There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The introduction of the militia brought tragic results in a number of “rumpuses” across town. In Scollay Square soldiers fired into what was perceived to be an unruly mob, killing several people; on Boston Common, an eighteen-year-old merchant marine was shot to death after he tried to interfere with the arrest of craps players. Dozens of people were injured. “If you stop to watch a crowd you become in an instant part of it,” warned the newspapers in a special bold print notice. “There is no such thing now as ‘an innocent bystander.’ ”58

  The AFL’s Samuel Gompers, just back from a labor conference in Europe and quickly taking stock of the situation, advised the police to return to their jobs and seek the judgment of a board of mediation. There were conflicting reports that the police were willing to be reinstated, although they refused under any circumstances to surrender their union affiliation. Unfortunately the bias against the strikers, even without Commissioner Curtis’s animosity, had now gone too far to be reversed, and in any case Curtis was backed by Coolidge in rejecting the possibility of reinstatement. “It is manifest that the places in the police force of Boston, formerly held by the men who deserted their posts of duty, have by this action been rendered vacant,” Curtis announced.59

  Gompers publicly warned Curtis that he would be held accountable for his decision. “The situation in which the policemen found themselves today was provoked and practically forced upon them by the autocratic action of Police Commissioner Curtis,” Gompers said, “who at any time might have honorably settled the dispute by such action as is naturally expected of a public official in his responsible position.”60 Governor Coolidge then famously replied to Gompers, “Your assertion that the commissioner was wrong cannot justify the wrong of leaving the city unguarded…. There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”61

  Coolidge’s defiant utterance was reprinted in almost every paper in the country, and thousands of approving letters flooded Beacon Hill. Like Seattle’s Ole Hanson, the Massachusetts governor was catapulted overnight to national fame. “Thank God for Governor Coolidge and the hard-headed people of Massachusetts,” raved the St. Paul Pioneer Press, while the Philadelphia Record saw the Boston police fight as one of “Americanism vs. Anarchy,” and cheered that “Americanism was overwhelmingly victorious.” Other papers noted the significance of Coolidge’s stand for the stricter handling of labor unions generally, one proposing that it should “stiffen the heart and backbone of every executive in the land.”62

  As threatened, Curtis moved quickly to permanently refill the police ranks, which proved an easy task given the large number of unemployed war veterans in the city. Hundreds of locked-out cops then sued to demand reinstatement, and a boisterous rally was held in their behalf, but the effort was effectively denied. Similarly, an attempt to restore the nineteen union leaders to their jobs was quashed by the courts.

  The policemen’s modest desire to belong to a national labor union, a conservative one at that, which would help them secure more equitable pay and working conditions, had been interpreted as “crazy Bolshevism” and as an assault on America itself. It was about this time that “Americanism,” in the hands of entities such as the American Legion, became a term connoting not the country’s purported values of openness and democracy, but rather the worst spirit of reaction. Sadly, this trend of thought affected not only organized labor. Strikers were lacking in “Americanism” for their selfish demands and willingness to cause disruption and inconvenience, but myriad other people, those who did “brain work,” such as teachers, writers, and sociologists, or in some way sympathized with labor’s cause—the “parlor Reds” and high-society bleeding hearts—all could be stigmatized as untrustworthy, and all warranted scrutiny.

  AMERICA’S STEELWORKERS in the difficult summer of 1919 felt much aggrieved, as the wartime improvements in wages and working conditions enjoyed by other industries had largely passed them by. Many still turned in ten- and twelve-hour days, six and even seven days per week, with no benefits, sick time, or vacation—this despite the fact that war had been very good to the industry; profits at U.S. Steel reached $500 million in 1919, a staggering leap from $135 million in 1914. As the old Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers had largely been suppressed in the years since Homestead, it wasn’t until 1918 that a consortium of two dozen smaller unions, calling itself the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, joined together to bring steelworkers meaningful union representation. “One mighty drive to organize the steel plants of America,” was how William Z. Foster, an IWW veteran, general organizer of the Railway Carmen’s Union, and leader of the newly united steel unions, described the workers’ ambition.63 Foster and steel’s rank and file demanded a wage increase, an eight-hour day, a system of collective bargaining, and union recognition.

