures the class struggle that led directly to its adoption.”
Heather Cox Richarson recounts the history of Labor Day this way ” Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.
Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored.
Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.
The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.”
Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.
During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay.
While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system.
To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.
Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.
Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”
Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.
Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of “laborers, workmen, and mechanics” would not mean cuts in wages.
Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows.
The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics.
Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”
At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.
By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”
The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”
Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”
Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”
As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.
In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”
Happy Labor Day. “
Here is the Labor Day speech of Eugene V. Debbs, published on September 5, 1903 in the Social Democratic Herald and republished for the first time in Jacobin magazine; “The first Monday in September has by statutory enactment and general consent been set apart as Labor Day in the United States; and its celebration this year will be more general than ever before.
It is a day not only for rest and recreation, but for counsel and meditation. It affords an excellent opportunity to take a backward look, examine the present situation, take an inventory of resources and prepare for the greater work yet to be done before Labor Day can be celebrated by the hosts of freedom.
Labor Day must be regarded not as a privilege to be thankful for, but as a right to be enjoyed.
We never hear of Capital Day, not because Capital has no day, but because every day is Capital Day.
The struggle in which we are now engaged will end only when every day is Labor Day.
Upon every hand we see the signs of preparation.
The working class are mustering their mighty forces for political and economic conquest.
While the capitalists are capitalizing, the industrial conditions are revolutionizing, the working class are organizing, the Socialist sentiment is crystallizing and in due time the cooperative commonwealth will be materializing.
The liberation of the toilers of earth from the bonds of wage slavery is a mission worthy of the great international movement historically commissioned to render that inestimable service to humanity.
Courage is needed and intelligence, and both will be furnished in abundance by the working class itself.
Organization, based upon the mutual economic interests of the working class, is the demand of the day.
All workers, men, women and children, of all races and countries are included in the call to action.
The only line that is drawn is between the working class and their exploiters and that must be drawn straight and reach around the globe.
Workingmen, this is the day for you to realize that your interests are the same, that divided you are helpless, that united you can and will conquer the earth!
United political action will place the working class in control of government, and the abolition of capitalism will inevitably follow.
To work for wages, no matter how high, or how short the work-day, is to acknowledge a master and be at his mercy.
The full-grown workingman of the future will be free with his fellow workers to employ themselves, be their own masters and enjoy all the fruit of their labors.
Let every intelligent workingman resolve this day to do his share to abolish the wage system and emancipate the sons and daughters of toil.
The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, the party that stands for economic equality and industrial freedom, the party of progress and civilization.
This is the day to hold aloft its banner and proclaim its principles.
The struggle is as righteous as ever prompted men to do and dare on field of battle.
A few men are great now because the great mass are small.
Socialism means the exaltation of the whole and not the aggrandizement of individuals.
It is the greatest movement in all history.
It is the challenge of the twentieth century to the tyranny and oppression of the ages.
The ultimate triumph is inevitable.
The future is for socialism and humanity.”
“The Wobblies” (1979) IWW Labor Union Documentary Revolutionary Anticapitalist Industrial Unionism
When Labor Day Meant Something, by Chad Broughton/ The Atlantic
“Labor Day began not as a national holiday but in the streets, when, on September 5, 1882, thousands of bricklayers, printers, blacksmiths, railroad men, cigar makers, and others took a day off and marched in New York City.”
We celebrate today the 1905 founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago, a key event in the history of organized labor and an example of the Butterfly Effect, as from this coming together of revolutionary ideologies and worker solidarity in mass action consequences gathered force as they spread outward to transform our nation and the world, and will continue to do so in the future.
Here is an idea whose time has truly arrived in this age of globalization; a universal labor union which ensures that no worker can be used against another. Regardless of their nation or where they do the work.
Most people don’t think of Spokane and the Pacific Northwest as the crucible of the labor movement and Socialism in America, its anarchist communes and international networks of liberation struggle of over a hundred years ago and its legacies among those who live here, but most people don’t have a life partner whose father grew up with mine in the shadow of her grandfather John F. McKay and his friend Eugene V. Debs.
I have among the tools of my trade, that of resistance, chaos, anarchy, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, a battered length of iron, pitted and scarred from many battles and acts of sabotage, artifact of a heritage of resistance which reaches back into antiquity and connects us with the lives of others who refused to submit to authority, and carried as a walking stick by John F. McKay in his many campaigns of revolutionary struggle throughout the world.
As an Industrial Workers of the World unionist and with his friend Eugene V. Debs, John F. McKay defied and challenged authority throughout the world to forge a better future in which no worker can be used against another. He began this life work as a Montana state senator in 1918-1922; for union organizing among the miners and loggers he was excommunicated by the Church, and defeated an assassin sent against him.
An infamous event from this period was the Centralia Massacre of November 11 1919, in which a local Washington State headquarters of the IWW was attacked by members of the American Legion who had been called on by the town council to restore order during a strike; they surrounded and fired on the building, and a young IWW man who happened to be a World War One veteran fired back, killing several of them. The remaining strikebreakers stormed the building, killed several of the office staff, and castrated, dragged behind cars, and lynched others. Their mutilated bodies were hung about town; captured survivors were convicted on trumped up charges and given sentences of 25 years. From this abattoir emerged a champion of the people; I believe this event began John F. McKay’s shift from political to direct action. He smashed through the ambush with the crowbar now in my toolkit, and through a blockade in a stolen truck to escape. At the end of his term in the senate he became a full time IWW organizer.
In 1930 he moved to Spokane and founded the All Worker’s Party, and with the hundreds of men he organized kept thousands of people alive during the Great Depression, by raiding trains for food to distribute while his teams turned the power and water back on for families who had no cash to pay the utilities with, among other things.
And with this wrecking bar in his fist he fought for liberty, equality, and justice for the rest of his life. I hope to be worthy of its use, in bearing forward the legacy of resistance he created in the quest to make all human beings equal, and all workers to share in the rewards of their labor in a just society.
The sign above the gate of Auschwitz read; “work will set you free.” This is a lie. Only revolutionary struggle and seizure of power will set you free.
As described in Jacobin; “Even Americans familiar with labor history might be surprised by the slogan of the Congress of South African Trade Unions: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” More commonly associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the motto was likely brought to South Africa by IWW members (“Wobblies”) shortly after the revolutionary union’s founding in 1905.
That the IWW was global enough to spread its phraseology across the Atlantic Ocean belies its popular conception, which tends to focus exclusively on the union’s organizing in the US. But the IWW’s revolutionary ideals found purchase among workers throughout the world, eventually gaining members in at least twenty countries on all six of the inhabited continents.
The IWW inspired activists in the Ghadr movement, which sought Indian independence from the British Empire. Its members interacted with Chinese republican revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen and the anarchists of the Partido Liberal Mexicano as well as its hero, Emiliano Zapata. Its ranks included everyone from socialist tribune Eugene Debs to Ghadr movement leader Pandurang Khankhoje to border-hopping migrant laborers in the American Southwest.”
Also writing in a book review in Jacobin, Staughton Lynd analyzes why the most consequential and universal labor union, the first of its kind in the history of the world and the seed idea which originated all unions today, had collapsed utterly, I’d say during the division of 1924 over whether its leadership should take the federal pardon; “Eric Chester’s new book, Wobblies In Their Heyday, fills this gap. It is indispensable reading for Wobblies and labor historians. One way to summarize what is between these covers is to say that Chester spells out three tragic mistakes made by the old IWW that the reinvented organization must do its best to avoid.
1.Macho Posturing
At its peak in August 1917, the IWW had a membership of more than 150,000. Nine months later, Chester writes, “the union was in total disarray, forced to devote most of its time and resources to raising funds for attorneys and bail bonds.” This sad state of affairs was, of course, partly the result of a calculated decision by the federal government to destroy the IWW. But only partly.
According to Chester another cause of the government’s successful suppression of the Wobblies was that during and after the 1913 Wheatlands strike in California hop fields, some Wobblies threatened to “burn California’s agricultural fields if two leaders of the strike were not released from jail.”
For years, Wobbly leaders had insisted that sabotage could force employers to make concessions. But what Chester terms “nebulous calls for arson” and “macho bravado” only stiffened the determination of California authorities not to modify jail sentences for Wobbly leaders Richard Ford and Herman Suhr.
Chester finds no credible evidence that any fields were, in fact, burned. But after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, this extravagant rhetoric calling for the destruction of crops apparently helped to convince President Wilson to initiate a systematic and coordinated campaign to suppress the Wobblies.
2. Avoiding Controversial Stances to Avoid State Repression
International solidarity and militant opposition to war and the draft were central tenets of the IWW. Wobblies who had enrolled in the British Army were expelled from the union. At the union’s tenth general convention in November 1915, the delegates adopted a resolution calling for a “General Strike in all industries” should the United States enter the war.
What actually happened was that general secretary-treasurer Bill Haywood and a majority of IWW leaders agreed that the union should desist from any discussion of the war or the draft, in the vain hope that this policy would persuade the federal government to refrain from targeting the union for repression. At the same time, the great majority of rank-and-file members, with support of a few leaders such as Frank Little, insisted that the IWW should be at the forefront of the opposition to the war.
Self-evidently, what Chester terms the IWW’s “diffidence” was the very opposite of Eugene Debs’s defiant opposition to the war. When Wobbly activists “flooded IWW offices with requests for help and pleas for a collective response to the draft,” the usual response was that what to do was up to each individual member.
Haywood, Chester notes, “consistently sought to steer the union away from any involvement in the draft resistance movement.” Debs notwithstanding, the national leadership of the Socialist Party, like the national leadership of the IWW, “scrambled to avoid any confrontation with federal authorities.” Radical activists from both organizations formed ad hoc alliances cutting across organizational boundaries.
The IWW General Executive Board was unable to arrive at a decision about the war and conscription, and a committee tasked with drafting a statement that included both Haywood and Little failed to do so. In the end, Chester says, “the IWW sought to position itself as a purely economic organization concerned solely with short-run gains in wages and working conditions.”
3.Falling Into the Divide-and-Conquer Trap
The reluctance of the Wobbly leadership to advocate resistance to the war and conscription carried over to a legalistic response when the government indicted IWW leaders. Haywood urged all those named in the indictment to surrender voluntarily and to waive any objection to being extradited to Chicago. In the mass trial that followed, the defendants were represented by a very good trial lawyer who was also an enthusiastic supporter of the war and passed up the opportunity to make a closing statement to the jury.
The judge’s superficial fairness deluded Wobs into hoping for a good outcome. The jury took less than an hour to find all one hundred defendants guilty of all counts in the indictment. Ninety-three received lengthy prison terms. They were imprisoned in Leavenworth, described by Chester as ‘”a maximum-security penitentiary designed for hardened, violent criminals.” Forty-six more defendants were found guilty after another mass conspiracy trial in Sacramento.
Thereafter, Chester writes, the “process of granting a commutation of sentence was manipulated during the administration of Warren Harding to divide and demoralize IWW prisoners.” The ultimate result was “the disastrous split of 1924, leaving the union a shell of what it had been only seven years earlier.”
Executive clemency, like that granted to Debs, was the only hope for the imprisoned Wobblies. President Harding rejected any thought of a general amnesty, obliging each prisoner to fill out the form requesting amnesty as an individual. The application form contained an implicit admission of guilt. (The newly created ACLU supported this process.)
Twenty-four IWW prisoners opted to submit a form requesting amnesty. A substantial majority refused to plead for individual release. More than seventy issued a statement in which they insisted that “all are innocent and all must receive the same consideration.”
The government insisted on a case-by-case approach. Fifty-two prisoners responded that they refused to accept the president’s division of the Sacramento prisoners, still alleged to have burned fields, from the Chicago prisoners. Moreover, they considered it a “base act” to “sign individual applications and leave the Attorney General’s office to select which of our number should remain in prison and which should go free.”
Initially, the IWW supported those prisoners who refused to seek their freedom individually. Those who had submitted personal requests for presidential clemency were expelled from the union.
In June 1923, the government once again dangled before desperate men the prospect of release, now available for those individual prisoners promising to remain “law-abiding and loyal to the Government.” This time a substantial majority of the remaining prisoners accepted Harding’s offer, and IWW headquarters, in what Chester calls “a sweeping reversal,” gave its approval. Eleven men at Leavenworth declined this latest government inducement. In addition, those who were tried in California did not receive the same offer.
In December 1923, the remaining IWW prisoners at Leavenworth, including twenty-two who had been convicted in Sacramento, were released unconditionally. The damage had been done. Those who had held out the longest launched a campaign within the IWW to expel those who had supported a form of conditional release. There were accusations against anyone who had allegedly proved himself “a scab and a rat.”
When a convention convened in 1924, both sides claimed the headquarters office and went to court. An organization consisting of the few hundred members who had supported the consistent rejection of all government offers “faded into oblivion by 1931.”
It is not the intent of Chester’s book, or of this review, to trash the IWW. This review has dealt with only about half of the material in the book (for example passing by the story of Wobbly organizing in copper, both at Butte, Montana and Bisbee, Arizona). Moreover, anyone who lived through the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panthers is familiar with tragedies like those described here.
The heroism of members of all three groups who were martyrs — such as Frank Little, Fred Hampton, and the Mississippi Three (James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) — remains. The vision of a qualitatively different society — as the Zapatistas say, “un otro mundo” — remains also.”
Monkeywrench of John F. McKay
The IWW, a reading list
The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era, by Eric Thomas Chester
Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane!: Fighting for Free Speech with the Hobo Agitators of the Industrial Workers of the World, by John Duda (Editor)
We celebrate the glorious Resistance of the people of Chicago today remember the tragedy of their brutal police repression in the Haymarket Riot, which echoes throughout history and the world in countless horrifically parallel events today.
Herein unfold legacies of our history, repression and resistance, solidarity and class war, witness and remembrance, both those we must escape and those we must keep alive, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As we unite in solidarity and mass action to challenge the theft of our liberty and our humanity, our rights of free speech and protest as citizens and as human beings, by the treasonous and criminal fascist tyranny and police terror of the Trump regime, let us remember our history and this moment.
Once again we are confronted with an example of Benjamin Franklin’s principle of unity and the costs of division, which he demonstrated so ably with his bundle of arrows, paraphrasing the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy Tadadaho Canasetoga the Peacemaker, “One arrow can easily be broken; many arrows together are unbreakable”.
As written by Jeff Schuhrke in Jacobin, in an article entitled Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs; “International Workers’ Day traces its roots to the 1886 Haymarket affair, when labor radicals in Chicago were unjustly executed. Ever since, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.
On a visit to Chicago in 1988, Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano asked local friends to take him to Haymarket Square, the place forever associated with, as he put it, “the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st.” He was quickly disappointed by what he found. “No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago,” Galeano lamented a few years later. “Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.”
In Uruguay, as around the globe, the Chicago anarchists executed in the 1880s while fighting for the eight-hour day have long been considered labor martyrs. But as Galeano’s fruitless search for a memorial demonstrates, in the United States — particularly in Chicago — the memory of the Haymarket martyrs has traditionally been suppressed, and the meaning of what happened to them has been contested for well over a century.
Reactionaries and those in power have typically presented the Haymarket affair as the quintessential story of “the thin blue line,” in which heroic police officers saved civilization from a lawless mob of terrorists. As recently as October 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot compared the current moment to the 1880s, when “people feared for their safety from groups of anarchists who routinely created chaos in the streets.”
But generations of Chicagoans — including many that voted out Lightfoot this year and elected progressive trade unionist Brandon Johnson — have rebuffed that narrative. They instead tell a story of exploited workers struggling for human dignity, having their lives deliberately destroyed, and yet meeting their fate with courage and thus inspiring a movement for working-class liberation.
While the epic of the Haymarket affair has rightly been told and retold countless times, the story of this battle over historical memory — and how it specifically played out in Chicago — remains relatively unknown.
The Martyrs
On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of US workers went on strike and marched to demand the eight-hour workday — a day of action called by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the precursor to the American Federation of Labor. Thanks to radical labor organizers like Albert Parsons and August Spies, Chicago saw the biggest demonstrations of the day, which remained peaceful.
But two days later, police shot several striking workers at the city’s large McCormick Reaper Works as they scuffled with scabs. Witnessing this firsthand, a horrified Spies called for a rally to “denounce the latest atrocious act of the police.”
The next night, May 4, around 2,500 workers — most of them immigrants — gathered at Haymarket Square to listen to local anarchists deliver speeches from atop a wagon. Mayor Carter Harrison was in attendance and judged the gathering to be “tame.” As the rally wound down and the crowd dwindled to two hundred people, Harrison headed home, but not before telling the 175 police officers stationed a couple blocks away to stand down.
Ignoring the mayor’s instructions, the police marched toward the protesters and ordered them to disperse as the last speaker was wrapping up. That’s when a still-unknown assailant threw a homemade bomb into the phalanx of cops, which immediately exploded. Frantic, officers began shooting wildly, and some of the rally-goers allegedly shot back. In the end, seven police officers and at least three workers died. Officer Mathias Degan was killed by the eruption, but historians generally believe the other cops died after being hit by friendly fire from fellow officers.
The business press immediately labeled the incident “the Haymarket Riot” and demanded blood. Martial law was declared in the city. Chicago police ransacked union halls, radical newspapers, and private homes, arresting hundreds of anarchists, socialists, and labor activists without due process.
That summer, eight of the city’s most outspoken anarchists — Parsons, Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe — were put on trial for the murder of the seven police officers. With no physical evidence directly tying the men to the bomb, they were instead tried for their revolutionary beliefs and found guilty.
The judge sentenced Neebe to fifteen years in prison, but the other seven were condemned to execution. Over the next year, Lucy Parsons, Albert’s wife and fellow anarchist, led an international campaign demanding clemency for the men, whom sympathizers began calling the Haymarket martyrs. Radicals, liberals, and trade unionists worldwide rushed to support the cause, viewing the trial as a sham and an attempt to crush the labor movement.
The Illinois governor commuted the sentences of two of the condemned men — Fielden and Schwab — to life in prison, but did nothing to spare the lives of the others. On the eve of the scheduled executions, Lingg died of an apparent suicide in his jail cell. Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel were hanged together on November 11, 1887. They were buried in Waldheim Cemetery in the western suburb of Forest Park — no graveyard in the city was willing to accept their remains.
On May 1, 1890, invoking the memory of the Haymarket martyrs, workers in multiple countries staged strikes and demonstrations demanding the eight-hour day. From then on, May 1, or May Day, was International Workers’ Day.
But in Chicago, a struggle over the meaning and memory of the Haymarket affair exploded almost immediately — and has continued for over a century.
Two Monuments
In September 1887, six weeks before the execution of the convicted anarchists, a group of prominent Chicago-area businessmen launched a fundraising drive to build a monument honoring the police officers killed and wounded at the Haymarket affair. With the Chicago Tribune hyping the campaign, the group quickly raised $10,000 to erect a nine-foot-tall bronze statue of a cop with his arm outstretched and palm facing forward. An inscription on the pedestal read: “In the name of the People of Illinois, I command peace.”
The police monument, which was placed in Haymarket Square, sparked protest even before its official unveiling in May 1889. On May 3, 1889, a leaflet was placed on the new monument’s pedestal asking, “Have you ever given a thought to . . .the base murder of five of the real victims of the haymarket tragedy…?” The anonymously authored pamphlet continued: “The time will come for an ample justification of our comrades, but it is not quite yet. On the monument at the haymarket should be inscribed in letters of fire these words: ‘Erected to commemorate the strangling of free speech and the shame of an enslaved people!’”
Authorities shrugged off this “blatant anarchist screed,” as the Tribune called it, and moved forward with the police monument’s dedication ceremony on May 30, Memorial Day. Meanwhile, the widowed Lucy Parsons and her comrades established the Pioneer Aid and Support Association to solicit donations for the families of the Haymarket martyrs. The association also raised money for a monument at the site of the martyrs’ tomb — a response to the police statue in Haymarket Square.
After nearly six years, enough money had been collected for sculptor Albert Weinert to build the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument: a statue of a hooded woman, representing Justice, protecting a fallen worker and placing a laurel wreath on his head. August Spies’s final words from the gallows are inscribed on the monument: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”
On June 25, 1893, at a ceremony attended by eight thousand people, the monument was unveiled at the grave of the executed anarchists in Waldheim Cemetery. The following day, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld — a prolabor Democrat elected the previous November — pardoned the Haymarket anarchists, freeing Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe while excoriating the trial and executions as a gross miscarriage of justice.
Altgeld’s pardon, along with his refusal to support the deployment of federal troops to crush the Pullman strike the following year, effectively ended his political career. He lost his reelection bid and never held public office again.
Remembering
In the decades following the Haymarket affair, as trade unionists and radicals around the world cemented the tradition of marking May 1 as International Workers’ Day, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument became a place of pilgrimage for leftists and labor activists.
Eugene Debs, who had led the 1894 Pullman strike and would later become the standard-bearer of the Socialist Party, paid a visit to Waldheim Cemetery in the late 1890s and penned an essay celebrating the Haymarket anarchists. Describing them as “the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom,” Debs wrote that he looked forward to the day “when the parks of Chicago shall be adorned with their statues.”
Around the same time, famed anarchist Emma Goldman also came to Chicago and paid her respects at the monument, which she called “the embodiment of the ideals for which the men had died.” At her request, Goldman was herself buried at Waldheim in a grave plot near the Haymarket anarchists after her death in 1940.
As for the police monument at Haymarket Square, after nearby property owners complained that it took up too much space, it was moved about a mile west to the intersection of Randolph Street and Ogden Avenue in 1900. Every year on May 4, the Veterans of the Haymarket Riot — an organization of surviving police officers from the night of the bomb — would gather for a memorial service in front of the statue and rededicate themselves to preserving “law and order.”
On May 4, 1927, a streetcar making the turn from Randolph to Ogden jumped the tracks and crashed into the monument’s pedestal, toppling the statue. The motorman claimed it was an accident caused by unresponsive air brakes, but legend has it he was later overheard saying he “was sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised.” It is indeed a curious coincidence that the collision happened on the anniversary of the Haymarket incident. To avoid similar traffic accidents, the police statue was moved the following year to nearby Union Park, where it would remain mostly out of sight for the next three decades.
Describing them as ‘the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom,’ Debs wrote that he looked forward to the day ‘when the parks of Chicago shall be adorned with their statues.’
During the great labor upsurge of the 1930s, a new generation of working-class radicals — particularly the youthful Communist organizers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — embraced the legacy of the Haymarket martyrs. In early 1938, the CIO-affiliated, Communist-led Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE) successfully unionized International Harvester’s Tractor Works — the McCormick family–owned plant where August Spies witnessed police brutalizing strikers in 1886, prompting the fateful Haymarket rally.
In February 1941, around one thousand FE members rallying outside the tractor plant were addressed by none other than Lucy Parsons, who was now in her eighties and losing her eyesight. It would be one of Parsons’s last public appearances, as she tragically died in a house fire the following year. Her ashes were buried in Waldheim close to the grave of Albert and his comrades — a fitting resting place given that Lucy, more than any other individual, had kept the revolutionary spirit of the Haymarket martyrs alive through her more than fifty-year career as an agitator and organizer.
“Declaration of War”
As McCarthyite hysteria smothered the country, May Day went virtually unrecognized in Chicago and the broader United States for many years. The police monument was even refurbished and moved back to Haymarket Square in May 1958. The martyrs’ monument in Waldheim Cemetery was maintained only thanks to the efforts of Irving Abrams, a longtime Wobbly and the last member of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association.
In the late 1960s, Chicago was rocked by unrest reminiscent of the Haymarket affair, as the forces of “law and order” sought to quell social movements and silence radical agitators. Following Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968, young black residents rebelled against racial injustice, and Mayor Richard J. Daley infamously ordered police to “shoot to kill” suspected rioters. That summer, thousands of anti–Vietnam War activists converged in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, only to be met with a bloody police crackdown that culminated in a conspiracy trial against protest leaders.
