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Tag: "This Day in Labor History"

This Day in Labor History: November 30, 1999

[ 29 ] November 30, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On November 30, 1999, protests began in Seattle, Washington against the World Trade Organization. The WTO meetings offered unions, environmentalists, and various social and economic justice activists from around the world a forum to voice their rejection of the neoliberal free trade agreements of the late 20th century that had undermined American unionism, allowed corporations the mobility to flee meaningful labor agreements or environmental restrictions, thrown millions of farmers and indigenous peoples off their lands as cheap American agricultural goods flooded world markets, and stripped people around the world of the ability to influence the economic conditions of their nations and the social and economic safety nets created in the twentieth century to provide people with a modicum of dignity. These protests raised an important hue and cry against this injustice, but became most known for the violence that took place on the streets.

The general story of what went down on the streets is pretty well known. A loose coalition of people opposed to free trade agreements decided to target the WTO meeting in Seattle as a general point of protest. The protest was supposed to be nonviolent, but as is usually the case, there wasn’t much of a mechanism to ensure that it actually was so. The idea quickly caught fire and at least 40,000 people came to the protests, making it the largest international protest against free trade in world history. I don’t want to spend much time focusing on the idiotic black bloc anarchists who decided to break Starbucks windows during the protest and undermine the nonviolent mission of the protests without permission from the other stakeholders. I also don’t want to focus on the fascistic police response by the Seattle Police Department, which should allay any mythology that the police will ever be on the side of working class protest, unless it is very much in their own interest to do so. I’d rather focus here on the role of the labor movement. But by the evening of November 30, the streets of Seattle were at war and the labor and environmental organizations who had planned the thing found their message swamped in a sea of violence and the media coverage of it.

Labor’s involvement in the protests came in the wake of the federation increasingly realizing that the good old days were no longer true. There was a lot of denial and trying to ignore the problem of labor’s collapse in the 90s, although the defeat over NAFTA and the ascendance of John Sweeney to the head of the AFL-CIO were clear signs that at least some people were trying to take it seriously.

The first moment of the protests, and really more accurately the weeks before the protest, saw an uptick in conversations about how labor was finally reaching out to other social organizations. “Turtles and Teamsters” was the phrase used to describe this phenomenon, an apt one as this came just a few years after the resolution of the ancient forest campaigns and spotted owl crisis in the Pacific Northwest that saw environmentalists and labor at each other’s throats. But environmentalists and labor had long had much in common and had for the last three decades had off and on alliances over specific issues. So this was not unprecedented but was meaningful at this point, particularly in its public nature. And at the protests, Steelworkers and Earth First members were making many of the same points–that free trade agreements undermine both good working conditions and environmental standards, that workers breathe in the same air as environmentalists, and that without meaningful protections on labor and environmental standards, a race to the bottom would ensue around the world, which is of course exactly what has happened.

After the protests, recriminations were everywhere, particularly against the Seattle city government and police, as well as the anarchists. Organized labor’s role in the whole event was largely forgotten. Left leaning discontent quickly moved on to the Nader campaign, while 9/11 changed the course of the nation’s history, or at least so popular culture likes to believe. But in the narrative of the left, 9/11 is what killed any chance of meaningful continued actions against unfair trade.

Even without the black bloc protestors and 9/11, we can legitimately question whether any real movement would have developed out of Seattle that would have led to meaningful alliances and a program for change. I am skeptical. It was immediately clear that this was a moment where various people could protest against something but that what would come next was a question no one was prepared to answer. That isn’t denigrating the moment, but everything that happened at Seattle was the easy part. That’s why I’m a little skeptical about the 9/11 claim; it seems like a cop-out for the fact that there wasn’t really any meaningful alliance building going on that would lead to an obvious next step. Once host cities and countries isolated the protesters from the function of the meetings, there wasn’t much else the various movements could do because there wasn’t any other plan. It’s possible that had the AFL-CIO and environmentalists placed the repeal of NAFTA and other free trade agreements as the one and only thing on their agenda and fought like the devil to make it happen–well–it probably still wouldn’t have worked given the overwhelming dominance of neoliberal ideology among the Republican and Democratic Party at the time. But that was probably the only concrete place where such alliances could have really made a difference where it counts–in the law. And in any case, such an alliance was not really feasible. I don’t disagree that on a national activist scale, 9/11 and the War on Terror dropped economic concerns from a high priority–and even today, look at so many of the people progressives claim to love and how little many of them ever talk about economic issues–but honestly, there’s not a whole lot of evidence from the last 40 years that what passes for the non-union left in this country has had much real impact on the nation’s trajectory.

But that doesn’t mean that commenters of the time didn’t hope it was so. The WTO protests was the first time I remember labor writers and activists and historians make statements that I’ve seen over and over again since–at the Wisconsin protests, during Occupy, after the Chicago Teachers Union strike–that this is the moment when labor will turn it around. This is almost entirely wishful thinking and it places a big burden on those trying to build a movement, but once people started realizing that the American labor movement was in very real trouble, they began hanging enormous expectations on whatever pocket of labor uprising popped up at a given moment.

So what to make up the WTO protests for labor? Ultimately, it’s not much. It is an important moment in public perception. But the ultimate effect of these protests upon the American working class was basically zero and the odds were long against it ever becoming something more than zero, even if the protests and the aftermath nationally took an entirely different course.

This is the 83rd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: November 13, 1909

[ 16 ] November 13, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On November 13, 1909, at the Cherry Mine in Cherry, Illinois, a coal car filled with hay for the mules who worked underground rolled down a track. Earlier that week, an electrical outage had struck the mine. The miners were then forced to use torches, kerosene lamps, and other flammable forms of lighting while at work. Hay sticking out from the edge of the car brushed up against a torch and caught fire. The car moved down the track, spreading the fire. As the mine caught fire, the company closed the oxygen supply to the mine. This tampered down the fire but also began suffocating the workers. 259 miners died, the worst coal mine fire in U.S. history.

The Cherry Mine opened in 1905 to provide coal for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad’s trains. Coal powered technology meant a lot of brutal manual labor to run the machines that the nation increasingly relied upon. Conditions in the mine were sadly what you would expect for the first decade of the twentieth century. Child labor was common, with boys often starting work at age 11. It was mostly immigrant labor. Miners were paid by production, not the hour, making work more dangerous and deadly.

Once the company began moving to control the fire, it was up to the workers to find a way out of the mine. About 200 of the around 480 who worked that day did, mostly climbing through escape shafts. Some of the miners who escaped descended back in a hoisting cage to rescue others. This was extremely dangerous because each time they went down, the chances of coming up again were increasingly small given what was going on underground. They made six trips, rescuing more workers each time. The seventh time however, the man operating the levers above ground misinterpreted their tugging signals and did not hoist them up in time. Everyone in the car burned to death.

When the company closed the oxygen supply, it allowed what is known as “black damp” to infect the workers. This was the combination of carbon dioxide and nitrogen that built up in mines without a fresh oxygen supply, slowly asphyxiating the workers. It’s worth noting what this is like. It’s not a sudden death. It’s a slow choking, as all oxygen leaves the air. You have hours to contemplate your death. Maybe leave a letter for your loved ones if you have paper and enough light from your last lamp. You see your comrades start to succumb and you know in minutes, that will be you. Brutal.

