Working Class Heroes

Scott Martelle is a writer, journalist, and incredible researcher with a taste for history. In late April Scott shared a post with @WCHeroes on the Ludlow Anniversary Observance. His novel on the Ludlow Massacre is called “BLOOD PASSION” and is so much more than a labor story. Scott’s writings can be found regularly at his website. Below, in his own words – an excerpt of a tale of how his book came about – followed by an excerpt of the “Introduction” to “BLOOD PASSION”…

PREFACE:

Why didn’t I know about that? I knew about the April 1914 Ludlow Massacre, when two mothers and 11 children died after marauding Guardsmen torched a strikers’ tent colony. But the broader war came as a revelation. And it was telling that such a protracted showdown between capital and labor had been reduced to a literal footnote … Although Blood Passion explores the violent trajectory of a labor strike, it is not a work of labor history. Rather, it is a journalist’s look back at a story of oppression and rebellion, of ordinary people revolting under a corrupt local political system, and of immigrants who discovered that if they wanted a piece of the American Dream they had better be ready to fight for it. A union helped them in that battle, and is an integral part of that history, but this book is about the combatants and the battles themselves.

We must welcome this carefully-researched study of one of the most dramatic, violent, and important episodes in the history of labor struggles in this country.

-Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

Ludlow, Colorado

Hot summer winds whisk across the Colorado prairie with a distracting persistence, kicking up small dust devils and swirls of debris that whisper eastward over Interstate 25 and on into the vast flatness of the Great Plains. A freeway sign at Exit 27 says this spot is the town of Ludlow, but there’s no town here, just a chain-link fence with an unlocked gate surrounding a white-walled meeting hall, a gazebo with picnic tables, and a monument that looks like an oversized Victorian grave marker. A half-dozen isolated ranchettes, some with metal-bar horse corrals, dot the sweeping countryside, giving the place a forgotten feel, like a Grange Hall amid farms gone fallow. A rusty railroad runs north and south like a seam stitching the prairie to the Sangre de Cristo—Blood of Christ—Mountains. In one direction lies Colorado Springs and, farther north, Denver; the opposite direction takes you to Trinidad and on across the old Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. On the west side

of the tracks a washboard road curls into a canyon leading to the ghost towns of Hastings and Delagua. A little to the south another dirt road trails into another canyon to more ghost towns—Berwind and Tabasco, reduced now to tan clusters of crumbling stones along a gurgling creek, the only sound save for the occasional chirp of a bird or the rustle of dry leaves and grasses. Coal once was king here, but emptiness now reigns, and it doesn’t take much of a romantic flight to hear the footfalls of the dead.

Less than a century ago this quiet and mostly empty stretch of southern Colorado was the scene of great strife, and great agony. More than seventy-five people died, most of them shot to death in the first eight months of a coal strike that lasted fifteen months and that the miners lost. The United States had endured violent labor battles before, and there have been many since. None, though, reached the level of pitched warfare that erupted here in Colorado’s southern coalfields, where East Coast money and power collided with immigrant poverty and need. The nadir came on a sunny Monday morning in April 1914, when a detachment from the Colorado National Guard engaged in a ten-hour gun battle with union men at Ludlow, where a tent colony housing some eleven hundred strikers and their families had been erected. Seven men and a boy were killed in the shooting, at least three of the men—all striking coal miners, one a leader—apparently executed in cold blood by Colorado National Guardsmen who had taken them captive. As the sun set, the militia moved into the camp itself and an inferno lit up the darkening sky, reducing most of the makeshift village to ashes. It wasn’t until the next morning that the bodies of two mothers and eleven children were discovered where they had taken shelter in a dirt bunker beneath one of the tents. The raging fire had sucked the oxygen from the air below, suffocating the families as they hid from the gun battle.

The deaths of the women and children quickly became known as the Ludlow Massacre, and the backlash was vicious and bloody. Over the next ten days striking miners and their supporters poured out their rage in attacks across the coalfields in “an armed and open rebellion against the authority of the state as represented by the militia. This rebellion constituted perhaps one of the nearest approaches to civil war and revolution ever known in this country in connection with an industrial conflict.” And it was a guerrilla war that stretched along more than two hundred miles of the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies. Union men—mostly Greek and Italian immigrants—swept in from the hillsides and burned mine works to the ground before disappearing. Guards and strikebreakers were killed. At one point several dozen mine officials, guards, scabs, and their families were holed up in a mine shaft, the entry partially sealed by dynamite blasts, with rampaging miners ready to kill if they came out. It took the U.S. Army to bring the bloodshed to an end.

The lessons of the Ludlow Massacre are something that all Americans should know. Scott Martelle is probably America’s greatest living authority on the subject; please read this, and visit ScottMartelle.com.

Publisher’s preface :  The folks working in a call center in Asheville, NC – the least unionized state in the country – have been battling to organize. Many have helped, IBEW most notably with boots on the ground and legal advice. This blog has carried posts by and about these people before. Here is another in their ongoing saga, but first a page from an item on their Facebook page about what they encounter:

In response to increased Union “activity’, Sitel did what 2/3 of companies its size do: paid an exorbitant amount of money to a professional “union avoidance” firm. That firm is the Xxxxxx Yyyyyyyyy Zzzzzzzz whose president is Aaaa Bbbbbb. XYZ’s homepage touts its services as rather benign “consulting” whereby employees are required to attend “captive audience” meetings with a “personal persuader” to educate employees about Unions. XYZ boasts a 90% success rate. Both companies who hire them and the paid “union busters” are required by federal law to file financial transaction disclosures which become part of the public record.