A local group of unionists — CIO veterans Leslie Orear, Bill Garvey, and Mollie Lieber West, along with University of Illinois Chicago labor historian Bill Adelman — believed it was a critical moment to resurrect the history and lessons of the Haymarket affair. On May 4, 1969, they organized a wreath-laying ceremony at Haymarket Square, emceed by renowned Chicago broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel. Connecting history with the present moment, they emphasized how the 1886 rally had been a protest against police brutality. The committee then incorporated as the Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS) and began pushing for a new, pro-worker memorial in Haymarket Square.
Five months later, on the night of October 6, the Haymarket police statue was blown to pieces when explosives were placed between its legs. The Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) took responsibility, blowing up the statue to inaugurate their weeklong “Days of Rage” demonstrations.
The leader of the Chicago Police Sergeants’ Association described the statue bombing as “a declaration of war between the police and the SDS and other anarchist groups,” and declared it was now a “kill or be killed” situation for cops. Only two months later, Chicago police, alongside the FBI, brutally murdered Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark.
The cop statue was quickly rebuilt, but the Weathermen destroyed it a second time on October 5, 1970. After the statue was put up again, an exasperated Mayor Daley ordered round-the-clock police protection of the monument, costing the public an estimated $67,440 per year.
Orear, president of the recently formed ILHS, wrote to Daley recommending the city move the police monument to a different location. Swayed by the fiscal logic of the argument, the city relocated the statue in early 1972 from Haymarket Square for the last time. It was initially placed in the lobby of police headquarters for four years, then spent three decades in the courtyard of the police academy — where would-be vandals could not get to it.
Preservation
For years, Chicago officials rejected the ILHS’s appeal for a new monument or park in Haymarket Square. “It’s all a part of a deliberate amnesia,” Orear complained. “Our story is that Haymarket was a police riot — nobody did a damn thing till the police came. Their story is that [the incident] saved the city from anarchist terrorism.”
In May 1986, a coalition of artists, activists, unionists, teachers, historians, clergy, and other community members came together to commemorate the centennial of the Haymarket affair. Scores of public events were held around Chicago, including marches, rallies, art exhibits, poetry recitals, a dramatization of the Haymarket trial performed by members of Actors’ Equity, and musical performances by Pete Seeger, among others. Mayor Harold Washington gave his stamp of approval to the festivities by declaring May 1986 “Labor History Month.”
Finally, by the early 2000s, the city agreed to erect a new monument in Haymarket Square.
Made by artist Mary Brōgger, the Haymarket Memorial was dedicated in September 2004 — over 118 years after the bomb was thrown. Located at the exact spot where the speakers’ wagon stood on the night of May 4, 1886, the memorial is a rust-colored sculpture depicting a wagon with human shapes speaking atop it.
‘Over the years,’ a carefully worded plaque on the memorial’s base reads, ‘the site of the Haymarket bombing has become a powerful symbol for a diverse cross-section of people, ideals and movements.’
At the dedication ceremony, the presidents of both the Chicago Federation of Labor and Fraternal Order of Police gave speeches — and each was heckled by different crowd members with competing interpretations of the Haymarket affair. “Over the years,” a carefully worded plaque on the memorial’s base reads, “the site of the Haymarket bombing has become a powerful symbol for a diverse cross-section of people, ideals and movements.”
Despite the memorial’s intended ambiguity, it has been claimed by the labor movement and frequently serves as a rallying point for marches organized by leftist protesters of various stripes.
Not to be outdone, in June 2007, the Haymarket police statue was again refurbished, given a new pedestal, and moved to Chicago Police Headquarters on South Michigan Avenue. The rededication ceremony featured the great-granddaughter of Mathias Degan, the one officer historians agree was killed by the bomb.
Rebirth
In recent decades, Chicago’s growing working-class Latino community has embraced the Haymarket story, which is perhaps not surprising given the almost saintlike status of the Haymarket martyrs in Latin America’s labor movements.
On May Day 2006, up to four hundred thousand Latino workers marched in Chicago as part of the historic “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations, some of them stopping to pay homage at the new memorial in Haymarket Square. A few weeks later, Eduardo Galeano returned to the Windy City during a book tour and discussed the significance of the Haymarket affair with some of the local unionists who had led the march.
Latino Chicagoans especially celebrate Lucy Parsons, who claimed Mexican ancestry. In 2017, a portion of Kedzie Avenue in the Logan Square neighborhood, near where Parsons resided for several years, was honorarily named “Lucy Gonzales Parsons Way” with support from socialist alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa. Fellow socialist Anthony Quezada, a newly elected Cook County commissioner, successfully introduced a resolution last month formally recognizing May 1 as International Workers’ Day and commemorating the lives of the Haymarket martyrs. And last year, young Latino artists with Yollocalli Arts Reach — the youth initiative of Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art — painted a new mural of the Haymarket martyrs on the exterior of Grace Elementary School in the city’s Little Village neighborhood. The mural is titled “Que La Libertad Nos Bese En Los Labios Siempre” (“May Freedom Kiss Us on the Lips Forever”).
“You have to swim in whatever pool there is and rebuild and rebuild,” said the ILHS’s Orear, who died in 2014 at the age of 103. “This is the story of American labor — defeat, starvation and rebirth.”
Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs, Jeff Schuhrke
Social injustice is the crack in the Liberty Bell; as we stand united in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the world in our wonderfully diverse human family, with our essential workers who during the Pandemic, this particular one for now it seems held at bay but a threat which may return in new and terrible forms like the Black Death at any time, risked their own lives and those of their families to guarantee basic services to us all, and with our vulnerable populations who bear the true costs of what wealth and hegemony of power and privilege we may enjoy, let us always remember that among the causes and origins of our current problems is the failure of our political and economic systems to realize our founding value of equality.
What is the meaning of the Pandemic? Among other things it has exposed the faultlines of our civilization and the internal contradictions whose mechanical failures now threaten us all with civilizational collapse and extinction as consequences of capitalism and colonialism as systems of unequal power, and of control and dominion of nature as flawed coping strategies for our fear of her as uncontrollable, irrational, chaotic, and free; fear of the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For in this failure of our grasp to reach the limits of our vision we have allowed a failing capitalism to try and bring us down with it, to subvert democracy and the structural safeguards of our freedom embodied in our government as a free society of equals, and as our devastation of the environment creates pandemics and poisons our world to threaten our very lives.
When we will say, Enough! When will we reclaim our liberty and ownership of the public resources we have let slip away into the hands of those who would enslave us?
When we think of labor unions, of strikes and the right of workers to organize in defense of fair and safe work, we must think not only of our universal human rights and our duty of care for each other in solidarity, but also of the systems of oppression and unequal power in which such seizures of power become necessary and arise as imposed conditions of struggle. The event we celebrate today of over one hundred years ago, the Seattle General Strike, was such a victory, one which in large part founded organized labor.
From Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin comes an inspirational account of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 in the wake of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and conditions of austerity and worker exploitation much like those today. May we learn from the examples of history how better to meet the challenges of the future.
“The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
November 11, 1918. The war was finished. There were wild celebrations everywhere — everywhere, that is, in France, Britain, and the United States. Spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness erupted, and millions took to the streets of Paris, London, and New York.
In Seattle, the Star pronounced, “War is Over!” The city learned of the armistice on Sunday night, November 10; at once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets filled, his planned proclamation of a holiday irrelevant; his wish for a proper, orderly, patriotic manifestation was superseded.
Revelers celebrated not just the end of the war, but also what they thought to be the end of the so-called Spanish flu. Over the course of that day, makeshift bands appeared, with people banging garbage-can lids and lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Workers abandoned the shipyards, longshoremen quit the waterfront, and the city center was gridlocked. The city’s health authorities, too, were taken aback. There were no masks to be seen; social distancing was defiantly disregarded. They had their own plans in the works, perhaps with some recklessness, to withdraw their edicts, their restrictions on crowds and mandatory masking, and to triumphantly pronounce the influenza beaten.
Sailors, first carriers of the influenza and also its first victims, were ordered into the crowds to ensure that the celebration was official and properly patriotic. The November celebrations were also suggestive of a level of underlying discontent, a prelude to another war coming, to a return of “normalcy” in the nation’s most class-divided, strike-prone city — above all to the great “Seattle Strike.”
“The war to end all wars,” the papers repeated without a blush. Yet 10 million had been lost in the slaughter on the Western Front; millions more were maimed, emotionally as well as physically. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were vast swaths of devastation, the heart of the continent was in ruins, and there were new armies, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory, of “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” “democracy at full tilt.” “We won the war!”
The workers of Seattle, however, had never really supported this war, unless one reduced it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. Still, they celebrated; especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, conscription; to “sedition” charges and “criminal syndicalism” laws; to the red squads, raids, and prison sentences. The killing — nearly 5 million Americans served in World War I, and 53,000 were killed in action — was not restricted to the trenches. On the home front, the influenza killed 675,000, and more than 1,500 deaths were recorded in Seattle.
The Flu Comes to Seattle
In the winter of 1918, much of the city — the schools, and most public places — was still reopening. It remained unclear if the epidemic was, in fact, finished, with a second spike just before Christmas. The heavy rains had begun. The first loggers were drifting back; they joined others — wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for spring and work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle in winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. Some were sick. The Union Record, the city’s union-owned daily newspaper, reported that “peace” abroad was bringing hunger at home. One man, a union representative from the Metal Trades Council (MTC), told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in one night, all for bed and board.”
It had taken time for the influenza to reach Seattle. This city of three hundred thousand, situated in the far northwestern corner of the nation, was two mountain ranges and several long days from Chicago by train; it was weeks from the East Coast by the Panama Canal, and still much longer around the Strait of Magellan. Seattle was, in this sense, isolated, yet by war’s end, it had become the center of trade with Asia, two days closer to Vladivostok than its rival to the south, San Francisco. It was the gateway to Alaska and its fisheries. Wheat from the great fields of the Palouse was shipped from its docks.
Seattle had become an imperial outpost. The Puget Sound country bristled with warship building and armed encampments. Camp Lewis, just south of Tacoma, was the largest such base in the West. Bremerton, across the bay, was home port for the navy’s North Pacific fleet. Sailors trained there; warships, meant for the Asian “theater,” were built in its yards. The real war, of course, was an ocean away in the other direction. In spite of this, Seattle’s shipyards — the city’s “basic industry” — produced more ships for the war (ninety in total, steel hulled) than any other shipyard in the country. The yards were “the life” of the city, “pulsing through every [other] industry, affecting all workers.” These yards employed some thirty five thousand men; fifteen thousand more worked in Tacoma’s shipyards.
The influenza, despite its name, originated not in Spain but in Kansas in 1917, settling in Camp Riley. It was well traveled by the following summer’s end. It had first spread eastward, moving from camp to camp, reaching Europe with the arriving American Expeditionary Forces. It swept across Europe, adding a new dimension of horror to the trenches of the Western Front. Then home again to the United States, it returned with soldiers and sailors, killing ferociously. Public health officers in Seattle certainly knew about it and expected it, yet, as elsewhere, they were caught off guard when it actually appeared. It came in late September, by way of infected sailors in Boston dispatched to Philadelphia, then with the 334 of these who set sail from Philadelphia for Puget Sound. On arrival, many were desperately ill.
“In the event the disease appears here,” announced Seattle’s commissioner of health, Dr J.S. McBride, on September 28, “and it is not unlikely that it will, we will endeavor to isolate the first cases and thus try to prevent it becoming an epidemic.” Isolation would begin with places of amusement, theaters, sporting events, restaurants, and saloons. It was also presented as an opportunity to shut down the city’s notorious Skid Row, with its flophouses, saloons, brothels, and various other places of unsavory amusement, including the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). Industry, however, would carry on, indeed be encouraged — the city’s “interests” were anxious to remain open, free of wartime restrictions, determined to reestablish the “open shop.”
McBride and his staff watched for the first signs of the influenza; these came initially in the Navy’s facilities in Bremerton, then in Camp Lewis with, suddenly, reports of hundreds of cases of a severe influenza. These, the authorities initially insisted, were simply the flu, though noting that, in some cases, this flu quickly became pneumonia. Bremerton reported fourteen deaths. Sailors were ordered to avoid large gatherings. Visitors were banned. Camp Lewis was placed under quarantine.
Still, in Seattle, McBride and staff looked in the wrong places, even when hundreds of cadets at the Naval Training Station at the University of Washington were reported to be suffering from a mild flu. For some reason, they saw the university as set apart. Their demesne was the city; McBride continued to pronounce Seattle influenza-free. Then, on October 4, one cadet was reported dead, hundreds more ill, and four hundred hospitalized. Precious time had been wasted. That night, two influenza cases were reported in the city — each resulting in death.
The next morning, McBride met with the mayor, Ole Hanson, a real estate broker; together they announced to the public that the influenza had found its way to Seattle. McBride ordered all private and public dances prohibited, declared that streetcars and theaters had to be well ventilated, and ordered police to strictly enforce the anti-spitting ordinance. He appealed to the public to practice a voluntary quarantine. Over the next days, however, closings were ordered — first church services, then places of entertainment, then the public schools.
The suddenness of the closures took the public by surprise and sparked some resistance. The superintendent of schools, Frank Cooper, believed them to be unwise: “I consider it more dangerous to have children running around the streets loose than to have them in school where they will be under strict medical supervision.” Crowds of people continued to congregate in the city’s theater district, large numbers of sailors mixing with them, despite police efforts to keep amusements closed. The police organized an “Influenza Squad” to enforce the orders, but results were mixed. Those who could began leaving the city, some to mountain retreats, others further afield. The writer Mary McCarthy’s parents evacuated to Chicago, where they each were stricken, dying before the year’s end, leaving their children orphans. McCarthy was returned to Seattle and put in the care of an aging aunt.
Seattle’s officials singled out the shipyards for attention, though more in keeping with wartime patriotism than with concern for the health of the workers. The yards, after all, far from healthy places, were well known as rough-and-tumble work sites where “men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Influenza added to this toll. Still, McBride wanted to keep these workers on the job. He believed he could, especially as many of these workers toiled outside, where they were thought to be less susceptible to the disease than other factory workers.
Nevertheless, he sought to inoculate the entire workforce with one of the sera that had been developed. “Let no question of money or men interfere with your work.” When requests came from others, he responded, “Seattle needs all the serum we can grow, and we will share with nobody until our shipyard workers and other citizens have been properly inoculated.” Workers were skeptical; war, the virus, and the brutality of work had produced widespread fatalism, a realism in the face of calamity in all quarters. The numbers of the sick and the dead rose, and by mid-October, four thousand cases had been reported; no evidence ever appeared to suggest the sera had been of use.
Hanson and McBride were stubbornly confident that isolation and closures would work. Hanson maintained to the end that the influenza was really just a form of the flu, a “grippe.” He believed that it would last no more than a week. They were wrong. In no large American city was the influenza contained quickly.
Within days, the flu reached all sections of Seattle, though “south of Yesler” and the Rainier Valley, home to Seattle’s slums and the cheap housing of the workers, suffered most. Frustrated, the authorities blamed a noncompliant public for the influenza’s persistence. They continued to work to see that the closure orders were widened and enforced. On October 28, McBride issued new orders, including mandatory wearing of flu masks. These were worn reluctantly; they came to be the symbols of Seattle besieged. Streetcar conductors were ordered to bar people not donning a face covering. Hanson told commuters that they had better find a mask and wear it, “or tomorrow morning they will walk to work.” In late October, however, the numbers of new cases of infection leveled off and then began to fall.
Strike Town
Seattle’s shipyard workers believed they had sacrificed unreasonably for the sake of the war. Their hours had been long, their work grueling. Hulet Wells, the onetime socialist president of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC), also president of the state’s Socialist Party, while awaiting sentencing for opposing conscription, found work at Skinner & Eddy, the largest of the yards. There he encountered a; “howling bedlam . . . a wilderness of strange machines, whirling belts and belching fires . . . The human ant heap boiled with all the specialists that fit into the modern shipyard. Everywhere there was deafening noise, boilers rang, planers screamed, long white-hot rods were smashed into bolt machines. Here was the angle-bending floor where black men beat a tattoo with heavy sledges, and here a steam hammer thumped its measured blows . . . [as well as] the wrenching scenes of the injured, the sirens of the ambulances, and the dying or dead being carted off into the chaos of the waterfront roadways.”
In 1917 and 1918, the city’s unions increasingly felt pressure from the federal government and its shipping board. The shipyard workers had worked with standards set nationally by labor boards in Washington, DC, even when believing themselves punished by these standards. It was indisputable that prices were higher on the West Coast — above all in Seattle — than in the East. The unions were especially intent on raising the wages of the unskilled and semiskilled, an immediate necessity in breaking down divisions in the shops. However, wage demands were repeatedly rejected. Seattle’s workers, inheritors of a decade of intense conflict, by the war’s end, believed themselves betrayed by the government. They had been lied to, they believed, by the president, the shipping board, and the city’s health officials. They were bitter, angry, and itching for a fight. They voted to strike in December. The January strike was inevitable.
The men walked out on the morning of January 21, 1919. There were women scattered through their ranks, as well as black workers, though they were few and their union status unclear. Virtually all the AFL’s international unions in these trades barred women and blacks. A. E. Miller, the chairman of the MTC, announced the strike “absolutely clean,” meaning that thirty-five thousand workers struck en masse, and none came to take their places. They showed “splendid solidarity and great enthusiasm,” undaunted by the winter rain. Tacoma and Aberdeen quickly followed. Speaking on behalf of the workers, John McKelvey defied the owners. The “shipyard millionaires have been getting all the credit for the ships we have built. Oh yes, they’re ship builders. If they think they can build ships let ’em go ahead and build them!”
The Union Record brought news of the strikers’ plight to its fifty thousand subscribers, supporting the strike without qualification. Next to its front-page lead on January 2, “45,000 Men Out in Sound Cities,” it ran an article titled, “Tremendous Profits Made by Seattle Shipbuilding Firms,” revealing the businesses’ costs, sales, and profits. The day’s editorial, “A Great Strike,” explained: “The whole question of wages is bound up in the tremendous increase in the cost of living in Seattle.”
The strike, however, was not just a symptom — real enough in itself — but an indication as well of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years — “an epidemic of strikes” — was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism. Seattle was both a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism; its unions’ commitment to workers’ control ran deep, and support for the Russian Revolution was widespread. Kate Sadler, the workers’ “Joan of Arc,” had led Seattle’s delegation to the Mooney conference. Crystal Eastman in the Liberator reported that Sadler led her city’s “wild ones,” who insisted on a general strike no later than May Day to free the framed San Francisco union man. “Russia Did It!” would be the lead of a leaflet penned by the young Harvey O’Connor (illustrated with a brawny worker and a fat capitalist in a coffin — twenty thousand were distributed).
At the same time, Seattle was filling up with unemployed, homeless, demobilized young men, and it was still not entirely free from the flu. In response, the MTC packed the Hippodrome with thousands to announce the formation of a “Soldiers, Sailors and Workers Council.” The meeting went forward despite the authorities, who surrounded the hall with military police. Thousands gathered in Tacoma as well, with Camp Lewis soldiers, no longer under quarantine, in attendance.
It was increasingly clear that unions did not know with whom they were to negotiate: the national board or the local employers. In either case, the employers refused to budge, as did the eastern board members, the shippers, and their allies in the national AFL unions. The MTC thus turned to Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), the federation of 110 local unions — the organization that, in defiance of the AFL, was built from the bottom up, that championed industrial unions, supported sympathy strikes, cooperated with the IWW, and was led by socialists — with a request for the strike.
“The idea of a general strike swept the ranks of organized labor like a gale,” wrote O’Connor. On January 22, in an assembly of the CLC, in the Labor Temple, the metal workers made their case, requesting that Seattle’s workers join them in a general strike. The aim would be not only to win their demands but also to present a show of force in the face of the employers’ renewed open-shop campaign. They believed that the fate of the organized labor movement itself was at stake. Representatives of the city’s local trade unions and rank-and-file militants packed the Labor Temple. According to O’Connor, “Every reference to the general strike was cheered to the echo; the cautions of the conservatives . . . were hooted down” or interrupted by shouting, clapping, and singing.
The CLC proposed a referendum on the strike, which passed unanimously. The enthusiasm that evening brought with it high rhetoric, emotion, even tears. Then came a cornucopia of demands; appetites grew, delegates revealing their own grievances and aspirations, hopeful that these, too, might be addressed. The metal workers, however, insisted that the strike’s demands be limited to those of the shipyard workers already out — what they wanted was a “clean-cut demonstration of the economic power of organized labor.”
The meeting ended in an uproar when delegate Fred Nelson unfurled a banner showing a soldier and a sailor in uniform with a worker in overalls and the slogan “Together We Will Win.” This was followed by “a storm of applause which lasted several minutes,” abating only when delegate Ben King of the Painters, just returned from the Mooney Congress in Chicago, recounted “sleeping between soldiers and sailors and they are all with us.” The applause “broke out afresh.”
America’s First General Strike
On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers — all of them — struck. In doing so, they literally took control of the city. They brought the city to a halt — a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront, where “nothing moved but the tide.” The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated — the strikers were joined by workers not in unions, unemployed workers, and family members. The city’s authorities were rendered powerless — there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.
Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.
The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?” — the red, white, and blue, or the red. The mayor, Hanson, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds. The general strike was not a revolution. It was a coordinated action in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, there had never been anything quite like it. The strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that was, in fact, revolutionary in some places — a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia.
It was no wonder, then, that revolution was in the air — terrifying some, inspiring others. Then, too, no one knew for certain just how far this strike might go. The strike was simple and straightforward for many, a powerful statement of solidarity and nothing more. But others did indeed want more: all-out victory for the shipyard workers, for example. Some wanted much more, but surely no one could know, not on that cold February morning, not with any certainty, just what lay ahead. Hence the Union Record’s February 6 editorial, written by Anna Louise Strong: “ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M. There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. Both of these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor.”
Seattle’s streets were quiet, and some thought this a problem. “Seattle Strikers Too Polite,” led the Appeal to Reason, the Midwestern Socialist newspaper. But this missed the point. The strikers feared provocation and had good reason to — it had been used time and again in the war against the Wobblies. Where the workers gathered, however, in the “feeding stations,” the union halls, the co-op markets, or the neighborhoods where workers and their families lived, it was another story.
The “feeding stations” were showcases of self-organization. They may have been authorized by the strike committees; on the ground, they depended on the creativity of ordinary people. Thousands of volunteers took on the strike’s tasks, including running the kitchens, organizing milk distribution, and policing the city. The process of handing out milk was elaborate. “The dairies supplied by the milk dealers were only eleven in number, [and] so located that it would have been impossible for the mothers of Seattle to secure milk unless they owned automobiles.” The milk wagon drivers therefore “chose 35 locations spaced throughout the city, secured the use of space in stores, and proceeded to set up neighborhood milk stations.” Strong asked if the kitchens ever gave away meals. “Lots of them,” was the response. “We don’t refuse anyone, union or non-union if they can’t pay.” The strike may well have been the only occasion, before or since, when no one in Seattle went hungry.
On Saturday night, the strikers held a dance, and as late as Monday, they organized massive strike rallies. In the Georgetown neighborhood, the crowd was so large that the building sank somewhat and had to be evacuated. The meeting reconvened, and with “great enthusiasm . . . it was decided to make the meetings a regular weekly event . . . it was unanimous that the strike should continue until a living wage had been obtained by the shipyard workers. . . . Many of those present expressed the opinion that the scope of the meetings should be enlarged to include the wives and daughters of the workers, and to make them real community gatherings for the discussion of questions in which all are concerned.”
