Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  The fall of 1919 saw three landmark labor strikes, each of which was seized upon by the government, business interests, and the press as evidence of a radical conspiracy in the labor movement, thereby adding further fuel to the already hotly blazing red scare.

  The first strike involved a most unlikely group of employees. For some time, members of the Boston police force had been discontented with their working conditions, long hours, and inadequate pay. In the spring, they were given a meager raise, but their other two issues remained unaddressed.

  In June, when the Boston Social Club, a police officers’ association, announced plans to unionize and affiliate with the American Federation of Labor, they were merely following the same course of action as police in more than three dozen other American cities, including Chattanooga, Los Angeles, Topeka, Tulsa, and Washington, D.C. But the Boston police commissioner and former mayor, Edwin U. Curtis, forbade such a move, saying that “a police officer cannot consistently belong to a union and perform his sworn duty.”26 Undaunted, BSC leaders defied Curtis and asked the AFL for a charter, which was granted on August 15. Less than two weeks later, Curtis tried nineteen BSC officials for violating orders; they were found guilty and given suspended sentences.

  In an attempt to find a middle ground, a citizens’ committee appointed by Boston’s mayor, Andrew J. Peters, declared that the police should not affiliate with the AFL but were free to form an independent union of their own. Commissioner Curtis’s response was to reverse his prior ruling and dismiss the nineteen convicted officers from the force on September 8. The Boston Social Club called an emergency meeting and, by a vote of 1,134–2, approved a strike for the following evening. As local newspapers condemned the decision, business owners recruited a volunteer police force from among their employees, Harvard University students, and former servicemen and American Legionnaires.

  But when 1,117 of Boston’s 1,544 officers walked off the job at 5:45 p.m. on Tuesday, September 9, the volunteer force, working together with the non-striking policemen, were overwhelmed, as bands of toughs roamed the city, smashing shopwindows, looting, roughing up private citizens, and holding public dice games. At midnight, a contingent of servicemen from the Boston Navy Yard was called in to maintain order.

  The Boston papers wasted no time in labeling the strike a radical conspiracy. The Herald decried the “Bolshevist nightmare,” while the News Bureau called the strike an “attempt at sovietizing Boston.” The Evening Transcript published photographs of looted stores, comparing the mayhem to the Russian Revolution and praising the volunteer police for keeping “the State’s collective will supreme over Bolshevism.”27

  Although Mayor Peters called out five thousand soldiers of the State Guard to protect the city, the night of September 10 was worse than the previous one. Riots broke out at a number of places, and there were several deaths, but by the morning of Thursday the eleventh, the State Guard and volunteer police force had managed to get the situation under control.

  In Washington, the mood was decidedly apprehensive. The Boston Evening Transcript reported that lawmakers were “giving close attention to the Boston police strike … One senator said that … if the police should win the patrolmen of other cities would immediately attempt to affiliate with labor organizations.”28 On September 11, President Wilson, who was barnstorming the country to drum up support for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, issued a statement calling the strike “a crime against civilization.” That same day, the Democratic senator Henry L. Myers of Montana took the floor of the Senate to denounce the “growing unrest throughout the country” and predict that “unless some branch of the Government stops this tendency, there will be no need of holding an election in 1920 [because] a Soviet Government will have been organized by that time.”29

  Despite the generally acknowledged conservative political leanings of law-enforcement officers, newspapers nationwide agreed that the Boston police strike constituted an outbreak of revolution. “Lenine [sic] and Trotsky are on their way in the United States,” cried The Wall Street Journal, while in Philadelphia the Evening Public Ledger declared, “Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a specter … If [the nation] ever was vague in its conception of the Bolshevik horror its vision is clean-cut now.”30

  Mayor Peters, a Democrat, suggested arbitration to settle the strike, but Police Commissioner Curtis and Massachusetts’s governor, Calvin Coolidge, both Republicans, refused. “The men are deserters,” said Coolidge. “This is not a strike. These men were public officials. We can not think of arbitrating the government or the form of law.”31

  On September 12, the head of the AFL, Samuel Gompers, urged the strikers to put their faith in mediation and return to work. The Boston Social Club voted unanimously to follow Gompers’s suggestion, but the following day Curtis fired the striking officers and announced that a new police force would be formed.

  In a September 14 telegram to Gompers, Governor Coolidge declared unequivocally, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,”32 a phrase that, as he later wrote, “caught the attention of the nation,” catapulting him to the 1920 Republican vice presidential nomination, and ultimately, with the death of Warren Harding, the presidency.33

  Meanwhile, the Bureau of Investigation’s assistant director, Frank Burke, wired the Boston field office: “Make thorough investigation in police strike situation and ascertain whether radical elements or I.W.W.’s are in any way responsible for situation.”34 In their reports, BI agents offered some generalized accusations about radical involvement but could come up with nothing specific linking any radical individuals or organizations to the strike.†

  Nevertheless, the BI kept supposed radical instigators under surveillance and investigation after the strike ended.

