A People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn

  Is it not a crnel civilization that allows little hearts and little shoulders to strain under these grown-up responsibilities, while in the same city, a pet cur is jeweled and pampered and aired on a fine lady's velvet lap on die beautiful boulevards?

  The city became a battlefield. On August 10, 1905, the New York Tribune reported that a strike at Federman's bakery on the Lower East Side led to violence when Federman used scab labor to continue producing:

  THE SOCIALIST CHALLENGE

  Strikers or their sympathizers wrecked the bake shop of Philip Federman at No. 183 Orchard Street early last night amid scenes of die most mmultuous excitement. Policemen smashed heads right and left with their nightsticks after two of their number had been roughly dealt with by the mob. .. .

  There were five hundred garment factories in New York. A woman later recalled the conditions of work:

  . .. dangerously broken stairways . .. windows few and so dirty.. .. The wooden floors that were swept once a year. . .. Hardly any other light but the gas jets burning by day and by night. . . the filthy, malodorous lavatory in the dark hall. No fresh drinking water.. . . mice and roaches. . . .

  During die winter months . . . how we suffered from the cold. In the summer we suffered from the heat. . ..

  In these disease-breeding holes we, the youngsters together with the men and women toiled from seventy and eighty hours a week! Saturdays and Sundays included!... A sign would go up on Saturday afternoon: "If you don't come in on Sunday, you need not come in on Monday." ... Children's dreams of a day off shattered. We wept, for after all, we were only children. ...

  At the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, in the winter of 1909, women organized and decided to strike. Soon they were walking the picket line in the cold, knowing they could not win while the other factories were operating. A mass meeting was called of workers in the other shops, and Clara Lemlich, in her teens, an eloquent speaker, still bearing the signs of her recent beating on the picket line, stood up: "I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now!" The meeting went wild; they voted to strike.

  Pauline Newman, one of the strikers, recalled years later the beginning of the general strike:

  Thousands upon thousands left the factories from every side, all of them walking down toward Union Square. It was November, the cold winter was just around the corner, we had no fur coats to keep warm, and yet there was the spirit that led us on and on until we got to some hall. . . .

  I can see the young people, mostly women, walking down and not caring what might happen . .. the hunger, cold, loneliness.. .. They just didn't care on that particular day; that was their day.

  The union had hoped three thousand would join the strike. Twenty thousand walked out. Every day a thousand new members joined the

  A PEOPLE'S HISTORY Of THE UNITED STATES

  union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which before this had few women. Colored women were active in the strike, which went on through the winter, against police, against scabs, against arrests and prison. In more than three hundred shops, workers won their demands. Women now became officials in the union. Pauline Newman again:

  We tried to educate ourselves. I would invite the girls to my rooms, and we took turns reading poetry in English to improve our understanding of the language. One of our favorites was Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt," and another . . . Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy." - -.

  "Rise like lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number!

  Shake your chains to earth, like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you—

  Ye arc many, they are few!"

  The conditions in the factories did not change much. On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that began in a rag bin swept through the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, too high for fire ladders to reach. The fire chief of New York had said that his ladders could reach only to the seventh floor. But half of New York's 500,000 workers spent all day, perhaps twelve hours, above the seventh floor. The laws said factory doors had to open outward. But at the Triangle Company the doors opened in. The law said the doors could not be locked during working hours, but at the Triangle Company doors were usually locked so the company could keep track of the employees. And so, trapped, the young women were burned to death at their work-tables, or jammed against the locked exit door, or leaped to their deaths down the elevator shafts. The New York World reported:

  .. . screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both the Grcene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying. .. .

  From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death—girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.

  THE SOCIALIST CHALLENGE

  327

  When it was over, 146 Triangle workers, mostly women, were burned or crushed to death. There was a memorial parade down Broadway, and 100,000 marched.

  There were more fires. And accidents. And sickness. In the year 1904, 27,000 workers were killed on the job, in manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. In one year, 50,000 accidents took place in New York factories alone. Hat and cap makers were getting respiratory diseases, quarrymen were inhaling deadly chemicals, lithographic printers were getting arsenic poisoning. A New York State Factory Investigation Commission reported in 1912:

  Sadie is an intelligent, neat, clean girl, who has worked from the time she got her working papers in embroidery factories.... In her work she was accustomed to use a white powder (chalk or talcum was usual) which was brushed over the perforated designs and thus transferred to the cloth. The design was easily brushed off when made of chalk or of talcum. ... Her last employer dierefore commenced using white lead powder, mixed with rosin, which cheapened the work as the powder could not be rubbed off and necessitate restamping.