Only 21 workers survived after the immediate post-fire escape. This was a group that was able to collect water from a seep and then descended deeper into the mine to escape the black damp. Finally, after 8 days, they dug themselves out and ran across a rescue party. One died soon after but the others survived.

Of the dead who left behind dependents (the majority), 1 was a native-born American. The plurality were Slavs (broadly defined at the time) followed by Italians, Austrians, and many other European groups. While the survivors and families had very little recourse in the courts (most lawsuits against companies were lost at this time and even if they were won, would drag on for years). This event got enough national publicity though that financial support came pouring in. With pressure on the company to pay up, the donations, and the union, each widow received $3261 (about $82,000 in 2012).

The company claimed innocence, saying that it had constructed the mine to the legal standards. But the legal standards meant unsafe mines where 259 workers could die. The company certainly hadn’t broken any major safety laws with this event. United Mine Workers of America president Duncan McDonald lashed out. From the Decatur Daily Review:

“The safest mine in Illinois,” as the St. Paul Coal Company declared the Cherry mine to be, has turned out a veritable death trap for 400 men. Gross negligence in constructing the mine in defiance of all provisions approved by competent mining engineers was the fundamental cause of the greatest mine disaster in the history of the United States.”

This is the conclusion of Duncan McDonald based upon an investigation conducted by him as president of the United Mine Workers of Illinois. He has been at Cherry since early Sunday morning.

The several points where the company failed to provide safeguards for the miners as found by McDonald follow:

The structure around the main entrance in the Cherry mine was entirely of pine timber, which is a highly combustible material. As soon as the flames from the burning bale of hay, which caused the disaster, came in contact with this timber, a fierce fire was the result. The coal dust which had accumulated on top of the structural work ignited like tinder and spread to other inflamable parts of the mine. Had the entries been built of brick or steel girders or concrete there is no doubt that the dreadful catastrophe would never have occurred.

A scarcity of water and a lack of sufficient rubber hose in the mine made a fight against the flames by the miners caught in the trap an impossibility. The company had neglected to provide sufficient means to extinguish a blaze after once it was started. No pipes carrying water under pressure were placed in the mines, nor was there sufficient support on the surface, and even if there had been such it would have been of no practical service because the company failed to provide necessary fire hose.

No fire drill had ever been practiced among the men, and no precaution had been taken by the company to see that in case of an emergency the miners would have the benefits of the right sort of rational discipline and instruction to them to safety.

The open torch flaming near the main entrance in the second vein was a constant menace. This torch had been used as a substitute for an electric light which had been out of repair for two weeks.

The escape shaft was timbered with pine and the stair were built of wood. This was gross negligence on the part of the company. A mine where any effort has been made to safeguard life would certainly have had an escape shaft constructed of steel or reinforced concrete. One of the first things in the corridor of the mine to burn away was the escape shaft. This made egress absolutely impossible after the cage stopped running and practically sealed the doom of the men below.

The escape shaft was placed less than three hundred feet from the main shaft at Cherry. This would be contrary to law, unless the location of the escape shaft were permitted by some state mine inspector.

In the aftermath of the Cherry Mine disaster, the state of Illinois began crafting new safety laws for mines that included safety training, certification for those in charge of safety equipment, and better fire fighting equipment. The company was fined $650 for using child labor in the mines and the state strengthened its child labor laws. It also helped convince Congress to establish the United States Bureau of Mines in 1910, which oversaw mine safety. The settlement for the survivors also led to the passage of Illinois’ first workers’ compensation law in 1911, following closely behind Wisconsin, Washington, and other states in creating the beginnings of a social safety net, however pro-corporate it was at the time.

For those who want to read a journalistic account of the disaster and the survivors’ experience, check out Thomas White’s “Eight Days in a Burning Mine,” published in The World in October 1911 and reprinted on the web by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. You may also be interested in this 1910 report by the State of Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics on the investigation that followed the fire.

This is the 82nd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: October 30, 1837

[ 17 ] October 30, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On October 30, 1837, Nicholas Farwell, a train engineer toiling for the Boston and Worcester Rail Road Corporation fell off a train while at work and had his hand crushed by the train. Farwell sued the company for damages. The 1842 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court set into place the doctrine of worker risk. This decision set a vitally important precedent in American labor history that the worker voluntarily took on risk when he or she agreed to be employed on the job. Over the next century, tens thousands of Americans died on the job with employers doing nothing.

Farwell had done nothing wrong. While he was working, a switchman messed up and the train derailed, which is how Farwell was thrown. Rather than accept his fate, which was not good as a disabled individual in a world without a social safety net, Farwell sued the company for $10,000. In his decision in Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Rail Road Corporation, Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw disagreed. Shaw claimed that Farwell was personally responsible for the risk of work. Risk was what someone took on by taking a job as well as the opportunity of bettering oneself in the new industrial system. Because Farwell was paid more than other railroad workers, he was already being compensated for the higher risk of his work. Shaw called the $2 a day Farwell made, a “premium for the risk which he thus assumes.” Shaw might sue his “fellow servant” who made the mistake that led to his fall but the company was immune to lawsuits of this kind.

These ideas come back to the idea that American people were fundamentally independent operators, free labor who made economic choices as such. He could have farmed, he could have apprenticed, he could have been a millionaire, but he chose to work on the railroad and was thus responsible for the choice. The upside of higher wages and the downside of higher risk was something Farwell had to judge for himself, as did any worker.

The Farwell case was part of a larger transformation in the American legal code to facilitate corporate growth at the expense of those it affected. It’s not just labor law either. Citizens sued textile mills for damming rivers that ended eon-old fish runs people upstream relied upon. The courts consistently found in favor of the new corporations, broadly using ideas of progress to justify their decision. This led to corporations having the right to pollute at will, timber companies to destroy the stream banks and land of farmers with nominal riparian rights, and dominate anyone who got in the way of their growth.

The Farwell decision directly led to tens of thousands of dead workers and hundreds of thousands (if not millions of workers) who suffered from occupational disease, tuberculosis, lead poisoning, electrocution, hands caught in unsafe saws, hair pulled from their heads after it was caught in machinery, suffocation in coal mines, and endless other workplace hazards in world where corporations had no responsibility for their workers’ safety and health.

This terrible scenario finally began to change after 1900, when courts began ruling in favor of suing plaintiffs or their surviving families. While many corporations were outraged at the sheer idea of responsibility for workers (the Progressive workplace reformer Alice Hamilton famously told a story about a paint manufacturer’s sheer incredulity when he realized she was telling him he should be responsible for his workers getting lead poisoning. He just couldn’t imagine such a world), others saw the writing on the wall and created the system of worker compensation that took the issue out of courts and gave corporations a consistent way out of large settlements, a system that would provide workers some protection, however minimal and however lower the compensation was than their previous wages, but also meant they could not sue their employers.

Increased laws regulating corporate responsibility for workplace health eventually helped many companies decide to move their production facilities outside the United States where they could reproduce the days where they didn’t have to care about dead or sick workers. Today, workers toil for American companies or subcontractors with American companies in Bangladesh, Mexico, Honduras, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and other countries across the world and face many of the same problems of workplace safety and long-term health that Americans did 150 years ago. This is not an accident. It’s an intentional choice by corporations who seek to recreate the Farwell doctrine.

You can read the Farwell decision here.

There’s a good bit of literature on this case. I primarily used the first chapter of Jonathan Levy’s 2012 book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, which is an excellent book in the rapidly expanding literature broadly described as “histories of capitalism,” a literature with which labor historians have a lot of problems, but that’s for a different discussion.