  The Boston police strike was broken, and even though the striking officers had demanded nothing more radical than shorter hours and better working conditions, the perception of a revolutionary uprising persisted. The New York Times commended Boston for “giving Bolshevism a salutary lesson,” while the Boston News Bureau expressed relief over the defeat of the “attempt at sovietizing Boston.”35

  • • •

  A week after the police strike ended, a second momentous strike began when more than 275,000 steelworkers throughout the country walked off the job on September 22. Steel was the watershed industry in the battle between capital and labor; the business community feared that if steel became unionized, the trend would quickly spread to the rest of the mass-production sector.

  As with all heavy industry, the backbone of steel manufacturing was immigrant labor. Wages were low, working conditions perilous, and hours inhumanely long—the average workweek was close to seventy hours, and many steelworkers labored twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

  In August 1918, a meeting of twenty-four AFL unions in Chicago formed the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, with Gompers as honorary chairman. In June 1919, the committee wrote to the board chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, Judge Elbert H. Gary, proposing a conference to discuss industry conditions and the plight of steelworkers. When Gary failed to answer, the committee sent a strike ballot to local unions, and they unanimously approved it. On August 21, the committee announced twelve demands that would be made, including the right to collective bargaining, an eight-hour day and six-day week, the abolition of twenty-four-hour shifts and company unions, increased wages, and double pay for overtime, Sundays, and holidays.

  The committee then asked Judge Gary for an arbitration conference to address their differences. He responded, “As heretofore publicly stated and repeated, our corporation and subsidiaries, although they do not combat labor unions as such, decline to discuss business with them. The corporation and its subsidiaries are opposed to the ‘closed shop.’ They stand for the ‘open shop.’ ” Refusing to meet, Gary asserted, “In wage rates, living and working conditions, conservation for life and health,
care and comfort in times of sickness or old age, and providing facilities for the general welfare and happiness of employees and their families, the corporation and subsidiaries have endeavored to occupy a leading and advanced position amongst employers.”36

  In an effort to head off a steel strike, President Wilson, in his August 31 Labor Day message, called on organized labor to join the government in combating radicalism, in exchange for which he vowed to call a conference to discuss “fundamental means of bettering the whole relationship of capital and labor.”37 The president’s promise apparently carried little weight, for on September 10, the second day of the Boston police strike, the AFL announced the impending action against the steel companies. Citing “the intolerable and brutal conditions under which the men are compelled to work,” the AFL named September 22 as the day a nationwide steelworkers’ strike would begin.38

  The timing could not have been worse. The antilabor climate, which had been building since the Seattle general strike, had sharply intensified as a result of the police strike, and when the steelworkers left the job, the mainstream press quickly dragged out the specter of “Bolshevism.” The New York Tribune called the steel strike “another experiment in the way of Bolshevizing American industry,” and the New York World said the strike had “some of the aspects of an economic revolution.” The Wall Street Journal saw only “well-paid, satisfied workers” who were being led astray by “I.W.W. influences … and Russian Bolshevists.” The Chicago Tribune regarded the steel strike as a tipping point: “In the end the decision means a choice between the American system and the Russian—individual liberty or ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ … The American people ought to do some serious thinking in these days forced upon them by radicals and aliens. Is the American system worth keeping? Are American ideas as good as German or Russian?”39

  Steel officials, seeing the opportunity to turn public opinion in their favor, began a disinformation and smear campaign against the strikers. Newspapers carried stories, based entirely on industry sources, claiming that workers were abandoning the strike and returning to their jobs in droves. “CONDITIONS ALMOST NORMAL IN ALL STEEL PLANTS,” read a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times on September 23, the same day union leaders estimated that 284,000 steelworkers were walking the picket lines. “STRIKE CRUMBLING,” proclaimed The Christian Science Monitor a week later, at a time when the number of strikers had actually grown to more than 365,000, almost three-quarters of the industry workforce.

  In Pittsburgh, the epicenter of the steel industry and ground zero of the strike, the city’s seven newspapers functioned as the mouthpiece of the steel companies. As the Interchurch World Movement, an ecumenical group that conducted an independent investigation of the steel strike, later reported, the Pittsburgh press created the perception that “the strikers were foreigners striking in support of demands which would enable them to get control of the steel industry … Undiscriminating readers must have gained the impression that the men on strike in the steel industry were disloyal and un-American by virtue of entertaining some revolutionary economic theory.”40

  Reinforcing the idea that radical beliefs were un-American, the Justice Department, working with local law-enforcement agencies in many communities, arrested hundreds of radical steelworkers, most of whom were noncitizens and therefore deportable under the Alien Act of October 1918. Senator William S. Kenyon of Iowa, chairman of a Senate committee to investigate the strike, announced that it was high time the United States became a “one-language nation.”41

  Strike leaders came under heavy attack, as moderates were overshadowed by firebrands like the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers’ chairman, John Fitzpatrick, who attempted to rally his constituency with remarks like “We are going to socialize the basic industries of the United States,” and “The strike won’t stop until the steel workers become the lawmakers, at Washington, D.C.”42 Critics of the strike cited Fitzpatrick’s rhetoric as proof that the strikers to a man sought to overthrow the government.