Richard Myers (IWW, IBEW, & UFCW) has been in or around unions for 40 years. At different times he has been an organizer, steward, safety rep, salt, deputy secretary, officer, and for a brief period, a labor spy. A self-educated labor history student and author, he has specialized in researching the struggles of coal and hard rock miners, particularly in the West. He is a frequent contributor to Working Class Heroes. His particular areas of interest are the histories of the Western Federation of Miners, the United Mine Workers, and the Industrial Workers of the World.

We may glimpse 37 minutes of Citizens United in action thanks, apparently, to a daring food service worker in Florida who hid a camera behind $50,000 a plate asparagus.

In response to the mainstreaming of his disparaging remarks about the “47 percent”, Mitt Romney is now drawing the curtain on all that inside plutocracy, vowing in his public pronouncements to be president of the “one hundred percent”. In counter-attack, Romney campaign supporters have dug up a 14 year old audio clip, snipped Barack Obama’s redistribution comments out of their context to reverse their intent, and asserted a false equivalency via Fox News and the Drudge Report.

Although Obama is accused by the faux horror-stricken right wing echo chamber of uttering the “R” word as dire threat to the entire empire, Media Matters provides the full context:

Drudge used the headline “I actually believe in redistribution” under a picture of Obama, which right-wing bloggers seized on to label Obama “America’s Socialist in Chief.”Even that is a cropped version of what Obama said. The end of his sentence was, “at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.”

But the extended video obtained by NBC News completely debunks the idea that Obama was in any way expressing opposition to capitalism. His next sentence is, “How do we pool resources at the same time as we decentralize delivery systems in ways that both foster competition, can work in the marketplace, and can foster innovation at the local level and can be tailored to particular communities.”

  Media Matters for America: Extended 1998 Video Discredits Right-Wing Media’s Portrayal Of Obama As A Socialist

The “R” word – redistribution – is code for all of those nefarious socialist schemes which would seek to use some mechanism to enforce a more equal distribution of wealth. In spite of what we hear from the right wing echo chamber, Obama is no socialist. I contend that this defense of Obama, while important to set the record straight, is still a distraction from a far more important issue. Let us entertain for a moment an observation by one elected official who does not shy away from the “S” word.

Today the Walton family of Wal-Mart own more wealth than the bottom 40% of America. #Taxes #Budget

July 22, 2012 10:50 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@SenSanders

Bernie Sanders

Politifact evaluated this assertion by Senator Bernie Sanders, concluding that “Sanders’ claim is solid. We rate it True.” Politifact’s analysis includes this calculation:

…the Walmart heirs’ $89.5 billion “is still equal to the combined net worth of the bottom 33.2 million families (about 28.2 percent of the total).”  Politifact: Bernie Sanders says Walmart heirs own more wealth than bottom 40 percent of Americans

“33.2 million families”. That’s 33,200,000 families whose total wealth is matched by one family of just six individuals. That’s breath-taking disparity, if you can get your mind around it.To the uninitiated, this might seem prima facie evidence that some sort of “redistribution” already exists in our society. Such neophytes must be taught that wealth transfer is only “redistribution” if it follows the scientific laws of entropy; i.e., tending toward a more even distribution.

Thus, redistribution (along with socialist, marxist, and more recently, Kenyan) is one of the buzz words frequently to be found bouncing around in the right wing echo chamber. Wealth that travels in the opposite direction is respectable, and may therefore be described by such esoteric terms as capitalist accumulation. Such a phrase is, of course, a taboo topic, lest someone might look it up and thereby comprehend its processes.

What could stand in the way of the economic stratification that socialist Sanders decries? I ventured into the bloviosphere to research just such terminology, and thereby discovered the ubiquitous right wing phrase “big government”. Simply saying it aloud makes me shudder. Indeed, reciting such a detestable expression over and over, interspersed with terms such as socialist and Kenya, is sure to persuade us that they all mean the same thing. Thus, we can’t have socialists anywhere near the levers of power because – you know – redistribution and all that.

One word that hasn’t been much heard in the right wing echo chamber – not in recent decades, at least – was once uttered with all the contempt and ire with which modern day conservatives disclaim socialism, et al. That word is Wobblies. Yet  the Wobblies arguably have the most succinct and coherent explanation for what happened at that exclusive Romney fund raiser. The Wobblies would leap to honor the eavesdropping food service worker as a fellow worker; indeed, as a veritable hero of the working class. Fellow workers are employees who intuitively perceive that there is something horrifically out of balance when one human making nine dollars an hour is obligated to serve other humans capable of dropping fifty thousand dollars a plate.

The subversive act of this fellow worker – surreptitiously recording a video that exposes utterly the concocted deceits of the ruling class – awards an even higher honor in the eyes of Wobblies, that of sab cat. Sab, of course, refers to sabotage – not so much in the sense of destroying property (the Wobblies WANT property via that sinister, despicable process of redistribution, why should they destroy what they desire?), but rather, in the sense of impeding the schemes of the bosses. Who, then, are these Wobblies – are they just more of these big government socialists, Marxists, or (gasp)commies?

Surprise! The Wobblies oppose not only big government, but any government at all beyond what is necessary to protect the interests of the working class:

“the Industrial Workers of the World would place an industry in the hands of its workers, as would socialism; it would organize society without any government, as would anarchism; and it would bring about a social revolution by direct action of the workers, as would syndicalism. Nevertheless, it claims to be distinct from all three.”  The New International Year Book

“Wobbly” is a nickname for any member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the colorful union briefly recapitulated in the Warren Beatty film Reds. The Wobblies believed (and still believe) that capitalism is nothing more than a system of upwardredistribution of wealth from the working folk who create it, to those very plutocrats who scheme behind closed doors to use their incredible resources of wealth and power to maintain control over an economic system that rewards them far beyond the value of their own contributions. To the Wobblies, the millions of workers employed by Walmart have more to do with creating the incredible wealth of the Walmart heirs than do those six individuals themselves. Astonishing idea, eh?