This is the 81st post in this series. Other posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: October 26, 1825

[ 13 ] October 26, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal opened, eight years after construction commenced. This engineering marvel would have enormous impacts on the future of American work, including spurring ever-greater industrialization, helping cement the Great Lakes states as a center of American industrialization, and ensuring New York would be the long-term center of American commerce. It also came at a cost of over 1000 dead workers.

The engineers who designed the Erie Canal thought of their project as a uniquely American achievement, a sign of the glorious republicanism of the new nation flexing its increasingly powerful muscles. As economic and technical elites would do throughout American history, these engineers and politicians used national rhetoric to hide the very real muscles they relied on to build their marvel. And those workers were treated poorly.

Americans were used to hard work in the 1820s. Farm work was pretty tough and in some ways had much in common with canal digging. Working on either meant you might cut trees, dig ditches, divert streams and labor in cold weather. Most canal workers labored seasonally, but I don’t have to tell you all how cold an upstate New York winter can be so for those who did labor through the winter, the working conditions were awful.

Epidemics were a huge problem and contributed significantly to the dead workers. In 1819, more than 1000 workers got sick from some sort of disease that came from working in a swamp that went on for 30 miles (in our significantly ditched, diked, and drained landscape of the east, it’s hard to imagine such enormous swamps, although they do still exist in some areas). Only a few of these workers died, but most were disabled for long periods of time. Other epidemics were far worse. For workers who did avoid sickness, widespread disease did lead to increased wages, however briefly. One contractor had to raise wages from $12 to between $14 and $17 a month due to an epidemic, about which he complained bitterly.



Building the Erie Canal

The use of gunpowder killed a lot of workers. The care given to explosions was pretty low through the 19th century and workers were blown up all the time or killed by rocks blown through the air. Canal collapses were also common, burying workers. Workers fell to their deaths building the locks and aqueducts. Orrin Harrison was exhausted from too much work. He fell asleep resting against a balance beam on a lock. Dozing, he fell into 8 feet of water where his legs were caught in the lock’s gates and he drowned. The death toll rose daily from these sorts of incidents.

At first, the workers were mostly American-born, but this quickly changed as labor needs increased and the reality of just how brutal this work was became more real. Thus very quickly, the Canal became a prime job site for the nation’s growing numbers of Irish immigrants. We usually associate Irish immigration a couple of decades later with the potato famine, but it had already begun by the late 1810s, with an 1817 famine what was pushing them out. The Irish would take the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the pre-Civil War north and become despised by the nation’s Protestants for it, later leading to the Know-Nothing Party and other anti-immigrant sentiment. By the end of the Erie Canal’s construction, the Irish made up a sizable percentage of the labor force.

Within the national framework of republican free men working for oneself as a craftsman or farmer, laboring as canal diggers was the lowest of work. That living conditions were so awful for these workers seemed irrefutable evidence that these workers were morally deficient, for who would live in such conditions? When the Irish then took these jobs, it reinforced the prejudice many New Yorkers had against the Irish, especially since they already saw them as living in filth. Contractors housed their workers in shanties that were frequently compared to barns that stood physically removed from towns and farms, isolating these workers physically and socially. Plus farm workers had warm beds and good food. Canal diggers did not. The work’s seasonality was also far more unpredictable than farming, meaning economic and personal insecurity.

Mostly, the laborers who came to the U.S. to work on the project found their experience disappointing. William Thomas had immigrated from Wales. He wrote back home: “I beg all my old neighbors not to think of coming here as they would spend more coming here than they think. My advice to them is to love their district and stay there.” Thomas considered returning to Wales, although we do not know if he did.

Dangerous and deadly work in the United States would grow and grow in coming decades as the Industrial Revolution transformed the nation. Some of it would be in the kind of grunt work of building a canal (or a railroad soon after). Some would take place in the factories, some in digging or cutting the raw materials for it all. Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century, the death toll would be of little concern to bosses and certainly not to the capitalists financing this growth. Immigrants would provide much of this labor, as would African-Americans in some areas. Others would advise their families and friends to love their district and stay there too but millions would choose possible death over permanent poverty and come to work in the dangerous trades and unsafe worksites.

I relied on Carol Sheriff’s book, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 to write this post.

This is the 80th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: October 16, 1859

[ 64 ] October 16, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On October 16, 1859, radical Republican John Brown and a small band of followers, both white and black, launched a violent attack against the American system of slave labor at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia). While unsuccessful (and insane if one assumes he wanted something other than martyrdom), Brown’s raid did more than almost anything else in the 1850s to highlight the differences between northern and southern labor systems and the moral bankruptcy of the latter. Agree or disagree with his actions, he made it almost impossible for northern whites to claimed to be abolitionists to hide behind gradual programs or a vague hope for the future. For southern whites, it was a call to arms against increasingly radical anti-slavery forces in the north and the desires of slaves to escape. For African-Americans, at least the few who had the opportunity to take advantage of Brown’s actions, it was the deliverance from a hell of forced labor and degradation for which they had prayed.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time revisiting Brown’s famous raids here. Most readers here have heard of his 1859 attack and many are no doubt familiar with his 1856 murder of slaveholders in Kansas that put him on the run. Rather, I’d rather explore Brown’s positions and words about the United States’ slave labor system.

African-American women working in cotton field. Not sure of date, but typical of slave labor.

Brown had called for armed resistance to slave labor since at least 1851. Speaking to the United States League of Gileadites, a radical anti-slavery organization he founded to mobilize African-Americans, Brown talked about how to resist the Fugitive Slave Act. Brown told 44 attending free blacks that if one was arrested, “Let no able-bodied man appear on the ground unequipped, or with his weapons exposed to view; Let that be understood beforehand.” As we know from Harpers Ferry and Kansas, Brown had no problem putting this into effect. And we can certainly condemn his violence. But let’s step back and remember just how horrible slavery was. On December 20, 1858, Brown, who had briefly returned to Kansas, led a party into Missouri to free slaves. They liberated 11 slaves and killed a slaveholder. He then took them north, helping to deliver a baby from one of the ex-slaves, and got them into Canada after an 82-day trip. Were his actions justified?

This is from his letter to the New York Tribune, justifying his actions. “On Sunday, September 19, a negro man called Jim came over to Osage settlement, from Missouri, and stated that he, together with his wife, two children, and another negro man, was to be sold within a day or two, and begged for help to get away.” Brown and his friends gathered other slaves and helped them to freedom? If a slave holder was killed in such an action, is this a reasonable price? As Brown put it, “Now for a comparison. Eleven persons are forcibly restored to their natural and inalienable rights, with but one man killed, and ‘all hell is stirred from beneath.’” If one has the opportunity to free people from slavery, what is less moral? Saying no or killing a single white person in the process of saving eleven black people? For Brown, the answer was obvious.



John Brown in Kansas

When Brown launched his raid on Harpers Ferry, the South recognized it for what it was–a direct and violent attack upon their system of forced labor they had based their economy around for two hundred years. John Brown was their greatest fear and railroading him to the hangman’s rope was the obvious result (even if it also served the national political ambitions of the Virginia governor).

