by Philipp Blom
On March 23, the battle between the workers and heavily armed police units commenced. It soon became clear that without outside assistance, the workers had little chance of success. Shelled by artillery fire, they had nowhere to retreat to, and after one week the factory was taken by government forces at the cost of some 150 lives. Six thousand people were arrested, with four thousand sentenced to prison by special military courts; four revolutionaries were condemned to death, and several others were shot by police, allegedly while fleeing. For the communist movement of Germany, the March Action proved a crippling disaster, as hundreds of thousands of sympathizers turned away from its two main parties. The Soviets’ most explicit attempt to ferment a revolution outside Russia had resulted in abject failure.
Beyond the Soviet experiment, the shattered economies and destabilized societies of the Western world also appeared to be strained to the breaking point. In March a coal strike forced the British government to declare a state of emergency, and there was a general strike in the north of France; in the industrial cities of northern Italy, Mussolini’s fascists were embroiled in violent confrontations with socialist workers’ organizations in a de facto civil war. Silesia saw a bloody armed insurrection, and rioting occurred from Vienna to Reykjavik. In Hungary, Admiral Horthy installed a dictatorship, and on October 19 the Portuguese prime minister, António Granjo, was murdered during a military coup.
The Battle of Blair Mountain
THE THREAT OF REVOLUTION was felt everywhere, even in the United States. The wave of returning servicemen, a crisis in agriculture due to wartime overproduction, the racial tensions after the migration of more than a million blacks from the Deep South to the industrial cities of the North—all these had led to a period of strife. In 1919 there had been a wave of strikes involving four million workers nationwide, including Chicago policemen, who left the streets to the rule of the mob in their fight for better pay.
In the heated postwar climate, anarchists had attempted to assassinate high officials and the Red Scare had swept aside all civil rights for those in the crosshairs of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and the ambitious J. Edgar Hoover, who spearheaded the campaign against undesirable foreigners, especially those with left-wing associations. That summer there had also been a deadly wave of race riots and lynchings. To a certain extent America was at war with itself, and this war was never more bitterly fought than in 1921 in Logan County, a mining district in West Virginia.
The issue at stake in what became known as the Battle of Blair Mountain was not world revolution but the cruel exploitation of the miners. Before the opening of the coal fields at the end of the nineteenth century, West Virginia had been overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Within a generation, tens of thousands of recent immigrants had come there to work in the mines, the most productive in the United States.
The owners of the extremely lucrative coal mines had instituted a system that was in wide use. Their employees worked with company equipment which they had to lease from their employers, and they were paid by the wagonload of coal, weighed and assessed always to the company’s advantage. The pay the men received was partly in tokens that could be spent only at the company store, which charged inflated prices for all goods. Wage increases were always followed by a price hike at the stores, so the employers never lost out. The workers and their families also lived in company housing, which they had to rent separately. Any form of union organization or membership was strictly forbidden, and union members were fired on the spot.
The miners effectively lived on a monetary treadmill from which there was no escape. In return they worked extremely long hours in mines with only the most rudimentary safety features. Accidents, maimings, and deaths were frequent, and in 1907 a single explosion in a mine run by the Fairmont Coal Company in Marion County had cost 361 lives. In fact, the miners’ odds for survival were worse than those of soldiers at the Western Front. There had always been attempts at resistance, including strikes and outbreaks of violence that had caused the governor to send in troops more than once. In their struggle for better working conditions, the miners were faced with impossible odds.
The mine owners had employed the Pinkerton detective agency that functioned as a private army outside the law and which took appropriate measures whenever the company’s authority was challenged—from mere intimidation and pistol-whipping of perpetrators to evictions of entire families and even murder. Once, in 1913, the mine guards had driven an armed train through a tent encampment in which striking miners lived. The machine guns mounted on the train fired into the tents, and it was almost miraculous that only one person was killed.
In 1921 matters were coming to a head. Another attempt at organizing the workers had resulted in the firing of dozens of workers and the eviction of their families. A year earlier, detectives who had evicted miners’ families had been gunned down by embittered miners in an open shootout in the town of Matewan, whose sheriff, Sid Hatfield, was sympathetic to the miners. Hatfield was a gunman straight out of a Western. Though Prohibition was a dead letter in a southern mining town, he did not drink because he found that alcohol impaired his reactions; to deter possible opponents he would launch a potato into the air and then draw his gun and explode it in midflight with a single shot. When company detectives threatened him with arrest and reached for their guns (accounts vary according to which witness one believes), Hatfield was faster; miners positioned on roofs and behind windows finished off the job. Seven detectives and three townspeople lay dead at the end of the battle.