In all these places, the strike was the topic. It was analyzed, criticized, extolled, and debated, and when the workers’ representatives packed the rowdy, emotion-filled strike committee meetings, they came prepared; they were making history, and they knew it. The general strike served notice that Seattle’s workers had become a class “for themselves” — class conscious and “there at the creation,” as the late historian E. P. Thompson put it. “Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way,” he wrote in The Making of the English Working Class.
Stopping Short
Alas, “The exhilaration from the marvelous display of solidarity experienced Thursday and Friday began to give way to apprehension,” wrote O’Connor. By the third day of the strike, they realized that the Seattle labor movement stood alone. The strike had not spread down the coast to California, nor was there support from across the nation. There was little, O’Connor observed, “to give aid and comfort, even verbally, to the labor movements of Seattle and Tacoma. Seattle, unfortunately, was all too unique in its militancy.” And, against them, the response of the authorities was unrelenting, especially the fearmongers. They frantically forecast a terrible future at hand: Bolshevism, anarchy.
Hanson, egged on by the papers, denounced the strike as “un-American” and refused to negotiate. The Post-Intelligencer observed: “The big fact that stands out from the temporary confusion of business is that Seattle, given a brief time for readjustment, would be well off, if not better than before, if the whole of its striking population [were] suddenly withdrawn from the city.” Hanson threatened martial law if the strike were not ended by 10 a.m. on Saturday. The “interests” in New York and Washington, DC, joined the chorus. The AFL denounced the strike, with the Teamsters Joint Council ordering the strikers back to work. There were telephone calls and telegrams, and a deluge of intimidation, threats, and vilification from the international offices.
The AFL censored the Central Labor Council and would later take credit for defeating its “strike.” Then the international officers arrived in person, threatening to rescind charters, seize union properties, and fire staff. Meanwhile, the shipyards in the East and California carried on as usual. The risk of the owners permanently shutting down the Seattle yards now seemed only too real — deliberative, political deindustrialization.
On Saturday, February 8, several unions returned, though this was by no means a stampede. The Executive Committee voted eleven to two to end the strike. They chose Jimmy Duncan, president of the CLC, not a delegate, to speak to the strike committee for them. He tried to convince those in attendance that continuing the walkout was futile. He failed. The strike committee, infuriated by Hanson’s threats and still committed to victory, overwhelmingly voted to continue the strike, as did the longshoremen and the Metal Trades unions. The divide increasingly became one between the rank and file, on the one hand, and the executive committee, on the other.
Then on Monday, with more unions yielding, Duncan returned to the strike committee. He recommended ending the strike on Tuesday at noon. He requested that those unions that had returned to their jobs come back out so that the strikers could return united; as they had left on Thursday, they would return on Tuesday. The shipyard strikers remained out one month longer.
A Class in Conflict
How is this strike to be assessed? Harvey O’Connor wrote, “For the majority of Seattle unions, there was no sense of defeat as the strike ended. They had demonstrated their solidarity with their brothers in the yards, and the memory of the great days when labor had shown its strength glowed in their minds.”
This sentiment was widely shared among Seattle’s workers. The CLC’s minutes are laden with messages of congratulations: the Metal Trades Council in Aberdeen commended Seattle’s workers “for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike [and urged] one big union and a 24-hour strike on May 1st to demonstrate our solidarity.” From the Astoria Central Labor Council came a communiqué “complimenting Organized Labor for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike.” Mine Workers Locals No. 2917, 1044, 1890, and 4309 sent resolutions “condemning the attitude of the ‘Star’ upon the strike and expressing willingness to lay down tools if conditions warrant.” The King County Pomona Grange pledged support by furnishing produce and finances to the strikers, while cash and expressions of solidarity came from local businesses.
Others concurred. The Socialists’ New York Call wrote:
Whatever may be said of the Seattle strike, it certainly is not a case of ‘blind striking,’ as the Journal of Commerce affirms. It has been calculated and prepared and is one of the finest examples of sacrifice and solidarity that workingmen have displayed in many years. It is a sympathetic strike participated in by workers who have no grievance of their own, at least none that they are raising at this time. They have walked out in support of another group of workers, with the view of aiding the latter to secure a speedy victory.
Max Eastman, editor of the Liberator, had visited Seattle that winter. What he may have contributed to the cause there, if anything, is not recorded. He did, however, record his evaluation: “The General Strike in this city of Seattle filled with hope and happiness the hearts of millions of people in all places of the earth. . . . You demonstrated the possibility of that loyal solidarity of the working class which is the sole remaining hope of liberty for mankind.”
The academic version of this story, which remains widely accepted, comes via the work of Robert L. Friedheim. “The first major general strike in the United States ended quietly at noon on February 11, 1919,” he wrote, adding without evidence, “Somewhat sheepishly, Seattle’s workers returned to their jobs in shops, factories, mills, hotels, warehouses and trolley barns. The strike had been a failure, and they all knew it. In the days ahead, they were to learn that it was worse than a failure — it was a disaster.” The CLC’s own strike committee, however, and to its great credit, commissioned a committee to produce a history of the strike. Anna Louise Strong at once penned her own findings:
The vast majority [of workers] struck to express their solidarity . . . and they succeeded beyond their expectations. They saw the labor movement come out almost as one man and tie up the industries of the city. They saw the Japanese and the IWW and many individual workers join in the strike, and they responded with a glow of appreciation. They saw garbage wagons and laundry wagons going along the streets marked “exempt by strike committee.” They saw the attention of the whole continent turned on the Seattle shipyards. They learned a great deal more than they expected to learn — more than anyone in Seattle knew before. They learned how a city is taken apart and put together again. They learned what it meant to supply milk to the babies of the city, to feed 30,000 people with a brand-new organization. They came close for the first time in their lives to the problems of management.
In the course of the strike’s five days, there had been no lockouts or significant dismissals. There had been no strikebreakers, no “replacement” workers needing protection. No mass arrests, thus no search for lawyers, no defense funds to build. There had been no violence — hence no funerals, no wakes, no widows with children to support. The leaders of the strike committee and the Central Labor Council worked to get the strike’s handful of victims — casualties were few — back to work. They remained quite capable of achieving this.
The fact was that the employers dared not test the workers, not in the short run. Seattle remained a union city. There was, of course, a sense of things getting back to normal, the exception being the waterfront, where the roller-coaster conflict continued. The shippers imposed the open shop, only to have this reversed in August. Now, at last, the ILA achieved job control and a single, alphabetical list. Seattle’s workers remained “strike prone,” among the most combative in the nation right into 1920–21. Wages remained relatively high in the city, as did the cost of living, leveling off but remaining above national averages through 1921.
Seattle’s workers had formed themselves as a class in conflict — in struggles that took place in the forests, on the waterfront, in cafés, and in laundries. They forged their class identity in the long, hard fight for industrial unions and the closed shop, and in the fight for workers’ power. At an early moment, the utopians of the Cooperative Commonwealth had taught socialism and attempted to practice what they preached. Later, the IWW and the Socialist Party fought for it, with the CLC, one step at a time, intent on implementing it.
The 1910s had been a decade of organizing, cooperating, and striking, the most basic weapons of working people in battles that were sometimes won and sometimes lost. Consciousness arose in the utopian colonies, in logging camps and mills, in free speech fights, and on the waterfront, in war and in dissent, in strikes of the “telephone girls,” waitresses, hotel maids, “lady barbers,” and laundry workers, in co-ops and in working-class neighborhoods.
Seattle’s workers transformed a world of war, of sickness, death, and grief, into a great celebration of the living, if only for five days. The general strike was, for Seattle’s workers, a giant step toward a future that might be theirs. This aspiration was surely valid in terms of their own experience. They insisted that their vision was by no means the “pie in the sky” of the preachers and the politicians. A better world was possible. It still is.”
Cal Winslow places the General Strike in the context of the birth of America’s labor movement in Seattle in his article in Jacobin entitled
Seattle, “the Soviet of Washington”; “Decades before Amazon dominated the city, Seattle was the fiery site of labor unrest, radical action — and the US’s only true general strike.
Seattle gleams under the grey skies that characterize its climate. Container ships from China wait in Elliott Bay to unload, while tour boats head out to Alaska’s shrinking glaciers. The Great Wheel towers over Pier 57, and there are tourists everywhere. Two gigantic sports arenas dominate the southern end of the waterfront, where in times past seamen brawled and the longshoremen struck the great ships — losing in 1916, winning at last in 1934. The football stadium is the prize of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who obtained the public funding for its construction. The best seats in the house sell for more than $1,000 and the approaches are lined with upscale bistros and bars. Just south of Lake Union, Allen’s Vulcan real estate company is building a head-office complex for another tech firm, Amazon, complete with interlinked spherical glasshouses enclosing a miniature rainforest. Facebook and Google are also moving in. Powered by these new developments, the Emerald City has the fastest growing population of any major urban area in the US. The world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, both reside here.
Seattle flourishes, then — it is an important place. But can we ask: what sort of place? A stage set, perhaps, for the new Gilded Age, in which corporate wealth and “vibrant” street life can distract the eye from all manner of social contradictions. Seattleites don’t mind the rain; in fact, they love the outdoors. However, public space is at a premium and access to its beaches severely restricted. Tech workers take great pride in Seattle’s high rating for “livability,” yet the cost of housing is rising even quicker than in the Bay Area and the traffic is often unbearable. Hundreds sleep on the street each night. Tent cities appear, reminiscent of the 1930s “Hooverville” shanty town erected in the mud flats south of the business district, and just as unwelcome to the authorities. Meanwhile elsewhere in the city, second homes abound.
Still, there are ghosts dwelling here: old memories — dimly held, to be sure. Here is Yesler Way, once better known as Skid Road because of the logs rolled downhill along its course to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on the shore. Nowadays a nondescript thoroughfare dotted with cafes frequented by tourists, including a branch of the city’s ubiquitous Starbucks chain, it used to heave with disreputable saloons, brothels, and flophouses, making Skid Road synonymous with any district where the down-and-out may gather: places that are rough, sometimes radical. The Industrial Workers of the World put down roots in this quarter among loggers, itinerant farm workers, and miners bound for the Yukon, as well as the shipyard workers who led the Seattle General Strike of February 6–10, 1919, the only true general strike in US history and the one occasion when American workers have actually taken over the running of a city — the sort of endeavor which earned this state, now given over to the billionaires of the new economy, the appellation “the Soviet of Washington.”
Pacific Hub
Seattle is situated on a vertical strip of land between Puget Sound — an “inland sea” off the northern Pacific — and the freshwater Lake Washington. Nonindigenous settlement began with the arrival of a couple of dozen migrants from Illinois in 1851, a few years after the Oregon Treaty fixed the border between the United States and British America at the 49th parallel. The incomers named the township after Chief Sealth of the area’s Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. Upon incorporation by the Washington Territorial legislature in 1869, the city had just two thousand inhabitants. This figure would swell to eighty thousand by the turn of the century. As places of note, Seattle and Tacoma, thirty miles to the south, were the warring creations of competing northern railroads. Two days closer than California to Vladivostok and Asian markets, Seattle became the main distribution hub for the northern Pacific Rim, usurping San Francisco’s former hegemony over the entire Pacific Slope. In addition to its command of Washington State’s forests and the great wheat belt of the Palouse steppe, Seattle also dominated the trade and fisheries of Alaska, whose economy was boosted by an influx of prospectors during the Klondike gold rush. Jobs in distributive and wholesale trades, as well as shipbuilding, attracted migrants fleeing slums, unemployment, and poverty in the East — blacklisted railroad workers, redundant miners, famished wheat farmers. When the mayor of Butte, the class battleground in Montana, visited Seattle in 1919 he recognized large numbers of ex-copper miners working in its shipyards. If Minnesota and neighbouring farm states appealed to the more prosperous Scandinavian immigrants, Swedes above all, western Washington with its extractive industries drew in the much poorer Norwegians and Finns, though core activists in the General Strike came from the British Isles.
The timber economy of Western Washington was dominated by the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Trust, which mounted a full-scale assault on the vast stands of ancient cedar, western hemlock, and Douglas fir forest. Timber from Washington State would buttress the copper mines of the West, underpin its railroad lines, and build its rapidly expanding cities, above all in California. The loggers toiled for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and slept in company shacks. Conditions in the mills were neither easier nor safer: giant saws, deadly belts, horrific noise, dust, smoke and fire. When the heavy winter rains came, the lumberjacks wrapped up their bindlestiffs and fled to Skid Road. There they would remain, sinking into debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods. They were despised by Seattle’s bourgeoisie as “timber beasts.”
The well-to-do lived away from Skid Road on the leafy boulevards of First and Capitol hills, along Magnolia Bluff and overlooking the lake in Madrona and Washington Park. They boasted a flourishing cultural life, including a fine university built in the French Renaissance style in Union Bay. The politicians and their newspapers might feud — what to do with the infamous Skid Road? — but Seattle was staunchly progressive: women’s suffrage, co-operatives, municipal ownership, growth. As it expanded from a low-lying base around Pioneer Square, the tops of surrounding hills were lopped off — “regraded” — for the benefit of developers. The neighboring town of Ballard was annexed in 1907 and the harbor municipalized four years later, a blow for the big railway and shipping interests struck on behalf of small manufacturers, minor shipping lines, and farmers anxious to force down rates. The new Port of Seattle developed some of the best waterfront facilities in the country, including the sort of moving gantry crane still used in container terminals today. The construction of a ship canal connecting Puget Sound with Lake Washington also commenced in these years.
In the 1890s, utopian land-settlement schemes in Seattle’s vicinity drew in idealists and free-thinkers. Harry Ault, Union Record editor, spent his teenage years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted Populists. He recalled his mother feeding workers in Coxey’s Army of the unemployed as it passed through Cincinnati in 1894. In the 1910s, Seattle’s established working-class communities — Ballard, “South of Yesler,” and into Rainier Valley — were blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the Sound, the green forests, or the great mountain ranges beyond — all that the city cherished, and still does. This rarely registered as a problem, however, among municipal reformers.
Manual labor was dangerous as well as poorly rewarded: wrote one labor activist at the time, “Every day or so some unlucky shipyard workers would be carried out in the dead wagon.” When the US Commission on Industrial Relations held hearings in the city in 1914, Wisconsin’s great labor specialist, John Commons, noted a “more bitter feeling between employers and employees than in any other city in the United States.” Seattle’s workers fought back against their oppressors as a class — and as a class, created a culture of their own: unions that were “clean,” not run by gangsters; a mass-circulation labor-owned newspaper, the Union Record — it became a daily in 1918, the only one of its kind; its circulation topped one hundred thousand in the aftermath of the strike. Socialist schools ran lectures indoors and out; IWW singing groups; community dances, and picnics. Milwaukee may have had its socialist congressman, Victor Berger; Los Angeles almost had a socialist mayor, Job Harriman; but Seattle’s socialists were working class and “Red.” Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs judged Washington State the “most advanced” and long suspected that it might be the first to achieve socialism. Electoral success proved elusive, but Washington claimed several thousand paid-up adherents, ranking second only to Oklahoma in the proportion of party members per head of population. The Left took control of the party in Seattle in 1912 after a protracted factional struggle. Proponents of industrial unionism, they were thorns in the side of national party officials who supported Samuel Gompers, conservative president of the craft-based American Federation of Labor. Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions — and by implication, workers’ control. “I believe that 95 per cent of us agree that the workers should control industry,” wrote Ault. Still, most unions retained their affiliation to the AFL. Progressives were critical of craft divisions but thought the IWW impractical and wanted to remain in the “mainstream.” They looked to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council, for leadership. A metal worker born in Fife, Scotland, clearly influenced by syndicalism, his compromise formula came to be known as “Duncanism.” The city’s labor movement was centralized around the SCLC, which coordinated rather than supplanted the craft unions to ensure that all contracts for crafts within a particular industry ran concurrently, allowing for bargaining as a unit. Though a consistent critic of the IWW which challenged the AFL from the left, Duncan nevertheless acknowledged it as “a pacesetter.” In this environment, social democracy and revolutionary unionism could intermingle. Seattle was an IWW no less than a Socialist Party stronghold, home to its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, and scene of free-speech fights ending in mass arrests, beatings, and victories. “Two card” workers were commonplace: an AFL card for the job, an IWW card for the principle.
Class solidarity wasn’t all-embracing, however. As late as September 1917, the Daily Call reported that one of the issues in a meatpackers’ strike was the workers’ demand for a white cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. The relatively few black workers in Seattle at this point, just 1 percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916. There were, however, signs of a shift in attitudes among the white majority. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, the socialist’s firebrand Kate Sadler, talked at black churches and was a scathing critic of exclusion and shop-floor segregation. The Union Record likewise insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” Ault told a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration that he had “little patience with racial prejudice,” recalling his early childhood in segregated Kentucky.
Voyage of the Verona
The opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914 lifted West Coast trade, offsetting the recession which had hung over the States since the previous year. Seeking a share of the shipping companies’ profits, longshoremen struck on June 1, 1916 for a closed shop, higher wages, and a nine-hour day. Workers in San Francisco quickly settled, but Seattle and Tacoma stayed out. When Andrew Furuseth, head of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, defended the San Francisco leadership at an SCLC meeting in September, he was chased from the hall with shouts of “coward” and “quitter.” The strike shook Seattle. The Washington National Guard deployed along its harbor, which “resembled a battleground. Non-union men went uptown looking for fights. Union longshoremen beat up scabs on docks and ship. There were fist fights, knife fights, docks bombed, pier fires, shots fired and murders.” By the strike’s end on October 4 — Tacoma and a number of smaller locals held out longer — there were 850 scabs working the docks and the longshoremen had lost control of the waterfront. They returned to work under the open shop plus the “fink hall” which screened out the International Longshoremen’s Association and IWW.
The shingle weavers of Everett, the “City of Smokestacks” thirty miles to Seattle’s north, were engaged in their own desperate strike — victims of nothing short of a reign of terror. “At every stage the Everett police and the private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking on their streets,” recalled Anna Louise Strong, who reported on the unrest for the New York Evening Post. On November 5, 1916, three hundred Wobblies embarked on the steamships Verona and Calista bound for the mill town. No one aboard expected a warm welcome from the authorities, but murder was not foreseen. On its arrival, the Verona was met with gunfire from lawmen and vigilantes. At least five workers were killed, all of them unarmed, and dozens injured. Two “citizen deputies” were also slain, although the fatal shots were fired from the shore, seventy-four people aboard the Verona were charged with murder. The Everett massacre was in some ways a Pacific Northwest Peterloo: an assault on free speech, fair play, and the very notion of “rights.” Disbelief, then anger, coursed through Seattle’s working-class districts. The IWW turned Everett into a cause célèbre, stumping the West on behalf of the accused. “These seventy-four men represent the migratory worker, the element that while necessary is ferociously exploited in this Western country,” declared IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a dozen rallies. “They want the good things in life as much as any other member of the human race and they are organizing in the IWW to get them.” There was a sea change in popular opinion, a massive swing to the left. The SCLC persuaded Seattle lawyer George Vanderveer, “Attorney for the Damned,” to assist the Verona defendants. He secured their acquittal the following spring. The Daily Call reported that IWW membership had risen to twenty thousand and that the Wobblies now employed a dozen paid organizers — exaggerated figures, perhaps, but after the serious setback on the docks the IWW had undeniably gained fresh impetus.
The Wobblies took this forward momentum into the woods: a general strike involving some fifty thousand loggers and mill workers. “They breathe bad air in the camps. That ruins their lungs. They eat bad food. That ruins their stomachs. The foul conditions shorten their lives and make their short lives miserable,” lumber organizer James Thompson told the Industrial Commission during hearings in Seattle. The IWW had always idolized the itinerant workers of the West. They set out from Seattle to organize them and succeeded. Their demands were typically straightforward: an eight-hour day, no work on Sundays or public holidays, sanitary kitchens and satisfactory food, single spring beds with clean bedding, no workers under sixteen in the mills, no discrimination against IWW members. In July 2017, the IWW held a mass rally of 3,500 workers at Seattle’s Dreamland Rink. The meeting began with the singing of “Solidarity Forever.” Kate Sadler and IWW organizer J. T. “Red” Doran were the featured speakers.
The police, sheriffs, National Guard, and US Army responded to the strike with savage repression. The jails filled up; prisoners were beaten. Strike leader James Rowan and twenty IWW members were arrested in a single swoop in the city of Spokane. The federal government organized a rival organization, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. As the strike spluttered, the Wobblies adjusted their tactics: a “strike on the job,” the loggers working their desired eight-hour shifts. The conclusion, in March 1918, was a sensation: the eight-hour day won and a long list of improvements in the camps. It was one of the IWW’s greatest accomplishments and a source of class pride well beyond the ranks of the IWW. Duncan drew the obvious moral: “the terribly effective force which takes the name of IWW … is largely made up of men who consider regular trade unionism ‘too slow.’” It was, he acknowledged, a “threat to the prestige of trade unionism on the Coast.”
Nevertheless, traditional unionism also thrived amid the industrial boom stoked by federal military procurement as Woodrow Wilson took the US into the First World War. “A red-letter year in the history of organized labour,” Duncan celebrated in July 1917. “A dozen new unions have been organized and all of the Seattle unions are flourishing.” He singled out the streetcar men whose membership had risen to 1,600; the telephone operators with nearly 1,100. Industrial action by the laundresses in particular had struck fear into Seattle’s respectable classes. Within a week, all the city’s major laundries had more or less closed down. Hotels and clubs began to run short of clean linen. The bourgeois Seattle Times fretted that the “family washtub would emerge from oblivion in thousands of Seattle homes.” The laundry workers took their case into the neighborhoods: a fair in Fremont, a parade in Rainier Valley. Stung by hostile public opinion, the employers rapidly capitulated. But if such triumphs deepened working-class consciousness, they brought down fierce repression, foretelling worse to come. William Preston, Jr, has revealed that “the lumber operators of the Northwest provided the initial impetus in the evolution of federal policy” — that is, the “Red Scare” and the Palmer raids. The workers’ movement in Seattle was strong, certainly, but not in Gramsci’s sense hegemonic. US entry into the European bloodbath in April 1917 turned dissent into treason. Gloves off, the federal government moved decisively against the IWW, indicting its top leadership. In Chicago, 101 members were tried and convicted of a range of alleged conspiracies. State vigilantism was visited upon Seattle, regarded as a center of both pro-German and pro-Bolshevik sentiment. The Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. despised the city’s workers as “the scum of the earth” who recognized “no law and no authority save the policeman’s night stick or physical violence.” There were police raids, ransacked offices, mass arrests. Emil Herman, state secretary of the Socialist Party was charged with violations of the Espionage Act and imprisoned in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Hulet Wells, a former president of the SCLC, was sentenced to two years in federal prisons for passing out “No Conscription” handbills, along with Sam Sadler, one-time president of the longshoremen.