Frederick Douglass, who of course knew the horrors of the slave labor system first hand, lauded Brown’s ideology, if not his strategy. Douglass and Brown had known each other since 1847 and while they did not see eye to eye on many things, they were allies. While Douglass disagreed with the attack on the federal arsenal (he fully supported freeing slaves and starting a hideout in Appalachia), he was close enough to Brown that he had to flee after the raid. With an arrest warrant out for him, Douglass crossed into Canada. Douglass’ own assistant, Shields Green, joined in the raid. In fact, Douglass knew about the attack before it happened. Brown had directly recruited him, saying “I want you for a special purpose. When I strike the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”

On the other hand, William Lloyd Garrison was outraged by the use of violence, calling it “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.” It took until the South seceded and ending slavery seemed possible before northern whites began embracing Brown as a harbinger of free labor. During the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body” became an anthem for the Union army and abolitionists who could not countenance violence in 1859 felt like they were honoring their fallen martyr by using the violent ends Brown died for to end slave labor.

For early African-American scholars of slavery like W.E.B. DuBois, Brown was nothing short of a hero for doing so much to free their people. Here is DuBois from his 1909 biography of Brown:

“Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth to-day? John Brown loved his neighbor as himself. He could not endure therefore to see his neighbor, poor, unfortunate or oppressed. This natural sympathy was strengthened by a saturation in Hebrew religion which stressed the personal responsibility of every human soul to a just God. To this religion of equality and sympathy with misfortune, was added the strong influence of the social doctrines of the French Revolution with its emphasis on freedom and power in political life. And on all this was built John Brown’s own inchoate but growing belief in a more just and a more equal distribution of property. From this he concluded, — and acted on that conclusion — that all men are created free and equal, and that the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”

For the words of John Brown and other primary sources on his life and attack on Harpers Ferry, see Jonathan Earle, John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents. Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, is an excellent history of the events, with special attention paid to the issues I highlight here. I borrowed from both books to write this post.

This is the 79th post in this series. Other posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: October 10, 1917

[ 50 ] October 10, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On October 10, 1917, the red light district of New Orleans, known as Storyville, closed due to the efforts of reformers seeking to eliminate vice from the city. During the Progressive Era, this was happening all over the country. The net effect was not to end sex work, but rather to change the working conditions of sex workers, making their lives and work much more dangerous and deadly.

Prostitution was a common, open, and public part of American urban life since at least the American Revolution. The 19th century city was full of houses of prostitution. Sometimes they were tolerated, sometimes they were not. Sometimes, such as happened in Providence in the 1840s, they became sites of anti-Irish violence since the Irish often became prostitutes.



1787 woodcut of prostitutes

The meaning of prostitution was also different than today. Sex work could take any number of forms. Some women were full-time prostitutes. Other were so-called “charity girls,” who would trade sex (in some form or another) for a good time out. Others sold their bodies once a month in order to make ends meet when their regular jobs (which were often seasonal and inconsistent anyway) could not. But it’s important to understand that prostitution was a sensible economic proposition for the 19th century working class woman. With few appealing options, low pay, and dangerous working conditions in so-called legitimate work, prostitution might not seem so bad.

The red light districts really took off in the 1880s and 1890s. This was the period of sexual double standard, when chaste Victorian women were supposed to disdain sex (including in marriage for the most part) while men had animal lusts that had to be satisfied. If that wasn’t going to happen even within marriage, it had to happen somewhere. And that’s where legalized (or quasi-legal) prostitution came into play. The districts published pamphlets advertising the different services brothels provided. They often operated in questionable legal circumstances, so it was a world of bribes, corruption, and toleration.



Interior of the Everleigh Club, Chicago’s most exclusive brothel, circa 1900.

Who became prostitutes? Mostly it’s who you would expect. Immigrants. Working-class whites. Women who were raped as young girls. Women whose families had abandoned them in childhood. Orphans. Single mothers with young children. African-Americans. What the red light districts did was not only to concentrate this work in particular urban zones, but also to provide a measure of safety. A woman selling sex in true privacy is a woman in tremendous danger. Brothels provided real safety. This is hardly to say that all brothels provided good working conditions. Quite the opposite. Some brothels specialized in sex that wasn’t necessarily safe. Others had madams that treated workers poorly, beat the women, etc. Drug abuse was common and the job put great toil on bodies. On the other hand, you were far less likely to be murdered or brutalized by a client in a red light district brothel, simply because there were other people around, including your friends and coworkers.

However bad conditions in some brothels were, it’s also important to remember how bad working conditions were in general. People died on the job all the time. Capitalists had no particular interest in keeping workers alive and certainly wouldn’t invest in doing so. Unions fighting for better lives for workers were routinely crushed. The poor died of tuberculosis, among many other diseases, in huge numbers. So as bad as these brothels might sound, once we take our moral repulsion for sex work out of the equation, it really isn’t any worse than any other Gilded Age work for women. In fact, it could be quite a bit better–for a few there was a real chance to make big money, even if for obvious reasons it wasn’t going to last forever.

And yet some brothels actually did provide relatively good and safe working conditions. Many brothels were owned by women, one of the only economic opportunities for female ownership in the Gilded Age. The women formed a community of sorts that included mutual support, strict rules for clients, visits from doctors, bouncers if the men got too rough, and police protection if it was necessary. This meant women worked in conditions as clean and safe as possible.

The red-light districts came under attack during the Progressive Era. An increasingly politicized and mobilized group of middle-class women, with some important support from men, attacked the sexual double standard. But this wasn’t how we oh so liberated people might want it attacked today. No, it was to apply chastity to men. This made sense though in one very important way–men consorting with prostitutes literally implanted venereal disease in the bodies of their wives. In a Victorian society where one could not talk about such things, you had women dying of advanced syphilis and gonorrhea. This finally led to great outrage and organized attempts to shut down the red light districts, including public protests and shaming police and politicians who supported it. They forced the police to organize vice squads and pass ordinances ending the houses of prostitution.

That outrage combined with the fear of white slavery. Were some women working in the sex trade against their will? Yes, certainly. Were there scary Chinese or Italian men drugging our innocent white women heading off the farms and into the cities and forcing them into hellish lives? Meh; it’s really hard to know. What we do know is that the middle-class flipped out over the idea during the 1900s and 1910s. This led not only to the Mann Act, most famously used against the boxer Jack Johnson for daring to marry a white woman and not care what anyone thought, but to a whole cultural enterprise dedicated to it. This includes the famous 1913 film Traffic in Souls. Despite what this clip claims, I think it actually is a scene from that film (although it’s been several years so I’m not sure). In any case, it gives you a good idea of the mania surrounding this.

Yet these Progressives hadn’t really thought through what they were advocating. They hadn’t at all considered where the women would go once the brothels closed. A few people saw the contradictions clearly. When a group of women went to the mayor of Toledo and urged him to close down the city’s red light district, he made them an offer. If each one of the women took one prostitute into their employ, he would personally employ two. The women thought he was crazy. They just assumed if you got rid of prostitution it would disappear. They left the meeting thinking him an incorrigible enemy of their cause.

When Washington closed its red light district in 1914, a group of prostitutes wrote an open letter. They asked:

Knowing that public opinion is against us, and that the passing of the Kenyon “Red Light” Bill is certain, we, the inmates of the underworld, want to know how the public expects to provide for us in the future?

We do not want “homes.” All we ask is that positions be provided for us. The majority will accept them. We must live somehow. We are human. With all the resorts in nearly all the large cities closed, it is useless for us to leave Washington.