  The prospects were good, or so it seemed, because the Wilson years had brought labor several key advances—the Clayton Act, the creation of the Department of Labor, the Industrial Commission Report of 1915—and unions had come out dependably for the president’s reelection in 1916. The following year, 1917, saw the president again extend a helping hand to his labor friends by appointing a President’s Mediation Commission to address workers’ issues related to the war. The panel examined copper mining, Chicago packinghouses, and the telephone and lumber businesses, and in January 1918 determined that what was needed was a government-recognized policy of collective bargaining between workers and management, employer-established grievance mechanisms, and the eight-hour day. Like the Industrial Commission Report, these wartime recommendations are now recognized as a kind of rough draft of the New Deal, and at the time, labor was not shy in its enthusiasm. “Messiah is arriving,” Sidney Hillman of the Almalgamated Clothing Workers exulted. “He may be with us any minute—one can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer—if only he listens intently. Labor will rule and the world will be free.”64 Foster, like Hillman and many others, was emboldened by the board’s findings to believe it a propitious time for progress in steel-workers’ rights. “The gods were indeed fighting on the side of labor,” echoes Dubofsky. “It was an opportunity to organize the [steel] industry as might never again occur.”65

  U.S. Steel chairman Judge Elbert H. Gary, however, refused to negotiate with the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, and President Wilson appeared reluctant to intervene. Foster and other union leaders warned that strike talk was too prevalent among the workers to hold back what was about to occur, and on September 22, 1919, as the White House remained mute, 350,000 steelworkers from nine different states walked off the job. It appeared that in the year and a half since the Mediation Commission’s labor-friendly pronouncements of early 1918, much had changed. The war, and the collaborative mood based around manufacturing production, had ended, and both the Justice Department and Congress had fallen under the spell of anti-Communism. The strike also occurred as Wilson was preoccupied with promoting the League of Nations to the country, and after suffering a stroke on October 2 he was, for all intents and purposes, a convalescent.

  The truth was that there had always been more than met the eye in the generally favorable relationship between Wilson and labor. His presidential commissions and boards released bold prescriptions for meaningful reforms, but the administration rarely followed up on their recommendations; industry, meanwhile, was pleased to deny unionism its basic rights as long as Wilson’s attorney general, Palmer, was determined to flex his department’s might in the full-time business of busting “labor radicals.” “No American president had ever before succeeded in so humbugging the people as Woodrow Wilson,” a disappointed Emma Goldman later said. “[He] wrote and talked democracy, acted despotically, privately and officially, and yet managed to keep up the myth that he was championing humanity and freedom.”66 Laborites could only watch in despair as a moment of opportunity passed by, and recall that only eighteen months before, as one historian writes, “The steel worker was ma
de to feel that he was mightily helping to win the war [and] the American worker read in the newspaper that he was an important person, that President Wilson, General Pershing and other great men were relying on him.”67

  In rejecting the possibility of strike talks, Judge Gary said he accepted the right of workers to unionize, but feared unionization meant a closed shop that would allow a small number of workers to bend others to their will. “If such a minority were to control the industries of the country,” he exclaimed, “it would mean national decay and defeat in the trade competition with other countries.”68 Observers recognized a familiar impasse, no different from that which had afflicted the Colorado coalfields five years before, in that big steel’s owners and stockholders were using misleading terms like “freedom of choice” and “liberty of contract” to refuse labor the very power of combination the corporations themselves enjoyed, thus denying workers the ability to bargain in any meaningful way. As the AFL helpfully pointed out to Judge Gary, “When trade unionism enters an industry that industry ceases to be despotism, because the union workers have a voice.”69

