An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  CHAPTER 6

  FORGOTTEN WORKERS OF AMERICA

  RACIAL CAPITALISM AND THE WAR ON THE WORKING CLASS, 1890s TO 1940s

  Between the Gilded Age of the 1890s, which saw an eruption of capitalist wealth in the United States, and the Great Depression, workers in the United States endured the bloodiest labor conflicts in the history of the industrializing world. Centuries of violent labor relations in slavery became generalized throughout the nation.1 Strikers were massacred by officers of the state. Fortified armories were built in city centers, and troops were called out to crush walkouts. Republican as well as Democratic presidents issued sweeping injunctions to undermine national labor organizing efforts. Employers hired private militias and engaged armed detectives to break union campaigns. In self-defense, working-class communities engaged in mass strikes, boycotted firms, torched buildings, destroyed hundreds of miles of railroad tracks, and, in fits of self-destructive rage, turned on each other. Class conflict was a pervasive fact of American life. The railway strike of 1877 (known as the Great Upheaval), the massacre of Chinese workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming (1885), the Haymarket Square Riot (1886), the Thibodaux Massacre (1887), the Apalachicola general strike (1890), the Homestead lockout (1892), the Pullman strike and boycott (1894), the Colorado labor wars of 1903–4, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911), the Ludlow Massacre (1914), the Everett Massacre (1916), and the Elaine Massacre (1919)—these were just a few of the better-known conflagrations.2 By the start of World War I, in 1914, the idea of the United States as a “classless society” was finished.

  The power that employers wielded in the state legislatures and in the courts meant that struggles for shorter work hours and better wages often had to be decided by workers’ direct action.3 The legal historian Karen Orren observes that workplace relations in the United States were governed more by the ancient feudal law of master and servant than by the Bill of Rights.4 Police and vigilante homicides of independent-minded workers were excused as a necessary aspect of establishing capital’s authority in industrializing America. The victims of the police attack that culminated in the massacre of striking steelworkers in Chicago in 1937 were denigrated by the corporate media as “Bolsheviks and Mexicans.”5 Interracial union organizing that challenged the availability of the nation’s cheap labor was especially dangerous. In Bogalusa, Louisiana, white union organizers were assassinated, and Black union members were terrorized by the Loyalty League, an organization created by timber companies to destroy unionizing in the state.6 In 1917, Mexican members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were violently deported by state and vigilante forces from Bisbee, Arizona, during a strike of copper miners.7 Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, an anarchist of African, Mexican, and Indigenous descent, admonished workers in Chicago to fight back with every means at their disposal: “The voice of dynamite is the voice of force, the only voice which tyranny has ever been able to understand.”8

  In a nation of many ethnicities the only common language appeared to be subjugation of the working classes. One Mississippi plantation owner stated, “I will be glad when free schools are abolished. Our tenants don’t need them and we can get along without them.”9 Science was enlisted by capital to prove the foolishness of upsetting social hierarchies by compassionate social policies and education, and Social Darwinism was used “as an evolutionary rationale for the inevitability of poverty.”10 The Progressive Era was a time when corporations and employers consolidated their power vis-à-vis the rest of society. Working-class resistance to corporate rule was not tolerated. The pro-business Florida Times-Union wrote, “When the soldier represses disorder he serves labor first, though he shoot strikers and bayonet brethren of his own craft—all must be taught to obey the law or the weak will go to the wall, and labor is the weakest of all the factors that now uphold society.”11 The Times-Union warned African American workers that Black lives only mattered insofar as they made themselves useful to capitalism: “In the South, the negro in politics is not tolerated—in other sections he must obediently follow. There are lynchings so nearly everywhere that the rule is established, but the South does not forbid the black man to earn a living as do our neighbors. If the negro be wise he will respect the limits set for him as does the elephant and the tiger and the other who accept rules and make no pretense to reason.”12

  According to the American Social History Project, “By 1910, the United States was the world’s greatest industrial power.”13 Inequality underwrote dramatic economic growth; racism reinforced class oppression; and voter suppression was an integral part of capital’s national toolkit of labor repression. “The new disfranchisement is in the main a master stroke of concentrated capital against labour,” W. E. B. Du Bois noted, “and an attempt under the cover of racial prejudice to take a backward step in the organization of labour such as no modern nation would dare to take in the broad daylight of present economic thought.”14 After the nation’s leaders oversaw the suppression of Black voting, first-generation immigrant workers were next in line to lose meaningful access to the ballot.15 The erosion of voting rights and the consolidation of corporate power meant that many Eastern European immigrants had a harrowing experience in the workplace. Russian workers in Pennsylvania referred to the region’s steel towns as Little Siberias while Italian laborers who worked for Jones & Laughlin Steel in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s compared the governance of their town with their experiences in Fascist Italy.16 The historian Gabriela F. Arredondo notes that many Mexican American factory operatives in Chicago declined to become US citizens even when they were eligible to do so. As one Mexican worker noted, “Even if we do become citizens here, we always remain Mexicans.”17