How many citizens will give employment to women in our class? Very few would be so liberal minded. They would consider us a detriment to their business. If we must reform, you who recommend these reforms, help us to lead a better life.

In years past, it has been tried and as soon as previous reputations were discovered, our positions were made unbearable. Then, through necessity we had to return to the old life.

Progressives had no answer for these questions.

Storyville itself isn’t particularly more significant than other red light districts with one big exception. I used it because I could find a solid date for its closure. I could have picked Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, or whatever. What was interesting about Storyville though was the special place it held in the American mind. The U.S. has always had a particular city dedicated in the national imagination to exotic sex. Until 1917, that was New Orleans because of its unique (for the U.S.) racial mixing. When Storyville closed, that site moved to Havana, where it remained until 1959. With Castro and Las Vegas rising at the same time, it moved to Nevada after the Cuban Revolution, where it more or less remains today. As New Orleans was more commited to sex tourism than much of the U.S., it took the Wilson Administration, very concerned about the moral purity of the military shipping to Europe, to force its closing. Storyville today is basically the Iberville Housing Project.

Storyville

The real effect of eliminating the red light district was not for prostitution to disappear. This seems self-evident, but as we have seen, was very much not obvious for Progressives, who often had a really naive view of human behavior generally. It was to put women on the street. Where they are beaten and raped and killed.

This isn’t necessarily a call for a return to the red light district. But it is an example of how criminalizing work because of our moral compunction does not eliminate the work. It simply moves it underground, where working conditions get worse and these workers die.

I strongly recommend Ruth Rosen’s The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 if you are interested in this topic.

This is the 78th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: October 1, 1910

[ 27 ] October 1, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On October 1, 1910, International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers member James McNamara blew up the Los Angeles Times building because the paper’s publisher, Harrison Gray Otis, was spearheading the city’s effort to crush unionism and remain an open shop alternative to heavily unionized San Francisco. The explosion and fire killed 21 people and wounded about 100 more, giving a black eye to the entire labor movement, embarrassing the American Federation of Labor, and setting back the labor movement in Los Angeles for decades.

In the early 20th century, Los Angeles was arguably America’s most conservative city. An hotbed of anti-union extremism, organized labor was almost entirely nonexistent. No one did more to push this policy than Harrison Gray Otis. In 1896, Otis took over the city’s Merchants Association and turned it to an virulently anti-union organization. Using his powerful newspaper as a mouthpiece for antiunionism, Otis spent the next two decades as the nation’s most important anti-union advocate. Some of this was ideology, some of it was LA boosters trying to undermine unionized San Francisco as the center of the California economy.

The Iron Workers were a tough bunch of unionists, to say the least. Formed in 1886, the union remained weak until it won a strike against a U.S. Steel subsidiary in 1902. This opened the door to them and within a year had most of the nation’s iron shops under their control, even signing some collective bargaining agreements with employers. In 1903, US Steel struck back, organizing the nation’s iron industrialists for a concerted union busting campaign that included spies, state complicity, and violence against workers. It was successful and by 1910, the union was out of every US Steel facility and most others. Responding to this campaign, beginning in 1906, the Iron Workers started using bombs to force companies to the bargaining table. Mostly this was just showing companies what they could do–the total damage of all these 110 bombs was small. But they did know how to manufacture and detonate bombs, that was for sure. No Alexander Berkman were these men.

During this tumult, a pair of Irish brothers named John and James McNamara rose into the Iron Workers’ leadership. John became Secretary-Treasurer of the union in 1905 and was heavily involved in the bombing campaign. In 1910, the Iron Workers launched a major organizing campaign in Los Angeles. They wanted a minimum wage of 50 cents an hour and overtime pay. Otis led the opposition. He and his employers organization raised $350,000 to fight the strike. A court judge issued injunctions that banned picketing. The Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance banning picketing or “speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone.” The strikers refused to follow these absurd laws and 472 were arrested. The strike was going pretty well and the total number of union members went up by 60%.

John and James McNamara

Yet on October 1, a bomb went off under the LA Times building. It was supposed to explode at 4 a.m. in order to not hurt anyone but the faulty timing mechanism set it off just after 1, meaning people were still working, including a bunch of reporters finishing a story late. Most of the dead were killed by the fire caused by the explosion. The next day, unexploded bombs were found underneath Otis’ home, as well as other sites around the city, although many claim that these were probably planted by the police to frame the union, an entirely possible scenario regardless of who bombed the actual building.

Ruins of the Los Angeles Times building

Otis immediately claimed the unionists had blown up his building. He wrote in the Times, “You anarchic scum. You cowardly murderers, you midnight assassins, you whose hands are dripping with the innocent blood of your victims, have committed one of the worst atrocities in the history of the world.” Unionists on the other hand believed Otis dastardly enough to bomb his own building just to frame the union.

Samuel Gompers immediately denied that any union was involved in such a dastardly crime. But a spy placed in the Iron Workers Union found out that the bombing campaign had come straight from the union’s top leadership. A hotel clerk recognized a photo of John McNamara, confirming he had rushed in and out of the hotel just before the bomb exploded. On April 13, James McNamara and Ortie McManigal, a rank and file union member, were arrested in Detroit with bombing equipment on them. They were taken to Chicago where instead of going to the police station they were held for a week in the home of a police sergeant. McManigal finally spilled the beans and implicated the entire Iron Workers leadership in the bombing. John McNamara was also discovered to have bombed a local iron manufacturing plant.

The labor movement was infuriated with the treatment of the prisoners, hiding them in a private home and forcing a confession. McNamara and McManigal claimed they had been tortured by the private investigators. For labor, this felt like the 1906 case when IWW leader Big Bill Haywood and other labor leaders were framed for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg. Clarence Darrow took the defense case. But it was so clear they were guilty that an ailing Darrow could do little for them. Muckraker Frank Norris got the brothers to confess in prison and convinced them to make their case that it was a justifiable bombing campaign. Seeing an inevitable defeat in court, Darrow got Otis and the AFL to agree to a plea bargain that would give the McNamara brothers light sentences in return for the end of the Iron Workers strike, which was ultimately what Otis wanted to begin with. But although Otis and the business community agreed to this, the prosecutor refused and the trial went forward with the stipulation that James would receive life and John a shorter sentence. That final plea agreement also stipulated a meeting between capital and labor and the end of the employers’ open shop campaign.


1911 Socialist Party pins in support of the McNamara brothers.

When Gompers found out the McNamara’s had pleaded guilty, he said they “had betrayed labor.” James McNamara received life in prison. John received 15 years. Thirty-eight Iron Workers were convicted of various crimes. The employers completely ignored their side of the agreement and continued fighting any unionization in their conservative town.

The bombing convinced national labor reformers to push for a greater government role in labor relations so that violence could be avoided. This led to the remarkable U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, created by President Taft in 1912, which will receive later coverage in this series.

The entire Los Angeles labor movement collapsed. Harrison Gray Otis almost couldn’t have asked for a better gift. Los Angeles remained a city with unusually low union density until the 1950s.

Ortie McManigal served 2 1/2 years as part of his plea deal. James McNamara died in prison in 1941. John McNamara served his full 15 years. Upon his release, he returned to union organizing, dying in Butte 2 months after his brother.

There’s a whole website dedicated to the bombing and those involved, which is actually quite good.

This is the 77th post in this series. The rest of the series is archived here.