  None of the girls knew of the change in powder, nor of the danger in its use.. . .

  Sadie had been a very strong, healthy girl, good appetite and color; she began to be unable to eat. . .. Her hands and feet swelled, she lost die use of one hand, her teeth and gums were blue. When she finally had to stop work, after being treated for months for stomach trouble, her physician advised her to go to a hospital. There the examination revealed die fact that she had lead poisoning.. ..

  According to a report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, in 1914, 35,000 workers were killed in industrial accidents and 700,000 injured. That year the income of forty-four families making $1 million or more equaled the total income of 100,000 families earning $500 a year. The record shows an exchange between Commissioner Harris Weinstock of the Commission on Industrial Relations and President John Osgood, head of a Colorado coal company controlled by the Rockefellers:

  WF.INSTOCK: If a worker loses his life, are his dependents compensated in any way?

  OSGOOD: Not necessarily. In some cases they are and in some cases not. WEINSTOCK: If he is crippled for life is there any compensation?

  OSGOOD: No sir, there is none....

  A PEOPLE'S HTSTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

  WEINSTOCK: Then the whole burden is thrown directly upon their shoulders.

  OSGOOD: Yes, sir. WEtNSTOCK: The industry hears none of it?

  OSCOOD: No, the industry bears none of it.

  Unionization was growing. Shortly after the turn of the century there were 2 million members of labor unions (one in fourteen workers), 80 percent of them in the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was an exclusive union—almost all male, almost all white, almost all skilled workers. Although the number of women workers kept growing—it doubled from 4 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1910, and women were one-fifth of the labor force—only one in a h
undred belonged to a union.

  Black workers in 1910 made one-third of the earnings of white workers. Although Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, would make speeches about its belief in equal opportunity, the Negro was excluded from most AFL unions. Gompers kept saying he did not want to interfere with the "internal affairs" of the South; "T regard the race problem as one with which you people of the Southland will have to deal; without the interference, too, of meddlers from the outside."

  In the reality of struggle, rank-and-file workers overcame these separations from time to time. Foner quotes Mary McDowell's account of the formation of a women's union in the Chicago stockyards:

  It was a dramatic occasion on that evening, when an Irish girl at the door called out—"A Colored sister asks admission. What shall I do with her?" And die answer came from the Irish young woman in the chair—"Admit her, of course, and let all of you give her a hearty welcome!1'

  In New Orleans in 1907 a general strike on the levees, involving ten thousand workers (longshoremen, teamsters, freight handlers), black and white, lasted twenty days. The head of the Negro longshoremen, E. S. Swan, said:

  The whites and Negroes were never before so strongly cemented in a common bond and in my 39 years of experience of the levee, I never saw such solidarity. In all the previous strikes the Negro was used against die white man but that condition is now past and both races are standing together for their common interests... .

  These were exceptions. In general, the Negro was kept out of the trade union movement. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1915: "The net result

  THE SOCIALIST CHALLENGE

  _________ ______________ ______________ 329

  of all this has been to convince the American Negro that his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his fellow white working-man."

  Racism was practical for the AFL. The exclusion of women and foreigners was also practical. These were mostly unskilled workers, and the AFL, confined mostly to skilled workers, was based on the philosophy of "business unionism" (in fact, the chief official of each AFL union was called the "business agent"), trying to match the monopoly of production by the employer with a monopoly of workers by the union. In this way it won better conditions for some workers, and left most workers out.

  AFL officials drew large salaries, hobnobbed with employers, even moved in high society. A press dispatch from Atlantic City, New Jersey, the fashionable seaside resort, in the summer of 1910:

  Engaged in a game of bathing suit baseball with President Sam Gompers, Secretary Frank Morrison and other leaders of the A.F. of T,. on the beach this morning, John Mitchell, former head of the mine workers' union, lost a $ 1000 diamond ring presented to him by his admirers after the settlement of die big Pennsylvania coal strike. Capt. George Berke, a veteran life guard, found the ring, whereupon Mitchell peeled a hundred dollar hill from a roll he carried in his pocket and handed it to die captain as a reward for his find.

  The well-paid leaders of the AFL were protected from criticism by tightly controlled meetings and by "goon" squads—hired toughs originally used against strikebreakers but after a while used ro intimidate and beat up opponents inside the union.

