Never Been a Time

by Harper Barnes

  Than to stay down south and be beat to death

  Under cracker laws.4

  MILLIONS TO LEAVE SOUTH! roared a headline in the Defender. GOOD-BYE, DIXIE LAND exulted another.5

  In early March of 1917, Missouri Malleable Iron Company, a large East St. Louis employer, added to the exodus by placing help-wanted ads in regional newspapers in four towns with large black populations—Vicksburg, Nashville, Memphis, and Cairo, at the lower tip of Illinois. One ad read, “Colored Labor for Foundry Work … wages $2 to $2.60 a day. Can earn $3 to $3.50 piecework. Steady work for steady men.”6

  There were no ads for black skilled workers.

  By then, many of the illegal saloons and gambling joints and bookmaking parlors that had been closed were open again. Mayor Mollman was trying to maintain a very tricky juggling act, keeping the church vote in one hand while the other was supporting illegal activity, which for many St. Louisans, black and white, was the only economic activity available.

  Layoffs at the Aluminum Ore plant continued into the early spring. On March 19, labor leaders would later charge, plant superintendent C. B. Fox and other executives of the aluminum plant met in secret with streetcar company officials and other potential employers to plan a joint campaign to lure another fifteen hundred unskilled Southern black workers to East St. Louis with extravagant promises. Fox denied that such a meeting had taken place. In any event, waves of young black men continued to arrive at the train station with empty pockets and, as the blues singers put it, “a matchbox for their clothes.” Some of the untrained black men, the lucky few, got low-paying jobs replacing experienced, better-paid white men at the Aluminum Ore plant. Others ended up on the streets.7

  In National City, by the spring of 1917, membership in the meatcutters’ union had dwindled from several thousand to several dozen. Management had intimidated most workers into avoiding the union by openly firing strikers and then, week by week, getting rid of anyone who merely spoke up for the union and replacing him with a black man. Workers were angry and frustrated, and they placed much of the blame on blacks. Although earlier labor actions against meat plants had included a significant number of blacks—the leader of the union at a smaller plant in one strike had been an African American meat cutter—by the end of 1916 nonunion strikebreakers, most of them black, had replaced about twenty-five hundred low-level white meatpacking workers. Blacks made up about 40 percent of the meatpacking work force, up from 15 percent a few years earlier. Most of the men who had been replaced in the filthy, backbreaking lower-level jobs at the meat plants were from the recent wave of immigrants to East St. Louis—Austrians, Poles, Russians, Bohemians, Greeks, Turks, and Armenians. The Irish and the Germans who had come earlier, at least those that still had jobs, had moved up the ladder into more skilled positions.8

  Thousands of cows, hogs, and sheep were slaughtered every day in the swampy bottomlands of the National City stockyards, at 640 acres a third again as large as the Chicago yards. The stink of death and rot and animal waste spread south across St. Clair Avenue into downtown East St. Louis until it permeated the air. About 8 percent of the men in East St. Louis with jobs worked in the stockyards and the slaughterhouses. Men in the slaughterhouses, Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle, his 1904 exposé of the Chicago stockyards, “worked with furious intensity, literally upon the run,” wading through blood as fast as they could move their legs.9

  Although most of the work to be had in and around the city—in the steel and aluminum mills, in the oil refineries, in the rail yards, and in the chemical plants—involved hard physical labor in dirty, dangerous surroundings over long hours for low pay, working in the meatpacking plants was particularly dehumanizing work, in which mass killing quickly became either unbearable or routine. The slaughterhouses were at their worst in the summer, when, Sinclair wrote, the killing beds “became a very purgatory”:

  All day long the rivers of hot blood poured forth, until, with the sun beating down, and the air motionless, the stench was enough to knock a man over… The men who worked on the killing beds would come to reek with foulness, so you could smell one of them fifty feet away … There was not even a place where a man could wash his hands, and the men ate as much raw blood as food at dinner-time. When they were at work they could not even wipe off their faces… [W]hen the sweat began to run down their necks and tickle them, or a fly to bother them, it was a torture like being burned alive [and] with the hot weather there descended upon Packingtown a veritable Egyptian plague of flies … [T]he houses would be black with them … and whenever you opened the door they would rush in as if a storm of wind were driving them.10

  As the summer of 1917 approached, many of the men who worked in the slaughterhouses of National City found themselves increasingly marginalized, increasingly desperate, and increasingly angry.