  Curiously, one of the critics of Gary’s stance was none other than John D. Rockefeller Jr., the scourge of Ludlow. At the urging of his labor guru, Mackenzie King, and through his greater involvement with the operations of his Colorado coal interests, Rockefeller had become a convert to the idea that, as King had said, “this is a period of transition in which organized labor is bound to come in for an ever increasing measure of recognition.” Called to Washington by President Wilson in 1919 to join a conference that focused in part on the impending steel strike, Rockefeller met with Judge Gary as well as Henry Clay Frick of Homestead notoriety. Both men rebuffed Rockefeller’s advocacy for fair worker representation and collective bargaining, Gary going so far as to suggest to Rockefeller that he was showing disloyalty to the very concepts that sustained large industry. Rockefeller stood his ground, urging Gary to modernize his views in order to avert a dangerous steel strike. “Surely,” said Rockefeller, “it is not consistent for us as Americans to demand democracy in government and to practice autocracy in industry.”70

  At the steel mills three months of picketing and fierce recriminations ensued, as law enforcement at every level of government joined with large numbers of scabs, spies, and deputized enforcers to confront striking steelworkers and stir up dissent within union ranks. Martial law was declared in various steel towns, and eighteen strikers were killed. At Gary, Indiana, both the National Guard and federal troops were called in to occupy the community. A particularly gruesome murder, that of UMW organizer Fannie Sellins, occurred at West Natrona, Pennsylvania. Sellins, who had been cautioned by a local magistrate “not to emulate Mother Jones,” was on her way to file a complaint with authorities about a special deputy who had killed a miner when she and a colleague, Joseph Starzelski, were set upon by a posse of deputies and shot dead. Despite arrests in the case, the killings were ruled “justifiable homicide” and no one was ever prosecuted. A photograph of the murdered woman’s face was made into a button worn in protest by steelworkers.71

  The willingness of the federal government to side with the corporations, as it did in dispatching troops to Gary, was a grave disappointment to the nation’s steelworkers, although equally hurtful to the strike’s chances was the refusal of the railroad unions to honor the strike with sympathy stoppages that would have had a crippling effect on big steel, and the willingness of tens of thousands of black workers to step in as replacements for the striking men. Even more devastating was the campaign of red-baiting embarked upon by the mills, successfully shifting the battle from a labor-management dispute over wages and conditions to one that invoked the alleged radicalism of “Bolsheviks” and Wobblies. The idea that the steel strike represented any kind of conspiracy, Bolshevik or otherwise, was ludicrous, since, as one commentator quipped, “A strike movement of 300,000 men in a dozen states is about as secret as a presidential campaign.”72 Indeed, as a follow-up study by the Interchurch World Movement noted, the steel strike’s leaders made every effort to avoid the charge of radicalism by handling the work stoppage in a straightforward manner more common to traditional trade unionism.73 But the propaganda spewed by the steelmakers was as effective as it was relentless, finding ready outlets in daily newspapers.

  These efforts were abetted by the steel industry’s discovery of a book William Foster had written years earlier in which he’d condemned the wage system as a “brazen and gigantic robbery” and demanded that “the thieves at present in control of the industries must be stripped of their booty.”74 Foster dismissed the work as juvenilia; it had been out of print for many years and no steel striker was found to be carrying a copy, but a facsimile edition was printed by the steel owners and distributed to churches, government agencies, and members of the press. Foster’s youthful anticapitalist thoughts, recycled by Big Steel, played into the assumption that the strikers, for their willingness to halt one of the nation’s essential industries, were un-American.

  Making little headway, the unions sought help from outsiders who had offered to mediate, but Judge Gary, sensing victory and continuing to dismiss Foster’s emissaries and the strikers at large as “Soviets,” remained firm in his refusal to negotiate. In the bitter cold of January 1920, the strike committee surrendered to U.S. Steel’s far greater strength and resources, and most workers—excepting those ostracized for strike activities—went back to the mills, having failed to attain even a hearing for their demands. It was estimated that more than $100 million in wages had been lost during the work stoppage.

  The strike’s collapse represented a lost opportunity for a labor movement whose hopes had risen with the shared patriotism of the war, and for American labor-industrial relations generally. A disciplined strike leadership making reasonable demands, and a deserving workforce that had performed heroically during the war, had been given the cold shoulder by a powerful corporation disdainful of democratic processes. U.S. Steel had refused to share influence, even proportionately, with unionized workers, while a president and administration often sympathetic to the cause of unionism had failed to intervene. As the Interchurch study found, U.S. Steel had from the start been largely and willfully ignorant of its workers’ grievances, and had remained throughout the crisis basically incurious about the strike’s motivations. Their goal instead had been to paint the strikers as something they were not, and it had worked. Laborites could only watch as a potential moment for reform ebbed away, a keenly felt disappointment.

