On the home front, the federal government took charge of the economy, allocating resources to war-related production, regulating its management, and taking direct control of communications and railroad systems. With the demand for labor soaring and immigration from Europe sharply curtailed by the war, industrial employers recruited new workers from the rural South, the Southwest, and Mexico. By the end of the war, about 500,000 African Americans, even more southern whites, and tens of thousands of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants had moved north to industrial cities.
Soaring prices and the push for breakneck war production made 1917 the most strike-torn year in U.S. history to that date, with nearly 4,500 walkouts by over 1.2 million workers. The next year saw fewer strikes (3,353), but they involved just as many people. Workers knew that labor was scarce, that the government encouraged quick concessions to strikers in war industries, and that the owners of these industries were making windfall profits. They also figured that this “war to make the world safe for democracy” should extend democracy to workplaces. In that spirit, many workers struck for the eight-hour day. As one of them later recalled, she and her shopmates in a Philadelphia hosiery mill saw no contradiction between supporting the war effort and asserting themselves through work stoppages. When local boys went off to the Army, she remembered, “We laid down our tools and paraded with our boys to the railroad station, and ate our lunch when they were gone, and took the afternoon off to show our patriotism.”
Mobilizing industry, the government also mobilized public opinion in behalf of the war and backed up persuasion with repression. The Committee on Public Information flooded the country with prowar press releases, advertisements, posters, movies, and some 75,000 speakers. The Espionage Act of June 1917 and Sedition Act of May 1918 meanwhile empowered the government to censor antiwar newspapers, ban antiwar literature from the U.S. mail, and jail anyone speaking against the war. About 900 people convicted under these laws went to prison; over 8,000 more were convicted of violating draft laws. The U.S. Justice Department coordinated the American Protective League, a businessmen’s group that reported disloyal activity—about 3 million cases by the war’s end. Vigilantes took action as well, with groups like the American Defense Society sending out patrols to break up antiwar gatherings.
Socialist Party leaders immediately condemned Congress’s declaration of war and called for “continuous, active, and public opposition,” a stand SP members ratified by a margin of eight to one. A few thousand left the Party, among them some prominent unionists like the Machinists’ William Johnston and the Typographers’ Max Hayes. In May 1917, Socialists joined with pacifists to launch the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace. Opposing military conscription, defending civil liberties, and organizing against deteriorating labor conditions, it established branches in eighteen states by the end of summer 1917. Its Workmen’s Council mobilized antiwar sentiment in unions. The young Socialist A. Philip Randolph and his comrade Chandler Owen founded the monthly journal The Messenger to promote unionism, socialism, and war opposition among African Americans. In the state and local elections of November 1917, Socialist candidates did well enough for Eugene Debs to declare, “The Socialist party is rising to power . . . growing more rapidly at this hour than ever in its history.”
Antiwar agitation was drawing an increasingly harsh response, however. In early August 1917, the “Green Corn Rebellion”—an open revolt against the draft—erupted in Seminole County, Oklahoma. White, black, and Creek rebels cut telegraph wires, burned bridges, blew up oil pipelines, and declared their plan to march to Washington, D.C., feeding themselves on ripening corn along the way. Oklahoma police arrested 450 people, many of them SP members. At the end of August, a People’s Council convention was banned from Minneapolis, then broken up by troops when it moved to Chicago. The War Department warned that it would suspend contracts at factories where unions endorsed the People’s Council.
Subsequent measures were aimed at the Socialist Party itself. The Postmaster General banned SP publications from the mail. The Attorney General named A. Philip Randolph “the most dangerous Negro in America,” and federal agents ransacked The Messenger’s offices. The Justice Department indicted twenty-seven SP leaders under the Espionage Act; Debs was sentenced to ten years for making an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. Victor Berger was reelected to Congress, then convicted of speaking against the draft, and the House of Representatives refused to seat him. The SP grew in northeastern cities, but heavier losses in rural areas reduced the average monthly membership from about 80,000 in 1917 to 74,500 in 1918.
