Strike!

Jeremy Brecher

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781629638089
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jeremy Brecher's Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America. Involving nationwide general strikes, the seizure of vast industrial establishments, nonviolent direct action on a massive scale, and armed battles with artillery and tanks, this exciting hidden history is told from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it. Encompassing the repeated repression of workers' rebellions by company-sponsored violence, local police, state militias, and the U.S. Army and National Guard, it reveals a dimension of American history rarely found in the usual high school or college history course.

Since its original publication in 1972, no book has done as much as Strike! to bring U.S. labor history to a wide audience. Now this fiftieth anniversary edition brings the story up to date with chapters covering the "mini-revolts of the twenty-first century, " including Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for Fifteen. The new edition contains over a hundred pages of new materials and concludes by examining a wide range of current struggles, ranging from #BlackLivesMatter, to the great wave of teachers' strikes "for the soul of public education, " to the global "Student Strike for Climate" that may be harbingers of mass strikes to come.

Part I

Mass Strikes in America

Prologue

VISITING THE UNITED STATES IN 1831, THE FRENCH TRAVELER ALEXIS de Tocqueville accepted as unsurprising the subordination of women, blacks, and Indians. But he was astonished not to find the extremes of rich and poor, aristocrat and peasant that were also taken for granted in Europe.

In the United States, the great majority of men were not landless peasants, but farmers working their own land, primarily for their own needs. Most of the rest were self-employed artisans, merchants, traders, and professionals. Other classes—wage-earners and industrialists in the North, slaves and planters in the South—were a minority. The great majority, Tocqueville found, were independent and free from anybody’s command.

Yet the forces that were to undermine this relative equality—and to produce the mass strikes and revolts that are the subject of this book—were already visible. Tocqueville noted with concern “small aristocratic societies that are formed by some manufacturers in the midst of the immense democracy of our age.”¹ Like the aristocratic societies of former ages, this one tended to divide Americans into classes made up of “some men who are very opulent and a multitude who are wretchedly poor,”² with few means of escaping their condition.

Further, Tocqueville saw that production tended to become more and more centralized, for “when a workman is engaged every day upon the same details, the whole commodity is produced with greater ease, speed, and economy.”³ Thus, “the cost of production of manufactured goods is diminished by the extent of the establishment in which they are made and by the amount of capital employed.”⁴ The large, centralized companies naturally won out.

This process shaped both the worker and the employer. “When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work.”⁵ Thus, “in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded…. [H]e no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling that he has chosen.”⁶ But, Tocqueville argued, while “the science of manufacture lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of masters,”⁷ until the employer more and more resembles the administrator of a vast empire.

De Tocqueville believed that “the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world.”⁸ And he concluded that “if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”⁹

Alexis de Tocqueville’s dire predictions soon proved all too true. American industry grew at an incredible rate. In the fifty years following the start of the Civil War, investment in manufacturing grew twelve-fold. The distance covered by railroads grew from 30,000 miles to more than 200,000. By the turn of the century, more than three-fourths of manufactured products came from factories owned by corporations and other associations of stockholders. In 1860, only one-sixth of the American people lived in cities of 8,000 or more; by 1900 it was one-third. The number of wage-earners, meanwhile, grew from 1.5 million to 5.5 million. The United States became a full-fledged capitalist society with an economy driven by the pursuit of private profit in a virtually unregulated market.

Looking back on how these changes had affected workers during his lifetime, a labor leader wrote in 1889:

With the introduction of machinery, large manufacturing establishments were erected in the cities and towns. Articles that were formerly made by hand, were turned out in large quantities by machinery; prices were lowered, and those who worked by hand found themselves competing with something that could withstand hunger and cold and not suffer in the least. The village blacksmith shop was abandoned, the road-side shoe shop was deserted, the tailor left his bench, and all together these mechanics [workers] turned away from their country homes and wended their way to the cities wherein the large factories had been erected. The gates were unlocked in the morning to allow them to enter, and after their daily task was done the gates were closed after them in the evening.

Silently and thoughtfully, these men went to their homes. They no longer carried the keys of the workshop, for workshop, tools and keys belonged not to them, but to their master. Thrown together in this way, in these large hives of industry, men became acquainted with each other, and frequently discussed the question of labor’s rights and wrongs.¹⁰

Out of these experiences and discussions, many workers concluded that they were no longer free and equal citizens; more and more they felt like wage slaves, able to live only by working for someone else, left to walk the streets destitute when no employer would hire them. No longer possessing the keys to the workshop, they were left virtually helpless. Yet they possessed a weapon that gave them power—the strike. For without their labor, all the factories and offices, railroads and mines could produce nothing.