  In this situation—terrible conditions of labor, exclusivity in union organization—working people wanting radical change, seeing the root of misery in the capitalist system, moved toward a new kind of labor union. One morning in June 1905, there met in a hall in Chicago a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States. They were forming the I. W. W.—the Industrial Workers of the World. Big Bill Ilaywood, a leader of the Western Federation of Miners, recalled in his autobiography that he picked up a piece of board that lay on the platform and used it for a gavel to open the convention:

  Fellow workers.. . . This is the Continental Congress of the working-class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-

  A t'KOPLE'S H1STOBY OF THE UNITED STATES

  class from the slave bondage of capitalism.. .. The aims and objects of this organisation shall he to put the working-class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to the capitalist masters.

  On the speakers' platform with Haywood were Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist party, and Mother Mary Jones, a seventy-five-year-old white-haired woman who was an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America. The convention drew up a constitution, whose

  preamble said:

  The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all die

  good things of life.

  Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all die toilers come together on die political as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class without affiliation widi any political party.. ..

  One of the IWW pamphlets explained why it broke with the AFL

  idea of craft unions:

  The directory of unions of Chicago shows in 1903 a total of 56 different unions in die packing houses, divided up still more in 14 different national trades unions of the American Federation of Labor.

  What a horrible example of an army divided against itself in the face of a strong combination of employers.. . .

  The IWW (or "Wobblies," as they came to be called, for reasons not really clear) aimed at organizing all workers in any industry into "One Big Union," undivided by sex, race, or skills. They argued against making contracts with the employer, because this had so often prevented workers from striking on their own, or in sympathy with other strikers, and thus turned union people into strikebreakers. Negotiations by leaders lor contracts replaced continuous struggle by the rank and tile, the Wobblies believed.

  They spoke of "direct action":

  Direct action means industrial action direcdy by, for, and of die workers themselves, without the treacherous aid of labor misleaders or scheming

  THE SOCIALIST CHALLENGE

  331

  politicians. A strike that is initiated, controlled, and setded by the workers directly affected is direct action. . .. Direct action is industrial democracy.

  One TWW pamphlet said: "Shall T tell you what direct action means? The worker on the job shall tell the boss when and where he shall work, how long and for what wages and under what conditions."

  The IWW people were militant, courageous. Despite a reputation given them by the press, they did not believe in initiating violence, but did fight back when attacked. Tn McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, they led a strike of six thousand workers in 1909 against an affiliate of the U.S. Steel Company, defied the state troopers, and battled with them. They promised to take a trooper's life for every worker killed (in one gun battle four strikers and three troopers were killed), and managed to keep picketing the factories until the strike was won.

  The TWW saw beyond strikes:

  Strikes are mere incidents in the class war; diey are tests of strength, periodical drills in die course of which the workers train diemselves for concerted action. This training is most necessary to prepare the masses for the final "catastrophe," the general strike which will complete the expropriation of the employers.

  The idea of anarcho-syndicalism was developing strongly in Spain and Ttaly and France at this time—that the workers would take power, not by seizing the state machinery in an armed rebellion, but by bringing the economic system to a halt in a general strike, then taking it over to use for the good of all. IWW organizer Joseph Ettor said:

  Tf the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do hut fold their arms and die world will stop. The workers arc more powerful with their hands in their pocket
s than all die property of the capitalists. . . .

  Tt was an immensely powerful idea. Tn the ten exciting years after its birth, the TWW became a threat to the capitalist class, exactly when capitalist growth was enormous and profits huge. The TWW never had more than five to ten thousand enrolled members at any one time- people came and went, and perhaps a hundred thousand were members at one time or another. But their energy, their persistence, their inspiration to others, their ability to mobilize thousands at one place, one time, made them an influence on the country far beyond their numbers. They

  A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

  traveled everywhere (many were unemployed or migrant workers); they organized, wrote, spoke, sang, spread their message and their spirit.

  They were attacked with all the weapons the system could put together: the newspapers, the courts, the police, the army, mob violence. Local authorities passed laws to stop them from speaking; the IWW defied these laws. In Missoula, Montana, a lumber and mining area, hundreds of Wobblies arrived by boxcar after some had been prevented from speaking. They were arrested one after another until they clogged the jails and the courts, and finally forced the town to repeal its antispeech ordinance.

  In Spokane, Washington, in 1909, an ordinance was passed to stop street meetings, and an IWW organizer who insisted on speaking was arrested. Thousands of Wobblies marched into the center of town to speak. One by one they spoke and were arrested, until six hundred were in jail. Jail conditions were brutal, and several men died in their cells, but the IWW won the right to speak.

  hi Fresno, California, in 1911, there was another free speech fight. The San Francisco Call commented:

  It is one of those strange situations which crop up suddenly and are hard to understand. Some thousands of men, whose business it is to work with their hands, tramping and stealing rides, suffering hardships and facing dangers—to get into jail. . . .