  The United States entered the Great War in early April of 1917. Shortly afterward, several hundred uniformed and armed national guardsmen from Missouri and Illinois were placed at either end of the three main bridges connecting St. Louis with southern Illinois: the Merchants’ Bridge, the Eads Bridge, and the Free Bridge. And more National Guard troops were stationed around large plants on both sides of the river, including the meatpackers of National City just to the north of East St. Louis and the Aluminum Ore Company on the southern outskirts of the city. Placing the militiamen around the plants was explained by federal officials as “part of a plan being carried out in practically every Western, Eastern, Northern, or Southern state, to guard against property damage by persons who are sympathizers with the Germans.” The troops had been ordered to keep a sharp eye out for enemy sympathizers. What the officials did not mention was that the Aluminum Ore Company and the streetcar company, both of which had gone through nasty strikes recently and were worried about more, had asked the state and federal governments for protection from disruption.11

  Management fears were understandable. Strikes were on the rise across the United States as the war in Europe simultaneously increased industrial demand and decreased the number of immigrant workers. “The urgent need for production,” remarked wartime labor mediator Alexander Bing, “gave the workers a realization of a strength which before they had neither realized nor possessed.” In 1916, there were more than thirty-six hundred strikes, three times as many as in 1915. In 1917, the number of strikes rose again to more than forty-two hundred—including major strikes by copper miners in Arizona and New Mexico, carpenters in Baltimore, garment workers in New York, janitors in Chicago, cereal mill workers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, meatpackers in Denver, Kansas City, and Omaha, oil field workers in Texas and Louisiana, shipyard workers in Norfolk and all along the West Coast, streetcar workers in Seattle and Springfield, Missouri, and lumbermen in the Pacific Northwest, to name a few of the more notable ones.12

  Blacks continued to be used as strikebreakers across the country, as in the bitter longshoremen’s strike in Seattle that began in 1916 and lasted well into the following year. For most blacks, there was little or no stigma attached to crossing a white picket line. The prevalent view among influential black leaders, such as Chicago Defender publisher Robert Abbott, was that the late Booker T. Washington had been right in saying said that blacks crossing white picket lines were simply exercising “their right to labor as free men.” Even W. E. B. Du Bois—while insisting that “the Crisis believes in organized labor”—had said in 1912 that if unions whose policy was to “beat or starve the Negro out of his job” went on strike, there was nothing wrong with blacks crossing their picket lines, because the displaced whites deserved “the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows.” (Ironically, in Seattle, although the waterfront strike had been marked by bloody street fighting between blacks and whites, once the strike was over, the black replacement workers were invited to join the longshoremen’s union, and many did. Such poststrike interracial solidarity was rare.)13

  After the United States entered the war, Missouri Malleable Iron in East St. Louis, l
ike industrial firms across America, anticipated a rapid growth in its armament contracts. The ironworks again advertised for black workers in the South. Once again, over the next few months, the Free Employment office shipped thousands of men, black and white, to other cities. The streets of downtown became crowded with homeless men and women, with panhandlers and muggers. Disease broke out in the close, filthy quarters. Tuberculosis spread rapidly, and health authorities were concerned that a major cholera epidemic was just waiting to break out. The diseases struck poor people without regard to race, but once again blacks were blamed.

  Opponents of Mayor Fred Mollman’s campaign for reelection began spreading the rumor that Mollman’s black supporters all had smallpox. In fact, there was a minor outbreak of smallpox that spring, and some blacks got it, but so did some whites, particularly men who worked in the meatpacking houses in the private fiefdom of National City.14

  Blacks, in particular, were forced by exorbitant rents in slum properties to crowd together into shacks and tenement flats south and east of downtown, some of them on the dark sandy grit of the remnants of Bloody Island. Most of the slum properties, including the brothels and unlicensed saloons—called “blind tigers” by East St. Louisans—were owned or managed by the politically powerful real estate firm of Tarlton and Canavan.