  The reconfiguration of racial capitalism in the early twentieth century hinged upon the exploitation of agricultural workers who were fired, deported, or driven into cities when they tried to organize in defense of their interests. Local governments, growers, and vigilantes in the Sunbelt counties stretching from Orange County, Florida, to Orange County, California, put the hammer down on agricultural laborers seeking to achieve independence.18 Employers and their enforcers ruthlessly suppressed Mexican, Chinese, Sikh, Japanese, Indian, Italian, white, and African American farmworkers seeking to organize.19 In 1908, a group of armed white citizens marched into a camp of farmworkers of Indian extraction in Live Oak, California, and “burned it to the ground, beat and terrorized a hundred or more Hindus in the camp, drove them out of the community, and, in doing so, robbed them of about $2,500.”20 For decades, politicians in California used anti-Chinese racism as bluntly as the Democratic Party used anti-Black hatred in the South to consolidate power.21 Leading growers in Jim Crow Florida urged their industry to look to California for a solution to the “labor problem” in agriculture.22

  The birth of modern agribusiness in the United States is a chronicle of dispossession. The Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agents played a key role in the bloody process of expropriating lands belonging to Mexican and Native American people. The historian Robert Perkinson writes, “From the beginning, the territory’s pioneering lawmen did less to suppress crime in any conventional sense than to force open lands for Anglo American settlement.”23 Mexican victims of the Texas Rangers’ furious attacks were quite often landowners with extensive holdings: “Title challenges and outright theft led to a loss of more than 187,000 acres of land for Tejanos in the lower Rio Grande Valley from 1900 to 1910.” The historian Zaragosa Vargas notes, “The eventual violent collapse of Tejano ranching society took place in the early twentieth century, when the Texas Rangers, intermediaries in the transition to capitalism, cleaned out the remaining Tejano landowners, summarily executing more than three hundred ‘suspected Mexicans.’”24 Over time, the pace of land theft quickened. Native Americans suffered most grievously, losing approximately ninety million acres of land in the decades after the implementation of the Dawes Act in 1887.25

  Agribusiness in the Sunbelt was marked by an authoritarian pattern of soc
ial control whereby racism, patriarchy, and rule by force overwhelmed democratic institutions. Writing in 1928, the Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox noted, “The Southern leadership, because of its success in disenfranchising its colored labor force, has remained a turbulent, primitive group of capitalists. It has been relatively untouched by the democratic restraints operative in other sections of the country. It can be depended upon, therefore, to throw its vast weight against organized labor and to obstruct movements to implement the democratic gains of the people as a whole.”26 When one extends Cox’s thesis to the entire Sunbelt, it is apparent that the disenfranchisement of farm labor lent an antidemocratic thrust to rural American politics with regressive implications for democracy that can be felt up to the present day.

  In 1915, inspired by the land reforms of the Mexican Revolution, insurgent Tejanos and Mexicans promulgated the Plan de San Diego, which called for the reclaiming of land in southern Texas for Mexican people and Native Americans as well as an independent state for African Americans.27 The insurgents launched bloody attacks on white ranchers under banners reading “Equality and Independence,” but they were defeated, and a new reign of Ranger-led violence was initiated. It resulted in the murder of hundreds of Tejanos and “the forced displacement of thousands of Mexicans who fled for their lives across the border.”28

  The US Border Patrol was created in 1924, ostensibly to provide border security. However, as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández observes, officers of the agency quickly understood immigration enforcement as labor control. Hernández quotes one Texas farmer as saying, “We tell the immigration officers if our Mexicans try to get away to the interior, and they stop them and send them back to Mexico. Then in a few days they are back here and we have good workers for another year.”29 Mexican laborers who regularly crossed the border between Mexico and the United States to work in Texas—for example, from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso—were sprayed with DDT, Zyklon B, and other carcinogenic chemicals by US health inspectors who used these Mexicans as unwilling subjects in experiments with different delousing treatments.30 Jose Burciaga, who worked as a janitor in El Paso, recalled, “At the customs bath by the bridge . . . they would spray some stuff on you. It was white and would run down your body. How horrible! And then I remember something else about it: they would shave everyone’s head . . . men, women, everybody. . . . The substance was very strong.”31 On January 28, 1917, Carmelita Torres, a domestic worker, organized Latinas who refused to be deloused: they shut down traffic in El Paso and protested the racial stereotype of Mexicans as disease carriers.

