by Paul Ortiz
THE FORGOTTEN NEW DEAL
One Saturday morning in August 1933, hundreds of African American women workers at the Charleston (South Carolina) Bagging and Manufacturing Company organized an occupation strike that completely shut down their textile bagging factory, idling eight hundred workers. The strike began on August 26, at 7 a.m. in the weaving room, where 130 women worked. “After the work had ceased there,” the Charleston News and Courier reported, “the agitators went into the spinning room, where a like number of workers had begun their day’s work.” The newspaper alleged that the women workers “threatened violence to those who would not cease work and at this time Samuel E. Stauffer, general manager, ordered the power turned off and the machinery stopped and called the police.”87 When the Charleston police arrived, however, they quickly found themselves on the defensive as the women defended their occupation strike with bobbins and knives. The women formed picket lines and sang improvised spirituals such as “I Ain’t Gonna Work No More” and other, more traditional gospel songs. The Charleston police called for reinforcements. The regional newspapers published stories aimed at robbing the insurgency of any political meaning and invoked insulting Hollywood racist stereotypes to denigrate the strikers. For example, the News and Courier claimed that the strike “resembled a jungle scene shown in the motion pictures.”88 Newspapers ran headlines such as “Spirit of Jungle Animates Negroes in Strange Strike at Charleston Bagging Mill.”89
Antilabor media coverage obscured the fact that these women timed their strike to the very moment that representatives of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration and owners of bagging companies across the country were meeting to create new wage and hours guidelines in the bagging industry.90 These guidelines, or codes, fell under the jurisdiction of the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration. The NRA was designed to lift the country out of the Great Depression via industrial recovery; among other things, it provided for minimum wages and maximum hours.91 African American women in Charleston were excluded from giving testimony at the high-level NRA hearings on the wages and working conditions in their industry, which were being held in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, the women fought to make their voices heard through courageous direct action, demanding a minimum wage of twelve dollars a week, exactly the same “blanket wage” recently negotiated in the textile and tobacco industries under the NRA.92 Black women’s fight in Charleston for a uniform minimum wage affirms their roles as pioneers of the resurgence of radical labor activism that birthed industrial unionism as well as paving the way for the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. The African American women at Charleston Bagging and Manufacturing were not merely waging a wildcat strike; they were struggling to expand the scope and scale of the New Deal to their workplaces and communities.93
They were part of what would become a mass movement of African American women across the country calling for federal intervention in the economy. Three days after the bagging strike broke out, domestic workers in nearby Edisto Island began insisting their employers pay the NRA’s minimum industrial wage of thirty cents an hour, despite the fact that domestic workers were excluded from the codes. One African American woman reportedly told a prospective employer: “You ain’t gonna git a cook less you pay her thirty cents by the hour, no mam! Uncle Sam done set the wage at that and you can’t ride over what he say.”94 African American women in Kingstree, South Carolina, told their bosses that the NRA required them to increase wages, and in rural Williamsburg County, the News and Courier reported, “There are some who have been working for years in the same place who either demand more pay or shorter hours. And from farms come reports that negroes who have been content to work for a dollar a day cording wood and other jobs now openly state they will have their ‘thirty cent a hour like de guv’mint pay.’”95
African American and Latinx women in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Tampa would join their sisters in Charleston in major strikes that challenged the government’s wages and hours codes. In March 1934, Black female laundry and cafeteria workers in Birmingham led wildcat strikes for better wages and working conditions under NRA code agreements.96 In the wake of the Birmingham upheavals, Black women domestic workers in New Hope, Alabama, launched the first recorded strike in the city’s history. Like their counterparts in Edisto, the New Hope women demanded a minimum wage scale that would cover all domestic workers.97 Black and white women farmworkers at Seabrook Farms in New Jersey stood up to tear gas and police beatings to demand NRA wages in their industry.98
Black women organizers expanded the normal scope of labor politics by demanding that their unions confront racism and anti-Black violence. Moranda Smith, a union leader at the R. J. Reynolds plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a member of the Communist Party, told the national convention of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers, “We want to stop lynching in the South. We want people to walk the picket lines free and unafraid and know that they are working for their freedom and their liberty.”99
The meaning of the New Deal was at stake. At the time of the Charleston Bagging and Manufacturing Company strike, white South Carolinians were hotly debating the causes of the Great Depression. State senator J. C. Long told a large Charleston gathering, “The depression was caused, in the final analysis, by the lack of people spending money”; he argued for the need to raise taxes in order to create public works projects.100 Full-page newspaper advertisements criticized the low wages and prices that seemed to be dragging the country deeper into depression. Charleston businesses promised to raise wages. On the day of the strike by bagging workers, the News and Courier ran an ad featuring a white woman lamenting, “I am a stenographer. I have been making only $10.00 a week and had to care for my mother and younger brother.”101 The message of the ad, endorsed by twenty-one major Charleston businesses, seemed to be that low wages were a scourge on society.