  George Locke Tarlton

  Thomas Canavan

  George Locke Tarlton was the thirty-five-year-old political boss of East St. Louis, the power behind Mayor Fred Mollman. His partner was fifty-eight-year-old Thomas Canavan, a politically savvy former alderman, a member of the board of election commissioners, and Mollman’s commissioner of public works. Tarlton publicly bragged that he controlled the mayor, a political hack and glad-hander whose family was in the harness business. According to reformer George W. Allison, a Baptist minister, Tarlton “owned” Mollman “boots and baggage.”15

  Tarlton was president of the East Side Levee and Sanitation District, which deposited millions of dollars in public funds in interest-free accounts in favored banks. The banks in return maintained a secret political slush fund Tarlton could use for bribery in political campaigns. A ruthless politician, he rewarded cronies with lucrative jobs and punished those who opposed him, as when he ensured the defeat at the polls of a state’s attorney—a fellow Democrat—who had prosecuted a corrupt Republican mayor allied with Tarlton. Tarlton became wealthy in part through crooked dealings, such as buying swamp land for a song, having it drained at public expense through the levee district, and selling it at a large profit. Tarlton and Canavan owned or managed hundreds of slum properties, including tenements and shotgun shacks where poor blacks lived and shady saloons, dance halls, and brothels frequented by both blacks and whites.16

  Tarlton and Canavan had been instigators in the 1916 Democratic campaign against so-called Negro colonization in St. Clair County. But the city elections in the spring of 1917 were a different matter. After Mollman had promised to add several uniformed black officers to the police department and build a fire station in a black neighborhood, Tarlton was able to work out a deal with Dr. Leroy Bundy and other prominent men in the black St. Clair County Republican League to support Mollman for mayor.17

  Shortly before the April 3 election, Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage made the first of several visits to investigate charges of widespread sin and corruption in St. Clair County. Mollman offered to support Brundage in any way he could to clean up the city, contending that most of the problems were outside of his jurisdiction, in other towns and in unincorporated areas in St. Clair County.

  Brundage knew Mollman was lying. Five private detectives hired by church groups, which were desperate to get the goods on the mayor, had supplied Brundage with extensive reports on illegal saloons, wide-open gambling joints, and dance halls with busy bedrooms upstairs, all within the city limits of East St. Louis, some of them within sight of city hall. The Reverend George W. Allison of the First Baptist Church, who had worked as a fireman on the railroad before going to divinity school, borrowed an army uniform from one of his supporters and spied on brothels, pretending to be a half-drunk and lecherous doughboy with two days’ leave before he was off for the trenches. The reports Allison and his private investigators brought back from the shanties of prostitution implicated prominent East St. Louisans, particularly Canavan and Tarlton, and absentee landlords as far away as New York. According to the Reverend Allison, many East St. Louis girls of high school age and even younger were being lured into working as prostitutes after being seduced by smooth-talking pimps in lowlife dance halls. “I know one mother who had three daughters ruined in three places,” he said later.

  Thwarted in their attempts to get their hands on theoretically public records showing who owned a particularly noisome downtown saloon and gambling joint, Allison’s plainclothes private detectives pretended to be potential buyers. They were given documents that proved that one building used for prostitution was owned by a man in New York, but all the rent money went through Tarlton and Canavan. The investigators ended up with a presale invoice listing the assets of the bar and adjoining “rooming house.” The assets included the names of two women. Each had a monetary figure next to her name. The women were prostitutes, and the figures represented their weekly earning capacity.18