The most brutal repression fell on the IWW. Wobblies ridiculed fighting for any cause save for industrial freedom, but they did not mobilize against the war or even resist conscription in many cases. Instead, they focused on expanding the One Big Union. IWW members in northwestern lumber camps led a successful strike for the eight-hour day in summer 1917, and organizing drives continued among harvest hands, metal miners, lumber workers, stevedores, and merchant seamen. But the Wobblies’ caution regarding the war provided no protection. On July 12, in Bisbee, Arizona, where the IWW was leading a peaceful strike by copper miners, deputized vigilantes packed more than 1,200 strikers into railroad cattle cars, deported them to New Mexico, and left them in the middle of the desert. That same month, Frank Little went to Butte, Montana, where martial law had been declared when copper miners went on strike. On August 1, masked vigilantes seized Little, tied him to a automobile, dragged him to a railroad bridge, and hanged him. On September 5, 1917, federal agents raided Wobbly offices and homes in sixty-four cities. The Justice Department convicted 184 IWW leaders of conspiring to obstruct the war effort. To quote Big Bill Haywood, who was sentenced to twenty years, “The Justice Department had shook the organization as a bulldog shakes an empty sack.”
The AFL meanwhile flourished as Gompers campaigned to secure union support for the war, labor participation in wartime industries, and government support for union organizing. The Federation’s Executive Council rejected his proposal that it repudiate strikes for the duration of the war. Otherwise his campaign generally met with success. He set up the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, which used funds from the Committee on Public Information to saturate the AFL with patriotic literature and organize chapters of unionists who pledged to support the war. Gompers also chaired the Labor Committee of the Council of National Defense, recommended unionists for government positions, and persuaded President Wilson to give labor equal representation with employers on the War Labor Board. The Board’s Code of Principles endorsed the eight-hour day, equal pay for men and women doing equal work, the right to a living wage, and the right to join a union.
During 1918, AFL membership rose by almost 40 percent, to 3.3 million. The United Mine Workers had close to 500,000 members (over 80 percent of all coal miners); the Carpenters and Machinists had more than 330,000 each. By 1919, more than 1.8 million railroad workers belonged to AFL affiliates or the independent brotherhoods. Many of the new union members came from sectors of the work force that the AFL and the railroad brotherhoods had declined to organize in the past.
Some were women. While the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electrical Railway Employees protested the hiring of streetcar “conductorettes,” the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, which had few female members before the war, recruited some 35,000 women in 1917–18. By summer 1918, even the Machinists had enrolled 12,500 women, who made up about 5 percent of the membership.
The “new immigrants” from eastern and southern Europe joined unions in unprecedented numbers. Chicago meatpacking workers—primarily Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks—poured into the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butcher Workmen, which grew from 7,300 members in 1916 to nearly 63,000 by the end of the war. In March 1918, federal mediation brought pay increases and union recognition to the packinghouses. Inspired by this advance, AFL headquarters pulled together a committee of twenty-four national unions to organize the steel i
ndustry, where European immigrants also predominated.
Workers of color were not so welcome. The AFL still excluded anyone of Asian descent. Unions in meatpacking and steel signed up Latinos, but in the Southwest, where their numbers were greatest, most AFL affiliates required that Spanish-speaking members be citizens and assigned them to segregated locals. For African Americans, AFL unionism could mean segregation, wholesale exclusion, or worse. In the pulp and paper mills of Bogalusa, Louisiana, the Carpenters recruited black and white workers into separate locals; in Key West, Florida, the union refused to admit black carpenters and thus prevented their employment on an Army construction project. AFL organizers in steel signed up black workers in Cleveland and Wheeling but not in Pittsburgh, where white unionists were so hostile that the black community came to see them as the main obstacle to its advancement. The atmosphere was even more hateful in East St. Louis, Illinois. In May 1917, its central labor council vowed to tackle the “growing menace” of black migration to the city. When two policemen were killed in a gunfight in a black neighborhood on July 1, white workers mustered in union halls for a twoday rampage against African Americans. At least thirty-nine people were killed, many more burned out of their homes, and some 6,000 black residents fled the city.