Feting the Shilka
In this extraordinarily tense atmosphere, the revolution came to Seattle on the Friday before Christmas, 1917. The Russian cargo vessel Shilka, red flags flying, steamed into Elliott Bay. Seattle’s socialists, its Wobblies, its dockers, metal workers, waitresses and shingle weavers, scrambled to the docks to greet the newcomers, as did naval officers and city police wary that the ship might contain Bolshevik gold, even perhaps munitions. In fact, the Shilka carried only beans and peas in its hold, and simply needed to refuel. But the arrival of a soviet of Russian sailors was momentous in itself. For the workers, its arrival greatly added to the festive mood. The sailors were fêted. There were testimonials, speeches and spontaneous singing — the “Marseillaise,” also the “Red Flag.” Hundreds of Seattleites jammed into the IWW Hall on Second Avenue where they greeted a young sailor, Danil Teraninoff, on stage with rapturous applause. “Never in Seattle has there been such a demonstration of revolutionary sentiment as at the moment the Russian fellow worker ascended the platform,” reported the socialist Daily Call. The visit of the Shilka sealed the extraordinary romance of Seattle’s working people with the October days, their passionate sympathy and solidarity with the revolution unparalleled in an American context. According to the late Philip Foner, “no labour body was a more consistent defender of the Russian revolution than the Seattle Central Labor Council.” Seattle delegates to AFL national conventions pressed for official recognition of the fledgling workers’ state, to no avail. The longshoremen intercepted railroad cars with loads labeled “sewing machines,” unearthing rifles and ammunition bound for Admiral Kolchak’s White armies on the Siberian front. The IWW resolved that they would “rather starve than receive wages for loading ships on a mission of murder.” The authorities, alarmed when not hysterical, “discovered,” among other things, Bolshevik conspiracies which trade unionists had every practical reason to deny. Until recently historians tended to accept these denials at face value, in so doing diminishing these remarkable events. On the contrary, the Russian Revolution was indeed a factor — a contradictory one, yes: inspiring the Left while terrifying the upper classes — in Seattle’s General Strike.
The political culture of Seattle in these years was shaped not only by its own tumultuous industrial-relations history but also by currents sweeping through working-class movements internationally. The Union Record published letters from Lenin including his “Letter to American Workers”; the Industrial Worker reported on a Labour socialist conference in Leeds where Ramsey MacDonald, flanked by Tom Mann, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, “hailed” the Russian Revolution. The new spirit of industrial radicalism spread far beyond its natural home in the IWW. Even where issues with management were “pure and simple,” bitter conflicts ensued. The AFL also felt the heat, its collaboration with employers and strict insistence on the sanctity of contracts, jurisdictional division by craft, and the authority of national officials rejected by growing numbers of workers.
The celebrations of 1917 were the prelude, then, to the great strikes of 1919. Seattle workers saw in the October Revolution their own image, the embodiment of what they were fighting for at home. “No single event,” wrote Duncan, “throughout the whole world today can, from the standpoint of workers everywhere, compare in importance with the successful piloting of the Russian Soviet Republic past the treacherous rocks of international capitalist greed and the determination of these plunderers to ruin what they cannot rule.” When two thousand longshoremen, overflowing their hall, celebrated the second anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, 1919, they rose in “tremendous cheering,” as the IWW’s J. T. Doran walked from the vestibule to the rostrum and began to speak. Doran, free on bail from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, delivered, according to Magden, a rousing speech in which he described the workers’ revolution in Russia as “the most stupendous event since the fall of feudalism.”
Union City
By the end of the First World War, trade union membership in Seattle had quadrupled since 1915 to create, in effect, a closed-shop city. The General Strike would require no pickets, since there were no strikebreakers. Prejudice toward minorities eased, challenging management’s ever-ready divide-and-rule tactic. On the eve of the strike, Japanese unions appealed to the SCLC to join the strike committee and were accepted. “Even in the midst of strike excitement, let us stop for a moment to recognize the action of the Japanese barbers and restaurant workers who, through their own unions, voted to take part in the General Strike,” commented the Union Record. “The Japanese deserve the greater credit because they have been denied admission and affiliation with the rest of the labor movement and have joined the strike of their own initiative. We hope that this evidence of labor’s solidarity will have an influence on the relations between the two races in the future.” Black workers were accepted as full members of Seattle’s unions later the same year. The General Strike began with an appeal from the shipyard workers to the SCLC for support in a pay dispute following a period of wartime wage repression. There were thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle out of a total population of around three hundred thousand — fifteen thousand more in Tacoma. The industry fused together the two sectors of the local working class, the seasonal lumber and harvest workers and the city’s skilled trades, in a potent combination. Seattle had delivered more vessels to the Navy than any other port, even though its labor movement was strongly anti-war. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand workers, including many unemployed, answered the General Strike Committee’s call. For the best part of a week, they fed the people, patrolled the streets, and celebrated workers’ power as a lived reality, until the combined weight of the forces ranged against them — the police and the special constables drafted in by Seattle’s belligerent mayor, Ole Hanson; the federal troops deployed by Secretary of War Newton Baker; the big newspapers; and the national leaders of the AFL and its affiliates — broke the striking unions’ resolve.
At the outset of the hostilities, Anna Louise Strong wrote that a Seattle walkout wouldn’t in itself greatly trouble the big commercial combines in the East. “But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order — this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.” Stirred by the Everett case, Strong had taken a job as second-in-command at the Union Record. Probably an IWW member, she lived and worked in Socialist circles, also retaining acquaintances from her earlier life — including Russian émigrés, one a friend of Lenin’s. She organized much of the paper’s international coverage, notably a Russia department, and also wrote its editorials; as often as not she was the voice of the General Strike.
Against a remarkable backdrop of communist uprisings in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, red flags on the Clyde, and the hot summer in Turin, the Seattle strike fired the starting pistol for an extraordinary year of working-class rebellion in the States, the like of which has not been seen since: the Boston police strike; industry-wide action in steel, coal mining, and textiles. The subsequent era of working-class retreat began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution — the American Plan. In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into redundancy, while the Waterfront Employers’ Association reintroduced the open shop. But labor radicalism didn’t die after 1919. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground; also in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. Along with an underlay of Scandinavian progressivism, this legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which brought an alliance of CIO unions and progressive farmers to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. It was in 1936 that FDR’s postmaster general, David Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington,” a phrase later popularized in the writings of Mary McCarthy.”
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2023, Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power; In what ways will such class struggles between capital and labor define our nation, democracy, and the fate of humankind?
In this moment we test and observe enormous forces of history in the crucible of America, this absurd experiment in which one human being is as good as any other, and of equal value as an inherent quality of our humanity.
What a revolutionary notion; and possibly the origin of all true revolution.
Among the vast systems of dehumanization we must wrestle with to achieve a free society of equals, privatization and theft of the commons has unleashed a death spiral of capitalism wherein all wealth accumulates at the top embodied in a few apex predators and oligarchs in an increasingly narrow hegemonic elite of wealth, power, and privilege, as those whose labor creates that wealth and power become nearer to true slaves under forces of falsification, commodification, and theft of the soul.
This is late stage capitalism, as it reaches the point of civilizational collapse, as we are witnessing now with the hollowing out of the middle class and the emergence of a mass precariat in the shadow of plutocratic extravagance and decadence.
So for the political and social threats we now face; and all of this dovetails horrifically with civilization as war on nature which of late has in fires and floods sent us signs of our impending doom and the existential threat of a dying earth and the extinction of our species.
Yet we have ready examples at hand of different paths we may take, we human beings, and of how we may choose to be human together.
Here I am thinking of the courageous and glorious history of organized labor and of the 1919 Seattle General Strike which shaped labor unions in America, which seeks to change the relationships between capitalist and labor classes.
We celebrate today the birth of the labor movement and the anniversary of the September 28 1864 founding of the First International. The principles of labor organization which it forged have become foundational for any revolutionary struggle; class solidarity and international unity of action foremost among them.
In this time of Nazi revivalism and nationalist identity politics which has recaptured Hungary, Italy, and Austria, with significant threats to democracy in Germany, France, The Netherlands (not the one with Beetlejuice), Belgium, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Portugal and well as in America, the idea of Internationalism and the solidarity of a United Humankind offers an alternative vision of humankind and civilization.
For those of us with a multigenerational heritage of labor unionism, this is a special day of family remembrance of the great sacrifices with which our more fair and equal partnerships in society were won, and of re-evaluations of what remains to be achieved and forging strategies and plans of action for the struggles ahead.
In this great project of the transformation of humankind and the systems and structures of our social, political, and economic relations, I invite you all to share; let us seize our power to shape ourselves and our own destiny from those who would enslave us.
Writing in Socialist Worker, Elizabeth Schulte describes the purpose and significance of the First International; “Karl Marx made sure there was no confusion on where he thought socialists should want their story to go. When he drafted the rules for the International Workingman’s Association in 1864, he started with the statement: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
No other class could do the work of liberating the working class, only the working class itself, Marx believed. This stood in sharp distinction to other ideas about achieving full human liberation and equality at the time.”
“By studying the historical development of capitalism and its inner workings, Marx identified the potential revolutionary role of the working class in winning a socialist society.
By the nature of workers’ role under capitalism — forced to sell their labor power in workplaces where they neither own nor control the means of production — workers came into conflict with the existing system and the bosses who own and control these workplaces.
The Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs explained this relationship in a 1905 speech, focusing in on a famous member of the ruling class, industrialist Andrew Carnegie; “The capitalists own the tools they do not use, and the workers use the tools they do not own. The capitalists, who own the tools that the working class use, appropriate to themselves what the working class produce, and this accounts for the fact that a few capitalists become fabulously rich while the toiling millions remain in poverty, ignorance and dependence…
Andrew Carnegie, who owns these tools, has absolutely nothing to do with the production of steel…His mills at Pittsburgh, Duquesne and Homestead, where these tools are located, are thronged with thousands of toolless wage workers, who work day and night, in winter’s cold and summer’s heat, who endure all the privations and make all the sacrifices of health and limb and life, producing thousands upon thousands of tons of steel, yet not having an interest, even the slightest, in the product.
Carnegie, who owns the tools, appropriates the product, and the workers, in exchange for their labor power, receive a wage that serves to keep them in producing order; and the more industrious they are, and the more they produce, the worse off they are; for when they have produced more than Carnegie can get rid of in the markets, the tool houses are shut down and the workers are locked out in the cold.
This is a beautiful arrangement for Mr. Carnegie; he does not want a change…and he is doing what he can to induce you to think that this ideal relation ought to be maintained forever.”
As Debs pointed out, this conflict between those who work and those who rule isn’t always obvious. In fact, capitalism does its best to obscure it. But nonetheless, these contradictions are ever present.”
“On any average day, workers feel powerless in their workplaces. It can seem like the last place where they could have their voices heard — and for good reason. In most workplaces, you check your opinions and your rights at the door in exchange for employment, and you are forced to bend to the rules laid out by your employer.
It hardly feels like a place, as Marx argued, where workers have the most power. This is why — though there has been an increase in strikes, including the explosive teachers’ strikes of last spring and this fall — the workplace is still not the epicenter of most working-class struggle today.
Plus, it’s important to point out that workers have been involved in struggles that aren’t at their workplaces — such as the Women’s Marches, the #MeToo movement, protests against the Trump administration’s family detention policies and more.
These are important points of struggle where class issues are fought out. But it’s the potential power that workers have at work which Marx believed made them the prime force for change.
In ways that are unlike any other group in society, workers are brought together by capitalism into a common situation and usually a common location — and by being subject to a common discipline, they have an interest in taking action collectively. This is why Marx said capitalism created its own “gravedigger.”
Of course, many factors keep the underlying contradictions from turning into outright revolt. They often are specifically designed to keep workers’ eyes trained on one another rather than the bosses — such as competition for jobs or sexism and racism.
But when workplace struggles do break out, not only are the contradictions laid bare, but so is workers’ potential power as workers. Strikes can play the role of demonstrating to workers their collective power to shut down a workplace, and even a city and more.
The more the struggle is able to challenge the status quo, the more questions come up about who should be making the decisions about our everyday lives — inside and outside the workplace.
During the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which was inspired by the Russian Revolution, workers demonstrated a high level of organization — both so they could have the strongest impact on the bosses and to make sure that their families received the food and milk they needed, and much more.
The General Strike Committee became the real government of the city, as First World War veterans replaced the police, and radical literature was passed from hand to hand to provide the news that the bosses’ newspapers refused to report.
In the process of this kind of struggle, one that grows beyond individual workplaces and begins to challenge the existing governments and social structures, history shows that workers see that they have to reorganize society if they are going to win against those who would like to keep the status quo.
Marx learned this through the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. He concluded that while many democratic changes could happen quite quickly, a complete transformation of society is necessary if workers’ power is going to prevail.”
As Marcello Musto writes in Jacobin; “After its first meeting, on September 28, 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association (better known as the “First International”) quickly aroused passions all over Europe. It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of women and men to struggle against exploitation. Thanks to its activity, workers were able to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of their own strength, and to develop new, more advanced forms of struggle for their rights.
In the beginning, the International was an organization containing various political traditions, the majority of which were reformist rather than revolutionary. Originally, the central driving force was British trade unionism, the leaders of which were mainly interested in economic questions. They fought to improve the workers’ conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence, they conceived of the International primarily as an instrument to prevent the import of workers from abroad in the event of strikes.
The second most important group were the mutualists, long dominant in France. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they opposed any working-class involvement in politics and the strike as a weapon of struggle.
Then there were the Communists who opposed the very system of capitalist production and argued for the necessity of overthrowing it. At its founding, the ranks of the International also included a number of workers inspired by utopian theories and exiles having vaguely democratic ideas and cross-class conception who considered the International as an instrument for the issuing of general appeals for the liberation of oppressed peoples.
It was Karl Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International and who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly working-class-based political program that won it mass support. Rejecting sectarianism, he worked to bring the International’s various strands together. Marx was the political soul of its General Council (the body that worked out a unifying synthesis of the various tendencies and issued guidelines for the organization as a whole). He drafted all its main resolutions and prepared almost all its congress reports.
But the International was, of course, much more than Marx, brilliant a leader as he was. It was not, as has often been written, the “creation of Marx.” Rather it was a vast social and political movement for the emancipation of the working classes. The International was made possible first of all by the labor movement’s struggles in the 1860s. One of its basic rules — and the fundamental distinction from previous labor organizations — was that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
“The late 1860s and early 1870s were a period rife with social conflicts in Europe. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation quickly spread widely. From 1866 on, strikes intensified in many countries and formed the core of a new and important wave of mobilizations. The International was essential in struggles that were won by workers in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. The scenario was the same in many of these conflicts: workers in other countries raised funds in support of the strikers and agreed not to accept work that would have turned them into industrial mercenaries. As a result, the bosses were forced to compromise on many of the strikers’ demands. These advances were supported by the diffusion of newspapers that either sympathized with the ideas of the International or were veritable organs of the General Council. Both contributed to the development of class consciousness and to the rapid circulation of news concerning the activity of the International.
Across Europe, the association developed an efficient organizational structure and increased the number of its members (150,000 at the peak moment). For all the difficulties bound up with a diversity of nationalities, languages, and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organizations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the crucial importance of class solidarity and international cooperation.
The International was the locus of some of the most famous debates of the labor movement, such as that between communism and anarchy. The congresses of the International were also where, for the first time, a major transnational organization came to decisions about crucial issues, which had been discussed before its foundation, that subsequently became strategic points in the political programs of socialist movements across the world. Among these were the indispensable function of trade unions, the socialization of land and means of production, the importance of participating in elections and doing this through independent parties of the working class, women’s emancipation, and the conception of war as an inevitable product of the capitalist system.”
“The 156th anniversary of the First International takes place in a very different context. An abyss separates the hopes of those times from the mistrust so characteristic of our own, the anti-systemic spirit and solidarity of the age of the International from the ideological subordination and individualism of a world reshaped by neoliberal competition and privatization.
The world of labor has suffered an epochal defeat, and the Left is still in the midst of deep crisis. After decades of neoliberal policies, we’ve returned to an exploitative system, similar to that of the nineteenth century. Labor market “reforms” — a term now shed of its original progressive meaning — have introduced more and more “flexibility” with each passing year, creating deeper inequalities. Other major political and economic shifts have succeeded one another, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Among them, there have been the social changes generated by globalization, the ecological disasters produced by the present mode of production, the growing gulf between the wealthy exploitative few and the huge impoverished majority, one of the biggest economic crises of capitalism (the one erupted in 2008) in history, the blustery winds of war, racism and chauvinism, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a context such as this, class solidarity is all the more indispensable. It was Marx himself who emphasized that the confrontation between workers — including between local and migrant workers (who are moreover discriminated) — is an essential element of the domination of the ruling classes. New ways of organizing social conflict, political parties, and trade unions must certainly be invented, as we cannot reproduce schemes used 150 years ago. But the old lesson of the International that workers are defeated if they do not organize a common front of the exploited is still valid. Without that, our only horizon is a war between the poor and unbridled competition between individuals.
The barbarism of today’s world order imposes upon the contemporary workers’ movement the urgent need to reorganize itself on the basis of two key characteristics of the International: the multiplicity of its structure and radicalism in objectives. The aims of the organization founded in London in 1864 are today more timely than ever. To rise to the challenges of the present, however, the new International cannot evade the twin requirements of pluralism and anticapitalism”.
What did Marx intend when he handed humankind the Promethean Fire of liberation and revolutionary struggle that was the International?
Here is my reply in a celebration of his birthday and of the Communist Manifesto in my post of May 5 2022, Let us Dream a New Post-Capitalist Society: Karl Marx, on his birthday; Karl Marx transformed the history and evolution of humankind with a unique primary insight, simple to tell though it has many layers; we humans are self created beings, whose souls are artifacts of our civilization as historical and social constructions, interdependent with those of others, and if we change how we relate to each other as systems, narratives of identity, informing, motivating, and shaping forces, if we change the nature of our relationships, we also change the nature of humankind.
Are we not made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to each other?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership.
“The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” So wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, which remains the most impactful revisioning of human relations, being, meaning, and values in the history of civilization.
Celebrate with me today the birthday of Karl Marx, who shaped from the Humanist tradition of the Enlightenment a toolkit for the realization of our potential humanity, of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and of the liberation of humankind from systems of unequal power, from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and from the tyranny and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
An enduring legacy of Karl Marx is his instrumentalization of Socratic method as a tool of understanding unequal power as dialectical process, which can be generally applied in human sciences. This he demonstrated at length in the example of economics because he wanted to place it on a footing as science, much as Freud insisted on defining his new psychology as medical science to confer authority on it.
Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At thirteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969, in Berkeley at People’s Park. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third part of a round of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man free of the profit motive would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Godel, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe.
The third time I read Marx was over a decade after my baptism by fire in Beirut, this time as a counselor seeking to better understand and help my clients. I remain as I was then, a scholar of the intersection of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, whose primary field is the origin of human evil and its consequences as violence, though of course I have been greatly changed by my life experience, and my understanding has changed with me.
My third reading of Marx coincides with my Defining Moment of understanding the Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force from which evil, violence, and fascist tyranny arise, a Ring of Power which requires the renunciation of love to wield, and a pathology which can be healed by the redemptive power of love. Here Marx helps us to understand the dynamics of unequal power as a system of oppression, a model which can be applied generally to issues including those of gender, race, and class.
We often have difficulty envisioning a therapeutic model of finding balance and harmony in society rather than a coercive one; we may align ourselves on the side of freedom against tyranny and the force and control of the carceral state, but how can we abolish the police and throw open the gates of the prisons, abolish borders and the counterinsurgency model of policing which enforces white supremacist and patriarchal terror, renounce the social use of force and abandon violence and war, cast down law and order from their thrones and forge a civilization of liberty and chaos in its place?
Let me provide you with an example of what that might look like. On my return from adventures abroad, I took a job as a counselor in a program called Vision Quest run through a Native American tribe for court mandated youth, under the flags of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers with the Army’s permission, and with gorgeous Union Army blues parade uniforms glittering with gold buttons in which one may feel like a prince.
As described to me, I would lead a group of boys through the program from a three month boot camp in Arizona near the historic Fort, then ride horses to Denver and Philadelphia, sleeping in a tipi as one of several such teams while they learned riding and parade horse drill, and finish the program on a tall ship in the Florida Keys teaching them to sail. They would earn their GED high school equivalency certificate, and graduates would have served their sentences and be provided with jobs and transitional supervised community based housing. There was no lockdown; just men learning to live together without violence.
This sounded like a grand adventure, and for most of my life if you told me something was going to be an adventure, or as Obi-Wan says in the first Star Wars film “some damn fool idealistic crusade”, I’d likely do it. It’s the part they leave out of the pitch you need to worry about with this kind of quasi-official outfit; what no one told me was that the clients were mainly violent felons with four or five year sentences that would eventually land them in adult prisons if they washed out, with issues like psychotic rage and often highly trained and indoctrinated gang soldiers, cult zealots, and fanatics of political terror as well. It turned out to be both much tougher and much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and became my entry point into working as a counselor.
They were some of the toughest and most unreachable boys in our nation, mainly Black and from the vast ghettos of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, with issues of abuse, abandonment, and addiction as consequences of structural and systemic inequalities and injustices, internalized oppression, and the legacy of slavery. And they were boys our nation had thrown away.
This is what is wrong inherently with prisons as a cure for systemic inequalities; not only does prison cause more harm rather than heal it, we are throwing our children away.
We had a three percent recidivism rate from that program; 97% of our clients had no further contact with the law after completion. This amazing success with teenagers our society had pronounced violent and unreformable criminals began with an awareness that perpetrators are also victims, and was won by providing a constructive way for them to earn honor and membership; so far like many other programs based on military models of identity construction.
But it was the horses, wild mustangs given to each new client as their own personal mount who had to break and learn to ride them, that allowed them to forge the ability to bond with others, because you can trust a horse and it will never betray you. Teambuilding exercises did the rest, as in the military but without the purpose of violence.
So it was, with The Communist Manifesto in my saddlebag and dreaming with serenity between a seventeen year old former gang enforcer and cult extremist of Louis Farrakhan’s racial separatist theocratic-fascist Nation of Islam who had been shot six times in six different gunfights with rival gangs and whose joy was to recite poetry from my copy of Rumi, and on the other side a fifteen year old former Jamaican Posse drug lord from Philadelphia who had two million dollars in cash in his pockets when his reign of terror, which included skinning alive people who owed him money and ordering his recruits to set a member of their families on fire as a loyalty test, ended in betrayal and arrest and who had discovered a genius for choreography in adapting reggae to parade drill, that I had a primary insight and realization of the nature of violence as a disease of power, of addiction to power and of unequal power, which operates multigenerationally as epigenetic trauma and historical legacies of slavery and racism, and often a result of secret power.
Dehumanization is the end result of commodification; Jean Genet famously called the quest for wealth and power necrophilia for this reason. William S. Burroughs coined the term the Algebra of Need as a metaphor of Capitalism; Malcolm X references Burroughs’ metaphor of capitalism as possession when he speaks of heroin addiction as a white man who must be exorcised and cast out of one’s body. And with his invention of the philosophy of Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre explored the implications of Marx’s primary insights as a psychology of the consequences of unequal power relations and the mechanical failures of our civilization’s internal contradictions as alienation, falsification, commodification, internalized oppression, and the disfigurement and theft of the soul by hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege and the hegemonic forces of those who would enslave us.
As a systemic and pervasive means of transforming persons into things, capitalism is an enabler which acts as a force multiplier for a host of evils, inequalities of racism and patriarchy, and divisions of exclusionary otherness, touching every aspect of our lives including our identity and social relations and confronting individuals with enormous and weaponized forces with which we must wrestle.
And our best response to these threats is solidarity in refusal to submit or be isolated by our modern pathology of disconnectedness, divided by otherness and identitarian categories of exclusion and privilege and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and subjugated by authorized identities and the weaponization of overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power; to unite as a band of brothers, sisters, and others and to shelter and protect our humanity and viability through and with others as a United Humankind.
In our revolutionary struggle for our souls, for autonomy and self ownership, for liberty and our uniqueness as self created beings, and for the liberation of humankind, we are each other’s best resource of action.
We are not designed to survive alone, and it can be difficult to get people in crisis to reach out for help, and for our institutions of caregiving to find where help is needed before things spiral downwards into violence, nor can violence be cured with violence or state repression. But this is the great mission of our humanity; to unite across the boundaries of our differences in revolutionary struggle to become better.