  But it was the committee’s secretary-treasurer, William Z. Foster, who became the lightning rod for the anti-union campaign. Foster was a seasoned organizer who had participated in his first strike in 1894, at age thirteen. He was later affiliated with the Socialist Party and the IWW but eventually decided to stay with organized labor and work at “boring from within,” which he characterized as “the policy of militant workers penetrating conservative unions, rather than trying to construct new, ideal, industrial unions on the outside.”43 Returning to the AFL, he worked on campaigns to organize railroad workers and meatpackers before being appointed to the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers. The National Association of Manufacturers, a rabidly anti-union group representing big business, disdainfully referred to him as “the well-known ‘Red’ Foster.”44

  The Bureau of Investigation, which had been keeping tabs on the leaders of the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers for at least six months prior to the strike, discovered a 1911 pamphlet titled Syndicalism, co-authored by Foster, which was filled with revolutionary doctrine and rhetoric. The work stated, among other things, that a syndicalist “considers the State a meddling capitalist institution … He is a radical opponent of ‘law and order’ … He recognizes no rights of the capitalists to their property, and is going to strip them of it, law or no law.”45

  Foster’s words were also turned against the movement as a whole. The pamphlet, which had long been out of print, suddenly began appearing everywhere, and newspapers were quoting from it at length. Despite Foster’s subsequent wartime record of patriotic service as a speaker at Liberty Bond drives and Gompers’s defense of him, Foster’s words and radical philosophy as expressed in the 1911 pamphlet were now depicted as the driving forces behind the steel strike.

  On September 24, the House Military Affairs Committee chairman, Julius Kahn, who during the war had recommended “a few prompt trials and a few quick hangings” as a solution to the problem of dissent,46 now met with Attorney General Palmer to suggest that since there had been a number of steel-strike-related deaths, Foster should be arrested for murder. Moreover, if it could be shown that the killers had been influenced by Foster’s writings, he should also be considered an accessory before the fact.

  In the Senate, Montana’s Henry Myers labeled Foster “an enemy of this Government and of organized society,” and Charles Thomas of Colorado accused him of intending “to keep the revolution going until [he] may become in America even as Lenin and Trotski [sic] have become in Russia.”47

  On October 3, Foster appeared before the Senate committee investigating the steel strike and refused to completely repudiate his earlier writings. “The last piece,” wrote the labor historian David Brody, “had been fitted in place to complete the picture of the steel strike as a dangerous radical movement.”48

  The National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers understood they had been discredited. What the committee did not know was the key part played by the Bureau of Investigation in tarnishing the strike leadership and, by extension, the strike itself. It was the BI that created the fiction of the strike’s being engineered entirely by Foster and the Wobblies, as a way of getting rid of the relatively conservative leadership of the AFL, in order to form “the greatest revolutionary labor movement the world has ever seen.”49 In fact, there was no evidence of radical or revolutionary action on the part of Foster or other committee leaders during the course of the strike, but as Hoover wrote in an internal Justice Department memo in October, the bureau’s smear tactics “quite apparently had a very salutary effect upon the failure of the radical elements in the steel strike.”50

  From the beginning, the steel strike was plagued by violence, due in no small part to collusion between the steel companies and the law-enforcement agencies in striking communities. Indeed, in the great majority of cases, the violence was initiated by the police—sometimes on horseback—as union meetings were
raided, picket lines broken up, and strikers mercilessly beaten.

  In many cases, the companies provoked ethnic and racial strife among strikers. One detective agency hired by the Illinois Steel Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, instructed its employees to “stir up as much bad feeling as you possibly can between the Serbians and Italians.”51 In Donora, Pennsylvania, two men were shot and many more were injured in a battle between striking steelworkers and imported African-American strikebreakers. Predictably, however, press reports made it seem as if the strikers were responsible for the violence and the steel companies were merely defending themselves against the lawlessness of the workers.

  In the process of saving western Pennsylvania from this “revolution,” the authorities gratuitously swept aside civil liberties, as the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly were denied to union members in many localities, most of which had experienced no previous violence as a result of public meetings. In a number of places, the ban on public assembly actually began before the strike had even started.

  The worst violence occurred in Gary, Indiana, where five thousand striking workers battled with strikebreakers and police on October 4. Fifty were injured and another fifty jailed, as eleven companies of state militia were called in but were unable to keep order, despite the support of five hundred special police and three hundred deputies. When Indiana’s governor, James P. Goodrich, appealed for federal troops after two days of hostilities, General Leonard Wood arrived with a thousand soldiers armed with cannons, machine guns, and rifles. The general’s first step was to declare the city under martial law.