The opening of Hatfield’s trial in January 1921 coincided with a general strike by the miners, whose level of union organization was higher than ever before despite their employers’ repressive measures. Police acted largely as agents of the mining firms, harassing strikers, destroying their tents and their possessions, and brutalizing individuals at every opportunity. At the same time, imported strikebreakers weakened the force of the unionized miners, and the mines continued to work almost to capacity.
The strikers grew despondent when news spread throughout the valley that their hero, Sid Hatfield, who had been acquitted earlier that year, had been assassinated in cold blood when he arrived in a nearby town to face additional charges against him. Hatfield and a friend were walking up the steps of the courthouse unarmed on August 1 when detectives belonging to the firm involved in the Matewan massacre opened fire on the two men, killing them both. Their deaths outraged the miners, especially when the murderers appeared to be on the verge of escaping prosecution. The strikers began to organize in armed militia groups and held protest meetings at which thousands participated. Urged on by their leaders, they decided to march on Logan, the seat of a neighboring county, to force the government to take action.
With an estimated five thousand armed and angry miners wearing red bandannas marching on the small town, the authorities began to panic. They organized an army of deputies, mine guards, store clerks, and state police, twelve hundred strong, to defend the city against the invasion. Led by a colonel of the National Guard who had fought in World War I, the deputies entrenched themselves on Blair Mountain, which lay between the marchers and the town of Logan. As the miners assembled on the base of the mountain on August 30 the first sporadic skirmishes occurred between the two forces. The next days saw intense fighting with deaths on both sides. Airplanes hired for the occasion dropped bombs on the miners’ positions, while US Army Air Service bombers flew reconnaissance missions against the miners. Some thirty troops and one hundred miners were killed. Hundreds more were injured.
On September 1 President Warren Harding called in the army, causing almost all the miners to surrender immediately. The battle was over, and the defeated miners were sent home. More than twelve hundred of them were indicted for treason, but only one conviction was handed down. The real consequence of the battle was elsewhere: Blair Mountain put an end to all efforts to unionize labor in the southern mining industry. Like other violent labor disputes during this period,
it resulted in a significant erosion of workers’ rights.
AFTER A MAJOR EARTHQUAKE, a multitude of aftershocks of varying intensity will continue to rock the affected area for weeks, months, or even years to come, causing more damage, more anxiety, and an immense weariness. The huge, devastating shock of the First World War was over, but its aftereffects would not cease to rumble on. While the Western world was no longer at war, it had definitely not found a state of peace. The brutalization and destabilization associated with the greatest armed conflict the world had ever seen was continuing to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people—so much so that one could argue that the conflict was continuing, albeit on internal fronts. The social order had been rocked to its foundations, and the economic situation varied from apparently robust in the case of the United States to straitened and tense in the case of France and Britain and desperate in the case of Germany and, even more so, the Soviet Republic. It was not a time of peace but simply a cessation of organized warfare.
Even before the war, the Russian economist Ivan Bloch had argued forcefully that the kind of industrialized conflict that was to be expected if major economies engaged one another on the battlefield would not be won by anyone. It would be a war not of armies but of economic systems, and it would be decided only by which economy would be forced to its knees first. More troublingly, he had also predicted that even for the winners victory would come at a crippling price, and in the end there would be only losers.
The early 1920s showed how accurate this analysis had been. Even for the wealthiest and most triumphant of the victors, the United States, the War entailed a vortex of social change and civil unrest that proved almost impossible to control—particularly as one ineffectual president, the ailing Woodrow Wilson, was succeeded by another one, Warren G. Harding, who freely admitted that the business of governing was far too involved and complicated for a man of his intellectual capacities.
At a moment when the United States badly needed firm and wise piloting during its transition from war to peace, from a predominantly rural economy to a predominantly urban and industrial economy, and from a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society to an ethnically and religiously much more diverse one, this stewardship was lacking. As the war economy wound down, large sectors of the economy, particularly in agriculture, were struggling to cope with changing patterns of demand, while in industry there were new conflicts not only between the unions and the bosses but also between the workers themselves.
In Europe the situation was considerably worse and significantly less stable. To the orthodox dreamers on the left and the right, these conflicts were nothing but the birth pangs of a new order that would sweep away the sullied and dirty compromises of bourgeois democracy. But if the world revolution dreamed up by communist theoreticians had not followed from the war, neither had a reestablishment of the old order and its imagined firm sense of purpose and destiny. There was fighting everywhere, bitterness, and violence against or by the state. The Western world was seeking a new order.
·1922·
Renaissance in Harlem
I, too, am America.