Let us defy the malign forces that would divide and enslave us and consume our souls. So I say with Karl Marx, the great visionary of liberty and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; People of the world, unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.
The Emancipation of Labor: A History of the First International, Henryk Katz
We celebrate today the 1905 founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago, a key event in the history of organized labor and an example of the Butterfly Effect, as from this coming together of revolutionary ideologies and worker solidarity in mass action consequences gathered force as they spread outward to transform our nation and the world, and will continue to do so in the future.
Here is an idea whose time has truly arrived in this age of globalization; a universal labor union which ensures that no worker can be used against another. Regardless of their nation or where they do the work.
Most people don’t think of Spokane and the Pacific Northwest as the crucible of the labor movement and Socialism in America, its anarchist communes and international networks of liberation struggle of over a hundred years ago and its legacies among those who live here, but most people don’t have a life partner whose father grew up with mine in the shadow of her grandfather John F. McKay and his friend Eugene V. Debs.
I have among the tools of my trade, that of resistance, chaos, anarchy, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, a battered length of iron, pitted and scarred from many battles and acts of sabotage, artifact of a heritage of resistance which reaches back into antiquity and connects us with the lives of others who refused to submit to authority, and carried as a walking stick by John F. McKay in his many campaigns of revolutionary struggle throughout the world.
As an Industrial Workers of the World unionist and with his friend Eugene V. Debs, John F. McKay defied and challenged authority throughout the world to forge a better future in which no worker can be used against another. He began this life work as a Montana state senator in 1918-1922; for union organizing among the miners and loggers he was excommunicated by the Church, and defeated an assassin sent against him.
An infamous event from this period was the Centralia Massacre of November 11 1919, in which a local Washington State headquarters of the IWW was attacked by members of the American Legion who had been called on by the town council to restore order during a strike; they surrounded and fired on the building, and a young IWW man who happened to be a World War One veteran fired back, killing several of them. The remaining strikebreakers stormed the building, killed several of the office staff, and castrated, dragged behind cars, and lynched others. Their mutilated bodies were hung about town; captured survivors were convicted on trumped up charges and given sentences of 25 years. From this abattoir emerged a champion of the people; I believe this event began John F. McKay’s shift from political to direct action. At the end of his term in the senate he became a full time IWW organizer.
In 1930 he moved to Spokane and founded the All Worker’s Party, and with the hundreds of men he organized kept thousands of people alive during the Great Depression, by raiding trains for food to distribute while his teams turned the power and water back on for families who had no cash to pay the utilities with, among other things.
And with this wrecking bar in his fist he fought for liberty, equality, and justice for the rest of his life. I hope to be worthy of its use, in bearing forward the legacy of resistance he created in the quest to make all human beings equal, and all workers to share in the rewards of their labor in a just society.
The sign above the gate of Auschwitz read; “work will set you free.” This is a lie. Only revolutionary struggle and seizure of power will set you free.
As described in Jacobin; “Even Americans familiar with labor history might be surprised by the slogan of the Congress of South African Trade Unions: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” More commonly associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the motto was likely brought to South Africa by IWW members (“Wobblies”) shortly after the revolutionary union’s founding in 1905.
That the IWW was global enough to spread its phraseology across the Atlantic Ocean belies its popular conception, which tends to focus exclusively on the union’s organizing in the US. But the IWW’s revolutionary ideals found purchase among workers throughout the world, eventually gaining members in at least twenty countries on all six of the inhabited continents.
The IWW inspired activists in the Ghadr movement, which sought Indian independence from the British Empire. Its members interacted with Chinese republican revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen and the anarchists of the Partido Liberal Mexicano as well as its hero, Emiliano Zapata. Its ranks included everyone from socialist tribune Eugene Debs to Ghadr movement leader Pandurang Khankhoje to border-hopping migrant laborers in the American Southwest.”
Also writing in a book review in Jacobin, Staughton Lynd analyzes why the most consequential and universal labor union, the first of its kind in the history of the world and the seed idea which originated all unions today, had collapsed utterly, I’d say during the division of 1924 over whether its leadership should take the federal pardon; “Eric Chester’s new book, Wobblies In Their Heyday, fills this gap. It is indispensable reading for Wobblies and labor historians. One way to summarize what is between these covers is to say that Chester spells out three tragic mistakes made by the old IWW that the reinvented organization must do its best to avoid.
1.Macho Posturing
At its peak in August 1917, the IWW had a membership of more than 150,000. Nine months later, Chester writes, “the union was in total disarray, forced to devote most of its time and resources to raising funds for attorneys and bail bonds.” This sad state of affairs was, of course, partly the result of a calculated decision by the federal government to destroy the IWW. But only partly.
According to Chester another cause of the government’s successful suppression of the Wobblies was that during and after the 1913 Wheatlands strike in California hop fields, some Wobblies threatened to “burn California’s agricultural fields if two leaders of the strike were not released from jail.”
For years, Wobbly leaders had insisted that sabotage could force employers to make concessions. But what Chester terms “nebulous calls for arson” and “macho bravado” only stiffened the determination of California authorities not to modify jail sentences for Wobbly leaders Richard Ford and Herman Suhr.
Chester finds no credible evidence that any fields were, in fact, burned. But after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, this extravagant rhetoric calling for the destruction of crops apparently helped to convince President Wilson to initiate a systematic and coordinated campaign to suppress the Wobblies.
2. Avoiding Controversial Stances to Avoid State Repression
International solidarity and militant opposition to war and the draft were central tenets of the IWW. Wobblies who had enrolled in the British Army were expelled from the union. At the union’s tenth general convention in November 1915, the delegates adopted a resolution calling for a “General Strike in all industries” should the United States enter the war.
What actually happened was that general secretary-treasurer Bill Haywood and a majority of IWW leaders agreed that the union should desist from any discussion of the war or the draft, in the vain hope that this policy would persuade the federal government to refrain from targeting the union for repression. At the same time, the great majority of rank-and-file members, with support of a few leaders such as Frank Little, insisted that the IWW should be at the forefront of the opposition to the war.
Self-evidently, what Chester terms the IWW’s “diffidence” was the very opposite of Eugene Debs’s defiant opposition to the war. When Wobbly activists “flooded IWW offices with requests for help and pleas for a collective response to the draft,” the usual response was that what to do was up to each individual member.
Haywood, Chester notes, “consistently sought to steer the union away from any involvement in the draft resistance movement.” Debs notwithstanding, the national leadership of the Socialist Party, like the national leadership of the IWW, “scrambled to avoid any confrontation with federal authorities.” Radical activists from both organizations formed ad hoc alliances cutting across organizational boundaries.
The IWW General Executive Board was unable to arrive at a decision about the war and conscription, and a committee tasked with drafting a statement that included both Haywood and Little failed to do so. In the end, Chester says, “the IWW sought to position itself as a purely economic organization concerned solely with short-run gains in wages and working conditions.”
3.Falling Into the Divide-and-Conquer Trap
The reluctance of the Wobbly leadership to advocate resistance to the war and conscription carried over to a legalistic response when the government indicted IWW leaders. Haywood urged all those named in the indictment to surrender voluntarily and to waive any objection to being extradited to Chicago. In the mass trial that followed, the defendants were represented by a very good trial lawyer who was also an enthusiastic supporter of the war and passed up the opportunity to make a closing statement to the jury.
The judge’s superficial fairness deluded Wobs into hoping for a good outcome. The jury took less than an hour to find all one hundred defendants guilty of all counts in the indictment. Ninety-three received lengthy prison terms. They were imprisoned in Leavenworth, described by Chester as ‘”a maximum-security penitentiary designed for hardened, violent criminals.” Forty-six more defendants were found guilty after another mass conspiracy trial in Sacramento.
Thereafter, Chester writes, the “process of granting a commutation of sentence was manipulated during the administration of Warren Harding to divide and demoralize IWW prisoners.” The ultimate result was “the disastrous split of 1924, leaving the union a shell of what it had been only seven years earlier.”
Executive clemency, like that granted to Debs, was the only hope for the imprisoned Wobblies. President Harding rejected any thought of a general amnesty, obliging each prisoner to fill out the form requesting amnesty as an individual. The application form contained an implicit admission of guilt. (The newly created ACLU supported this process.)
Twenty-four IWW prisoners opted to submit a form requesting amnesty. A substantial majority refused to plead for individual release. More than seventy issued a statement in which they insisted that “all are innocent and all must receive the same consideration.”
The government insisted on a case-by-case approach. Fifty-two prisoners responded that they refused to accept the president’s division of the Sacramento prisoners, still alleged to have burned fields, from the Chicago prisoners. Moreover, they considered it a “base act” to “sign individual applications and leave the Attorney General’s office to select which of our number should remain in prison and which should go free.”
Initially, the IWW supported those prisoners who refused to seek their freedom individually. Those who had submitted personal requests for presidential clemency were expelled from the union.
In June 1923, the government once again dangled before desperate men the prospect of release, now available for those individual prisoners promising to remain “law-abiding and loyal to the Government.” This time a substantial majority of the remaining prisoners accepted Harding’s offer, and IWW headquarters, in what Chester calls “a sweeping reversal,” gave its approval. Eleven men at Leavenworth declined this latest government inducement. In addition, those who were tried in California did not receive the same offer.
In December 1923, the remaining IWW prisoners at Leavenworth, including twenty-two who had been convicted in Sacramento, were released unconditionally. The damage had been done. Those who had held out the longest launched a campaign within the IWW to expel those who had supported a form of conditional release. There were accusations against anyone who had allegedly proved himself “a scab and a rat.”
When a convention convened in 1924, both sides claimed the headquarters office and went to court. An organization consisting of the few hundred members who had supported the consistent rejection of all government offers “faded into oblivion by 1931.”
It is not the intent of Chester’s book, or of this review, to trash the IWW. This review has dealt with only about half of the material in the book (for example passing by the story of Wobbly organizing in copper, both at Butte, Montana and Bisbee, Arizona). Moreover, anyone who lived through the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panthers is familiar with tragedies like those described here.
The heroism of members of all three groups who were martyrs — such as Frank Little, Fred Hampton, and the Mississippi Three (James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) — remains. The vision of a qualitatively different society — as the Zapatistas say, “un otro mundo” — remains also.”
The IWW, a reading list
The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era, by Eric Thomas Chester
Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane!: Fighting for Free Speech with the Hobo Agitators of the Industrial Workers of the World, by John Duda (Editor)
Among the many horrific incidents of capitalist state terror and police crimes against humanity designed to repress dissent and break the power of organized labor, the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 remains an example of the principle of witness as articulated by the heroine of the telenovela series Wednesday; “If we don’t tell our stories, they will.”
Along with the falsification of rewritten histories as authorized identity is the terror of silence and erasure as a system of control and repression of dissent.
The idea of witness, crucial in Elie Wiesel’s ars poetica and ideology as argued in his famous speech Silence is Complicity, here combines with Michel Foucault’s dialectics in Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia to form a praxis of democracy as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
As I wrote in my post of December 24 2022, Nevermore A Silent Night, For Silence Is Complicity; Tis the night before Christmas, a liminal time throughout the diaspora of our civilization which was reshaped historically by Paul’s reimagination of classical mystery faiths and Judaism as they collided and transformed each other, a night of magic, the redemptive and totalizing power of love, the rapture and terror of dreams and the power of wishes to redefine us and our possibilities of becoming human.
Clustered in dense layers around this time are rituals and symbols whose roots in our collective psyche are ancient and powerful, among them the family singing of Silent Night, a carol of great beauty composed in 1818 and made a universal cultural heritage by Bing Crosby’s recording in 1935. Its primary meaning remains the same; while the world sleeps, we are recreated anew and reborn with the dawn, to a new life wherein all things are possible. Choose wisely what you wish for, and who you wish to become.
As Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Tonight I write to you not of the freedom and autonomy conferred by such acts of self-creation, nor of poetic vision as a sacred path in pursuit of Truth or of Orphic dream navigation as an art of transformative change, but of the art of making wishes itself. For wishes are a form of what Foucault called truth telling, though he wrote in the context of the witness of history and the primary duties of a citizen to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. In wishes we speak the truth of ourselves, and shape our lives into an unfolding of our intentions as we have named and so created them, naming, defining, and claiming ourselves as Adam named the beasts. Wishes are a performance of our best selves, and of the truths we have chosen to become and embody; truths written in our flesh.
Herein the key and most precious and unique human act is to perform and make your dreams real.
We must never allow truths to be silenced, nor our souls stolen by those who would enslave us. True faith is living your truth; this sometimes means resistance to falsification and authorized identities as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle, but it always means living authentically and on your own terms, for only you can discover your own best self, and in this you are the only authority and the sole arbiter of choices and decisions, and of human being, meaning, and value.
In the arena of struggle between truth telling and the complicity of silence, I wish for us all Nevermore a Silent Night, for silence is complicity.
To silence in the face of evil there can be but one reply: Never Again.
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few?
Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel – April 12, 1999”
As written by Carol Quirke in Workplace Fairness, in an article entitled The Memorial Day Massacre: A Lost Piece of History; “You would think that, having been raised a mile from where 10 workers were killed and 30 more were shot by police while picketing a steel plant, I would have heard of such a tragedy. More confounding, my great-uncle, Eddie Marasovic, was wounded by a police bullet in that violent affair that would become known as a massacre.
Yet I knew nothing of it.
It happened in May, 1937, before I was born, on the prairie outside the Republic Steel plant on Chicago’s East Side. This spit of land, along Lake Michigan’s southern tip, linked the steel plants of southern Chicago to a long string of industry that reached through Indiana, giving rise to what labor economists called the largest steel producing region in the world.
Why did I only learn about the killing of workers from a poster of the massacre that I found in a bookstore, in a city located two states away, nearly half a century after the event transpired?
The Memorial Day Massacre, as many refer to it, was largely repressed by many in the community where it occurred.
In the late 1990s when I began researching it, scholars had also neglected the tragedy for decades. Greg Mitchell’s new PBS film and book, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, explore how vital evidence — a Paramount newsreel — helped union leaders and civil libertarians turn the tide against the extreme pro-police news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the killings.
A single newsreel cameraman, Orlando Lippert of Paramount News, captured the tragedy on film. Lippert’s footage, suppressed by Paramount until a congressional committee under progressive Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. (D-Wisc.) screened it, showed police firing at protesters, striking 40 of them, the vast majority in the back or on the side.
The newsreel provided vital proof of corporate and state violence against working Americans.
How had events transpired as they did?
Tensions had been ratcheting up for months ahead of the tragedy. In 1935, the new Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO), under the leadership of United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis, organized industrial labor, unskilled workers flexed their muscle. And, in late 1936, workers set off the sit-down craze, initiating hundreds of strikes from late November 1936 through the spring of 1937.
Lewis’s CIO achieved an agreement with U.S. Steel, the largest producer in the country, but Thomas M. Girdler, the CEO of Republic Steel, and the heads of other smaller steel companies (known as Little Steel), vowed to keep unions out. When workers called a strike at these plants, unionists rallied at Republic Steel. But Chicago police refused to let strikers picket the plant and on May 28, 1937, they viciously beat strikers, including women.
To build community support, workers organized a Memorial Day picnic for families and labor activists on the prairie several blocks from their plant. More than 1,000 people showed up, many in their Sunday best, and then set off on a peaceful march to form a picket line close to the Republic plant.
Police halted them halfway there. Orlando Lippert’s newsreel of events shows men and women gesticulating to police. Seconds later, the film shows workers fleeing. Police run after them, many with guns drawn, and fire upon the crowd. Four workers died of their wounds immediately, and within three weeks, another six had lost their lives. Others were hospitalized due to severe beatings. One boy, age 11, was shot in the foot.
My grandmother’s youngest brother, my great uncle Eddie, was one of those who had been shot. Ironically, though I learned of the massacre in 1983 at the Northern Sun bookstore in Minneapolis, I only discovered our personal connection at a family wedding several years later. My great uncle’s daughter shared the story of her father having been shot that Memorial Day.
In 1996, in the midst of my graduate studies, examining how news photography shaped labor conflict, I interviewed my aunts and uncles to see if I could find out more. They knew nothing of the Memorial Day Massacre. I became fascinated, not only about the events in Chicago, but about the ways in which it had been forgotten.
Only from an oral history that my brother, Michael, conducted with our grandparents did I find out that my grandfather was working in the Republic plant for 17 days before and after the massacre. He was one of the “loyal workers” the company deployed to suggest the strikers did not represent most workers. He was, in effect, a scab. My uncle Eddie, in contrast, stood on the field that day, fighting for the right to a union.
I have few strands of information, hardly more than whispers, of Eddie’s life.
He continued his employment at Republic Steel for nearly four decades. But these are the lone facts I can dredge up. From family, there is little more. Others, notably urban sociologist William Kornblum in his 1975 book Blue Collar Community, have observed that Chicago’s East Siders did not want to discuss the events that so divided their community.
As documentarian George Stoney found in his exploration of Southern millworkers involved in the 1934 general textile strike, being subject to state violence can cause trauma or shame, making workers suspicious and willing to repress their own experiences.
Even the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) refused to honor the massacre’s victims — it took a decade for the union’s newspaper to print the infamous photographs of its members being beaten and shot at by police, even as other union papers and metropolitan dailies published such imagery. In 1937, SWOC was fighting for its right to exist — and it may have feared scaring off membership by highlighting the massacre.
The intransigence of Girdler and the other Little Steel executives soon stymied the union drive. Little Steel only accepted union representation after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1940 that workers deserved compensation for the companies’ illegal actions against them, and as President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced industry to negotiate with unions if they wanted federal defense contracts.
While workers did not obtain contracts immediately, efforts at curtailing labor spies, corporate mercenaries, and police overreaction to labor disputes mostly succeeded. A committee under Sen. La Follette probed the massacre and exposed the buried Paramount footage.
This spotlight upon extralegal violence helped curb it in the future. Documenting and publicizing the surveillance of workers — and the collusion between private “security” forces, police and the National Guard — lmited such practices. The stifling of violence, and federal support for unions along with workers’ ongoing mobilization, ultimately led a third of the nation’s industrial workforce to enjoy union representation by the early 1950s.
It was only in the mid-1990s that I began to deeply research the story of the massacre. By reading the La Follette transcripts, I was able to find traces of my great uncle.
I knew from a second cousin that her father, Eddie Marasovic, had been shot in his leg, and he carried the bullet in his body to the grave. Unexpectedly I encountered his name, in Exhibit #1463: A medical examiner’s sketch of a body, with dots strewn across the drawing, for all the bullets that more than two dozen activists had borne that day. My great-uncle’s name corresponds to the bullet that wounded his leg.
My family had been touched by history, recorded in history, and yet those marks had been lost to me. Repressed, censored or silenced — I am still trying to learn.”
As written by Howard Fast in a witness statement entitled Memorial Day Massacre: It was a day for parades, picnics and boat-rides–and tear-gas, bullets and death; “Memorial Day in Chicago in 1937 was hot, humid, and sunny; it was the right kind of day for the parade and the holiday, the kind of a day that takes the soreness out of a Civil War veteran’s back makes him feel like stepping out with the youngsters a quarter his age. It was a day for picnics, for boating, for the beach or a long ride into the country. It was a day when patriotic sentiments could be washed down comfortably with Coca-Cola or a Tom Collins, as you preferred. And there’s no doubt but that a good deal of that holiday feeling was present in the strikers who gathered on the prairie outside and around Republic Steel’s Chicago plant.
Most of the strikers felt good. Tom Girdler, who ran Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands, and word went around that old Tom could do worse than earn an honest living hoeing potatoes. The strike was less than a week old; the strikers had not yet felt the pinch of hunger, and there was a good sense of solidarity everywhere. Because it was such a fine summer day, many of the strikers brought their children out onto the prairie to attend the first big mass meeting; and wherever you looked, you saw two-year-olds and three-year-olds riding pick-a-back on the shoulders of steelworkers. And because it was in the way of being their special occasion as well as a patriotic holiday, the women wore their best and brightest.
In knots and clusters, the younger folks two by two, the older people in family groups, they drifted toward Sam’s place on South Green Bay Avenue. Once, Sam’s place had been a ten-cent-a-dance hall; now it was strike headquarters, which meant, in terms of the strike, just about everything. There, the women had set up their soup kitchen, and there the union strategy board planned the day-to-day work; food was collected at Sam’s place, and pickets used it as their barracks and headquarters.
Today, several thousand people gathered around the improvised platform set up at Sam’s place, to listen to the speakers and to take part in the mass demonstration. How serious an occasion it was, they knew well enough; rumors circulated that the police were going to attempt something special, something out of the run of clubbing and gassing which had marked the strike from the very first day; rumors too that a mass picket line was going to be established today. It was a serious occasion, but somehow something in the day, the holiday, the sunshine and the warm summer weather made the festive air persist. Vendors wheeled wagons of cold pop, and brick ice cream, three flavors in one, was to be had at a nickel a cake.
For the young folks, it was the first strike; they sat under the trees with the girls, grinning at the way the strike committee worked and poured sweat; and the women, cooking inside the hall, reflected, as a hundred generations of women had reflected before, that man’s work is from sun to sun, but women’s work….
A group of girls sang. Strike songs were around, a new turn in the folk literature of the nation. First shyly, hesitantly, then with more vigor, with a rising volume augmented by the deep bass and rich baritone of the men, they sang the deathless tale of Joe Hill, the song-maker and organizer whom the cops had killed; they sang, “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong….” They sand of the nameless IWW worker, tortured into treason, who pleaded, “Comrades, slay me, for the coppers took my soul; close my eyes, good comrades, for I played a traitor’s role.”
The meeting started and came down to business. The chairman was Joe Weber, who represented the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee. Outlining the purpose of the mass meeting, he flung an arm at the Republic plant, a third of a mile down the road. Twenty-five thousand men were on strike; their purpose was to picket peacefully, to win a decent raise in wages so that they might exist like human beings. But there had been constant, brutal provocation by the police. Well, they were gathered here, as was their constitutional right, to protest that interference.
Dozens of strikers had been arrested, beaten, waylaid; strikers’ property, as for example a sound truck, had been smashed and destroyed. Even women had been beaten, dragged off to jail, treated obscenely. The National Labor Relations Act guaranteed them their rights; today they were going to demonstrate in support of those rights.
Other speakers backed up Weber. When the audience cheered some point, the children present gurgled with delight and clapped their hands. As soon as the meeting had finished the strikers and their wives and children began to form their picketline. After all, this was Memorial Day; the thing took on a parade air. Some of the strikers had made their own placards; also, a whole forest of them appeared from inside the union hall, made by committees. The slogans were simple, direct, and non-violent: “REPUBLIC STEEL VIOLATES LABOR DISPUTES ACT.” “WIN WITH THE C.I.O.” “NO FASCISM IN AMERICA.” “REPUBLIC STEEL SHALL SIGN A UNION CONTRACT.”
The signs were handed out, many of them to boys and girls who carried them proudly. At the head of the column that was forming, two men took their place with American flags. The news reporters, who had come up by car only a short while before, were hopping about now, snapping everything. For some reason that has never been analyzed, news photographers and strikers get along very well, even when the photographers come from McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. There was a lot of good-natured give and take. When the column began to march, down the road from Sam’s place first, and then across the prairie toward the Republic Steel plant, the news photographers moved with it, some walking, some by car. This fact later turned into a vital part of American labor history.
Republic Steel stood abrupt out of the flat prairie. Snake-like, the line of pickets crossed the meadowland, singing at first: “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong…”; but then the song died as the sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated policement took up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’ march slowed–but they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened. It brought to mind how other Americans had faced the uniformed force of so-called law and order so long ago on Lexington Green in 1775; but whereas then the redcoat leader had said, “Disperse, you rebel bastards!” to armed minutemen, now it was to unarmed men and women and children that a police captain said, “You dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go!”