Disclosure: I am the primary author of two linked Wikipedia articles.

They came from all parts of the city. They carried banners and signs displaying union membership, membership in other organizations. Some of the signs were in English, some in other languages. They paid tribute to their sister and fellow workers who died in the fire. The anger and sorrow in their eyes warned passersby and observers that they would not be silent, would not rest until an investigation took place and the conditions that led to their colleagues’ deaths were ameliorated.

Karachi, 2012 or New York, 1911? This is where they join.

146 young women died in 1911, in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, after being trapped or leaping to their deaths. 289 people, mostly young women, died in 2012, in the fire in Karachi. In both factories, rules governing the conditions for workplaces were not observed. Most of the exits were locked. Others were blocked by piles of merchandise. In Karachi, the windows contained grillework that made it impossible for them to be used for egress. In New York, most of the windows were on higher numbered floors, which made them not practicable as exits, although some of the workers jumped from them anyway, only to end up dead on the pavement below.

The victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire were identified and buried in a Workmen’s Circle cemetery at the juncture of Brooklyn and Queens. Many of the victims of the Karachi fire were never identified because they were on the contract system, something close to the status of a temporary worker in the USA. They were not “full” workers.

In 2007, the IMF lent Pakistan money to renovate its infrastructure and provide electricity to most people in Pakistan. But, the IMF Board warned, Pakistan would have to cut back on its expenditures. What this ended up meaning is that the extra funds were pocketed by wealthy government officials and factory owners who then employed workers on the contract system in factories that were not maintained according to building codes and regulations governing the safety of workers within.

Although only two percent of Pakistanis are organized in unions, Pakistan does subscribe to and is a member of the ILO – International Labour Organization. But since most factories and work buildings are not registered, it is difficult to make sure they adhere to building and safety codes.  Authorities, usually aligned with or in the pay of factory owners, neglect inspection of factories and don’t monitor their premises for needed improvements.

Editorials are calling for the government to inspect all factory buildings. With perhaps a touch of irony, some of them label the unregistered factories as “concentration camps.”  As a founding member of the World Trade Organization, Pakistan was charged with making reforms in conditions for workers.

However, another problem is that female workers, who furnish at least half of the work force for textile factories, are essentially non-people. They are considered “homemakers” and as such are not counted in employment. They cannot organize or campaign for a voice of their own. So although even as “homemakers” they have complained repeatedly about the terrible conditions in factories, their complaints fall on deaf ears because of their lack of status.

In 1911, upon the heels of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a board of inquiry was set up to define and enforce workplace safety regulations.  I would like to think that when Pakistan has its next election, the candidate who promises to maintain transparency will call for a thorough inspection of factories, and the rules by which they function.

Sung here by ”Duo Wajlu” from Germany.

Mayn Rue Plats – My Resting Place (written in Yiddish. English translation here)

My love, don’t seek me where myrtle grows, where birds sing, where fountains spray. Where lives wither by machines, where slaves’ chains clang, where tears flow and teeth grind: That is my resting place. So if you truly love me, come lift up my heart and sweeten my resting place.

Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923), known as the “Sweatshop Poet”, New York, New York

Olivia Emisar is a bleeding heart liberal, democrat, progressive, as left as she can go without losing her balance.  She is a freelance writer, novelist, active blogger, and occasional WCH contributor.

The Working Poor

To the 1% Lady from a 99% Lady,

Think Progress and other media outlets reported your insightful perceptions about us “low income” people who just “don’t get it.” You offer as examples the “nail ladies,” college students, and babysitters.

It is with a heavy heart as I shake my head that I am forced to reply to the charges you made against us based on our income and supposed lack of education.

Your comments clearly underline that it is you, and those you represent, who are clueless about anything outside of the 1 percent gated bubble. Your commentary clearly displays your lack of education and knowledge about your own country of residence and its people.

The fact that you state that the nail ladies, college students and babysitters don’t agree with your perceptions is proof positive that they are well versed in the ins-and-outs of politics and how decisions made at the top affect the vast majority of the population.

They can’t agree with your views because they pay the consequences. Capish?

You and your kind seem to be under the impression that you have earned a permanent position as the ruling class by virtue of your inherited trust funds. Thus, you must know what is best.

You don’t.

The fact that you have babysitters is not unusual but I beg to make a distinction between what “we,” the common folks, call babysitting and what your kind labels so carelessly.

First of all, like in most our communities, my neighbor’s teenage daughter was the babysitter for a few other neighbors.  She had taken babysitting classes and was current on her CPR license.  Her babysitting took place on a weekendwhen she did not have homework and only for a few hours, so the parents could go out to dinner to a place that did not involve speaking into a clown’s mouth. (I know this reference is lost on you, Google is your friend.)

Your babysitting is done by an Au Pair, a young student from another country who works 24/7 at raising the kids you spawned and had no intention on raising yourself. Your kids are trophies to be groomed into their rightful scheming positions of corporate nepotism. See picture at right. ———->>>>

Your kids grow up to be Mitt Romney and George W. Bush.  It is too bad you don’t hang out with other people in your income bracket who do have a clue about the working poor.

- Have someone introduce you to the Kennedys. Your world of knowledge will expand beyond your wildest dreams. -

Our kids are groomed to be good citizens who have a clue about what it takes to earn a dollar and to be generous with their time and income to those less fortunate.

Which brings me to the point of being “less fortunate.” What the hell do you think that means? – Do you think anyone below your economic status is “less fortunate” because your frame of reference is in dollars and cents?

To us, the less fortunate live on the streets and suffer mental and health problems. Their houses burn down and the insurance company your husband manages refuses to make good on the policy.  They suffer a major illness and they are unable to pay the horrific cost of medical care.  These are the people we think of when we say “less fortunate” and none of it is through any fault of their own.