Black women workers at Charleston Bagging and Manufacturing were working fifty-four-hour weeks and making an average of eight dollars a week. They knew that they were being excluded from the debate when the News and Courier supported the aspirations of fictitious white female stenographers and ignored the plight of real Black workers. Charleston businesses supported the idea that white workers should enjoy higher wages in order to get the economy going again, but they rejected similar aspirations among Black workers. The News and Courier took a hectoring tone when it wrote, “As usual they [Black workers] have interpreted the news [of the NRA codes] to suit themselves, and have managed to get hold of a mass of misinformation.”102 The paper also quoted supposed economic experts in the South who argued that if the federal government raised industrial wages, then Black farmworkers would refuse to work for white farmers.103
The one-sided debate in the press reveals the ways that the New Deal marginalized and excluded many workers in the name of economic progress.104 Workers were aware of these exclusions. In the fall of 1933, African Americans in Birmingham organized the Forgotten Workers of America (FWA), whose purpose was to democratize Franklin Roosevelt’s industrial policies. “Our name comes from President Roosevelt’s phrase, ‘the forgotten man,’” James “Doc” Mason, an FWA leader, wryly noted. “There are four types of workers the National Recovery Administration forgot,” Mason continued. “They are the domestic, agricultural, educational and governmental employees. What we are trying to do is to obtain for these workers’ recognition, better working conditions, and higher wages.”105 By the spring of 1934, the FWA had organized six local chapters.
The Charleston bagging workers strike was defeated by police force. Bobbins were no match for guns, and by the evening of Saturday, August 26, Charleston police had driven the women out of the factory. From this point onward, police deployed in force whenever African Americans tried to picket or even gather near the plant.106 The city also suppressed the annual Colored Labor Day march. The excuse was “possible communistic influences”—but Black workers didn’t need Marxists to explain the la
bor theory of value to them.107 With roots in the nineteenth century, Colored Labor Day was an event where African American unionists from Charleston and the Sea Islands gathered to celebrate the role their labor had played in building the nation.108 A day after the elimination of Colored Labor Day, the News and Courier wrote, “Charleston celebrated with the nation yesterday the first Labor day under the new deal, and celebrated it quietly.”109 Yet it was a quiet only achieved by police suppression. The following week, the city of Charleston sponsored a gala parade celebrating the achievements of the National Recovery Administration.110 African Americans were not invited. Racial capitalists in Charleston helped transform the New Deal into a White Deal.
Throughout the nation, Latinx workers were at the forefront of the birth of industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) at its inception in 1935. The CIO organized workers in steel, rubber, food processing, textiles, and other major industries. The historian Vicki L. Ruiz found that Mexican American cannery workers in the Southwest drew on strong kinship networks in their communities to create a vibrant, democratic unionism in their workplaces from the Great Depression into the 1940s.111 Latinx and African American workers were organizers and leaders in Communist-led unions such as the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers; the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers; the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers; and many others. Building on the work of Luisa Capetillo, her Latina predecessor in Florida, Luisa Moreno, a native Guatemalan, became one of the nation’s most effective organizers. She helped tobacco workers, pecan shellers, and farmworkers build new unions across the country.112 Moreno’s Marxist background, her antiracism, and her commitment to building working-class power made her a tremendous force for social justice—workers composed ballads in her honor. Facing deportation hearings in 1949, Moreno, a regional director of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers in California, urged her CIO comrades to carry the movement forward: “From New York to Florida, from Florida to Texas and California, in several states in many cities and towns I became a part of the struggle to strengthen old AFL locals, to build and extend CIO locals—for better working conditions, for more pay, for improvements in the deplorable conditions of women workers, Negro workers, Mexican workers.”113
Rank-and-file activists built their unions member by member, sacrifice by sacrifice. Leon Alexander, a coal miner and organizer for the United Mine Workers in Alabama’s coal fields, inherited his union lineage from his father, who had been blacklisted along with all of his African American comrades in the bloody 1920 Alabama coal strike. Alexander credited the rise of the CIO to years of bitter African American struggles in Alabama’s coal pits: “In Alabama Black folks was in the forefront of it, because the first ones that was organizing was only Blacks. Whites didn’t have anything to do with it. They was afraid of being branded as a ‘nigger lover’ that’s what they posted, put up posters all around, those white people who finally decided to help us organize District Twenty, they plastered up posters saying that they were nigger lovers.”114 Alexander credited a UMW organizer, Walter Jones, with convincing white workers to join the union: “He had a saying that when the company’s kicking ass they don’t look to see whether the ass is Black or white they just started kicking ass and if it happen to be a white ass he get kicked just like the Black one, and he convinced them and showed them that.”