  On April 3, forty-seven-year-old Fred Mollman was reelected mayor by the largest majority in East St. Louis history, managing to win a seemingly paradoxical combination—the black vote, the union vote, the gambling vote, and the church vote. He even got most of the female vote. For the first time, women were allowed to vote in Illinois, although it would be four more years before female suffrage had been extended to national elections. On election day, a reporter saw Locke Tarlton drive up to a polling place and climb out of the car with a thick stack of $5 bills in one hand. Blacks who had just finished voting began lining up in front of Tarlton. Each voter gave a small piece of paper to Tarlton, and the real estate mogul glanced at it and then handed over a $5 bill. Tarlton was overheard bragging that there was “no place for pikers in this election.”19

  Mollman announced that he considered his reelection “an endorsement of my policy of law enforcement,” and he pledged that saloons would never again be open on Sunday as long as he was mayor. He threw a postelection banquet for his black supporters at a Masonic hall in a predominantly black area in the South End near Thirteenth Street and Bond Avenue. Four or five hundred blacks came by for food and drink and political speeches. Although Mollman was nominally a Democrat, one of the sponsors was the St. Clair County Republican League. The banquet stuck in the craw of many white East St. Louisans, who saw it as Mollman fawning over the very people who were destroying the city.20

  Shortly after the election, one of Mollman’s reluctant reform supporters, William Miller, head of the downtown YMCA, became alarmed at the armed gangsters—they were white—swaggering in and out of the building across the street and roughing up passersby. The building, owned by Tarlton and Canavan, housed the Commercial Hotel, a notorious saloon, gambling hall, brothel, and den of thieves a couple of blocks from city hall. The saloon had been one of the places Mollman had closed down in the cleanup campaign earlier in the year, but now that he had been reelected it was already open again. Miller warned that there was bound to be trouble coming when there were so many young men with guns downtown, “men who never worked at all but found some way to make a living.” He told Mollman, “Conditions have grown rank by degrees and they are rotten clear to the core and you sit here and can’t see it, can’t understand it. Your moral vision is gone … If you live down in this end of town, where the sentiment is rotten to the core, you think it is the sentiment of the whole world, but it certainly is not. The end of this thing is coming soon.”21

  On the evening of April 17, several hundred members of the aluminum workers union met at the Labor Temple, a downtown auditorium that was privately owned but used for meetings by workers’ groups. They voted to strike the Aluminum Ore Company over a myr
iad of unresolved issues, including the mass firings of men friendly to the union. A large and rowdy picket line went up at the plant early the following morning.

  Federalized national guardsmen were already camped nearby to help keep the plant open, and management supplemented them with professional strikebreakers from Chicago. They wielded pickaxes and shovels to protect replacement workers, black and white, as they were led through lines of union men screaming “Scab!” The company announced that the strikers were German sympathizers disrupting essential work on war materiel. The Journal seemed to agree, remarking on its editorial page, “When strikes are called now, there is good reason to suspect something other than the interests of workers is at the bottom of them.”22

  Other industries were in turmoil, too. The streetcar workers were also going through bitter negotiations, and they were told by management to go ahead and strike if they wanted to. The streetcars would be driven by soldiers, who wouldn’t have to be paid by the company at all. And the meatpackers, who could look through the fences around their plants and see soldiers dawdling in front of their tents, simply gave up trying to organize and hoped they could hang on to their jobs. The aluminum workers’ strike lasted two months, but for all practical purposes it was over a week or two after it began. Superintendent C. B. Fox refused to meet with the union’s executive committee, and announced before the end of April that all strikers who didn’t immediately leave the Employees Protective Association would be barred from the plant for life. He took out a full-page ad in the Journal, stating that the company had hundreds of openings. Strikers who quit the union and wanted to come back to work could apply for jobs, but there was no guarantee they would be hired.23

  But hundreds of men continued to picket, sustained as much by anger and bitterness as any real hope of winning the strike, and by the opportunity to vent their anger on the replacement workers who entered the plant every day under armed guard. The aluminum plant had been stockpiling guns, and strikers were sometimes fired upon. In the most serious incident, late on the evening of May 10, a powerful searchlight suddenly blazed from a tower in the plant, blinding the seven hunderd picketers near the gate, and security guards inside the plant compound fired into the dazed crowd. Five men were seriously wounded, including a unformed policeman who had been trying to maintain order.24