The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America - Hardcover

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Subverting the Organization of Labor

The right of labor to organize without interference, coercion, and intimidation derives from the exercise of the rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, and freedom of the press enumerated in the Constitution of the United States.

La Follette Committee, U.S. Senate, 1939

The man was lying on the ground, defenseless. The policemen stood over him,beating his limp body with long clubs while fellow officers watched. This scene,captured on film, was one among many in South Chicago on Memorial Day 1937. Thebeatings?along with a barrage of tear gas and a hail of bullets?were part ofan unprovoked police attack on workers who were striking against the RepublicSteel Corporation.

Union members and their families and supporters had come that day to picnic andthen to demonstrate before the struck plant. As the strikers and their wives andchildren marched, Chicago police began to advance toward them. "Then suddenly,without apparent warning, there is a terrific roar of pistol shots, and men inthe front ranks of the marchers go down like grass before a scythe," the St.Louis Post Dispatch reported, describing a Paramount newsreel of the eventthat was not released to the public at the time.

"Instantly police charge on the marchers with riot sticks flying. At the sametime tear gas grenades are seen sailing into the mass of demonstrators, andclouds of gas rise over them." The police are "appallingly businesslike" intheir attack; one strikes a marcher "horizontally across the face, using hisclub as he would wield a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on the top of hishead, and still another is whipping him across the back." Ten workers werekilled and ninety or more were wounded that day, in what came to be known as theMemorial Day Massacre. Within weeks, more strikers were killed by police atRepublic Steel plants in Ohio and Michigan.

Two years later, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, then chaired byCongressman Martin Dies, held hearings in Chicago to investigate Communistinfluence in the labor movement. (*Note: The House Committee on Un-AmericanActivities (HCUA) has also been known as the House Un-American ActivitiesCommittee (HUAC) and, after 1969, as the House Internal Security Committee(HISC). We have used the more common designation HUAC throughout.) Theunwarranted police violence against strikers and the hearings of thecongressional investigating committee stand as examples of two facets of thegovernment's attack on labor. The Memorial Day Massacre was the culmination ofsixty years of assaults by the armed forces of the government, a campaignconducted on behalf of employers in their disputes with workers over the rightto representation and the often grievous conditions of work. The Dies Committeehearings were the renewal of an assault by the legislative and executivebranches of the federal government on those within the labor movement who weresaid to harbor forbidden radical visions of America?an assault that would lastanother twenty years.

The Class War Against Labor

Whether they were lumberjacks of the Pacific Northwest; coal miners ofPennsylvania, Illinois, and Colorado; migrant farm laborers of Wheatland,California; or needle trades workers of New York City, their work early in thetwentieth century was grueling and life-threatening. In the textile factories ofLawrence, Massachusetts, "thirty-six out of every hundred of all men and womenwho worked in the mills died before they were twenty-five years of age." At thePressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, one man a day onaverage was killed by the brutalizing pace of a giant, newly designed productionline. To improve their conditions?indeed, to reclaim their humanity?Americanworkers had no option but to act collectively, to unionize.

Success in attaining the right to union representation depended squarely on theefficacy of the workers' primary weapon: the strike. Undercutting strikes meantcondemning workers to the absolute control of employers and to insufferableconditions on the job. Yet that was the practice of government in America fordecades before the turn of the century and for at least three decades afterward."The existing attitude of the courts and government officials," thecongressional Commission on Industrial Relations wrote in 1916, "generally isthat the entire machinery of the State should be put behind the strike breaker."Because that machinery included the various armed forces of the state, which thegovernment was quick to deploy, violent conflict often broke out. In what couldrightfully and literally be called a "class war," the government's alignmentwith one side doomed the other to defeat.

Louisiana timber workers, South Carolina textile workers, West Virginia coalminers, Pittsburgh steel workers, San Francisco dock workers, Minneapolisteamsters, Detroit auto workers, Chicago packinghouse workers were gunned downby local police, state constabularies, National Guardsmen, and federal troops.From 1877, the year of labor's Great Upheaval, when more than one hundredrailway strikers and their supporters were killed by police, state militia, andthe U.S. Army, to 1937, the year of the Memorial Day Massacre, the employers'privileged access to the power of the state was most dramatically evident in theform of military force.

But it was also evident in judicial decisions and legislative enactments."During strikes," the Commission on Industrial Relations said, "innocent men arein many cases arrested without just cause, charged with fictitious crimes, heldunder excessive bail, and treated frequently with unexampled brutality for thepurpose of injuring the strikers and breaking the strike." Employer groups suchas the National Association of Manufacturers had succeeded, the commissionreported, "in preventing the enactment of practically all legislation intendedto improve the conditions or advance the interests of workers." The "economicbias" of the courts in labor disputes was evident in the "long list of statutes,city ordinances, and military orders abridging freedom of speech and press" thathave "almost uniformly been upheld" and in the "injunctions [that] have in manycases inflicted grievous injury upon workmen."

In extreme cases, employers enjoyed more than the privileged access to statepower?they usurped state power. "We unearthed a system of despotic tyrannyreminiscent of Czar-ridden Siberia at its worst," the New York DailyNews wrote of Pennsylvania's coal patches and steel towns in 1925. "We foundpolice brutality and industrial slavery." This assessment was confirmed by theLa Follette Committee of the U.S. Senate a decade later. In company-owned andcompany-controlled towns, workers lived in conditions that approximated"industrial peonage." The police, paid by the companies but "vested with theauthority of the State," were "used to abridge the constitutional rights of freespeech and assembly and freedom of the press," the La Follette Committee added."In times of strike these private armies have often assumed the attitude of theState toward a foreign enemy at war, or the attitude of public police towardcriminals, shooting and killing union people in an effort to compel submissionto the wishes of employers."

In 1935, however, under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the passage of the WagnerAct shifted government away from its uncritical support of industry. Thislegislation guaranteed collective bargaining; barred unfair labor practices thatinterfered with workers' rights; outlawed industrial espionage, yellow-dogcontracts (*Note: Under a yellow-dog contract, workers, in order to be hired,were required to sign a statement swearing that they would not join a union.After a Supreme Court decision in 1917 legalized yellow-dog contracts, allstrikes by employees who had...