Author: Martin Kihn

Yes, it is yours. Your being clueless about how society works and malfunctions is a huge part of the problem. You actually have the power to effect changes that benefit society at large and do not take away anything from your personal life.

The “nail ladies” -and all others who make your life easy to live- have names and lives outside of their working hours. They live where the rest of us live and are fully aware of the disparity between your lifestyle and ours. They are more aware and educated than you have given them credit for.

We need to point out the falsehood of your statements. You don’t want people to be educated beyond their present levels. It is hard to get “good help” when people know and demand their rights.

We will no longer enable your bad behavior. We will make sure we put enough regulations in place to prevent you from stealing our natural resources and polluting our country. We even intend to organize more working people into unions -a word and concept that no doubt  will give you apoplexy- to achieve living wages. We know this pisses you off immeasurably.

Your kind is notoriously cheap when it comes to labor and tips. We, the middle class, pay and tip better than you do because we understand what it takes for that waiter to earn his paycheck.

You don’t.

Unlike you, we are true Americans. We love our country and see all its faults. We try to fix them and make it better for generations to come.

What have you done for your country lately? (or ever?) Bought a horse? Shipped jobs overseas? Not paid more than a fraction of the taxes you really owe?

I can’t continue to write this letter because I have children to raise, a home to clean, errands to run and meals to prepare. I know you are puzzled by this, but I have no time to explain.

I will leave you with a final thought: We don’t envy your wealth. What we resent are your greed and sense of entitlement.

It is time for you to grow up and live in the real world.

Think Progress

WCH Contributor Patrick Murfin’s writing can be found regularly at the blog Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout

Boston Police leave a meeting after voting to strike. Note how young most of the officers were, many veterans of the Great War and with young families.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  And here is a bit of history that is very instructive of the present moment when Republican/Tea Party governors gleefully make war on unionized public employees, try to strip Democratic big city administrations of their power and authority, and make open warfare on despised ethnic minorities.  These governors have sometimes, like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, tried to split police from other unionized public employees by exempting them from some of the worst of the outrages.  After all, authoritarians need their agents of official repression. But other governors have not even bothered and lately the Republican presidential candidate has publicly disdained spending tax payer money on “police and teachers.”  It is not impossible to image a replay of the sorry events chronicled below.  Read on.

On September 9, 1919 more than 1000 members of the Boston Police Force went out on strike to demand recognition of their newly charted union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor(AFL).  That was more than 72% of the officers and men of the force, including the overwhelming majority of rank and file patrolmen.  They set off a firestorm that would end with their union smashed, all of their number fired and banned from re-employment for life, the dreams of respectability and cooperation of the leading labor conservative dashed, and a flinty, taciturn Yankee governor catapulted to national prominence.

In many ways the strike had its origins in the always tense relations between the lofty Protestant Brahmins who had once dominated the city with noblesse oblige and the ever growing mass of largelyCatholic and Irish immigrants and their decedents clamoring for their place in the sun.  The Brahmin class ruled, with minor and rare interruptions for the fugitive Democrat or Know Nothing, since the first mayor under a city government charter in 1822.  They changed party labels with the times fromFederalist to Whig to Republican, but they were always the same party, united against the Popish menace since immigrants from the Auld Sod began pouring into the city in the 1830s.

But by the 1870’s political control of the city hung in the balance.  Mayors switched regularly between Republicans and Democrats.  At first the Democrats were simply WASP “class traitors.”  But Irish bornHugh O’Brien shocked the blue bloods by winning in 1885.  And after 1902, with one brief exception, Irish Democrats, including twice each John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and machine master James M. Curry, held the mayoralty and a solid majority of the City Council.  The Brahmins had lost control of the city never to regain it.

But they were not the sort of people to give up easily.  For nearly twenty years they made war on Democratic city administrations via their continuing iron grasp on the State House.  There were many battlegrounds as governors and legislatures sought to strip authority away from the city piecemeal.  But control of the large Police Department was the main battleground.  The department had become almost exclusively Irish.  From the point of view of Republicans in the state house the department was a cesspool of patronage.  Democratic mayors, naturally, believed control of the police was a natural part of city administration.

As early as 1895, reading the demographic writing on the wall, the state stripped the mayor of direct authority over the police by creating a five member Board of Commissioners appointed by the governor.  In 1906 Republican Governor Curtis Guild, Jr. decided to bring the police more directly under his control.  The Board was replaced by a single Police Commissioner appointed for a six year term and answerable to the Governor.

But just because the state had usurped command authority over the local police, did not mean that it was assuming the cost of the force.  The city was still responsible for the pay, equipment, and maintenance of police stations out of its tax revenues—and the legislature put severe limits on how the city could raise and levy taxes.  Under the circumstances Democratic mayors had little incentive to keep pay competitive and stations in repair.

Conditions for patrolmen had been deteriorating for years.  And sharp inflation associated with World War I deeply eroded the value of pay packets. Since 1913 the cost of living had risen 76%, while pay increased only 18%. Officers were not paid for required court appearances and were expected to provide their own uniforms and equipment, including the pistols they carried in their pockets.

Work days were 10 hours and the men were often required to sleep overnight  at stations without pay in case they were needed.  The work week was typically between 75 and 90 hours a week and conditions in the stations, which lacked basic sanitation, were appalling.   Under the circumstances it was understandable that officers sought to improve their condition.

At first they sought to transform the Boston Social Club, an organization formed by the Department itself in 1906, the year a single commissioner took control of the force.  After officers watched Boston Firefighters win a major pay raise by threatening to resign in mass in August of 1918, they pressed the Commissioner to open negotiations through the Social Club.