—Langston Hughes, “I, Too,” 1924
NINETEEN TWENTY-TWO WAS A YEAR OF BEGINNINGS AND REBIRTHS. It was a good year for modernist literature, with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris and the great poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot in London, of Upton Sinclair’s great American satire Babbitt and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
On May 18 a group of men had made modernist history simply by having dinner together at the Majestic Hotel in Paris. The diners were Marcel Proust, James Joyce, the great choreographer and impresario Sergei Diaghilev, composers Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, and critic Clive Bell. The men had found nothing interesting to say to one another, however. Joyce came late and Proust even later, at half past two in the morning, by which time the Joyce was snoring peacefully in his chair. Stravinsky was heard to say that he detested Beethoven, and eventually Joyce woke up and admitted to Proust that he had never read any of his works. Proust admitted he had never read Joyce, either.
Across the Atlantic, 1922 marked another kind of beginning: that of a new culture, the Harlem Renaissance. Part cultural blossoming, part political movement, part artistic statement, and part social phenomenon, the Harlem Renaissance—which owed its name to the bustling, exhilarating, and hopeful place that had given birth to it—was a truly historic moment, the awakening of a whole population to an identity that was an expression of their own bitter experiences and stubborn hopes.
In moments of excitement and uncertainty, works of art can take on great importance. This had been the case a year earlier, in 1921, when the magazine Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had launched one of America’s most brilliant literary careers with the publication of nineteen-year-old Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.1
The sense of deathless history, of a breath flowing through the centuries of what had been a brutally disrupted past for most African American families, touched a chord with many of Hughes’s readers. Here was a new way of seeing history and the present.
The Afro-American Realty Company
MANY FACTORS SHAPE an extraordinary historical moment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Harlem had been run down and all but derelict, victim of a property boom gone bust. Speculators had built apartments for middle-class families here, mostly white, but there had been too much construction, and the supply of housing had far outstripped demand. In 1908 a black real estate developer, Philip Payton, and his Afro-American Realty Company, had begun to buy or lease empty buildings and to rent them out to black tenants who had arrived in New York as part of the beginning of the mass migration northward of African Americans from the Deep South. They had responded to the need for labor in factories emptied of white Americans who had enlisted for the war, as well as to their urge to escape the bludgeoning daily racism of life in the Jim Crow states. They came mainly from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and from the British West Indies.
New hope: Street scene in Harlem.
The influx of tens of thousands of black tenants around the beginning of the twentieth century had the predictable consequence of causing many of the remaining whites to leave. Between 1920 and 1930, some 120,000 white Harlem inhabitants went elsewhere and 90,000 blacks moved to the area. In 1920, 32 percent of the people living in the neighborhood were African American; ten years later, this proportion had risen to 70 percent. The wealthiest blacks lived on West 139th St., dubbed “Strivers’ Row,” a “block of tan brick houses, flanked by rows of trees . . . , designed in the early twentieth century by [Beaux Arts architect] Stanford White, at the time when Harlem was . . . German.”2
It was the right moment for a new beginning. The Harlem Renaissance would not have been possible without the second and third postslavery generations, ready to rediscover their own cultural identity and to find a voice, or without the surge in black self-awareness and self-confidence engendered by the valor of black soldiers in the First World War. Another factor helped in this extraordinary cultural awakening: the adventurous cultural climate created by Prohibition.
By 1920 the cultural alchemy that was to become the Harlem Renaissa
nce had created a bubbling, heady brew of gifted young people—poets, writers, singers, musicians, artists—seeking a new voice for themselves. They met and mingled in Harlem’s businesses and jazz clubs (which were overwhelmingly owned by whites) and produced a vibrant array of literary and political magazines.
Journals for a Better World
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PUBLICATION of the Harlem Renaissance was The Crisis. It was the official journal of the NAACP—“the moral and political conscience of the nation on the issue of institutional racism”—and still exists today.3 It had been founded in 1910 by the formidable writer, civil rights activist, and visionary W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of trailblazing sociological essays and sketches, and the leading black intellectual of his day.4
After obtaining a bachelor’s degree at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Du Bois had gone on to get a second bachelor’s degree, this one in history, at Harvard, where he came under the influence of the legendary philosopher William James. After further study in Berlin and wide travel in Europe, Du Bois received a doctorate from Harvard, the first African American to do so. His success provoked continuing attempts to slap him down: in 1923, in a front-page editorial, a Dallas newspaper declared of the fifty-five-year-old Du Bois: “The arrogant, ebony-head, thick-lipped, kinky-haired Negro ‘educator’ must be put in his place and made to stay there.”5
Angered but not deterred by such outbursts of hostility, Du Bois chose to build a better future for blacks by attaining social acceptance through education. Even so, his magazine The Crisis was considered sufficiently dangerous that in 1920 a Mississippi judge had jailed a black minister for selling copies of it. Du Bois supported the idea of the “talented tenth,” an elite group of liberally educated and socially respectable blacks who would lead their race forward to greater sociopolitical confidence, and he used The Crisis to present the views of NAACP leaders, including writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, and to promote younger black poets and intellectuals.