  ——

  THE OWNERS OF THE NATION’S COAL MINES proved as steadfast as the steel bosses in rejecting negotiation when, on November 1, 1919, the United Mine Workers struck for a postwar adjustment on wages and hours. The public understandably grew apprehensive as, with winter coming, half a million coal miners switched off their headlamps and set down their tools. The Memphis Commercial Appeal urged a swift resolution, noting that while miners and mine owners deserved respect, “the rights of 110,000,000 American freemen are superior to those of a few hundred operators or 500,000 miners.” Publisher William Randolph Hearst suggested that “the mines must be worked even if the government itself has to work them.”75

  During the war the cessation of coal production would have been not only unpatriotic but illegal, and although the war had technically ended, a federal court in Indianapolis, with a nod from President Wilson, went ahead and issued an injunction against the strike. The return of the hated injunction, which labor had hoped it had seen the last of with the passage of the Clayton Act of 1914, infuriated unions; the AFL denounced the court’s action in no uncertain terms and urged the miners to stand firm. But UMW chief John L. Lewis knew well that the public had a very short patience for coal strikes, and having studied how devastating injunctions had been in the past, particularly against Debs and the ARU in 1894, he ordered the UMW rank and file back to work. “We are Americans. We cannot fight our government,” he told reporters.76 Lewis’s loyal words didn’t sa
ve him from a contempt citation, however, when some UMW miners wildcatted and refused his order to resume work. A continuation of the crisis was averted only when the government suggested a 14-cent wage increase as a stopgap, and established an arbitration council to look into the miners’ claims of being underpaid.

  While the miners fared better than their brethren in the steel mills, in that they did obtain some concession for their trouble, it was distressing that a federal injunction had once again been effectively deployed to break a strike, and that the public had been led to resent labor for its “radical” intentions. The Seattle Times arrogantly termed the rejection of labor’s demands “the natural outcome” of a war fought for democracy, and applauded the fact that “before the force of that righteous, American ‘solidarity,’ the bogus ‘solidarity’ preached by the IWW … has crumbled and is crumbling everywhere.”77

  At the moment, these two “solidarities” were on a collision course in the town of Centralia, Washington, about sixty-five miles south of Seattle. Situated in lumber country, the town had a strong IWW presence, but was also home to several reactionary organizations—the Employers Association of Washington, the Citizens’ Protective League, as well as chapters of both the Elks and the American Legion. Local police were in sympathy with these groups and had made no attempt to intervene on Memorial Day 1918 when “patriots” stormed the Centralia IWW office, carried boxes of the group’s records, literature, and furniture into the street and fed the entire haul to a giant bonfire; even the local’s typewriter was sacrificed. A handful of Wobblies were arrested, while a blind news dealer who faithfully sold the IWW’s Industrial Worker was kidnapped, taken by car to a neighboring county, and shoved into a ditch.78

  By November 1919 the IWW had managed to open a new hall in a former hotel. Hearing rumors that members of the American Legion were planning to use the distraction of an upcoming Armistice Day parade to launch another assault, the Wobblies issued a leaflet reassuring locals that rumors of Bolshevism and radicalism in the community were exaggerated. “Our only crime is solidarity, loyalty to the working class and justice to the oppressed,” the appeal explained.79 They braced for the expected attack, arming men within their headquarters on the day of the parade and positioning others across the street and on an adjacent hillside. “I fought for democracy in France,” vowed one Wobbly, “and I’m going to fight for it here.”80 When the parade passed by as scheduled, a squad of Legionnaires led by Post Commander Warren Grimm, a former football All-American at the University of Washington who went by his gridiron nickname, “Wedge,” broke off from the procession and charged the IWW hall. The well-positioned Wobbly guns opened fire, cutting Grimm down, but the Legion had superior numbers and could not be repulsed for long; they successfully scattered the Wobblies, some of whom hid in an old meat locker until arrested while others escaped out a back door and fled.81