In 1919 Governor Calvin Coolidge appointed a new, tough minded Commissioner, Edwin U. Curtis. The Commissioner refused to negotiate with the Social Club and unilaterally imposed his own sham grievance procedure.  Seeing they were getting nowhere, members of the Social Club voted overwhelming to seek a charter for a local union from the AFL.  Curtis responded on August 11 with a sweepingGeneral Order forbidding police officers to join any “organization, club or body outside the department” exception only “patriotic organizations” such as newly minted the American Legion which had the explicit approval of the commissioners.  Officers pointed out that the order was so broad that it not only outlawed belonging to a union but also many ordinary fraternal organizations, sporting clubs, or the popular local Democratic Club.

Four days later the Social Club received its AFL charter and on August it was formally welcomed into theBoston Central Labor Union, which also expressed strong support for the new union and condemned the high handed tactics of Commissioner Curtis.  The new union appointed an eight member committee to seek a meeting with Curtis to open negotiations.

Curtis not only refused to meet with the men, he suspended all of them and 11 officers of the local union pending disciplinary board action for insubordination.  His actions were wildly applauded in the local press.  The union dug in its heels and a crisis loomed.

Democratic Mayor Andrew James Peters, the first non-Irishman since 1902 but politically beholden to the loyal mass of Irish voters who had elected him, attempted to calm the situation with the appointment of a Citizens Commission to investigate complaints by police officers and plead with Curtis for restraint. Committee Chairman James J. Storrow, a prominent reformer with connections to the establishment, recommended that Curtis recognize a union un-affiliated with the AFL and renounce the use of the strike. In return the Commissioner would re-instate the suspended officers and open negociations.  The plan received the endorsement of four out of five Boston daily newspapers and even the local Chamber of Commerce.  But Curtis, with the encouragement of Governor Coolidge, remained unmoved.

Department trials began on September 8 and the members of the bargaining committee were, as predicted, found guilty.  The union responded with a strike vote of 1134 to 2 and scheduled the walk out for the next day.  Curtis threatened to fire all strikers and express confidence that most would show up for work.

They didn’t.  The strike began effectively at 5:45 PM.  The city was left with a skeleton force of sergeants and officers.  Governor Coolidge ordered 100 Metropolitan Park Police Department officers under his control to take the place of the strikers, but 58 of them refused and were immediately placed on suspension pending dismissal.

That night was marked by street disturbances, particularly in South Boston, the Irish neighborhood where most of the strikers lived.   Mostly it was rowdies throwing stones at street cars and over turning push carts and general hooliganism.  Professional gamblers, prostitutes, and bootleggers emerged from the shadows to openly and defiantly ply their trades on the speech.  But later research showed that despite hysterical press claims, major crimes such as armed robbery and burglary were committed at no greater pace than a comparable period with police protection. The next morning all five Boston daily ran screaming headlines portraying the city as under siege by criminals.  Lurid stories were told, many of them outright fabrications, others wild exaggerations.

That morning Mayor Peters formally asked the Governor for state troops to enforce the peace. He had held off all night in hopes that Commissioner Curtis would make the call and relieve him of the politically dangerous onus of calling out troops against his own ethnic and labor constituents.  Which is exactly what Coolidge wanted.  Coolidge agreed and eventually dispatched more than 5000 members of the State Guard, mostly called up from small towns in western Massachusetts and the wealthier suburbs of the city, and included a unit of Harvard Students, many of them scions of the Brahmin class.

The newspapers were lambasting the strikers as traitors and deserters.  Soon they were upping the ante by accusing them of being Bolsheviks and revolutionaries.  Wire services picked up the most lurid tales of looting and crime spreading them—and outrage—across the country.

The Guard assumed control of the streets on the night of September 10.  They were inexperienced, poorly trained, and sometimes frightened.  The Guard was quick to use lethal force against street assembly.  It opened fire on a crowd of civilians in South Boston killing at least 4 outright and wounding many.  Others around the city were shot, bayoneted or clubbed with rifle butts.  Sporadic disturbances continued though the night of September 12.  Each day the rhetoric from Curtis, Coolidge, and the press grew more heated and pictures of a reign of terror were painted in the press.

A mass meeting of Boston officers on the 11th scolded Coolidge for his harsh charges of desertion and treason, noting that many members of the force had served honorably and bravely in war and pointedly noting that Coolidge had not.

The night of the 11th the Central Labor Council, sensing public hostility, declined to support a resolution calling for a General Strike in defense of their new union brothers.  Instead they issued a bland call for arbitration.  The police union was shocked by the apparent desertion of their new allies when they most needed them.

Returning from a trip to Europe the AFL’s longtime chief, the conservative craft unionist Samuel L. Gompers, who had cooperated with authorities in the persecution of Reds, socialists, and anarchists and had opposed the radical Industrial Workers of the World at every hand, was shocked.  He thought he and his “respectable” union movement had officially been given a place at the table.  He had won the plaudits of the President and corporate bosses for his dedicated support of the War.  He was the farthest thing in the world from a radical or revolutionary, but here he was being denounced as if he was Eugene V. Debs himself.

Nor were the police officers radical men.  Most were observant Catholics and extremely patriotic.  None of the leadership had ties to the Socialist Party or any other left wing organization.  They were simply loyal Democrats.  And on numerous occasions members of the force had shown that they were willing to use their clubs on picket lines or against radical meetings.  They were as bewildered as Gompers at the turn of events.

Gompers summoned up all of the prestige he thought he had earned.  On September 12 he wired President Woodrow Wilson and Governor Coolidge, requesting that the suspended men be reinstated, and that the union return to work pending the results of an arbitration panel. He followed with a personal phone appeal to the governor. Coolidge responded to this moderate request with a personal blast of Gompers and a public scolding that left the AFL chief deeply humiliated.  “There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime,” Coolidge scolded, and declared that he would continue to “defend the sovereignty of Massachusetts.”  Coolidge was catapulted to the national fame that would lead him the Vice Presidency in 1920 and the White House upon the death of Warren G. Harding.