About two hundred and fifty yards from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers. Billies and clubs were out already, prodding, striking, nightsticks edging into women’s breasts and groins. It was great fun for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of holsters.
“Stand fast! Stand fast!” the line leaders cried. “We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!”
The cops said, “You got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights.”
Even if a modern man’s a steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a pistol equalizes him with a weakling–and more than equalizes. Grenades began to sail now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic, and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing ran like fire through the police.
They began to shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers–at a time when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.
And so it went, on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the field a bloodstained field of battle. World War veterans there said that never in France had they seen anything as brutal as this.
Now, of course, this brief account might be passed off as a complete exaggeration, as one-sided and so forth–the same arguments might be used that are constantly thrown up whenever it is a case of labor versus capital or labor versus the police. It might be said, as the Chicago Tribune said the next day, that this was the doing of Reds who were plotting to take over the plant, and the police had only done their duty.
But the photographers were on the spot, and everything I have described here and a good deal more was taken down with both newsreel and still cameras. The stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel held by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor; and I recommend to the special attention of anyone interested in checking this bit of labor history Exhibit 1418, Exhibit 1414, Exhibit 1351, and the morbid chart of gunshot wounds–in the back–known as Exhibit 1463.
That, in brief–and most brief, since the space here is limited–is a summary of what happened in Chicago on May 30, 1937. These events, which came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre, shook the nation as did few other acts of anti-labor violence since the Haymarket Affair of the 1880’s. Later, the Senate Committee’s investigation highlighted them, and brought home to the American people the full savagery of the police and the men who ran Republic Steel. But then the war washed the memory out for a time, and to understand fully today what happened then in Chicago, certain other facts must be noted.
Let us look at the situation of the steel industry after the worst part of the depression. Taking United States Steel as an example, we find that by 1935 the firm was well on the way over the hump, with a net profit of $6,106,488. Wheels had begun to turn again in America, and the next year’s profit took an enormous jump upwards, a net of $55,501,787 in 1936. Then the graph inclined even more sharply, and in the first three months of 1937 the company recorded a net profit of $28,561,533.
This was big steel. Republic, a light steel industry, was a part of what was known as little steel, and while the profits there were smaller–$4,000,000 in 1935 and $9,500,000 in 1936–they were part of the upward spiral.
It was within this framework of hot furnaces and mounting profits that the C.I.O. began to organize. And as they built their industrial unions, the steel companies built their armed goon squads. It was in 1936 that the C.I.O. began to make real progress in organizing the steel industry, and by the middle of 1937 half a million steelworkers had joined the union. Over 750 union lodges were formed, and by now most of the steel manufacturers had realized that it was a most destructive kind of insanity to fight organizaion. Again, by June 1937, some 125 companies had signed union contracts. Among these firms, which employed 310,000 workers, were Carnegie-Illinois and several other subsidiaries of US Steel.
But the big independents, the Little Steel combine, still held out. Let us name them as they stood on that Memorial Day of 1937. There was Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel, employing 53,000 workers. There was Bethlehem Steel, with 82,000 workers. There was Youngstown Sheet & Tube, with 27,000. Then there were the smaller firms, National Steel, American Rolling Mills and Inland Steel. All together, these firms employed almost 200,000 workers and they accounted for almost forty per cent of the steel produced in America.
They were lined up for a knock-down, drag-out fight; no quarter asked, no quarter given. Tom Girdler was granted nominal leadership; a latter-day “robber baron,” to use Matthew Jospehson’s phrase, he was a natural for such a position, and we shall see later how his tactics led to the Memorial Day Massacre.
But he did not introduce the concept of violence; it was not necessary for him to do so. As far back as 1933 the steel companies were arming themselves for the coming struggle. For example, the following order was shipped to Bethlehem Steel. The invoice entered on the books of Federal Laboratories, and signed by A.G. Bergman, is dated September 30, 1933:
That makes for quite a sizable armament, but Youngstown Sheet and Tube went in for more and deadlier protection against unarmed strikers and their dangerous wives and children. On June 6, 1934, this firm was billed for the following order:
10 1½” cal. riot guns 201, $60 ea.
10 riot gun cases 211, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. long range projectiles, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. short range projectiles, $4.50 ea.
60 M-39 billies, std. barrel no disc, $22.50 ea.
600 M-39 billy cartridges, $1.50 ea.
200 grenades 106M, 10% disc., $12 ea.
These are only two examples of widespread gun-toting by the steel companies. Nor were these the only techniques they used. They hired spies and special agents. They organized goon squads composed of thugs, professional gangsters, and assorted degenerates. They bribed police chiefs and sheriffs.
And under their natural leader, Tom Girdler, they set themselves for violence.
That was part of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre. Another part was Tom Girdler himslef, and it is worthwhile to look into that gentelman’s history.
Matthew Josephson’s fine book, The Robber Barons, should be read as background to any study of Tom Girdler. Girdler is a latter-day Morgan, a Jim Fisk, a John D. Rockefeller–but operating at a time when the tactics of these financial pirates were supposed to be outdated and hopeless. Perhaps in some new edition of Josephson’s book, Girdler will be included, along with a few other of his worthy contemporaries, as a sort of appendix.
Girdler is a farm boy, and he likes to think of himself as a part and a little more than a part of the good old log-cabin tradition. He was fond of saying, in those days of steel trouble, that he liked a good rough-and-tumble fight; and he talked tough and tried to look and act tough. But his toughness was the toughness of the rear-echelon general, the armchair two-gun man. It was never his lot to face even a small reflection of the violence he created.
In the 1920’s, Cyrus Eaton, a Middle-Western manipulator, formed Republic out of four small steel companies. Eaton, too, had dreams of becoming an Andrew Carnegie; but his skill did not measure up to his ambition. He tangled with a very hard-boiled customer, Bethlehem Steel, and in the ensuing struggle Republic’s shares fell from 80 to 2. At that time, Girdler was making a very local name for himself in Jones and Laughlin Steel; Eaton pulled him out, promised him an arm and a leg, and told him to save Republic. In that case, anyway, Eaton’s judgment was not at fault, for not only did Tom Girdler save Republic: he turned it into the most up-and-coming steel company in the land–and in doing so, he took just a little more than the arm and leg; he eased Eaton entirely out of the picture.
There is no doubting that Girdler made the most of what he stepped into. Republic was light steel, specializing in steel for furniture, boilers, automobiles, light trains, various types of metal containers. Nor could this kind of production be changed; the plants, too, were specialized. Reluctantly, Girdler worked with what he had. His own fancy was for heavy stuff: girders, plates for warships–the kind of work Bethlehem did. He looked to a future alliance with Bethlehem, but in the meantime he worked with what he had. He hired scientists and picked their brains in the traditional fashion. He forced the development of more and better alloys, until his stainless steel had gained a national reputation.
The plants were old and inefficient, so he began to replace them. Cyclical depression usually winds up with a replacement of fixed capital which has become outdated, and the fact that Girdler’s action was being duplicated all over the nation in the middle thirties set at least a part of the wheels of industry in motion. At this point, Girdler was not too interested in profits; profits could be assured for a later period if he was successful in replacement and in mergers.
He worked for control of Republic by chasing down small holdings of shares wherever he could locate them. He begged proxies. Because his Ohio plants were a good distance from the ore deposits of Minnesota, he planned and executed a merger with Corrigan-McKinney of Cleveland. When this went through he had a lake port to operate from, and a modern steel plant to add to his growing empire. For four years he worked to get proxies and control, until at last he was sitting firmly in the driver’s seat, with plant after plant coming into the growing orbit of Republic. He went after Truscon Steel, the largest fabricator of building-shapes, doors, lockers and window frames in the Middle West, effected a merger, and built up Truscon until it was the largest plant of its kind in the world. All this cost money, and from 1930 to 1935 Republic lost something around $30,000,000. This did not affect Girdler; he drew his income from his own huge salary. He did not own the combine; he merely had control. No single stockholder held more than 6 percent of the total stock, but by 1935 Girdler was so firmly in the saddle that no one could challenge his rule–and since the financial-industrial empire was growing, in spite of some 2,000,000 additional shares of watered stock, no stockholder or group of stockholders made serious efforts to challenge or unseat him.
For all of his drive and his large talk about free enterprise, Girdler demonstrated in action that he not only did not believe in what American business calls “free enterprise,” but that he personally was working night and day to destroy it in the steel industry. His tactics were toward monopoly. He interlocked with Youngstown Sheet and Tube; he interlocked with Jones and Laughlin. He thought and talked combine–and he operated in that direction with a ruthlessness that bowled over his competitors like tenpins.
And when it came to dealing with his 50,000 workers, he chose the same tactics of ruthlessness and direct aggression.
He liked to refer to himself as a worker, but that was an out-and-out fiction; from his very beginnings in the industry, he had been an ally of management, and then, very soon, he became a part of management.
He entered the industry as a salesman for Buffalo Forge. Then he was employed by the Oliver Iron Company. He was an assistant superintendent with Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and he held similar jobs elsewhere. But always it was over labor or apart from labor. It was Tom Girdler getting ahead and using his brains in the best Horatio Alger tradition, while all around him heavy-set, heavy-muscled men by the thousands worked long hours to turn the ore into metal and to shape it, forge it, tool it. One would surmise from his later actions that he had never held anything else but contempt for those who worked with their hands.
He was schooled well for the battles of 1937. Jones and Laughlin’s Aliquippa Works was known as the “Siberia of America.” Their company town was a place where the few brave union organizers who dared to enter faced death, literally, tar and feathers, or some of the more gruesome and less printable fates that goon squads specialize in. The town was also called “Little Hell,” a more descriptive name.
Apparently it was a place that suited Girdler excellently, for in a space of four years he rose from an assistant to president. And after that, he continued to climb steadily on the irreproachable ladder of success. As he climbed, his technique of dealing with the men he employed became progressively more ruthless. When the Memorial Day slaughter occurred, he was earning $130,000 a year. One might consider his statement that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he bargained collectively with his employees as a piece of not too original verbiage. At the same time, he never gave any indication that the dead men and wounded women and children strewn over the Chicago prairie disturbed either his sleep or his equanimity.
Yet it would give a very false picture of the industrial situation in the second half of the third decade to single out Tom Girdler as industry’s bad boy. Nor could the dreadful occurrence of Memorial Day be understood from that point of view. From that point of view alone, the Chicago incident becomes an isolated instance of one man’s callousness–but it was by no means such an isolated instance.
Half a century before, the Haymarket Affair, also in Chicago, became the labor cause célèbre of the nation and the world. The four labor leaders who were then framed and put to death in Chicago became martyrs or devils, according to the reaction of one class or another. But they could not have been so framed and murdered had there not been complete accord on the part of the most powerful forces in American finance. The same accord operated in the case of Girdler and the Chicago bloodshed.
Girdler was the front, the testing ground, the trial balloon of the most reactionary forces in American capitalism. This is not a matter for speculation. Keen economic observers of the time analyzed the situation of Republic Steel in terms of the shareholders as well as the Wall Street moguls.
I pointed out before that Girdler never owned even a tiny fraction of Republic’s stock. The big stockholders in Republic–and among them were some of the most powerful finance blocks in America–willingly allowed him to climb into the saddle and, once there, made no effort to unseat him. It should be historically noted that the Chicago dead did not arouse either the ire or the disgust of these same shareholders. Their attitude was that of smiling behind their palms, and quietly letting Girdler bear the brunt of the storm. Also, Girdler all during that period was responsible to a board of directors. This board represented, in its composition, far-reaching and important interests; but at no point is there any record of their reprimanding Girdler or disagreeing with his action. Other factors can be cited. A handful of key men in Wall Street could have picked up their phones, called Girdler, and called a quick halt to the bloody, senseless battle with labor which he was promoting; they did not, and there is every reason to believe that they silently backed Girdler in his policy.
Following this line of thought, it is interesting to observe the general press reaction to the Memorial Day Massacre. Although brief, the description of events on that day given earlier in this account makes a fairly good picture of what happened in the meadows outside of Republic. Further documentation, hundreds of pages of detailed testimony, is included in the Senate Report, S. Res. 266, 74th Congress, Part 14, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937. Exhibits presented also run into the hundreds. The testimony is explicit; it goes into minutiae, as may be gathered from the following extract, page 4939. John William Lotito, one of the strikers, is being examined by Senator La Follette:
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Did you see Captain Mooney while you stood there in front of the police?
MR. LOTITO: I think Captain Mooney was standing on the side where the other flag was–that is, to my left.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Did you see what he was doing?
MR. LOTITO: Well, he had his hands up like this here. He was talking to the strikers. His lips were moving anyway. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You could not hear what he was saying?
MR. LOTITO: No.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: About how long would you say you stood there?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, maybe five minutes.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Now, tell me exactly, from your own knowledge, what happened at the end of this five-minute period.
MR. LOTITO: At the end of the five-minute period? Well, I was talking to this policeman there, and the first thing I knew I got clubbed, while I was talking to him.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: And then what happened?
MR. LOTITO: I got clubbed and I went down, and my flag fell down, and I went to pick up the flag again, to get up, and I got clubbed the second time. I was like a top, you know, spinning. I was dizzy. So I put my hand to my head, and there was blood all over. I started to crawl away, and half running and half crawling, and I didn’t know what I was doing, to tell you the truth. After I got up, why there was shots, and everything I heard, I didn’t know which way to run. Anyway, I retreated back that way.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You mean back toward Sam’s Place?
MR. LOTITO: And then I got shot in the leg.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: How far away were you from the place where you had been standing talking to the police when you were shot in the leg, would you say?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, I got quite a ways from there, all right.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Can you approximate how far?
MR. LOTITO: Maybe thirty or forty yards away I got.
This is just a page of testimony, chosen at random; there are far more harrowing details that might be listed; but the point is this: all the details necessary are there. They are reports of thousands of eye-witnesses who saw what happened. Newspaper reporters on the scene saw what happened. And if that were not enough, in addition to the still photographers, the Paramount News people took down a detailed photographic record of the whole affair.
In other words, the newspapers knew the facts of the case. They could not plead ignorance, even the carefully conditioned ignorance which allows them to interpret events precisely as they please. With all that, they too acted, with very few exceptions, very much as if they were part of the combine behind Tom Girdler. They lied about what had occurred outside the Republic Steel plant. They lied hugely and in unison, although they departed from the truth on many different levels.
The Chicago Tribune, for example, was overt and completely unabashed. It described the unarmed men and women and children who composed the picket line–none of whom were ever proved to possess a firearm during the march–as “lusting for blood.” It raised a red scare, which was sedulously promoted by the Hearst and the McCormick interests and their fellow hatemongers. The more conservative journals doubted that the police had indulged in provocation and pointed out that force was a necessary ingredient to the preservation of law and order. One looked in vain in such papers as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune for editorials reproaching Tom Girdler, or his private police, even in the mildest terms. No criminal action was ever taken to seek justice for the men who had died in Chicago. Only the few independent newspapers and the labor press kept the issue alive and fought for justice–and there too is a remarkable parallel to what happened before in the Haymarket Affair.
You may wonder how it was that you do not recall seeing the newsreel which so graphically describes all that happened, and which was shown at the La Follette investigation. The following editorial from the New Masses of June 29, 1937, sheds a good deal of light on that:
The reason given by Paramount News for suppressing its newsreel of the Chicago Memorial Day steel-strike massacre is an obvious sham. Audiences trained on the Hollywood school of gangster films are not likely to stage a “riotous demonstration” in the theater upon seeing cops beating people into insensibility, and worse. Against whom would the riot be directed anyway? The Board of Directors or Republic Steel and the Chicago municipal authorities are hardly likely to be found in the immediate vicinity.
The real reason behind the film suppression is its decisive evidence that virtually every newspaper in the country lied, and continues to lie, about the responsibility for violence in the strike areas. The myth that the steel strikers have resorted to violence to gain their just ends is now the basis for the whole campaign of slander and misrepresentation against them. That is why Tom Girdler of Republic Steel refuses to confer with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and that is why 95 per cent of the press carries on a publicity pogrom against the strikers.
Even after the St. Louis Post Dispatch performed a genuine service to the American people in breaking the story of the film (for which, though it is Pulitzer owned, it is very unlikely to get the Pulitzer award), the venal press still continued to blast away at the strikers with the same old legend. Not a comma has been changed in the editorials which, day after day, have defended the steel tycoons on the ground that there can be no compromise with labor violence.
And all this time, the film record exists–and has been described–which would enable the public to make up its own mind on this very crucial point!
At this point, with the added emphasis of the above editorial, we begin to have a very different picture of the Memorial Day Massacre than that which popularly surrounds it. Not that Tom Girdler’s responsibility is lessened, not that the brutality of his agents is mitigated one iota, not that the Chicago police bear any less the responsibility for murder; but the incident in whole becomes broader and more inclusive. We find that far from being an isolated case of managerial violence, it was a focal point for the theory and the technique of reactionary capitalism in the organizational struggles of the thirties. It was a test case; it was symptomatic. Steel is, as was said, the industry of industries, and in 1937 steel was chosen by the entrenched forces of the open shop as the battleground for the open shop–against industrial unionism.
It is the difficult and tedious task of the labor historian to document every statement he makes. There is a good reason for this, of course; the body of knowledge (press, magazines, most books, etc.) presented to the public, both currently and contemporaneously to the times of which he writes, contradicts almost every premise and almost every fact which he brings forth. Only the labor press, which has a limited readership compared to the commercial press, bears him out. This is not the case with other historians. For example, one could start a story about Lincoln with the accepted premise that we was a great and good man; in the case of Eugene Debs, one would first have to document his actions and prove his intentions.
In connection with that, the charge that labor promotes almost all industrial violence cannot be dismissed as a lie; it must be proved to be a lie–and once proved, this small account of the Memorial Day Massacre can be closed. I have shown some of the facts in the arms orders of the steel companies. After our account of what happened in Chicago, it might do to cite the New York Times headline for May 31, 1937:
4 KILLED, 84 HURT AS STRIKERS FIGHT POLICE
IN CHICAGO, STEEL MOB HALTED.
Technically, that is not a lie. Only four men had died then; eventually five more succumbed from wounds. If you called the picket line a mob, then there is no doubt but that it was halted–although some might prefer the word “slaughtered.” And some of the strikers did fight for their lives against the police. But this is pettifogging; the sense and intent of the headline, which very much set the pattern for nonsensational headlines all over the country, is more than apparent for anyone.
Let’s go on with the record. Monroe, Michigan–ten days after Chicago. There is a Republic plant which employs about 1,350 persons. The strike is called; the workers go out, and for two weeks picket lines are maintained in a disciplined fashion. There is absolutely no disorder.
Then, suddenly, there appears on the scene what we know familiarly as “the bloodthirsty mob of strikers,” and the hospital wards are full, and the damage is reckoned in lives as well as thousands of dollars. But the records show that after due deliberation and planning, Police Chief Jesse Fisher swore in enough special police to form a small army–at an expense of $9,000 to the little town. Leonidas McDonald, a Negro C.I.O. organizer, was attacked by a mob and severely beaten. This incident, which members of the mob assured reporters was carefully planned, touched off the riot. Then Chief Fisher ordered his men to attack the picket line. They went to work with tear-gas shells and grenades. The next day, the hospital wards were full, but Chief Fisher, bursting with pride, set about organizing a shotgun brigade of six hundred men.
It had worked in Chicago. Why not Monroe?
Newspapers told us that in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, the same pattern of violence was being inaugurated by strikers of the Moltrop Steel Products Company. But George Mike was not a picket and not a striker. He was a crippled war veteran, who stood on a corner in Beaver Falls, selling tickets to a C.I.O. dance. A deputy sheriff leveled his gas gun at him and fired. The shell smashed his skull, and he died the next day. Our newspapers, during the same weeks, described the frightful riot provoked in Youngstown by–not the strikers, but their wives. Women too can be a frightful menace to society, if you only see them in the proper perspective. Many of these women carried their small children on this particular day, and no doubt that added to their potential menace. They were coming home from a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and a few of them paused to rest on an embankment that was a part of Republic’s property. The deputies on guard ordered them off. The women and children responded too slowly, and the deputies helped them along with gas shells. As the women fled, their screams brought men to the scene, and when the men appeared, the deputies switched to repeating rifles.
Result: two dead, thirty injured.
Massillon, July 11, and strikers holding a meeting outside C.I.O. headquarters. Again, the firing starts, and in a little while there are three dead strikers and five more on their way to the hospital. Then C.I.O. headquarters is surrounded, and for an hour lead is poured into the building. And in the building, there is not one firearm.
But the newspapers said, the next day: “STRIKING MOB ATTACKS MASSILLON POLICE.” That was a Middle-Western paper, but most others bore variations of the same.
This sort of record could be continued indefinitely. One labor historian estimates that casualties suffered by the working class in organizational struggles outnumber total casualties suffered by United States Armed Forces in all of this country’s wars up to World War II. Though the violence of Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel was sharp and dramatic, it could be matched by the violence of any one of a hundred other corporations, over a period of half a century.
Some of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre has been presented here. It was shown that the incident itself was both a part and a focal point in the pattern of closed-shop violence. The strange, wild, tragic, and disordered years of the third decade of the twentieth century, here in America, were not unproductive. Out of depression and despair came the greatest organization of labor this country ever knew–the industrial unionism of the CIO. Out of the broad united front against fascism, led by the C.I.O. and other organizations, came the strength and desire to resist Hitlerite Germany and to carry the world through its sharpest crisis.
The America of today is not and cannot ever be the America of a decade ago. History does not stage repeat performances. It is very likely that there will be violence in connection with future strikes; but the American people have learned a good deal. And if such an incident as that in Chicago occurs again, it is wholly possible that those responsible will have to face the anger of millions instead of thousands.”
Presenting “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” Chapter 6: Three Strikes. Dr. Lewis Andreas talks about being at the 1937 Memorial Day massacre and providing medical care during the Depression. Justin McCarthy discusses his job conditions at Ford Assembly Plant prior to the unions implementation. Mike Widman remembers heading up union negotiations and the strike at the Ford Plant in 1940-41. Bob Stinson discusses working at General Motors and how the sit-down strike began. Union songs performed by the Almanac Singers are played throughout the episode.
Social injustice is the crack in the Liberty Bell; as we stand united in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the world in our wonderfully diverse human family, with our essential workers who during the Pandemic, for now it seems held at bay but a threat which may return in new and terrible forms at any time, risked their own lives and those of their families to guarantee basic services to us all, and with our vulnerable populations who bear the true costs of what wealth and hegemony of power and privilege we may enjoy, let us always remember that among the causes and origins of our current problems is the failure of our political and economic systems to realize our founding value of equality.
What is the meaning of the Pandemic? Among other things it has exposed the faultliness of our civilization and the internal contradictions whose mechanical failures now threaten us all with civilizational collapse and extinction as consequences of capitalism and colonialism as systems of unequal power, and of control and dominion of nature as flawed coping strategies for our fear of her as uncontrollable, irrational, chaotic, and free; fear of the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For in this failure of our grasp to reach the limits of our vision we have allowed a failing capitalism to try and bring us down with it, to subvert democracy and the structural safeguards of our freedom embodied in our government as a free society of equals, and as our devastation of the environment creates pandemics and poisons our world to threaten our very lives.
When we will say, Enough! When will we reclaim our liberty and ownership of the public resources we have let slip away into the hands of those who would enslave us?
When we think of labor unions, of strikes and the right of workers to organize in defense of fair and safe work, we must think not only of our universal human rights and our duty of care for each other in solidarity, but also of the systems of oppression and unequal power in which such seizures of power become necessary and arise as imposed conditions of struggle. The event we celebrate today of over one hundred years ago, the Seattle General Strike, was such a victory, one which in large part founded organized labor.
From Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin comes an inspirational account of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 in the wake of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and conditions of austerity and worker exploitation much like those today. May we learn from the examples of history how better to meet the challenges of the future.
“The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
November 11, 1918. The war was finished. There were wild celebrations everywhere — everywhere, that is, in France, Britain, and the United States. Spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness erupted, and millions took to the streets of Paris, London, and New York.
In Seattle, the Star pronounced, “War is Over!” The city learned of the armistice on Sunday night, November 10; at once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets filled, his planned proclamation of a holiday irrelevant; his wish for a proper, orderly, patriotic manifestation was superseded.
Revelers celebrated not just the end of the war, but also what they thought to be the end of the so-called Spanish flu. Over the course of that day, makeshift bands appeared, with people banging garbage-can lids and lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Workers abandoned the shipyards, longshoremen quit the waterfront, and the city center was gridlocked. The city’s health authorities, too, were taken aback. There were no masks to be seen; social distancing was defiantly disregarded. They had their own plans in the works, perhaps with some recklessness, to withdraw their edicts, their restrictions on crowds and mandatory masking, and to triumphantly pronounce the influenza beaten.
Sailors, first carriers of the influenza and also its first victims, were ordered into the crowds to ensure that the celebration was official and properly patriotic. The November celebrations were also suggestive of a level of underlying discontent, a prelude to another war coming, to a return of “normalcy” in the nation’s most class-divided, strike-prone city — above all to the great “Seattle Strike.”
“The war to end all wars,” the papers repeated without a blush. Yet 10 million had been lost in the slaughter on the Western Front; millions more were maimed, emotionally as well as physically. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were vast swaths of devastation, the heart of the continent was in ruins, and there were new armies, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory, of “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” “democracy at full tilt.” “We won the war!”
The workers of Seattle, however, had never really supported this war, unless one reduced it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. Still, they celebrated; especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, conscription; to “sedition” charges and “criminal syndicalism” laws; to the red squads, raids, and prison sentences. The killing — nearly 5 million Americans served in World War I, and 53,000 were killed in action — was not restricted to the trenches. On the home front, the influenza killed 675,000, and more than 1,500 deaths were recorded in Seattle.
The Flu Comes to Seattle
In the winter of 1918, much of the city — the schools, and most public places — was still reopening. It remained unclear if the epidemic was, in fact, finished, with a second spike just before Christmas. The heavy rains had begun. The first loggers were drifting back; they joined others — wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for spring and work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle in winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. Some were sick. The Union Record, the city’s union-owned daily newspaper, reported that “peace” abroad was bringing hunger at home. One man, a union representative from the Metal Trades Council (MTC), told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in one night, all for bed and board.”
It had taken time for the influenza to reach Seattle. This city of three hundred thousand, situated in the far northwestern corner of the nation, was two mountain ranges and several long days from Chicago by train; it was weeks from the East Coast by the Panama Canal, and still much longer around the Strait of Magellan. Seattle was, in this sense, isolated, yet by war’s end, it had become the center of trade with Asia, two days closer to Vladivostok than its rival to the south, San Francisco. It was the gateway to Alaska and its fisheries. Wheat from the great fields of the Palouse was shipped from its docks.
Seattle had become an imperial outpost. The Puget Sound country bristled with warship building and armed encampments. Camp Lewis, just south of Tacoma, was the largest such base in the West. Bremerton, across the bay, was home port for the navy’s North Pacific fleet. Sailors trained there; warships, meant for the Asian “theater,” were built in its yards. The real war, of course, was an ocean away in the other direction. In spite of this, Seattle’s shipyards — the city’s “basic industry” — produced more ships for the war (ninety in total, steel hulled) than any other shipyard in the country. The yards were “the life” of the city, “pulsing through every [other] industry, affecting all workers.” These yards employed some thirty five thousand men; fifteen thousand more worked in Tacoma’s shipyards.
The influenza, despite its name, originated not in Spain but in Kansas in 1917, settling in Camp Riley. It was well traveled by the following summer’s end. It had first spread eastward, moving from camp to camp, reaching Europe with the arriving American Expeditionary Forces. It swept across Europe, adding a new dimension of horror to the trenches of the Western Front. Then home again to the United States, it returned with soldiers and sailors, killing ferociously. Public health officers in Seattle certainly knew about it and expected it, yet, as elsewhere, they were caught off guard when it actually appeared. It came in late September, by way of infected sailors in Boston dispatched to Philadelphia, then with the 334 of these who set sail from Philadelphia for Puget Sound. On arrival, many were desperately ill.
“In the event the disease appears here,” announced Seattle’s commissioner of health, Dr J.S. McBride, on September 28, “and it is not unlikely that it will, we will endeavor to isolate the first cases and thus try to prevent it becoming an epidemic.” Isolation would begin with places of amusement, theaters, sporting events, restaurants, and saloons. It was also presented as an opportunity to shut down the city’s notorious Skid Row, with its flophouses, saloons, brothels, and various other places of unsavory amusement, including the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). Industry, however, would carry on, indeed be encouraged — the city’s “interests” were anxious to remain open, free of wartime restrictions, determined to reestablish the “open shop.”
McBride and his staff watched for the first signs of the influenza; these came initially in the Navy’s facilities in Bremerton, then in Camp Lewis with, suddenly, reports of hundreds of cases of a severe influenza. These, the authorities initially insisted, were simply the flu, though noting that, in some cases, this flu quickly became pneumonia. Bremerton reported fourteen deaths. Sailors were ordered to avoid large gatherings. Visitors were banned. Camp Lewis was placed under quarantine.
Still, in Seattle, McBride and staff looked in the wrong places, even when hundreds of cadets at the Naval Training Station at the University of Washington were reported to be suffering from a mild flu. For some reason, they saw the university as set apart. Their demesne was the city; McBride continued to pronounce Seattle influenza-free. Then, on October 4, one cadet was reported dead, hundreds more ill, and four hundred hospitalized. Precious time had been wasted. That night, two influenza cases were reported in the city — each resulting in death.
The next morning, McBride met with the mayor, Ole Hanson, a real estate broker; together they announced to the public that the influenza had found its way to Seattle. McBride ordered all private and public dances prohibited, declared that streetcars and theaters had to be well ventilated, and ordered police to strictly enforce the anti-spitting ordinance. He appealed to the public to practice a voluntary quarantine. Over the next days, however, closings were ordered — first church services, then places of entertainment, then the public schools.
The suddenness of the closures took the public by surprise and sparked some resistance. The superintendent of schools, Frank Cooper, believed them to be unwise: “I consider it more dangerous to have children running around the streets loose than to have them in school where they will be under strict medical supervision.” Crowds of people continued to congregate in the city’s theater district, large numbers of sailors mixing with them, despite police efforts to keep amusements closed. The police organized an “Influenza Squad” to enforce the orders, but results were mixed. Those who could began leaving the city, some to mountain retreats, others further afield. The writer Mary McCarthy’s parents evacuated to Chicago, where they each were stricken, dying before the year’s end, leaving their children orphans. McCarthy was returned to Seattle and put in the care of an aging aunt.
Seattle’s officials singled out the shipyards for attention, though more in keeping with wartime patriotism than with concern for the health of the workers. The yards, after all, far from healthy places, were well known as rough-and-tumble work sites where “men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Influenza added to this toll. Still, McBride wanted to keep these workers on the job. He believed he could, especially as many of these workers toiled outside, where they were thought to be less susceptible to the disease than other factory workers.
Nevertheless, he sought to inoculate the entire workforce with one of the sera that had been developed. “Let no question of money or men interfere with your work.” When requests came from others, he responded, “Seattle needs all the serum we can grow, and we will share with nobody until our shipyard workers and other citizens have been properly inoculated.” Workers were skeptical; war, the virus, and the brutality of work had produced widespread fatalism, a realism in the face of calamity in all quarters. The numbers of the sick and the dead rose, and by mid-October, four thousand cases had been reported; no evidence ever appeared to suggest the sera had been of use.
Hanson and McBride were stubbornly confident that isolation and closures would work. Hanson maintained to the end that the influenza was really just a form of the flu, a “grippe.” He believed that it would last no more than a week. They were wrong. In no large American city was the influenza contained quickly.
Within days, the flu reached all sections of Seattle, though “south of Yesler” and the Rainier Valley, home to Seattle’s slums and the cheap housing of the workers, suffered most. Frustrated, the authorities blamed a noncompliant public for the influenza’s persistence. They continued to work to see that the closure orders were widened and enforced. On October 28, McBride issued new orders, including mandatory wearing of flu masks. These were worn reluctantly; they came to be the symbols of Seattle besieged. Streetcar conductors were ordered to bar people not donning a face covering. Hanson told commuters that they had better find a mask and wear it, “or tomorrow morning they will walk to work.” In late October, however, the numbers of new cases of infection leveled off and then began to fall.
Strike Town
Seattle’s shipyard workers believed they had sacrificed unreasonably for the sake of the war. Their hours had been long, their work grueling. Hulet Wells, the onetime socialist president of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC), also president of the state’s Socialist Party, while awaiting sentencing for opposing conscription, found work at Skinner & Eddy, the largest of the yards. There he encountered a; “howling bedlam . . . a wilderness of strange machines, whirling belts and belching fires . . . The human ant heap boiled with all the specialists that fit into the modern shipyard. Everywhere there was deafening noise, boilers rang, planers screamed, long white-hot rods were smashed into bolt machines. Here was the angle-bending floor where black men beat a tattoo with heavy sledges, and here a steam hammer thumped its measured blows . . . [as well as] the wrenching scenes of the injured, the sirens of the ambulances, and the dying or dead being carted off into the chaos of the waterfront roadways.”
In 1917 and 1918, the city’s unions increasingly felt pressure from the federal government and its shipping board. The shipyard workers had worked with standards set nationally by labor boards in Washington, DC, even when believing themselves punished by these standards. It was indisputable that prices were higher on the West Coast — above all in Seattle — than in the East. The unions were especially intent on raising the wages of the unskilled and semiskilled, an immediate necessity in breaking down divisions in the shops. However, wage demands were repeatedly rejected. Seattle’s workers, inheritors of a decade of intense conflict, by the war’s end, believed themselves betrayed by the government. They had been lied to, they believed, by the president, the shipping board, and the city’s health officials. They were bitter, angry, and itching for a fight. They voted to strike in December. The January strike was inevitable.
The men walked out on the morning of January 21, 1919. There were women scattered through their ranks, as well as black workers, though they were few and their union status unclear. Virtually all the AFL’s international unions in these trades barred women and blacks. A. E. Miller, the chairman of the MTC, announced the strike “absolutely clean,” meaning that thirty-five thousand workers struck en masse, and none came to take their places. They showed “splendid solidarity and great enthusiasm,” undaunted by the winter rain. Tacoma and Aberdeen quickly followed. Speaking on behalf of the workers, John McKelvey defied the owners. The “shipyard millionaires have been getting all the credit for the ships we have built. Oh yes, they’re ship builders. If they think they can build ships let ’em go ahead and build them!”
The Union Record brought news of the strikers’ plight to its fifty thousand subscribers, supporting the strike without qualification. Next to its front-page lead on January 2, “45,000 Men Out in Sound Cities,” it ran an article titled, “Tremendous Profits Made by Seattle Shipbuilding Firms,” revealing the businesses’ costs, sales, and profits. The day’s editorial, “A Great Strike,” explained: “The whole question of wages is bound up in the tremendous increase in the cost of living in Seattle.”
The strike, however, was not just a symptom — real enough in itself — but an indication as well of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years — “an epidemic of strikes” — was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism. Seattle was both a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism; its unions’ commitment to workers’ control ran deep, and support for the Russian Revolution was widespread. Kate Sadler, the workers’ “Joan of Arc,” had led Seattle’s delegation to the Mooney conference. Crystal Eastman in the Liberator reported that Sadler led her city’s “wild ones,” who insisted on a general strike no later than May Day to free the framed San Francisco union man. “Russia Did It!” would be the lead of a leaflet penned by the young Harvey O’Connor (illustrated with a brawny worker and a fat capitalist in a coffin — twenty thousand were distributed).
At the same time, Seattle was filling up with unemployed, homeless, demobilized young men, and it was still not entirely free from the flu. In response, the MTC packed the Hippodrome with thousands to announce the formation of a “Soldiers, Sailors and Workers Council.” The meeting went forward despite the authorities, who surrounded the hall with military police. Thousands gathered in Tacoma as well, with Camp Lewis soldiers, no longer under quarantine, in attendance.
It was increasingly clear that unions did not know with whom they were to negotiate: the national board or the local employers. In either case, the employers refused to budge, as did the eastern board members, the shippers, and their allies in the national AFL unions. The MTC thus turned to Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), the federation of 110 local unions — the organization that, in defiance of the AFL, was built from the bottom up, that championed industrial unions, supported sympathy strikes, cooperated with the IWW, and was led by socialists — with a request for the strike.
“The idea of a general strike swept the ranks of organized labor like a gale,” wrote O’Connor. On January 22, in an assembly of the CLC, in the Labor Temple, the metal workers made their case, requesting that Seattle’s workers join them in a general strike. The aim would be not only to win their demands but also to present a show of force in the face of the employers’ renewed open-shop campaign. They believed that the fate of the organized labor movement itself was at stake. Representatives of the city’s local trade unions and rank-and-file militants packed the Labor Temple. According to O’Connor, “Every reference to the general strike was cheered to the echo; the cautions of the conservatives . . . were hooted down” or interrupted by shouting, clapping, and singing.
The CLC proposed a referendum on the strike, which passed unanimously. The enthusiasm that evening brought with it high rhetoric, emotion, even tears. Then came a cornucopia of demands; appetites grew, delegates revealing their own grievances and aspirations, hopeful that these, too, might be addressed. The metal workers, however, insisted that the strike’s demands be limited to those of the shipyard workers already out — what they wanted was a “clean-cut demonstration of the economic power of organized labor.”
The meeting ended in an uproar when delegate Fred Nelson unfurled a banner showing a soldier and a sailor in uniform with a worker in overalls and the slogan “Together We Will Win.” This was followed by “a storm of applause which lasted several minutes,” abating only when delegate Ben King of the Painters, just returned from the Mooney Congress in Chicago, recounted “sleeping between soldiers and sailors and they are all with us.” The applause “broke out afresh.”
America’s First General Strike
On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers — all of them — struck. In doing so, they literally took control of the city. They brought the city to a halt — a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront, where “nothing moved but the tide.” The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated — the strikers were joined by workers not in unions, unemployed workers, and family members. The city’s authorities were rendered powerless — there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.
Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.
The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?” — the red, white, and blue, or the red. The mayor, Hanson, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds. The general strike was not a revolution. It was a coordinated action in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, there had never been anything quite like it. The strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that was, in fact, revolutionary in some places — a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia.
It was no wonder, then, that revolution was in the air — terrifying some, inspiring others. Then, too, no one knew for certain just how far this strike might go. The strike was simple and straightforward for many, a powerful statement of solidarity and nothing more. But others did indeed want more: all-out victory for the shipyard workers, for example. Some wanted much more, but surely no one could know, not on that cold February morning, not with any certainty, just what lay ahead. Hence the Union Record’s February 6 editorial, written by Anna Louise Strong: “ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M. There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. Both of these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor.”
Seattle’s streets were quiet, and some thought this a problem. “Seattle Strikers Too Polite,” led the Appeal to Reason, the Midwestern Socialist newspaper. But this missed the point. The strikers feared provocation and had good reason to — it had been used time and again in the war against the Wobblies. Where the workers gathered, however, in the “feeding stations,” the union halls, the co-op markets, or the neighborhoods where workers and their families lived, it was another story.
The “feeding stations” were showcases of self-organization. They may have been authorized by the strike committees; on the ground, they depended on the creativity of ordinary people. Thousands of volunteers took on the strike’s tasks, including running the kitchens, organizing milk distribution, and policing the city. The process of handing out milk was elaborate. “The dairies supplied by the milk dealers were only eleven in number, [and] so located that it would have been impossible for the mothers of Seattle to secure milk unless they owned automobiles.” The milk wagon drivers therefore “chose 35 locations spaced throughout the city, secured the use of space in stores, and proceeded to set up neighborhood milk stations.” Strong asked if the kitchens ever gave away meals. “Lots of them,” was the response. “We don’t refuse anyone, union or non-union if they can’t pay.” The strike may well have been the only occasion, before or since, when no one in Seattle went hungry.
On Saturday night, the strikers held a dance, and as late as Monday, they organized massive strike rallies. In the Georgetown neighborhood, the crowd was so large that the building sank somewhat and had to be evacuated. The meeting reconvened, and with “great enthusiasm . . . it was decided to make the meetings a regular weekly event . . . it was unanimous that the strike should continue until a living wage had been obtained by the shipyard workers. . . . Many of those present expressed the opinion that the scope of the meetings should be enlarged to include the wives and daughters of the workers, and to make them real community gatherings for the discussion of questions in which all are concerned.”
In all these places, the strike was the topic. It was analyzed, criticized, extolled, and debated, and when the workers’ representatives packed the rowdy, emotion-filled strike committee meetings, they came prepared; they were making history, and they knew it. The general strike served notice that Seattle’s workers had become a class “for themselves” — class conscious and “there at the creation,” as the late historian E. P. Thompson put it. “Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way,” he wrote in The Making of the English Working Class.
Stopping Short
Alas, “The exhilaration from the marvelous display of solidarity experienced Thursday and Friday began to give way to apprehension,” wrote O’Connor. By the third day of the strike, they realized that the Seattle labor movement stood alone. The strike had not spread down the coast to California, nor was there support from across the nation. There was little, O’Connor observed, “to give aid and comfort, even verbally, to the labor movements of Seattle and Tacoma. Seattle, unfortunately, was all too unique in its militancy.” And, against them, the response of the authorities was unrelenting, especially the fearmongers. They frantically forecast a terrible future at hand: Bolshevism, anarchy.
Hanson, egged on by the papers, denounced the strike as “un-American” and refused to negotiate. The Post-Intelligencer observed: “The big fact that stands out from the temporary confusion of business is that Seattle, given a brief time for readjustment, would be well off, if not better than before, if the whole of its striking population [were] suddenly withdrawn from the city.” Hanson threatened martial law if the strike were not ended by 10 a.m. on Saturday. The “interests” in New York and Washington, DC, joined the chorus. The AFL denounced the strike, with the Teamsters Joint Council ordering the strikers back to work. There were telephone calls and telegrams, and a deluge of intimidation, threats, and vilification from the international offices.
The AFL censored the Central Labor Council and would later take credit for defeating its “strike.” Then the international officers arrived in person, threatening to rescind charters, seize union properties, and fire staff. Meanwhile, the shipyards in the East and California carried on as usual. The risk of the owners permanently shutting down the Seattle yards now seemed only too real — deliberative, political deindustrialization.
On Saturday, February 8, several unions returned, though this was by no means a stampede. The Executive Committee voted eleven to two to end the strike. They chose Jimmy Duncan, president of the CLC, not a delegate, to speak to the strike committee for them. He tried to convince those in attendance that continuing the walkout was futile. He failed. The strike committee, infuriated by Hanson’s threats and still committed to victory, overwhelmingly voted to continue the strike, as did the longshoremen and the Metal Trades unions. The divide increasingly became one between the rank and file, on the one hand, and the executive committee, on the other.
Then on Monday, with more unions yielding, Duncan returned to the strike committee. He recommended ending the strike on Tuesday at noon. He requested that those unions that had returned to their jobs come back out so that the strikers could return united; as they had left on Thursday, they would return on Tuesday. The shipyard strikers remained out one month longer.
A Class in Conflict
How is this strike to be assessed? Harvey O’Connor wrote, “For the majority of Seattle unions, there was no sense of defeat as the strike ended. They had demonstrated their solidarity with their brothers in the yards, and the memory of the great days when labor had shown its strength glowed in their minds.”
This sentiment was widely shared among Seattle’s workers. The CLC’s minutes are laden with messages of congratulations: the Metal Trades Council in Aberdeen commended Seattle’s workers “for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike [and urged] one big union and a 24-hour strike on May 1st to demonstrate our solidarity.” From the Astoria Central Labor Council came a communiqué “complimenting Organized Labor for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike.” Mine Workers Locals No. 2917, 1044, 1890, and 4309 sent resolutions “condemning the attitude of the ‘Star’ upon the strike and expressing willingness to lay down tools if conditions warrant.” The King County Pomona Grange pledged support by furnishing produce and finances to the strikers, while cash and expressions of solidarity came from local businesses.
Others concurred. The Socialists’ New York Call wrote:
Whatever may be said of the Seattle strike, it certainly is not a case of ‘blind striking,’ as the Journal of Commerce affirms. It has been calculated and prepared and is one of the finest examples of sacrifice and solidarity that workingmen have displayed in many years. It is a sympathetic strike participated in by workers who have no grievance of their own, at least none that they are raising at this time. They have walked out in support of another group of workers, with the view of aiding the latter to secure a speedy victory.
Max Eastman, editor of the Liberator, had visited Seattle that winter. What he may have contributed to the cause there, if anything, is not recorded. He did, however, record his evaluation: “The General Strike in this city of Seattle filled with hope and happiness the hearts of millions of people in all places of the earth. . . . You demonstrated the possibility of that loyal solidarity of the working class which is the sole remaining hope of liberty for mankind.”
The academic version of this story, which remains widely accepted, comes via the work of Robert L. Friedheim. “The first major general strike in the United States ended quietly at noon on February 11, 1919,” he wrote, adding without evidence, “Somewhat sheepishly, Seattle’s workers returned to their jobs in shops, factories, mills, hotels, warehouses and trolley barns. The strike had been a failure, and they all knew it. In the days ahead, they were to learn that it was worse than a failure — it was a disaster.” The CLC’s own strike committee, however, and to its great credit, commissioned a committee to produce a history of the strike. Anna Louise Strong at once penned her own findings:
The vast majority [of workers] struck to express their solidarity . . . and they succeeded beyond their expectations. They saw the labor movement come out almost as one man and tie up the industries of the city. They saw the Japanese and the IWW and many individual workers join in the strike, and they responded with a glow of appreciation. They saw garbage wagons and laundry wagons going along the streets marked “exempt by strike committee.” They saw the attention of the whole continent turned on the Seattle shipyards. They learned a great deal more than they expected to learn — more than anyone in Seattle knew before. They learned how a city is taken apart and put together again. They learned what it meant to supply milk to the babies of the city, to feed 30,000 people with a brand-new organization. They came close for the first time in their lives to the problems of management.
In the course of the strike’s five days, there had been no lockouts or significant dismissals. There had been no strikebreakers, no “replacement” workers needing protection. No mass arrests, thus no search for lawyers, no defense funds to build. There had been no violence — hence no funerals, no wakes, no widows with children to support. The leaders of the strike committee and the Central Labor Council worked to get the strike’s handful of victims — casualties were few — back to work. They remained quite capable of achieving this.
The fact was that the employers dared not test the workers, not in the short run. Seattle remained a union city. There was, of course, a sense of things getting back to normal, the exception being the waterfront, where the roller-coaster conflict continued. The shippers imposed the open shop, only to have this reversed in August. Now, at last, the ILA achieved job control and a single, alphabetical list. Seattle’s workers remained “strike prone,” among the most combative in the nation right into 1920–21. Wages remained relatively high in the city, as did the cost of living, leveling off but remaining above national averages through 1921.
Seattle’s workers had formed themselves as a class in conflict — in struggles that took place in the forests, on the waterfront, in cafés, and in laundries. They forged their class identity in the long, hard fight for industrial unions and the closed shop, and in the fight for workers’ power. At an early moment, the utopians of the Cooperative Commonwealth had taught socialism and attempted to practice what they preached. Later, the IWW and the Socialist Party fought for it, with the CLC, one step at a time, intent on implementing it.