  Employers and politicians invoked racialized stereotypes of Mexican workers to justify poverty wages and the denial of citizenship. Dr. George P. Clements, manager of the Agriculture Department of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce during the 1920s, denigrated the Mexican American worker: “He is ignorant of values; he knows nothing of time; he knows nothing of our laws; he is as primitive as we were 2,500 years ago. He does not know our language, the result being that he becomes a petty criminal through ignorant violations. . . . He rarely if ever takes out his citizenship, mixes in politics, or labor squabbles unless directed by some American group. He is the most tractable individual ever came to serve us.”32 Ralph H. Taylor, the executive secretary of the California Agricultural Legislative Committee, claimed, “The Mexican has no political ambitions; he does not aspire to dominate the political affairs of the community in which he lives.”33 Growers and state officials repeatedly emphasized that Mexican workers were preferable to any other form of labor because if they demanded rights or citizenship they could easily be deported.34

  The respect for individual improvement that supposedly characterized American culture was not tolerated when it was expressed by African Americans and Latinx people. In 1895, when Thomas A. Harris ignored Ku Klux Klan warnings against practicing law in Tuskegee, Alabama, he was shot and fled to sanctuary in Mexico.35 Du Bois noted that when Black farmers made gains in land ownership, white merchants responded with complaints “of labor scarcity, and they began systematically to scheme for some method by which Negro ambition could be kept from soaring too high, and by which the black man could be kept from benefiting from the new economic development in the South.”36 Black farmers had difficulty accessing federal farm loan programs “because they are excluded from white agricultural associations that qualify for these kind of loans.”37 In March 1925, the Negro World noted, with heavy irony, “Negroes could greatly improve the fine relation between the white people and themselves by their giving up business, quitting the professions, discarding land ownership and home building, deserting the school and renouncing the ballot, and by all making a mad rush for the first saw-mill that bids for labor. Suppose we agree on this step for the sake of our best friends.”38

  Forced labor was an integral part of the South’s modernization program, with Northern-owned firms profiting from unfree labor in the region’s mines, blast furnaces, textile industry, and road-building.39 In parts of Texas and Louisiana, employers and sheriff’s departments cooperated to operate large-scale virtual slave markets of Negro and Mexican cotton pickers, using vagrancy statutes to kidnap workers “to work under armed guard, and without being tried.”40 In other cases, labor agents “await Negroes and Mexicans on the highways and offer them a bonus and free transportation to go with them to some fictitious place to pick cotton. The cotton pickers having accepted the terms are taken to some distant point outside of a town and there go into camp. The would-be employer leaves them under guard and finds farmers who need cotton pickers.”41

  The Department of Justice, the Mexican government, and the NAACP launched investigations into the abuses of workers, but none of these inquiries curbed employers’ appetites for cheap labor supplied by the state. The Black press published an exposé of the plight of Puerto Rican workers who were lured to Arizona by the promise of high wages in 1926. Instead, the Puerto Ricans discovered to their horror that they were being used by the Cotton Growers Association of Arizona to “batter down the prevailing starvation labor wage now being paid the American Negro and Mexican cotton field laborers.”42 When nearly six hundred Puerto Ricans struck over their living and working conditions, they were arrested and herded into an open-air concentration camp near Phoenix. After strikes, protests, and investigations into their mistreatment, most Puerto Rican workers left Arizona.43

  Law enforcement officials profited from vagrancy statutes, and counties filled their coffers from the proceeds of forced labor. African American union members and homeowners in Florida were abducted by Broward County sheriff’s deputies and charged with vagrancy to discipline them. Morris Milgram, a social reformer writing in the 1940s, described how, in central Florida, “a series of arrests on charges of vagrancy, aimed at forcing workers to pick oranges against their will, occurred in picturesque Lake County early in 1945.”44 Lake County’s Sheriff Willis McCall acquired a reputation of beating workers who tried to bargain for better wages from their employers. In response to a Black worker who protested this state of affairs, the Leesburg chief of police, Frank Morgan, stated, “Well, I guess they had a right to arrest him and knock him on the head if he wouldn’t work.” Brutality against Black workers was the cornerstone of the Jim Crow social order.45

  Stocks and futures of the commodities produced by workers trapped in the convict lease system—including coal, cotton, phosphate, and naval stores (articles used in shipping)—were publicly traded for lucrative profits on New York, Chicago, and other exchanges. A Jacksonville reporter, writing in the Florida Metropolis, candidly noted that vagrancy laws and convict labor were needed to keep the turpentine, timber, and phosphate industries profitable in Florida.46 “Three young, hearty and strong negroes go to State prison for life,” the Florida Metropolis exulted in 1906, “and they will make excellent naval stores laborers, in fact, we understand that one of the three is an expert in that line of business.”47 In the same year, a Tampa councilman admitted that Africa
n Americans were the sole targets of that city’s vagrancy laws.48 The beneficiaries of the South’s draconian vagrancy laws were just as likely to be found on Wall Street as in a local sheriff’s headquarters.

  The triumph of white business supremacy relegated African American and Latinx workers to the bottom of the occupational ladder, and this meant they had to work for less than their white counterparts. The author Mario Barrera found that, in the first half of the twentieth century, Chicana/o workers in the Southwest were systematically paid lower wages than whites in agriculture, mining, railroad, transportation, construction, and other industries.49 Likewise, African Americans were shunted into the most menial jobs and were paid less for their work. In 1930, there was not a single African American railroad conductor or banker in Memphis, Tennessee. Black women were often paid half of what their white male counterparts were paid in Virginia’s major industries on the eve of the Great Depression.50 One of racial capitalism’s grimmest achievements was voter suppression and the weaponized labor relations that transformed the Sunbelt into a haven for cheap labor.