Commissioner Curtis moved to replace all striking officers from a pool of unemployed veterans provided by the American Legion.  They never got their jobs back, even when Democrats finally took control of the State House in 1932 and revoked the permanent ban.  To add insult to injury the replacement police force was granted substantially higher wages, provided with uniforms and equipment, and station houses were upgraded with modern facilities—all of the reforms sought by the banished men.

The scars of the strike are still felt today.  The clannish alienation of Southie, still the home of Irish Americans and immigrants alike and home to both strikers and victims of Guard violence, can be traced to the strike.  A deep suspicion of the scab police who displaced their people helped foster the culture that nurtured the notorious Irish gangs of strong arm and bank robbers, burglars, and cartage thieves that have thrived there ever since.   And some former policemen, unemployed and blacklisted, joined those gangs.

The suppression of the strike was a last gasp of the Brahmins and WASP dominance not only of Boston, but of the state, which is now not only the most reliably Democratic, but among the most heavily Catholic in the country.

Police and public unionism were set back generations.  Thoroughly frightened, the AFL revoked all of the charters for police unions that it had granted around the county.  Most states enacted laws making strikes by police and other public employees a crime subject to jail sentences.  Police union finally began to make a comeback in the 1950’s and public employee unionism has spread to every level.

But today attacks on public unions are resuming in volume and vehemence.  Calls for breaking existing unions and banning future ones are heard at Tea Parties around the land.  There is even nostalgia for Calvin Coolidge.

Yet another reason to stand firmly against the forces of reaction and blind conservatism and remember in November.

Ron Horvath is a Maine-coast, liberal writer/thinker, college grad, Viet Nam vet, master craftsman toolmaker for the master craftsman, and WCH regular contributor.

“But ’tis a common proof,

That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.”

- W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene I

From rags to riches is considered to be the arch-typical American story. Many  Americans are proud to point to their humble origins and tell how the strength garnered from their early struggles  made them what they are today. Politicians probably get more mileage from this self-promoting tale than any other class. Sometimes it’s actually true. Sometimes it’s just “politics.”

With the choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate Mitt Romney has woven that particular bit of Americana into his election campaign. Lacking it himself he now hopes some of the timeless magic of Ryan’s typical American small town upbringing will rub off on his own persona, suffering as it does from the taint of being a millionaire’s son, a “silver spoon.”

But Ryan’s past is typical in another, completely opposite, way. Like so many conservatives he is the born-again variety. Ryan, who went to college on Social Security survivor benefits, abandoned his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, a bastion of Democratic populism, as well as all the principles of small town America to bask in the warm glow, and greater personal profit, of service to well-heeled conservatism. Like so may of his fellow Republicans Ryan has found greater fortune in supporting the policies favored by the rich and powerful. Where fortune lies fortune-seekers will never be far off.

Sycophancy seems to be a common path for conservatives who spring from the lower classes, those who turn their backs on their common roots and become the devil’s disciples of the rich and powerful. Typically, their own success weighs far more heavily on their list of personal priorities than anything approaching class loyalty. Paul Ryan never fails to hurry to intimate meetings with the Koch brothers, his most powerful backers, but has often dismissed the concerns of common Americans at his “town meetings” with all too common Republican disdain.

John Boehner, who likes to brag about his working class roots at election time, now favors spray on tan salons, eighty thousand dollar per year golf club dues, and the most expensive suits in congress. Clearly the path to success for conservatives means attaching yourself to the already successful, mouthing their rhetoric, carrying their water, and letting them reward you generously for your loyalty to a higher class if not a higher principle.

Here in Maine one of my personal political opponents in the media often bragged about growing up on a dairy farm and therefore knowing first hand about “hard work.” Like most on the right he spent his time in print railing against government intervention and praising rugged individualism all the while ignoring the government imposed price controls that kept his family’s farm in business and able to afford his college education. Like most in his party he followed the money to his own personal success. Spending a few years as a teacher after college he then ran for the legislature as a conservative Republican only to lose his seat in the general flushing out of the GOP after the Bush administration. As a promising young man the party found him a paid sinecure holding down a desk at the state office of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative propaganda organization heavily funded by wealthy contributors.

It would be tempting to say the conservative tradition of sycophancy began in the eighteenth century with Edmund Burke one of conservatism’s founding fathers and a revered voice in the defense of time honored tradition. He, too, sprang from humble beginnings, a middle class Anglo-Irish family only to rise to being a member of parliament and the chief defender of the aristocratic class by whose support he was able to acquire a six-hundred acre estate in Buckinghamshire.” Clearly supporting the fortunes of the wealthy was one way of joining their class.

Is this the Republican’s model for reconfiguring society? With their dream of relieving corporations of all rules and regulations, with government enfeebled and without power or authority, with the economic elite more firmly ensconced in their power and position at society’s head, and with unions disenfranchised eliminating any political power for the working class what would be left for working and middle class Americans to rely on? Where would we seek accountability or redress for obvious corporate wrongs? If history teaches us anything it is that those without power are subject to the powerful.

Sycophancy as a political system fits the Republican mold. It is a system where wealth metes out freedom by degree. In their view of the world the more wealth you acquire the more freedom you possess. As poor men are never free of struggling for survival and subject to any power that can provide the means, the greater mass of the population in such a system would always be subject to the whims of the economic elite. Without a strong government to intervene and to set honest rules of engagement between individuals and groups of individuals the powerful will always exploit the weak. Without regulatory agencies with the force of law the corporate power will also crush any competition and small business would survive only in a state of economic dependence, of a feudal allegiance with whatever power holds sway over their particular sector.