THE WAR’S AFTERMATH
When the Great War ended on November 11, 1918, total union membership—in AFL affiliates, railroad brotherhoods, and other unions—topped 4 million. A steelworker in Canton, Ohio, captured the spirit of the times: “The justice of the demand for a fairer share has been established. It is not going to be given up now that the war has ended.” Organizing continued full speed. By 1920, AFL membership stood at nearly 4.1 million, and total union membership exceeded 5 million. Almost 20 percent of industrial workers belonged to a union.
The years 1919–22 saw more than 10,000 strikes involving over 8 million workers—more than 4 million in 1919 alone, a fifth of the labor force outside domestic work. Strikes rolled through California citrus fields, southern cotton mills, Paterson’s silk mills, New England telephone companies, Bogalusa’s pulp and paper mills, El Paso laundries, Arizona cotton fields, Tampa cigar factories, even the Boston police force. In February 1919, a general strike in Seattle mobilized 100,000 workers, including AFL members, independent unions of Japanese butchers, railroad workers and others, and unorganized workers. They ran Seattle for five entirely peaceful days, calling off the strike when troops dispatched to “restore order” were nearing the city.
Workers in U.S. colonies took militant action as well. Against the advice of Samuel Gompers, Puerto Rico’s Federación Libre de Trabajadores had staged wartime strikes in the sugar and tobacco industries. Veteran labor radical Luisa Capetillo had led a strike by 30,000 agricultural laborers on the eastern side of the island in 1918. In 1919, the FLT’s Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (PSP) debated independence but did not endorse it, deciding instead to return to the question once “the social democracy of labor” had been achieved. In the 1920 elections, the PSP won nearly a third of the popular vote. In the Philippines, the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF) supported its Nationalist Party allies with a no-strike pledge in 1919. Even so, the COF’s Domingo Simeon was implicated in a fatal bombing during a 1920 strike against the Manila Electric and Railway Company and sentenced to life in prison. The situation in Hawaii was more complicated. In January 1920, Filipino and Japanese unions on Oahu led a strike by more than 8,000 field hands—70 percent of the sugar plantation workforce. The planters used divide-and-conquer tactics to break the strike. They settled with Filipino leaders; held out against the Japanese Federation, charging that it was out to “Japanise” Hawaii; and hired Koreans, Portuguese, and native Hawaiians to replace Japanese strikers, who gave up after six months.
Stateside labor activism expanded its political dimensions. Strikers demanded the release of political prisoners, public takeovers of open shop industries, and labor participation in the European peace talks. Unions looked to political action. In January 1919, New York unions formed the American Labor Party, calling for restoration of civil rights and “democratic control of industry and commerce, by those who work.” By 1920, AFL unions and the railroad brotherhoods backed twenty-three state labor parties, which merged into the Farmer-Labor Party that July.
Political realignment rippled through radical labor as well. Socialists who supported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia broke away from the SP in September 1919 and formed two new revolutionary parties—the Communist Party (mostly immigrants) and the Communist Labor Party (mainly native-born activists). In 1923, they merged with other pro-Bolshevik factions to found the Workers’ Party of America, later known as the Communist Party USA. Many Wobblies joined the new communist movement, Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn among them.
Racial conflicts divided workers and unions. In the summer of 1919, race riots erupted in cities and towns across the country, with African Americans fighting off assaults on their communities. A five-day riot in Chicago halted cross-racial organizing in the packinghouses.
