Today in Labor History April 2, 1840: Émile Zola, French novelist, playwright, journalist was born. He was also a liberal activist, playing a significant role in the political liberalization of France, and in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted and imprisoned on trumped up, antisemitic charges of espionage. He was also a significant influence on mid-20th century journalist-authors, like Thom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. Wolfe said that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens, and Zola.
Zola wrote dozens of novels, but his most famous, Germinal, about a violently repressed coalminers’ strike, is one of the greatest books ever written about working class rebellion. It had a huge influence on future radicals, especially anarchists. Some anarchists named their children Germinal. Rudolf Rocker had a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London called Germinal, in the 1910s. There were also anarchist papers called Germinal in Mexico and Brazil in the 1910s.
Today in Labor History April 1, 1929: Textile workers struck at the Loray Mill, in Gastonia, N.C. Textile mills started moving from New England, to the South, in the 1890s, to avoid the unions. This escalated after the 1909 Shirtwaist strike (which preceded the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire), the IWW-led Lawrence (1912) and (1913) Patterson strikes, which were led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood and Carlo Tresca. The Gastonia strike was violent and bloody. Dozens of strikers were imprisoned. A pregnant white woman, Ella Mae Wiggins, wrote and performed songs during the strike. She also lived with and organized African American workers, one of the worst crimes a poor white woman could commit in the South. The strike ended soon after goons murdered her. Woody Guthrie called Wiggins the pioneer of the protest ballad and one of the great folk song writers.
Wiley Cash wrote a wonderful novel about Ella Mae Wiggins and the Gastonia strike, “The Last Ballad.” Jess Walter wrote a really great novel about the Spokane free speech fight, featuring Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, called “The Cold Millions.” Other novels about the Gastonia strike include Sherwood Anderson’s, “Beyond Desire,” and Mary Heaton Vorse’s, “Strike!”
“There was a time in the history of France when the poor found themselves oppressed to such an extent that forbearance ceased to be a virtue, and hundreds of heads tumbled into the basket. That time may have arrived with us.”
A cooper said this to a crowd of 10,000 workers in St. Louis, Missouri in July, 1877. He was referring to the Paris Commune, which happened just six years prior. Like the Parisian workers, the Saint Louis strikers openly called for the use of arms, not only to defend themselves against the violence of the militias and police who were sent to crush their strike, but for outright revolutionary aims.
The Great Upheaval was the first major worker uprising in the United States. It began in the fourth year of the Long Depression which, in many ways, was worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It lasted twenty-three years and included four separate financial panics. In 1873, over 5,000 business failed. Over one million Americans lost their jobs. In the following two years, another 13,000 businesses failed. Railroad workers’ wages dropped 40-50%. And one thousand infants were dying each week in New York City.
By 1877, workers had suffered four years of wage cuts and layoffs. In July, the B&O Railroad slashed wages by 10%, their second wage cut in eight months. On July 16, 1877, the trainmen of Martinsburg, West Virginia, refused to work. They occupied the rail yards and drove out the police. Local townspeople backed the strikers and came to their defense. The militia tried to run the trains, but the strikers derailed them and guarded the switches with guns. They halted all freight movement, but continued moving mail and passengers, to successfully maintain public support.
Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.
The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
Today in Labor History March 5, 1917: Members of the IWW went on trial in Everett, Washington for the Everett Massacre, which occurred on November 5, 1916. In reality, they were the victims of an assault by a mob of drunken, vigilantes, led by Sheriff McRae. The IWW members had come to support the 5-month long strike by shingle workers. When their boat, the Verona, arrived, the Sheriff asked who their leader was. They replied, “We are all leaders.” Then the vigilantes began firing at their boat. They killed 12 IWW members and 2 of their own, who they accidentally shot in the back. Before the killings, 40 IWW street speakers had been taken by deputies to Beverly Park, where they were brutally beaten and run out of town. In his “USA” trilogy, John Dos Passos mentions Everett as “no place for the working man.” And Jack Kerouac references the Everett Massacre in his novel, “Dharma Bums.”
Today in Labor History February 27, 1902: John Steinbeck was born on this date in Salinas, California. He wrote numerous novels from the perspective of farmers and working-class people, including “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Tortilla Flats” “Of Mice and Men,” “Cannery Row,” and “East of Eden.” In 1935, he joined the communist League of American Writers. He faced contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. The FBI and the IRS harassed him throughout his career. Yet he wrote glowingly about U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 and the Pulitzer in 1939.
Today in Labor History February 15, 1764: the city of St. Louis was established in Spanish Louisiana (now Missouri). In the 1800s, St. Louis would grow to become the second largest port in the U.S. and one of the major centers of labor organizing. In 1877, during the Great Train Strike, black and white workers united to take over the town in what some called the St. Louis Commune, after the Paris Commune, a few years earlier. The uprising in St. Louis was led by the socialist Workingmen’s Party, fighting for the 8-hour workday and an end to child labor. The Commune was quashed after soldiers killed 18 workers.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.
In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.