Without government support for research, scientists would be forced into corporate subservience, bending their discoveries and opinions to corporate needs and desires, regardless of factual evidence. (Remember when climate change reports from the Bush administration were “edited” by a former oil company lobbyist?) Scientific treatises in the future will once again include obsequious dedications to whatever ruling power needs to be assuaged. Scientific opinions will lean toward whatever half-truths corporate monitors find comforting.

The Republicans see this as the way things ought to be, the natural way of things. Throughout history the poor have had to attach themselves to the rich and the weak to the powerful. They have done so as servants, serfs, or slaves: in ancient Greece an indebted man often became the slave of his creditor. The social scale of ancient Rome was based on clientage. Rome, in its early Republican phase, was a place of no or little security, no safety nets, and its social system was based on the most basic facts of life. Every great man in Rome had a host of “clients” who came to him as he held court every day for favors, sustenance, or political support. In return he demanded loyalty, obedience, and service, often with sword in hand, whenever he called for it.

Conservatives who speak so easily about freedom forget this basic reality, that no one is free who requires food, clothing, and shelter for survival. We are all slaves to our material needs and to the means of acquiring them. How free can anyone be then in a world where so much of the worlds resources are under the control of so few? Like the wealthy class of Rome the elite of every age has had the power through their wealth to suborn common men. Those who live lives of “quiet desperation” are more easily bent to the needs and desires of those whose economic power enables them to deliver or withhold life’s necessities. Every devil’s disciple –the henchmen of every dictator and bully- is born of all too common human need.

This is the system the Republicans want to revive. The “freedom” of their rhetoric is the actually freedom to starve unless you serve them without question. The new freedom envisioned by them will be the freedom to choose a master, and there the freedom and the choice will end. Such a society would not be one of equals but of a descending scale of unequals, with every man bowing to the next higher and all and any above that. Power and privilege would define the social order.

Ronald M. Horvath

On the eve before the Great Depression, what the NEA called “America’s great crisis”, Chicago’s teachers found themselves in a contradictory and uncomfortable position. Although their pay and working conditions were better than the blue collar workers in the city, their work in the classroom was becoming increasingly difficult. There had been a dramatic increase in the number of Chicago public school students all through the 1920′s, which left the schools scrambling for funding.

The schools were largely financed through property taxes, and powerful corporations, along with real estate interests, had been dodging taxes for decades. The system was plagued with corruption and mismanagement and by the late 1920′s was bogged down in lawsuits, court actions and a business-led tax strike. To make matters worse, the appointed school board had become a cesspool of financial corruption, especially under the gangster-tainted reign of Mayor William Thompson, an ally of Al Capone.  By 1929, the year of the Wall Street stock market crash, Chicago was essentially broke.

However, teacher militancy did not begin right away. The shock of the Great Depression was too terrible. By 1932, half of the Chicago labor force was out of work and those who did have jobs found their wages cut. Teachers were paid their monthly salaries only three times between January 1931 and May 1933. They did not receive regular paychecks, but were paid in “scrip” which had to be redeemed by businesses and banks who did not honor their full value. 

According to the May 1933 Nation magazine, teachers faced dire poverty: 

“Homes have been lost. Families have suffered undernourishment, even hunger. Their life insurance cashed in, their savings gone, some teachers were driven to panhandling after school hours to get food.”

Paul Schneider, who had taught manual arts at Washburne High School, shot himself to death in despair before his wife and children. Later it was discovered that his life insurance had lapsed.

Classroom conditions were especially grim as schools were overcrowded with impoverished, undernourished students. A July 1933 Saturday Evening Post reported this from a Chicago high school teacher:

“If a girl in my class begins to grow thin and turns an ever paler face toward me, more than human sympathy requires me to know why. It is my job. If a boy–normally well behaved and sensitive lad of fifteen–is transformed into an ill-tempered dreamer, I can sometimes read the answer the answer in the patches on his clothing…In these stern years when I look searchingly into the eyes of a student, often it is as revealing as if I had peered through the window of a Chicago home.”

In the face of the social catastrophe, Chicago teachers stayed on the job despite the payless paydays, determined as one Chicago teacher put it “…not to desert the Chicago schools.” Teachers raised $112,000 to buy clothes and provide breakfasts for needy children and despaired that they could not raise more.

Teachers create a new lesson plan: Fight for your rights

Teachers also came to understand the importance of organizing resistance to the corrupt oligarchy who had made Chicago’s school funding crisis the worst in the nation. That was not easy. Only 10% of the teachers belonged to the four competing teachers’ unions, all of whom opposed any militant action, preferring petitions and lobbying. 

The first sign of militancy came at the end of 1931 when 26,000 people organized by the teachers’ unions and community groups held a mass meeting that helped prevent the actual closure of the Chicago schools.

Teachers began to believe that public education itself was under attack along with the democratic values that it represented. They saw education as a way to empower Chicago’s largely working class student population and provide a path of social mobility. 

Harry Tate of the Chicago Teacher Voter Association addressed a 1932 teachers’ mass meeting by calling schools “the last bulwark protecting American democracy.” In a nation where many believed the entire economic system was on the point of a violent collapse, this was not idle hyperbole. Totalitarian movements were on the march and working class resistance was critical to preventing their spread.

It takes a spark to set off a militant mass movement in the streets and that spark came on March 17, 1933, when teachers discovered that school janitors, many of whom were patronage employees protected by Chicago’s political machine, had received a secret raise when teacher’s pay was cut in January. Frustrated by the lack of results from cautious union leaders, hundreds of teachers marched to the mayor’s office on March 21 and assured him that they would return every Tuesday until teachers were paid. Teachers also organized a boycott of businesses that were still evading taxes.