This Day in Labor History: September 10, 1897

[ 5 ] September 10, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On September 10, 1897, Luzerne County sheriff deputies slaughtered 19 unarmed coal miners striking outside of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The strikers, primarily German, Polish, Lithuanian, and Slovak immigrants, were fighting for decent wages and working conditions in the one of the most brutal industries in the nation. The Lattimer Massacre was a touchstone event in the history of the United Mine Workers of America, who used it to organize workers across the region.

The 1890s saw a rise in immigration from Germany and eastern Europe; thousands of those migrants came to the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania. They were recruited there by coal companies as strikebreakers and because of that, the English, Welsh, and Scottish miners that previously dominated the industry hated them as scabs. Conditions in the coal miners were abysmal, with mine collapses and death shockingly common, a situation akin to modern Chinese mines. Making things worse was the Panic of 1893 and following depression that lasted for five years. The terrible poverty and desperation that resulted from these events led to some of the most dramatic events in American labor history, including the Pullman Strike, Coxey’s Army, and the rise of the Populists as a serious challenge to the 2-party system. Mine owners slashed wages during the depression for those who could get work at all. Typical company town conditions existed as well, with miners forced to rent from company-owned homes at high prices, forced to see company doctors, forced to shop at company stores, etc.

In 1897, the miners went on strike. The Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company laid off workers, raised fees for homes and doctors, forced longer hours on those who still worked, and tolerated a decline in working conditions. Work became more dangerous and more profitable for capitalists. The strike was lead by drivers, mostly teenagers who ran teams of mules to carry the coal out of the mines. The company consolidated its mule stables, forcing the drivers to travel farther on their own time to get their animals. In response, the drivers struck on August 14. When the new mine superintendent, a man named Gomer Jones, found out the mule drivers were striking, he grabbed a crowbar and whacked the first striker he saw in the head. The striker fought back and a general scuffle ensued. This helped lead the rest of the workers out on strike. With overall employment declining, workers saw little to lose by walking off the job together rather than get fired separately. By August 16, 2000 workers were on strike and most joined the United Mine Workers of America, a union trying to establish itself in the coal fields. This was a big deal because the Slavs had avoided the UMWA after being vilified by the unionized Anglo-Saxon miners. But the terrible conditions began to break down the ethnic divides in the anthracite fields.

The first strike ended on August 23 when the companies agreed to give miners the option to live in their own houses and see a doctor of their choosing, as well as grant a wage increase of about 10 cents. A second strike a few days later at nearby mines made the pay raise more universal in the region.

Or so the workers thought. In fact, when the owners announced the new pay rates on September 1, only a few workers saw a raise. On September 3, the workers went on strike again, with 3000 walking out. By September 8, somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 miners were on strike. The miners developed new demands, including a pay raise of 15 cents per employee, the ability to select their own doctor, the right to get paid for work even if the machines they workers were out of order (commonly Gilded Age workers were not paid if the company was not running for any reason; employers never could understand why workers wouldn’t “see reason” over this issue), and the freedom not have to buy from the company store.

Strikers near Lattimer, PA

The coal companies’ private police force, the Coal and Iron Police, were overwhelmed by these numbers and the owners created a posse of English and Irish residents, including many ex-miners. On September 8, about 300-400 miners, largely Slavs and Germans, marched to a mine in the town of Lattimer to support miners who had just joined the UMWA. Expanding the strike to Lattimer would be a huge victory for the miners because it would go a long way to shut down the entire the area and force the companies to grant workers’ demands. The mine owners knew this too. Luzerne County police, led by Sheriff James Martin, were openly heard bragging about how many miners they would kill. When the miners reached Lattimer, the police confronted them and ordered them to disperse. When they refused, the police opened fire, killing 19 and wounding about 40. All had been shot in the back.

The immediate aftermath led to infuriated miners who destroyed the home of the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Company mine superintendent and the Pennsylvania National Guard called in to restore order. Unrest continued until September 20. Local response was pro-miners. The Hazleton Daily Standard published this poem on September 17:

“If the courts of justice shield you
And your freedom you should gain,
Remember that your brows are marked
With the burning brand of Cain.
Oh, noble, noble, deputies
We always will remember
Your bloody work at Lattimer
On the 10th day of September.”

Philadelphia Inquirer depiction of the shooting, September 12, 1897

The state actually bothered to try Martin and his 73 deputies but despite the evidence of shooting workers in the back, they all claimed the marchers refused to disperse and were acquitted.

The Lattimer Massacre was a hugely important event in the history of the UMWA. First, standing up for the workers led to membership rising to 10,000, the largest in the union’s history. Second, it ended the widely held belief by both Anglo-Saxon miners and company owners that the Slavic workers were docile and would never join the union. The UMWA built off this event and in 1900, with an improved economy after the depression ended in 1898, won significant wage increases. UMWA president John Mitchell became, along with AFL head Samuel Gompers, the most important labor leader in the country.

The massacre was mostly forgotten about in the larger national consciousness, but finally, in 1972, a monument was erected at the site, which I visited in January.

This is the 76th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: September 9, 1919

[ 58 ] September 9, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On September 9, 1919, the police force in Boston went on strike, the most aggressive action to date by American public sector workers. The harsh response from the government of Massachusetts both set back public sector unionism and changed American political history.

The police had basic demands. They wanted union recognition, a pay raise, and improved working conditions. Boston police had not received an effective pay raise since 1854, with the starting salary for new officers the same as it had been 65 years earlier. Cops made only about half an average worker’s salary in 1919 and had to pay for their own uniforms. They worked between 75 and 90 hours a week and did not get paid for time they spent in court. Police stations were dilapidated and unsanitary. In other words, it was a bad job.

The officers’ first response was to petition to join the American Federation of Labor. The AFL first accepted police officers in June 1919 and cops around the nation immediately signed up. Soon, there were 37 police locals around the nation.

As the Boston police began talking about a strike, a key question was one that still dominates discussion of public unions today. Can public workers go on strike? This was not the only issue, as the state was fighting with the police over their right to affiliate with the AFL. But this is a central question of public sector unionism. It is still often debated, with the most resounding position from a politician taken by Ronald Reagan with the PATCO strike in 1981. Today, some states allow public employees to strike, while most do not. On this blog we’ve had debates about whether BART workers should go strike because it inconveniences San Francisco commuters.

The forces of order also worried whether unionized police would continue to break strikes upon orders from their superiors. The police commissioner and Boston Chamber of Commerce argued that police could not be unionists because it would create “divided loyalty,” a phrase clearly demonstrating their fear that the cops would no longer be a force dedicated to defending the interests of capitalists and busting the heads of those who challenged those interests. The Boston Police Department responded to its police joining the AFL by ordering them to disassociate with it. When the officers refused, the police moved toward a strike. After the police commissioner suspended 19 men on September 7 for union activity, the police responded by voting to go out on strike on September 9. By a vote of 1134 yes, 2 no. They were all fired on September 13.

Boston police officers on strike

The police going on strike at this particular time was especially incendiary. The wave of strikes that year no doubt emboldened the cops to take this unprecedented action, but it also helped ensure a belligerent response. Right in the middle of the Red Scare, with Eugene Debs serving time in prison, activists like Emma Goldman about to be deported, and the Centralia Massacre just around the corner, the forces of order were in no mood to respond rationally. Instead, they blamed it on the Bolshevism that threatened the United States. The New York Sun claimed that unionized police would lead to “virtual Soviet rule” while the Newport Daily News wrote that the “whole movement was the very essence of Bolshevism.”