On December 13, 1889, Franklin Benjamin Gowen will die in his room at the Wormley Hotel, in Washington D.C., with a single bullet hole in his head. His eulogists will refer to him as the former president of the Reading Railroad, attorney, philanthropist, and patron of the arts.
The obituaries will say that Mr. Gowen inherited the intellectual and moral characteristics of his father, James, a pious Protestant merchant from Northern Ireland. Sobriety and piety, of course, form the foundation of good society, and Franklin was alike his father in this way. But James was also a staunch Democrat, a character flaw for which I have little patience. Their home in Mount Airy was the only one in the neighborhood without crepe after President Lincoln was assassinated. And James Gowen went to his grave insisting that there was nothing to those nasty rumors about James Buchanan, with whom he was close. Well, I knew Aunt Nancy, too. I can assure you those rumors were entirely true, though such behavior coming from a Democrat is hardly surprising.
Today in Labor History January 31, 1912: A General Strike began in Brisbane, Australia. It lasted until March 6. The strike was a response to the suspension of tramway workers for wearing union badges. Within a few days, the strike committee became the de facto government of Brisbane. No work could be done in the city without the committee’s permission. They created their own independent police force and provided ambulance service for the city. They issued strike coupons, redeemable at stores that were in solidarity with the strikers. People wore red ribbons to show their support and even put them on their dogs and dray horses. On the second day of the strike, 25,000 people marched, with another 50,000 supporters watching. On Black Friday, February 2, the cops attacked a women’s march with batons. Emma Miller, a trade unionist and suffragist who was in her 70s and weighed less than 80 pounds, pulled out a hat pin and stabbed the rump of the police commissioner’s horse. The horse reared and threw the commissioner. As a result of his injury, he limped for the rest of his life. The courts ultimately ruled in favor of the unionists, and their right to wear union badges while on the job. Errol O’Neill wrote a play about the strike, “Faces in the Street.”
Today in Labor History January 14, 1921: Anarchist environmentalist writer and philosopher Murray Bookchin was born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants. Before the age of 10, he had joined the Young Pioneers, a communist league for children. As a young adult, he served as a union shop steward for the United Electrical Workers and later, as an autoworker, was active in the 1945-1946 GM strike. In the 1950s he started writing about the environment and, some say, was the first to introduce “environmentalism” and “ecology” to radical politics. He had a vision of an ecological society based on participatory, grassroots politics, in which municipal communities democratically plan and manage their affairs through popular assembly, which he called Communalism, or Libertarian Municipalism. This tendency has been a major influence on PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, as well as the Kurdish People's Protection Units and the Rojava Autonomous Region in Syria. Bookchin’s 1995 book “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism” critiqued the tendency of many anarchists toward primitivism, anti-technologism, & individual self-expression at the expense of forming a social movement.
Today in Labor History January 8, 1933: Anarchist uprisings began in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. While the northern uprisings were quickly suppressed, another anarchist uprising broke out in the Andalusian town of Casas Viejas on January 11, led by members of the anarchosyndicalist CNT union. The Civil Guards ultimately quashed it, too, slaughtering 24 people. For more on the Casas Viejas incident, read the detailed history in, “The Anarchists of Casas Viejas,” by Jerome R Mintz.
Today in Labor History December 25, 1968: Forty-four Dalits (untouchables) were burnt to death in the Kilvenmani massacre in Tamil Nadu. The Dalits had been striking for higher wages. The incident helped lead to major changes in the local rural economy, including a large redistribution of land. Meena Kandasamy portrayed the event in her 2014 novel “The Gypsy Goddess.”
Today in Labor History December 24, 1936: On Christmas Eve, drunk cops beat up 150 strikers on the Houston docks, sending 18 to the hospital. They were members of the Maritime Federation of the Gulf Coast. Gilbert Mers, who had dual membership in the Maritime Federation and the IWW, was their leader. Violence against dockers was rampant along the gulf coast in the 1930s. In July 1934, three black longshoremen were shot to death during a strike. In 1935, longshoremen struck along the entire gulf coast, with 14 more workers getting killed. From 1936 to 1938, 28 union members were killed and over 300 injured in strikes. Mers’ autobiography, “Working the Waterfront: The Ups and Downs of a Rebel Longshoreman,” was published in 1988, ten years before his death, at age 90. As a young man, Mers worked the docks in Corpus Christi, but went on to become President of the Corpus Christi Central Labor Council and the President of the Maritime Federation of the Gulf Coast, while remaining a dedicated dual member of the IWW throughout his life. He was part of the effort to establish an industry-wide union along the Gulf Coast states. In his autobiography, he exposes the brutality and corruption of the Texas Rangers in the 1930s-‘40s, and their use as violent, strike-breaking bullies with badges.
Today in Labor History December 21, 1907: The Santa María School massacre occurred in Iquique, Chile. The Chilean Army attacked striking saltpeter miners and their wives and children, killing over 2,000 and destroying the strike. It also effectively quashed the union movement for the next decade. The saltpeter strike was part of a wave of strikes that started in 1905, including a General Strike earlier in December, 1907. The event is depicted in Volodia Teitelboim’s 1952 novel, “Hijo de salitre.”