Strikes seem to have occurred ever since some people were forced to work for others. There are records of strikes by workers on the Great Pyramids of Egypt thousands of years ago. Strikes occurred in North America as early as 1636, but for the next two centuries they were rare, small, and local. Strikers and their organizations were often prosecuted as illegal conspirators.

Starting around 1800, workers gradually became an organized presence in American life. Workers in such trades as printing, shoemaking, and cabinetmaking began to organize craft unions in American cities. By the 1830s, many craft unions had held national conventions, local unions in many cities had formed central trades councils, and these city councils had held their first national convention. Workers also experimented with labor parties, producer and consumer co-ops, and even cooperative communities.

Yet until after the Civil War, the great majority of workers were self-employed. They might protest by voting, by demonstrating, by rioting, even from time to time by armed rebellion, but they could not strike.

Thus this book starts a dozen years after the Civil War, with the Great Upheaval of 1877—the first event in U.S. history to bring to the country’s attention the vast new class of workers who possessed neither workshops nor farms, and thus had to work for those who did, the new class of industrial capitalists.

Railroads, factories, and farms grew at breakneck speed in the years following the Civil War. What had been largely a local and regional economy became a truly national one. The frontier moved steadily westward as one after another territory formerly possessed by Indians was opened to homesteaders and land speculators. The railroads bribed politicians and received land grants the size of whole countries. The attention of the nation turned away from politics and toward the astonishing advance of industry. It seemed a “Gilded Age,” and the magnates who amassed great fortunes and vast enterprises were widely viewed as the conquering heroes of a new industrial civilization.

The government established the conditions for economic growth—from land grants for railroad corporations to high tariffs on imported products—but did little to cope with the consequences. Chaos resulted when industrialists used their control of the nation’s resources to increase their own fortunes by any means necessary. The result was an unorganized, disorderly society. The social institutions that later would function to moderate social conflict, ease distress, and defuse discontent were virtually nonexistent. Only those on whose backs the industrialists rode to power considered them not knights in shining armor but “robber barons.”

Then the bubble burst. In September 1873, the leading American banking house, Jay Cooke and Company, suddenly declared bankruptcy. The stock market tumbled, and by the end of the month the stock exchange had closed its doors. In 1873 alone, 5,183 businesses worth over $200 million failed.

Depressions had been a regular feature of capitalist society since its start. But by 1877, the depression had lasted longer than any other in American history. For workers, conditions were quite desperate. Wages throughout industry had been cut more than 25 percent, below subsistence in many cases, while an estimated one million industrial workers were unemployed. Large numbers of the unemployed hit the road looking for work, often traveling in bands of what were referred to as “tramps.”

The wealthier classes observed these conditions and trembled. Only six years before, the workers of Paris had arisen, taken over the city by armed force, and established the famous Paris Commune. Now it was not only Europe that was haunted by the “specter of communism.” A Workingmen’s Party, dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism, had arisen in America as well. Meanwhile, sallow, sullen-faced men, women, and children walked the streets with little in their stomachs and hardly a place to lay their heads. An English visitor found wealthy Americans “pervaded by an uneasy feeling that they were living over a mine of social and industrial discontent with which the power of the government, under American institutions, was wholly inadequate to deal: and that some day this mine would explode and blow society into the air.”¹¹

That explosion came with the Great Upheaval of 1877.

Chapter 1

The Great Upheaval

IN THE CENTERS OF MANY AMERICAN CITIES ARE POSITIONED HUGE armories, grim nineteenth-century edifices of brick or stone. They are fortresses, complete with massive walls and loopholes for guns. You may have wondered why they are there, but it has probably never occurred to you that they were built to protect America not against invasion from abroad but against popular revolt at home. Their erection was a monument to the Great Upheaval of 1877.

July 1877 does not appear in many history books as a memorable date, yet it marks the first great American mass strike, a movement that was viewed at the time as a violent rebellion. Strikers seized and closed the nation’s most important industry, the railroads, and crowds defeated or won over first the police, then the state militias, and in some cases even the federal troops. General strikes brought work to a standstill in a dozen major cities and strikers took over authority in communities across the nation.