Radicalism and racial pride surged among black workers. Cyril Briggs and Richard Moore left the SP in 1919 to found the African Black Brotherhood, dedicated to socialism and black liberation; by 1923, the Brotherhood had 7,000 members, including a chapter of West Virginia coal miners. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) won a gigantic following. Founded in 1914 in Jamaica to promote black pride and power, the UNIA had half a million U.S. members by 1921. Inside the AFL, black unionists attacked the failure to press affiliates on their color bars. At the Federation’s 1920 convention, David Grange of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union shouted from the floor, “It did not offend the dignity of any man to send the Negro into the firing lines in France.”
Repression of radicals only increased after the war ended. The Justice Department established a Radical Division—headed by young J. Edgar Hoover—to compile dossiers on subversives. On the night of January 2, 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer deployed federal agents in seventy cities across the country to arrest and detain 10,000 people identified in Department files as aliens and Communists. About 500 were deported; the rest turned out to be citizens, or immigrants without radical ties. State governments joined the hunt for subversives. New York’s Lusk Committee began to investigate “un-American” activities in 1919; it was the first of many such initiatives. By 1921, thirty-two states outlawed “criminal syndicalism”—advocating illegal labor tactics, distributing literature that encouraged them, or belonging to an organization that endorsed them. In 1923, California sent 164 Wobblies and Communists to prison. Massachusetts charged Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants active in Boston anarchist circles, with a double murder during a payroll robbery; they were convicted in July 1921, despite sturdy alibis, and finally executed August 23, 1927.
Vigilante attacks on radicals also continued. On November 11, 1919, an American Legion contingent attacked the IWW office in Centralia, Washington; one legionnaire was killed and all of the Wobblies defending the office arrested. Among them was the lumberjack Wesley Everest, just back from the war and still wearing his Army uniform. That night, the town’s jail turned him over to a group of “upstanding citizens” who castrated and hanged him and riddled his corpse with bullets. Six other men who defended the IWW office that day got prison sentences of twenty-five to fifty years.
Vigilantes targeted interracial unionism too, whether or not the IWW was involved. In Bogalusa, two AFL unions—the Carpenters and the International Timber Workers—united black and white workers to strike the Great Southern Lumber Company in 1919. The company organized and armed a Self-Preservation and Loyalty League to harass the strikers. On November 22, 1919, League members opened fire on Sol Dacus, the strike’s most vocal black leader, killing him and four white workers who had come to his aid.
Racism even tainted the final victory of the women’s suffrage movement. By 1917, both major parties endorsed votes for women
, who had already been enfranchised by eleven states. With its two million members—from wage workers and housewives to professionals and socialites—the National American Woman Suffrage Association was one of the largest women’s networks in the country. In January 1918, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the Nineteenth Amendment for woman suffrage; after several defeats, the Senate passed it in June 1919. Ratification came down to a single state—Tennessee—where white suffragists argued that enfranchising educated white women would help to preserve racial segregation, and the state legislature approved the Amendment by one vote. It became law in August 1920.
Attacks on radicals and interracialism heralded a massive assault on all labor activism. After the War Labor Board was dismantled in June 1919, corporate America launched a new campaign for the open shop. The first target was AFL organizing in steel. By mid-1919, the steel drive had signed up about 100,000 workers, a quarter of the industry’s labor force. When the companies began to fire union activists, organizers called a strike for September 22. Within a week, 365,000 men had walked out. U.S. Steel led the counterattack. It mobilized local and state courts and police departments, which deputized company guards and private detectives. Pickets were beaten, arrested, and jailed by the thousands, and twenty strikers were killed. Immigrants came under especially heavy assault. Steel executives described the strikers as ignorant foreigners led by “red radicals,” and the press agreed. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that immigrant strikers were “penetrated with the Bolshevik idea.” The New York Times considered Slavs the most dangerous—“steeped in the doctrines of the class struggle and social overthrow, ignorant and easily misled.” Samuel Gompers tried in vain to persuade his friends in government to impose arbitration. In January 1920, the steel strike and organizing drive collapsed in defeat.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 22