The strike also put the American Federation of Labor in a sticky situation. The AFL had encouraged these police unions after World War I. But this was a new thing. The AFL had rejected applications from police going back to at least 1897. Gompers was trying to build on his close relationship with the Wilson Administration he developed during World War I to expand the AFL into the heart of American life, a plan that would fail miserably in the coming years. He wanted to start organizing public sector workers and began referring to them as fellow workers to the private sector. At the same time, the AFL was nothing if not an organization dedicated to public order and a strike that portended spikes in crime was nothing that Gompers wanted any part of, especially if it portrayed labor’s interest as opposite to the public’s interest.

And what would happen if cops went on strike? Would anarchy result? The answer was sort of. There was a rise in assault, public gambling, and robbery. Moreover, the poor of Boston saw the strike as the class warfare it was, attacking the property of the rich and stoning a group of reserve police with chants of “Kill them all.” After the second night, state police opened fire on a crowd, killing 9.

In response, Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge called out the state guard to restore order in Boston and urged the Wilson Administration to prepare to send troops if needed. The guard busted the police strike and Coolidge fired all 1147 striking cops. Coolidge had opposed the police union from the beginning and completely rebuffed efforts from the police officers before the strike started to help mediate the situation.

Calvin Coolidge

Gompers and the AFL really struggled to respond to this strike for the reasons laid out above. Gompers told Coolidge that the federation did not support public sector strikes, even if it did support public sector unionism. But the ability of the AFL to control the workers federated with it was always pretty limited. Plus there was plenty of labor support for the strike. The Detroit Labor News wrote that policing “may be a sacred trust but the landlord will not accept it in lieu of rent, nor does the grocer consider it a medium of exchange.”

The strikers hoped to be reinstated to their jobs and placed their hopes in the 1920 Massachusetts election for governor, with Coolidge running for reelection against Democratic candidate Richard Long. Long pledged his support for reinstatement and the fired police officers worked for him, but Coolidge won reelection despite losing Boston.

Not surprisingly though, the strike did win real gains for the replacement police. The minimum yearly pay for patrolmen jumped to $1400 a year (still only about $17,000 in 2012 dollars). But the strike devastated public sector unionism around the nation. Even as the government grew, total numbers of unionized public workers declined with remaining unions fearful of even thinking about striking. Public sector unions would always have to be watchful about using the confrontational tactics of private sector workers, a conundrum it continues to face today. The strike’s failure and overwhelming repression also almost certainly delayed collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. The private sector gained those rights during the New Deal, while the public sector had to wait until the 1960s to begin that process. Overall then, crushing the strike was a huge victory for governments who sought to keep their employees union-free.

Coolidge received the Republican vice-presidential nomination for his actions in suppressing the strike and of course became president in 1923 when Warren Harding died, winning election for himself in 1924.

For more, see Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900-1962, by our valued frequent commenter Joseph Slater.

This is the 75th post in the series. The rest are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: August 25, 1921

[ 36 ] August 25, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On August 25, 1921, the largest labor insurgency in American history and the largest civil uprising since the Civil War began in Logan County, West Virginia when 10,000 miners and their supporters went to war with 3000 coal mine executives and their hired thugs. The Battle of Blair Mountain is one of the least known major events in American history.

By 1921, little had changed for several decades in the coal mining country of West Virginia. The coal companies ruled over this area like a medieval fiefdom, having almost total control over workers’ lives. They issued company scrip to shop at company stores, evicted workers from company housing if they went on strike, brutally crushed union attempts to organize the mines, and murdered union organizers. They hired goons to intimidate miners and spies to infiltrate union organizing effort. The United Mine Workers of America struggled to maintain a hold in West Virginia; in fact the UMWA throughout Appalachia had a rollercoaster of a membership for decades, with numbers skyrocketing after rare victories and collapsing after the inevitable oppression that followed.

Such a widescale rebellion took place in the aftermath of an event far more famous thanks to the John Sayles film detailing it, the Matewan Massacre, when Baldwin-Felts thugs got into a gun battle with the worker-sympathetic law enforcement officers of the town of Matewan. In 1921, the coal industry got their revenge on Mingo County sheriff Sid Hatfield, who had participated at Matewan, by murdering him on the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse in Welch. That was on August 1. On August 7, the UMWA issued a petition of workers’ demands, including the arrest of Hatfield’s murderers, to West Virginia governor Ephraim Morgan. Morgan rejected them out of town and workers’ anger grew.

On August 20, armed men began gathering in Kanawha County, outside of Charleston and by August 24, 13,000 miners had arrived fully armed and ready to demand justice. While alarmed politicians began working toward compromise, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin wanted blood. Supported by the Logan County Coal Operators Association, Chafin hated the UMWA and wanted to eliminate them from his country entirely, preferably with the maximum shedding of blood. The coal operators provided Chafin a hired army of 3000 people to oppress the miners. On the request of Governor Morgan, President Warren Harding had sent General Henry Bandholtz to West Virginia on August 25. Bandholtz told union leaders the army would “snuff them out” if they did not end the march, leading many prominent UMWA figures, including Mother Jones to urge the end of the action to prevent fatalities. Although on August 26, many of the miners agreed to return to their homes, Chafin wanted to his pound of flesh. His men began shooting union members as they returned to their homes, with families caught in the crossfire.



A bunker used by the coal miners’ private army.

When news of Chafin’s duplicitious and murderous violence reached miners, they exploded. Several days of sporadic fighting followed between Chafin’s army and the miners. The coal operators hired private planes to drop homemade bleach bombs and other munitions on the miners. The U.S. military clearly showed itself on the side of the mine operators. General Billy Mitchell ordered U.S. army planes to conduct aerial surveillance of the difficult terrain and report back to the mine owners, possibly the first time that planes were used by the U.S. army against American civilians. Over the next week, about 30 of Chafin’s troops died as did probably about 100 miners.



An unexploded bomb dropped by the coal company army on the miners, displayed by those it meant to kill.

The Battle of Blair Mountain ended when Harding sent in U.S. troops to put down the revolt. Fearing massive death, UMWA leader Bill Blizzard ended the revolt on September 2 and told his members to return to their homes, which they did, attempting to hide the guns in the dense mountains. As normal during the pre-New Deal period, UMWA membership followed the fortunes of organizing, with membership plummeting from 50,000 to 10,000 after the suppression of the uprising.

In the aftermath, 985 miners were indicted and tried for charges including murder and treason against the state of West Virginia (who knew you could commit legal treason against a state). The charges against most were dropped. A Baptist minister and his son who led a party that killed three members of the coal companies’ army did serve three years in prison, before a new governor, Howard Gore, pardoned them. Some argue that while the Battle of Blair Mountain was a total loss for the UMWA, the attention it garnered about the lives of coal miners helped build support for the major labor reforms of the New Deal, of which no one benefited more than the United Mine Workers of America.

Some years later, Chafin was arrested on corruption charges and served time in federal prison for bootlegging.