Teacher protest in the 1930′s

Elementary school teachers staged a one day sick-out in early April. That was followed later that month by a high school teachers’ sick-out with thousands students joining them in a sympathy strike. At an April Board of Education meeting the president of First National Bank was loudly booed by teachers who had packed the meeting after 3000 of them had protested in the Loop. 

On April 15, teachers received a partial payment of back wages, but that did not stop 8000 teachers who marched to visit Charles Dawes, former US vice president and head of City National Bank and Trust Co. The teachers wanted to know why the bank had just been bailed out to the tune of $90 million by the new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but could not help the teachers get paid.

All hell broke loose on April 24 when 5000 teachers converged on five of Chicago’s largest banks who had refused to buy the tax warrants that were needed to pay the teachers. Once inside teachers confronted the bankers with chants of “Pay us! Pay us!” as they trashed the offices by turning over desks, smashing windows and throwing ink on the walls. A week later there was a similar demonstration at the Chicago Title and Trust Company that involved a pitched battle with mounted Chicago police.

The violence got the attention of Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly and representatives of the major banks who hastily promised relief. The VEC announced that the teachers would receive 4 months of the nine months owed to them at  a huge rally in Grant Park on May 13 . Then on June 9, the last day of school, there was another confrontation with police as 5000 people protested in the Loop against the banks.

Most of the marches were organized by a new group called the Volunteer Emergency Committee(VEC). The VEC was led by a charismatic PE teacher named John Fewkes who belonged to the Men’s Teachers Union(MTU), one of the four Chicago teachers’ unions of the time. Even Margaret Haley of the Chicago Teachers Federation(CTF), who was very sparing in her praise of rival teacher union leaders, called him,”…a fine specimen of physical manhood, well built, and he had a demeanor that was impressive.” Fewkes made it clear that the VEC was a one issue group focused solely on teachers’ pay.

Chicago’s business community had also been organizing, with the Citizens Committee on Public Expenditures (CCPE) as the result. With the support of the CCPE, the banks had consistently refused to lend any more money to the hard pressed Chicago schools. It was essentially a banker’s coup with even the CCPE admitting they had “taken charge”. But even after their downtown offices were wrecked, the banks continued to arrogantly set school policy.

On July 12, 1933, the Chicago Board of Education approved a budget that stunned the packed meeting room with cuts so drastic that School Superintendent William Bogan, who had not been consulted, was seen holding his head in his hands in shocked silence. Helen Hefferan, a Board member whom the others suspected would oppose the cuts, was not even invited to the meeting. After the fateful July 12 meeting, the Board steadfastly refused all requests for an audit, presumably to protect financial irregularities and  the many political patronage employees. The US Commissioner on Education called the cuts  “a return to the dark ages”.

That evening the VEC joined the new Citizens Schools Committee(CSC) made up initially of teachers, the PTA and the city’s leading women’s organizations. The following week the CSC held a rally at the Chicago Stadium that drew more than 30,000 followed by renewed lobbying efforts. The first day of school in September was chaos as a result of the financial carnage, so the Board, on the defensive, effectively rescinded the worst of the cuts by October. Then in 1934, with federal money, the teachers finally got all their back pay.

The days of ’33 were a quantum leap in Chicago teacher consciousness

“Few of us are the sweet complacent, non-thinking 100 percenters that we used to be. Our eyes have been opened…After four years of learning that bankers are our worst enemies, that politicians are interested in our votes and power only and use our children merely as pawns in their selfish game, that we can depend on no one but ourselves, we cannot be restored to our previous complacency.” —- Teacher Edith Smith

John Fewkes, whom Time Magazine called the “John L. Lewis of the teaching profession”, was, like the legendary Lewis, a militant, not a radical. Fewkes was anti-communist at a time when communists played an important and generally positive role in the labor rebellions of the Depression Era. Fewkes would use militant tactics, but only for limited objectives. He went on to become a founder of Chicago Teachers Union in 1937 and served as its president for many years.

John Fewkes in 1967

After the days of ’33 and the founding of the CTU in 1937, Chicago teachers generally rejected any Oliver Twist meekness before an ofttimes illegitimate authority. But teachers had difficult decisions to make– what exactly should their new union do? 

Should the union take a broadly social activist role, allying with other organizations for progressive change? Should the union confine itself to bread and butter economics? Should it take a stand on issues of curriculum and testing? How should it confront Chicago’s school segregation and the barriers faced by teachers of color? What was the union’s relationship to Chicago’s corrupt political machine? What was the role of radicals, socialists and communists within the union? 

Teachers would grapple with all of these questions in the decades to come. Today, the Chicago Teachers Union, under new progressive leadership, is facing many of the same problems that teachers did back in the first half of the 20th century, plus new ones, such as the drive for privatization of the schools. Today the very existence of public education faces a greater threat than in the worst days of the Great Depression, but Chicago’s teachers are showing no signs of complacency. 

The spirit of ’33 lives on.

 
Chicago teachers rally at the Board of Education in July 2012

 

  

Sources Consulted: My special thanks to John Lyons and the late Mary Herrick whose excellent primary research made this posting possible.

 Education & the Great Depression: Lessons from a Global History by E. Thomas Ewing, David Hicks

 Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929-1970 by John F. Lyons

 The Chicago schools: a social and political history by Mary J. Herrick

 Chicago Public Schools and the Depression Years of 1928 -1937 by Lyman Burbank

 

Originally posted to BobboSphere on Thu Aug 02, 2012 at 12:06 PM EDT.

Also republished by In Support of Labor and Unions, History for Kossacks, Anti-Capitalist Chat, Readers and Book Lovers, Progressive Friends of the Library Newsletter, and Community Spotlight.