The 1910s had been a decade of organizing, cooperating, and striking, the most basic weapons of working people in battles that were sometimes won and sometimes lost. Consciousness arose in the utopian colonies, in logging camps and mills, in free speech fights, and on the waterfront, in war and in dissent, in strikes of the “telephone girls,” waitresses, hotel maids, “lady barbers,” and laundry workers, in co-ops and in working-class neighborhoods.
Seattle’s workers transformed a world of war, of sickness, death, and grief, into a great celebration of the living, if only for five days. The general strike was, for Seattle’s workers, a giant step toward a future that might be theirs. This aspiration was surely valid in terms of their own experience. They insisted that their vision was by no means the “pie in the sky” of the preachers and the politicians. A better world was possible. It still is.”
Cal Winslow places the General Strike in the context of the birth of America’s labor movement in Seattle in his article in Jacobin entitled
Seattle, “the Soviet of Washington”; “Decades before Amazon dominated the city, Seattle was the fiery site of labor unrest, radical action — and the US’s only true general strike.
Seattle gleams under the grey skies that characterize its climate. Container ships from China wait in Elliott Bay to unload, while tour boats head out to Alaska’s shrinking glaciers. The Great Wheel towers over Pier 57, and there are tourists everywhere. Two gigantic sports arenas dominate the southern end of the waterfront, where in times past seamen brawled and the longshoremen struck the great ships — losing in 1916, winning at last in 1934. The football stadium is the prize of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who obtained the public funding for its construction. The best seats in the house sell for more than $1,000 and the approaches are lined with upscale bistros and bars. Just south of Lake Union, Allen’s Vulcan real estate company is building a head-office complex for another tech firm, Amazon, complete with interlinked spherical glasshouses enclosing a miniature rainforest. Facebook and Google are also moving in. Powered by these new developments, the Emerald City has the fastest growing population of any major urban area in the US. The world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, both reside here.
Seattle flourishes, then — it is an important place. But can we ask: what sort of place? A stage set, perhaps, for the new Gilded Age, in which corporate wealth and “vibrant” street life can distract the eye from all manner of social contradictions. Seattleites don’t mind the rain; in fact, they love the outdoors. However, public space is at a premium and access to its beaches severely restricted. Tech workers take great pride in Seattle’s high rating for “livability,” yet the cost of housing is rising even quicker than in the Bay Area and the traffic is often unbearable. Hundreds sleep on the street each night. Tent cities appear, reminiscent of the 1930s “Hooverville” shanty town erected in the mud flats south of the business district, and just as unwelcome to the authorities. Meanwhile elsewhere in the city, second homes abound.
Still, there are ghosts dwelling here: old memories — dimly held, to be sure. Here is Yesler Way, once better known as Skid Road because of the logs rolled downhill along its course to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on the shore. Nowadays a nondescript thoroughfare dotted with cafes frequented by tourists, including a branch of the city’s ubiquitous Starbucks chain, it used to heave with disreputable saloons, brothels, and flophouses, making Skid Road synonymous with any district where the down-and-out may gather: places that are rough, sometimes radical. The Industrial Workers of the World put down roots in this quarter among loggers, itinerant farm workers, and miners bound for the Yukon, as well as the shipyard workers who led the Seattle General Strike of February 6–10, 1919, the only true general strike in US history and the one occasion when American workers have actually taken over the running of a city — the sort of endeavor which earned this state, now given over to the billionaires of the new economy, the appellation “the Soviet of Washington.”
Pacific Hub
Seattle is situated on a vertical strip of land between Puget Sound — an “inland sea” off the northern Pacific — and the freshwater Lake Washington. Nonindigenous settlement began with the arrival of a couple of dozen migrants from Illinois in 1851, a few years after the Oregon Treaty fixed the border between the United States and British America at the 49th parallel. The incomers named the township after Chief Sealth of the area’s Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. Upon incorporation by the Washington Territorial legislature in 1869, the city had just two thousand inhabitants. This figure would swell to eighty thousand by the turn of the century. As places of note, Seattle and Tacoma, thirty miles to the south, were the warring creations of competing northern railroads. Two days closer than California to Vladivostok and Asian markets, Seattle became the main distribution hub for the northern Pacific Rim, usurping San Francisco’s former hegemony over the entire Pacific Slope. In addition to its command of Washington State’s forests and the great wheat belt of the Palouse steppe, Seattle also dominated the trade and fisheries of Alaska, whose economy was boosted by an influx of prospectors during the Klondike gold rush. Jobs in distributive and wholesale trades, as well as shipbuilding, attracted migrants fleeing slums, unemployment, and poverty in the East — blacklisted railroad workers, redundant miners, famished wheat farmers. When the mayor of Butte, the class battleground in Montana, visited Seattle in 1919 he recognized large numbers of ex-copper miners working in its shipyards. If Minnesota and neighbouring farm states appealed to the more prosperous Scandinavian immigrants, Swedes above all, western Washington with its extractive industries drew in the much poorer Norwegians and Finns, though core activists in the General Strike came from the British Isles.
The timber economy of Western Washington was dominated by the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Trust, which mounted a full-scale assault on the vast stands of ancient cedar, western hemlock, and Douglas fir forest. Timber from Washington State would buttress the copper mines of the West, underpin its railroad lines, and build its rapidly expanding cities, above all in California. The loggers toiled for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and slept in company shacks. Conditions in the mills were neither easier nor safer: giant saws, deadly belts, horrific noise, dust, smoke and fire. When the heavy winter rains came, the lumberjacks wrapped up their bindlestiffs and fled to Skid Road. There they would remain, sinking into debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods. They were despised by Seattle’s bourgeoisie as “timber beasts.”
The well-to-do lived away from Skid Road on the leafy boulevards of First and Capitol hills, along Magnolia Bluff and overlooking the lake in Madrona and Washington Park. They boasted a flourishing cultural life, including a fine university built in the French Renaissance style in Union Bay. The politicians and their newspapers might feud — what to do with the infamous Skid Road? — but Seattle was staunchly progressive: women’s suffrage, co-operatives, municipal ownership, growth. As it expanded from a low-lying base around Pioneer Square, the tops of surrounding hills were lopped off — “regraded” — for the benefit of developers. The neighboring town of Ballard was annexed in 1907 and the harbor municipalized four years later, a blow for the big railway and shipping interests struck on behalf of small manufacturers, minor shipping lines, and farmers anxious to force down rates. The new Port of Seattle developed some of the best waterfront facilities in the country, including the sort of moving gantry crane still used in container terminals today. The construction of a ship canal connecting Puget Sound with Lake Washington also commenced in these years.
In the 1890s, utopian land-settlement schemes in Seattle’s vicinity drew in idealists and free-thinkers. Harry Ault, Union Record editor, spent his teenage years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted Populists. He recalled his mother feeding workers in Coxey’s Army of the unemployed as it passed through Cincinnati in 1894. In the 1910s, Seattle’s established working-class communities — Ballard, “South of Yesler,” and into Rainier Valley — were blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the Sound, the green forests, or the great mountain ranges beyond — all that the city cherished, and still does. This rarely registered as a problem, however, among municipal reformers.
Manual labor was dangerous as well as poorly rewarded: wrote one labor activist at the time, “Every day or so some unlucky shipyard workers would be carried out in the dead wagon.” When the US Commission on Industrial Relations held hearings in the city in 1914, Wisconsin’s great labor specialist, John Commons, noted a “more bitter feeling between employers and employees than in any other city in the United States.” Seattle’s workers fought back against their oppressors as a class — and as a class, created a culture of their own: unions that were “clean,” not run by gangsters; a mass-circulation labor-owned newspaper, the Union Record — it became a daily in 1918, the only one of its kind; its circulation topped one hundred thousand in the aftermath of the strike. Socialist schools ran lectures indoors and out; IWW singing groups; community dances, and picnics. Milwaukee may have had its socialist congressman, Victor Berger; Los Angeles almost had a socialist mayor, Job Harriman; but Seattle’s socialists were working class and “Red.” Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs judged Washington State the “most advanced” and long suspected that it might be the first to achieve socialism. Electoral success proved elusive, but Washington claimed several thousand paid-up adherents, ranking second only to Oklahoma in the proportion of party members per head of population. The Left took control of the party in Seattle in 1912 after a protracted factional struggle. Proponents of industrial unionism, they were thorns in the side of national party officials who supported Samuel Gompers, conservative president of the craft-based American Federation of Labor. Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions — and by implication, workers’ control. “I believe that 95 per cent of us agree that the workers should control industry,” wrote Ault. Still, most unions retained their affiliation to the AFL. Progressives were critical of craft divisions but thought the IWW impractical and wanted to remain in the “mainstream.” They looked to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council, for leadership. A metal worker born in Fife, Scotland, clearly influenced by syndicalism, his compromise formula came to be known as “Duncanism.” The city’s labor movement was centralized around the SCLC, which coordinated rather than supplanted the craft unions to ensure that all contracts for crafts within a particular industry ran concurrently, allowing for bargaining as a unit. Though a consistent critic of the IWW which challenged the AFL from the left, Duncan nevertheless acknowledged it as “a pacesetter.” In this environment, social democracy and revolutionary unionism could intermingle. Seattle was an IWW no less than a Socialist Party stronghold, home to its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, and scene of free-speech fights ending in mass arrests, beatings, and victories. “Two card” workers were commonplace: an AFL card for the job, an IWW card for the principle.
Class solidarity wasn’t all-embracing, however. As late as September 1917, the Daily Call reported that one of the issues in a meatpackers’ strike was the workers’ demand for a white cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. The relatively few black workers in Seattle at this point, just 1 percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916. There were, however, signs of a shift in attitudes among the white majority. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, the socialist’s firebrand Kate Sadler, talked at black churches and was a scathing critic of exclusion and shop-floor segregation. The Union Record likewise insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” Ault told a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration that he had “little patience with racial prejudice,” recalling his early childhood in segregated Kentucky.
Voyage of the Verona
The opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914 lifted West Coast trade, offsetting the recession which had hung over the States since the previous year. Seeking a share of the shipping companies’ profits, longshoremen struck on June 1, 1916 for a closed shop, higher wages, and a nine-hour day. Workers in San Francisco quickly settled, but Seattle and Tacoma stayed out. When Andrew Furuseth, head of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, defended the San Francisco leadership at an SCLC meeting in September, he was chased from the hall with shouts of “coward” and “quitter.” The strike shook Seattle. The Washington National Guard deployed along its harbor, which “resembled a battleground. Non-union men went uptown looking for fights. Union longshoremen beat up scabs on docks and ship. There were fist fights, knife fights, docks bombed, pier fires, shots fired and murders.” By the strike’s end on October 4 — Tacoma and a number of smaller locals held out longer — there were 850 scabs working the docks and the longshoremen had lost control of the waterfront. They returned to work under the open shop plus the “fink hall” which screened out the International Longshoremen’s Association and IWW.
The shingle weavers of Everett, the “City of Smokestacks” thirty miles to Seattle’s north, were engaged in their own desperate strike — victims of nothing short of a reign of terror. “At every stage the Everett police and the private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking on their streets,” recalled Anna Louise Strong, who reported on the unrest for the New York Evening Post. On November 5, 1916, three hundred Wobblies embarked on the steamships Verona and Calista bound for the mill town. No one aboard expected a warm welcome from the authorities, but murder was not foreseen. On its arrival, the Verona was met with gunfire from lawmen and vigilantes. At least five workers were killed, all of them unarmed, and dozens injured. Two “citizen deputies” were also slain, although the fatal shots were fired from the shore, seventy-four people aboard the Verona were charged with murder. The Everett massacre was in some ways a Pacific Northwest Peterloo: an assault on free speech, fair play, and the very notion of “rights.” Disbelief, then anger, coursed through Seattle’s working-class districts. The IWW turned Everett into a cause célèbre, stumping the West on behalf of the accused. “These seventy-four men represent the migratory worker, the element that while necessary is ferociously exploited in this Western country,” declared IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a dozen rallies. “They want the good things in life as much as any other member of the human race and they are organizing in the IWW to get them.” There was a sea change in popular opinion, a massive swing to the left. The SCLC persuaded Seattle lawyer George Vanderveer, “Attorney for the Damned,” to assist the Verona defendants. He secured their acquittal the following spring. The Daily Call reported that IWW membership had risen to twenty thousand and that the Wobblies now employed a dozen paid organizers — exaggerated figures, perhaps, but after the serious setback on the docks the IWW had undeniably gained fresh impetus.
The Wobblies took this forward momentum into the woods: a general strike involving some fifty thousand loggers and mill workers. “They breathe bad air in the camps. That ruins their lungs. They eat bad food. That ruins their stomachs. The foul conditions shorten their lives and make their short lives miserable,” lumber organizer James Thompson told the Industrial Commission during hearings in Seattle. The IWW had always idolized the itinerant workers of the West. They set out from Seattle to organize them and succeeded. Their demands were typically straightforward: an eight-hour day, no work on Sundays or public holidays, sanitary kitchens and satisfactory food, single spring beds with clean bedding, no workers under sixteen in the mills, no discrimination against IWW members. In July 2017, the IWW held a mass rally of 3,500 workers at Seattle’s Dreamland Rink. The meeting began with the singing of “Solidarity Forever.” Kate Sadler and IWW organizer J. T. “Red” Doran were the featured speakers.
The police, sheriffs, National Guard, and US Army responded to the strike with savage repression. The jails filled up; prisoners were beaten. Strike leader James Rowan and twenty IWW members were arrested in a single swoop in the city of Spokane. The federal government organized a rival organization, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. As the strike spluttered, the Wobblies adjusted their tactics: a “strike on the job,” the loggers working their desired eight-hour shifts. The conclusion, in March 1918, was a sensation: the eight-hour day won and a long list of improvements in the camps. It was one of the IWW’s greatest accomplishments and a source of class pride well beyond the ranks of the IWW. Duncan drew the obvious moral: “the terribly effective force which takes the name of IWW … is largely made up of men who consider regular trade unionism ‘too slow.’” It was, he acknowledged, a “threat to the prestige of trade unionism on the Coast.”
Nevertheless, traditional unionism also thrived amid the industrial boom stoked by federal military procurement as Woodrow Wilson took the US into the First World War. “A red-letter year in the history of organized labour,” Duncan celebrated in July 1917. “A dozen new unions have been organized and all of the Seattle unions are flourishing.” He singled out the streetcar men whose membership had risen to 1,600; the telephone operators with nearly 1,100. Industrial action by the laundresses in particular had struck fear into Seattle’s respectable classes. Within a week, all the city’s major laundries had more or less closed down. Hotels and clubs began to run short of clean linen. The bourgeois Seattle Times fretted that the “family washtub would emerge from oblivion in thousands of Seattle homes.” The laundry workers took their case into the neighborhoods: a fair in Fremont, a parade in Rainier Valley. Stung by hostile public opinion, the employers rapidly capitulated. But if such triumphs deepened working-class consciousness, they brought down fierce repression, foretelling worse to come. William Preston, Jr, has revealed that “the lumber operators of the Northwest provided the initial impetus in the evolution of federal policy” — that is, the “Red Scare” and the Palmer raids. The workers’ movement in Seattle was strong, certainly, but not in Gramsci’s sense hegemonic. US entry into the European bloodbath in April 1917 turned dissent into treason. Gloves off, the federal government moved decisively against the IWW, indicting its top leadership. In Chicago, 101 members were tried and convicted of a range of alleged conspiracies. State vigilantism was visited upon Seattle, regarded as a center of both pro-German and pro-Bolshevik sentiment. The Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. despised the city’s workers as “the scum of the earth” who recognized “no law and no authority save the policeman’s night stick or physical violence.” There were police raids, ransacked offices, mass arrests. Emil Herman, state secretary of the Socialist Party was charged with violations of the Espionage Act and imprisoned in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Hulet Wells, a former president of the SCLC, was sentenced to two years in federal prisons for passing out “No Conscription” handbills, along with Sam Sadler, one-time president of the longshoremen.
Feting the Shilka
In this extraordinarily tense atmosphere, the revolution came to Seattle on the Friday before Christmas, 1917. The Russian cargo vessel Shilka, red flags flying, steamed into Elliott Bay. Seattle’s socialists, its Wobblies, its dockers, metal workers, waitresses and shingle weavers, scrambled to the docks to greet the newcomers, as did naval officers and city police wary that the ship might contain Bolshevik gold, even perhaps munitions. In fact, the Shilka carried only beans and peas in its hold, and simply needed to refuel. But the arrival of a soviet of Russian sailors was momentous in itself. For the workers, its arrival greatly added to the festive mood. The sailors were fêted. There were testimonials, speeches and spontaneous singing — the “Marseillaise,” also the “Red Flag.” Hundreds of Seattleites jammed into the IWW Hall on Second Avenue where they greeted a young sailor, Danil Teraninoff, on stage with rapturous applause. “Never in Seattle has there been such a demonstration of revolutionary sentiment as at the moment the Russian fellow worker ascended the platform,” reported the socialist Daily Call. The visit of the Shilka sealed the extraordinary romance of Seattle’s working people with the October days, their passionate sympathy and solidarity with the revolution unparalleled in an American context. According to the late Philip Foner, “no labour body was a more consistent defender of the Russian revolution than the Seattle Central Labor Council.” Seattle delegates to AFL national conventions pressed for official recognition of the fledgling workers’ state, to no avail. The longshoremen intercepted railroad cars with loads labeled “sewing machines,” unearthing rifles and ammunition bound for Admiral Kolchak’s White armies on the Siberian front. The IWW resolved that they would “rather starve than receive wages for loading ships on a mission of murder.” The authorities, alarmed when not hysterical, “discovered,” among other things, Bolshevik conspiracies which trade unionists had every practical reason to deny. Until recently historians tended to accept these denials at face value, in so doing diminishing these remarkable events. On the contrary, the Russian Revolution was indeed a factor — a contradictory one, yes: inspiring the Left while terrifying the upper classes — in Seattle’s General Strike.
The political culture of Seattle in these years was shaped not only by its own tumultuous industrial-relations history but also by currents sweeping through working-class movements internationally. The Union Record published letters from Lenin including his “Letter to American Workers”; the Industrial Worker reported on a Labour socialist conference in Leeds where Ramsey MacDonald, flanked by Tom Mann, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, “hailed” the Russian Revolution. The new spirit of industrial radicalism spread far beyond its natural home in the IWW. Even where issues with management were “pure and simple,” bitter conflicts ensued. The AFL also felt the heat, its collaboration with employers and strict insistence on the sanctity of contracts, jurisdictional division by craft, and the authority of national officials rejected by growing numbers of workers.
The celebrations of 1917 were the prelude, then, to the great strikes of 1919. Seattle workers saw in the October Revolution their own image, the embodiment of what they were fighting for at home. “No single event,” wrote Duncan, “throughout the whole world today can, from the standpoint of workers everywhere, compare in importance with the successful piloting of the Russian Soviet Republic past the treacherous rocks of international capitalist greed and the determination of these plunderers to ruin what they cannot rule.” When two thousand longshoremen, overflowing their hall, celebrated the second anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, 1919, they rose in “tremendous cheering,” as the IWW’s J. T. Doran walked from the vestibule to the rostrum and began to speak. Doran, free on bail from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, delivered, according to Magden, a rousing speech in which he described the workers’ revolution in Russia as “the most stupendous event since the fall of feudalism.”
Union City
By the end of the First World War, trade union membership in Seattle had quadrupled since 1915 to create, in effect, a closed-shop city. The General Strike would require no pickets, since there were no strikebreakers. Prejudice toward minorities eased, challenging management’s ever-ready divide-and-rule tactic. On the eve of the strike, Japanese unions appealed to the SCLC to join the strike committee and were accepted. “Even in the midst of strike excitement, let us stop for a moment to recognize the action of the Japanese barbers and restaurant workers who, through their own unions, voted to take part in the General Strike,” commented the Union Record. “The Japanese deserve the greater credit because they have been denied admission and affiliation with the rest of the labor movement and have joined the strike of their own initiative. We hope that this evidence of labor’s solidarity will have an influence on the relations between the two races in the future.” Black workers were accepted as full members of Seattle’s unions later the same year. The General Strike began with an appeal from the shipyard workers to the SCLC for support in a pay dispute following a period of wartime wage repression. There were thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle out of a total population of around three hundred thousand — fifteen thousand more in Tacoma. The industry fused together the two sectors of the local working class, the seasonal lumber and harvest workers and the city’s skilled trades, in a potent combination. Seattle had delivered more vessels to the Navy than any other port, even though its labor movement was strongly anti-war. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand workers, including many unemployed, answered the General Strike Committee’s call. For the best part of a week, they fed the people, patrolled the streets, and celebrated workers’ power as a lived reality, until the combined weight of the forces ranged against them — the police and the special constables drafted in by Seattle’s belligerent mayor, Ole Hanson; the federal troops deployed by Secretary of War Newton Baker; the big newspapers; and the national leaders of the AFL and its affiliates — broke the striking unions’ resolve.
At the outset of the hostilities, Anna Louise Strong wrote that a Seattle walkout wouldn’t in itself greatly trouble the big commercial combines in the East. “But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order — this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.” Stirred by the Everett case, Strong had taken a job as second-in-command at the Union Record. Probably an IWW member, she lived and worked in Socialist circles, also retaining acquaintances from her earlier life — including Russian émigrés, one a friend of Lenin’s. She organized much of the paper’s international coverage, notably a Russia department, and also wrote its editorials; as often as not she was the voice of the General Strike.
Against a remarkable backdrop of communist uprisings in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, red flags on the Clyde, and the hot summer in Turin, the Seattle strike fired the starting pistol for an extraordinary year of working-class rebellion in the States, the like of which has not been seen since: the Boston police strike; industry-wide action in steel, coal mining, and textiles. The subsequent era of working-class retreat began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution — the American Plan. In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into redundancy, while the Waterfront Employers’ Association reintroduced the open shop. But labor radicalism didn’t die after 1919. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground; also in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. Along with an underlay of Scandinavian progressivism, this legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which brought an alliance of CIO unions and progressive farmers to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. It was in 1936 that FDR’s postmaster general, David Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington,” a phrase later popularized in the writings of Mary McCarthy.”
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2023, Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power; In what ways will such class struggles between capital and labor define our nation, democracy, and the fate of humankind?
In this moment we test and observe enormous forces of history in the crucible of America, this absurd experiment in which one human being is as good as any other, and of equal value as an inherent quality of our humanity.
What a revolutionary notion; and possibly the origin of all true revolution.
Among the vast systems of dehumanization we must wrestle with to achieve a free society of equals, privatization and theft of the commons has unleashed a death spiral of capitalism wherein all wealth accumulates at the top embodied in a few apex predators and oligarchs in an increasingly narrow hegemonic elite of wealth, power, and privilege, as those whose labor creates that wealth and power become nearer to true slaves under forces of falsification, commodification, and theft of the soul.
This is late stage capitalism, as it reaches the point of civilizational collapse, as we are witnessing now with the hollowing out of the middle class and the emergence of a mass precariat in the shadow of plutocratic extravagance and decadence.
So for the political and social threats we now face; and all of this dovetails horrifically with civilization as war on nature which of late has in fires and floods sent us signs of our impending doom and the existential threat of a dying earth and the extinction of our species.
Yet we have ready examples at hand of different paths we may take, we human beings, and of how we may choose to be human together.
Here I am thinking of the courageous and glorious history of organized labor and of the 1919 Seattle General Strike which shaped labor unions in America, which seeks to change the relationships between capitalist and labor classes.
Torch of Liberty 