Max Guzmán was a leader of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in Chicago. He began working at the Republic Steel Corporation in 1927. A decade later, Guzmán was one of hundreds of Mexican American factory operatives who formed the core of the Little Steel Strike in the spring of 1937. Historians have noted the important contribution of these workers: “According to an early president of the SWOC local at Inland, Mexican workers were crucial to the success of the picket lines at East Chicago’s steel plants, contributing at times three-fourths of the demonstrators.”115 Guzmán carried an American flag during an outdoor SWOC mass meeting on May 30, 1937, that was attacked by Chicago police. He was brutally beaten by the police, who murdered ten workers during the Memorial Day Massacre.116 The police arrested Guzmán, accused him of being a Communist, and threatened to deport him to Mexico “any time they felt like it.”117 Other courageous workers like Leon Alexander and Max Guzmán were integral to subsequent union victories in basic manufacturing in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Memphis.
Skillfully administered union contracts had the potential of bringing more equity onto the shop floor by breaking down generations of color bars, and abolishing the dual wage system.118 However, the fight to overcome entrenched racism in unionized workplaces was an ongoing struggle made more complicated by generations of inequality. Leroy Boyd became an effective union shop steward in his cotton compress plant in Memphis in the 1940s. His first challenge, however, was in convincing white operatives to stay in the union:
Well, at one time we had a little problem there with the white [workers]. The whites didn’t want to be in the same union. The white wants to get more [pay] than the black. So you had a problem with the white and black sticking together. So as times went on and you got good union representatives, they point out to them, you know, at meetings that your only survival is to everybody unite together. There was a game that the company play is to play the white against the black and the black against the white. So they worked there. We had whites in the shop. In some of the shops we had whites try to get out of the union. Wanted to form another union. They didn’t want to be in a union with Negroes.119
Interracial solidarity was in constant peril. Facing white intransigence in the early 1940s, an organizer in Alabama, Earl Brown, had to go outside the UMW contract and threaten a wildcat strike of fellow African American miners in order to equalize job opportunities in District 20’s coal mines.120 A United Auto Workers’ representative, Ralph Thompson, recalled that into the 1970s, white unionists in Memphis’s International Harvester Company plant silently cooperated with management—even to the point of sabotaging machinery and putting lives in jeopardy—in order to keep African American workers out of the skilled and higher-paying jobs.121
THE UNFULFILLED NEW DEAL
Industrial unions continued to make gains during World War II. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids union threatened a mass march on Washington, DC, to protest employment discrimination in the nation’s defense industries. Franklin Roosevelt responded by issuing an executive order to establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC).122 In the two-year period following World War II, approximately five million workers waged massive strikes—including several general strikes—which encouraged some to believe that a new day was dawning for the American working class as a whole.123
It was not to be. Capitalist powers regrouped and struck a number of counterblows, including the consolidation of its power in the Sunbelt against further unionization. The capstone antilabor achievement of the postwar period was Congress’s passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which severely undermined the power of labor unions to strike and enshrined the right of the federal government to intervene on the side of employers during labor disputes.124 Equally important were federal and state government programs that enforced a steady supply of workers from other countries who lacked the power—or legal right—to bargain collectively with their employers. On a national level, agricultural employers used the Bracero Program, the federal program instituted to provide low-cost Mexican labor to agribusiness, to replace “native” US workers with workers from Mexico. The historian Rodolfo Acuña noted that “unionization [in agriculture] was futile while the Bracero Program remained.”125
Organized labor also played a role in its own slow demise. As the Cold War gathered momentum, the CIO began purging left-led unions like Moranda Smith’s and Leroy Boyd’s Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers. Left-wing organizers such as Luisa Moreno were deported. The historian Michael Honey writes, “By 1949,
any union with antiracist policies was at risk within the southern CIO.”126 The energy that labor needed to consolidate its fragile gains and to defeat Jim (and Juan) Crow was wasted in fighting a Cold War that enriched the same employers’ organizations that worked assiduously to keep workers as powerless as possible. The continuing weakness of the working class in the Sunbelt made the region attractive to corporations. Often these corporations used the South as their first step to relocating permanently outside the United States.127 The republic of cheap labor was the Achilles’ heel of American democracy.
African American and Latinx workers’ insurgencies helped set the stage for the rise of industrial unionism and the CIO. It was not coincidental that Congress ensured that millions of Black and Latinx workers were excluded from New Deal social legislation in order to placate business interests from South Carolina to California who fought to maintain white business supremacy.128 Agricultural workers and domestic workers—two of the largest categories of Black and Brown workers—were barred from the core New Deal protections such as Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to organize. These exclusions in turn exacerbated Black and Latinx poverty, and drove deeper wedges between sectors of the US working class to create cleavages that would never be resolved. Birmingham’s Forgotten Workers of America understood at the outset that the New Deal fell grievously short of addressing the fundamental issues raised by working-class women and men of color in canneries, bagging plants, agriculture, and other sectors.