It all began on Monday, July 16, 1877, in the little railroad town of Martinsburg, West Virginia. On that day, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 10 percent, the second cut in eight months.¹ Men gathered around the Martinsburg railroad yards, talking, waiting through the day. Toward evening the crew of a cattle train, fed up, abandoned the train, and other workers refused to replace them.

As a crowd gathered, the strikers uncoupled the engines, ran them into the roundhouse, and announced to B&O officials that no trains would leave Martinsburg until the pay cut was rescinded. The mayor arrived and conferred with railroad officials. He tried to soothe the crowd and was booed. When he ordered the arrest of the strike leaders they just laughed at him, backed up in their resistance by the angry crowd. The mayor’s police were helpless against the population of the town. No railroad workers could be found willing to take out a train, so the police withdrew and by midnight the yard was occupied only by a guard of strikers left to enforce the blockade.²

That night, B&O officials in Wheeling went to see Governor Henry Matthews, took him to their company telegraph office, and waited while he wired Col. Charles Faulkner Jr., at Martinsburg. Matthews instructed Faulkner to have his Berkeley Light Guards “prevent any interference by rioters with the men at work, and also prevent the obstruction of the trains.”³

The next morning, when the Martinsburg master of transportation ordered the cattle train out again, the strikers’ guard swooped down on it and ordered the engineer to stop or be killed. He stopped. By now, hundreds of strikers and townspeople had gathered, and the next train out hardly moved before it was boarded, uncoupled, and run into the roundhouse.

About 9:00 a.m., the Berkeley Light Guards arrived to the sound of a fife and drum; the crowd cheered them. Most of the militiamen were themselves railroaders.⁴ Now the cattle train came out once more, this time covered with militiamen, their rifles loaded with ball cartridges. As the train pulled through the yelling crowd, a striker named William Vandergriff turned a switch to derail the train and guarded it with a pistol. A soldier jumped off the train to reset the switch. Vandergriff shot him and in turn was fatally shot himself.⁵

At this, the attempt to break the blockade at Martinsburg was abandoned. The strikebreaking engineer and fireman climbed down from the engine and departed. Col. Faulkner called in vain for volunteers to run the train, announced that the governor’s orders had been fulfilled, dismissed his men, and telegraphed the governor that he was helpless to control the situation.

With this confrontation began the Great Upheaval of 1877, a spontaneous, nationwide, virtually general strike. The pattern of Martinsburg—a railroad strike in response to a pay cut, an attempt by the companies to run trains with the support of military forces, and the defeat or dissolution of those forces by amassed crowds representing general popular support—became the pattern for the nation.

With news of success at Martinsburg, the strike spread to all divisions of the B&O, with engineers, brakemen, and conductors joining with the firemen who provided the initial impetus. Freight traffic was stopped all along the line, while the workers continued to run passenger and mail cars without interference. Seventy engines and six hundred freight cars were soon piled up in the Martinsburg yards.

Governor Matthews, resolved to break the strike, promised to send a company “in which there are no men unwilling to suppress the riots and execute the law.”⁶ He sent his only available military force, sixty Light Guards from Wheeling. But the Guards were hardly reliable, for the sentiment in Wheeling was strongly in favor of the strike.

The Guards marched out of town surrounded by an excited crowd, who, a reporter noted, “all expressed sympathy with the strikers.”⁷ Box-makers and can-makers in Wheeling were already on strike and soon people were discussing a general strike of all labor. When the Guards’ train arrived in Martinsburg, it was met by a large, orderly crowd. The militia’s commander conferred with railroad and town officials, but dared not use the troops, lest they “further exasperate the strikers.”⁸ Instead, he marched the Guards away to the courthouse.

At this point the strike was virtually won. But hardly had the strike broken out when the president of the B&O began pressing for the use of the U.S. Army against the strikers in West Virginia. “The loss of an hour would most seriously affect us and imperil vast interests,” he wrote. With federal troops, “the rioters could be dispersed and there would be no difficulty in the movement of trains.”⁹ The railroad’s vice president wired his Washington agent, saying that the governor might soon call for federal troops, and instructing him “to see the Secretary of War and inform him of the serious situation of affairs, that he may be ready to send the necessary force to the scene of action at once.”¹⁰ Although a journalist on the scene at Martinsburg reported “perfect order,”¹¹ and other correspondents were unable to find violence to report, Col. Faulkner wired the governor:

The feeling here is most intense, and the rioters are largely cooperated with by civilians…. The disaffection has become so general that no employee could now be found to run an engine even under certain protection. I am sat...