Why is the Battle of Blair Mountain so unknown, in comparison to other big labor events of the period? It’s a combination of reasons. First, the coal companies and their lackey West Virginia politicians worked very hard to keep news of this under wraps, even into the present. The state long refused to acknowledge the existence of this event with even a basic historical marker, although that has finally been rectified. I’m not sure that even today the event is taught in West Virginia history courses in schools, even though it is one of the most important things to ever happen there. Second, it was a total defeat for the union, although that hasn’t stopped other major losses like Homestead and Pullman from becoming iconic events. Third, it was rural West Virginia and not urban Chicago or Pittsburgh. We rarely think about rural people or rural issues in anything more than the abstract. West Virginia is isolated and you have to really work to get out to Blair Mountain, whereas anyone in New York can wander over to the site of the Triangle Fire and the giant factories of Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania serve as visual representations of the struggles of labor past. Blair Mountain has none of this.

Today, the site of the Battle of Blair Mountain is highly endangered thanks to the coal companies’ insatiable desire to take every rock out of West Virginia. The site is on the chopping block for a mountaintop removal operation of the type that is the latest iteration of how the industry has exploited the labor and nature of West Virginia for the last 150 years later. The lack of public knowledge about the important history that happened on the site assists the coal companies in their desire to mine it.

The likely future of the site of the Battle of Blair Mountain

This is the 74th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: August 22, 1945

[ 54 ] August 22, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On August 22, 1945, five airline stewardesses, as they were then called, formed the Air Line Stewardesses Association, wanting a labor union to give them a voice on a demanding, difficult job where they faced constant pressure about their bodies, poor working conditions, low pay, and restrictions on marriage status and age.

The position of flight attendant began on May 15, 1930, when a woman named Ellen Church worked at what was then known as a “skygirl.” Women worked very hard, but had to look glamorous while doing it. They spent hours on their feet, dealt with drunk passengers, bent and reached and stooped over. A pedometer worn by one stewardess on a 1948 flight from Chicago to Miami showed she walked eight miles during the flight. The career itself wasn’t glamorous—but it had to look glamorous to the passengers. Rather than train the hostesses, airlines required them to pay for their own training with private services, at least one flight attendant paid $325 to a private school for stewardess training in Kansas City in 1948.

The sexualized nature of this work meant that woman had to uphold physical standards so that the ancestors of fictional Don Draper could enjoy their flight. There were strict requirements around height, weight, and appearance. The woman had to remain single. Moreover, there was a forced retirement on your 32nd birthday. In other words, airlines used young women to sell sexual allure to male customers, who were then expected to choose conventional lifestyles and marry. The 1951 film Three Guys Named Mike followed a flight attendant played by Jane Wyman around her adventures of love and travel until she settled down with one of the Mikes, a small-town science professor where she could perform traditional duties of domesticity.

Working conditions could be quite unpleasant. Planes were smaller, slower, and flew at much lower altitudes than today. That meant long turbulent flights with a lot of passengers vomiting from motion sickness. Flight attendants had to manage this, getting thrown around from turbulence and sometimes crawling through vomit. Pay was very low, about $125 a month in 1944, which is the equivalent to $1630 a month today or slightly less than $20,000 a year. Moreover, the pay was weighted on 100 hours of air time, but various duties on the ground raised it to a real 150 hours, meaning 50 effective unpaid hours a month. There were very small numbers of male flight attendants as well, mostly on international flights, but they were losing their hold in the profession by the 1940s and many airlines refused to hire them.

Ada Brown had the idea to start the union. She was United’s chief stewardess and was angry about the airline’s unwillingness to make improvements. She later remembered, “As chief stewardess I tried to get improvements for the girls with salary, flight restrictions, and protection from unjust firing. We were always promised things, but nothing was ever done—except to throw parties for the stewardesses.” She found four friends to join her—Edith Lauterbach, Frances Hall, Sally Thometz, and Sally Watt. Lauterbach joined United in 1944. Like many women, she planned to work for a year, see a bit of the world, and quit. Instead, she became a union activist and fought to stay in the air, even after her age reached 32.

Within a few months, three-quarters of United attendants had signed up and by August 1945, the ALSA had established local councils in 4 cities, had elected officers, and drafted a constitution. ALSA became the new frontier in pink-collar labor activism, where professional and semi-professional women organized their professions, including telephone operators, waitresses, teachers, and social workers. The ALSA conceived of itself as elite labor and as such demanded respect. The first issue of the ALSA newspaper Service Aloft in October 1946 notes, “The airline industry seems to think they are doing a favor when they give a person a job as a steward or stewardess. They are prone to forget that these people have done more to sell airplane traveling to the American people than any other single factor.”

Thus began a multi-decade movement consisting of thousands of women, often new workers in a field with high turnover and severe rules that restricted long-term employees. It was a long hard struggle for flight attendants to reach the point they are at today. The union won its first contract in 1946, when United increased pay to $155 and agreed to limited hours, set rest periods between flights, and a grievance procedure. In 1947, ALSA President Ada Brown married and became a victim of United’s rule against marriage, forcing her to resign from both her work and the union. The union not only had to deal with these issues, but also significant sexual harassment from pilots, a group with which the union had a complex and not altogether productive or friendly relationship. A former TWA flight attendant remembered pilots making “unofficial girdle checks” on the attendants. The pilots union started their own subsidiary within the flight attendants and forced the ALSA to merge with it in 1949. Several breakoff movements took place over the years, with most of the attendants forming what is today Association of Flight Attendants in the late 1970s, although the AFA did not get a charter from the AFL-CIO until 1984.

The age requirements did not go away until 1968, after flight attendants used Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to challenge discrimination. At that point the average career of a flight attendant was only 18 months. The union pushed the airlines to end the marriage requirement as well, to which courts agreed in 1971, at the same time they opened the profession to men. The weight requirements were loosened in 1979 after more union pressure. The union pressed to apply OSHA rules to airplane labor, end bans on pregnant attendants, promote cabin safety measures for both passengers and workers, and helped kill a 1981 FAA plan to reduce flight attendants in each flight.

Today, the AFA is a part of the Communication Workers of America, a merger it undertook after post 9/11 layoffs. The union represents about 60,000 workers.

The last surviving member of the 5 flight attendants to start the ALSA, Edith Lauterbach, died in February at the age of 91. She retired from the airlines in 1986, the first woman to serve more than forty years as a flight attendant.

Edith Lauterbach

Those interested in learning more should read Kathleen M. Barry’s Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants, from which I drew a good bit of this post.

This is the 73rd post in this series. Other posts are archived here.

This Day in Labor History: August 14, 1935

[ 19 ] August 14, 2013 | Erik Loomis

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, bringing the modern welfare state to the American people and providing the nation’s poor long-desired old age insurance.

FDR signing the Social Security Act.

The nation’s elderly had long lived with the potential of late-life poverty. The nation’s lack of a welfare state doomed the poor to rely on their families for survival, an impossibility for many. During the nation’s frequent economic downturns, this problem was worse. The continued decline in quality of life for the elderly during the Great Depression helped spur a more organized movement for old-age insurance. Many advocates fell in behind Francis Townsend. A California doctor, Townsend believed that if you put more money in the hands of the elderly, they would reinvigorate the economy with their spending. The Townsend plan proposed a sizable pension of $200 a month to any American over the age of 60 and was based upon the federal investment in pensions for Civil War soldiers, the first welfare program in American history. Townsend favored a sales tax rather than an income tax (proposed by Huey Long in his own old-age pension program) to pay for it. People would have to spend every cent of the $200 each month and quit working in order to receive it, which Townsend said would open jobs for the young and spur the economy through spending. By 1935, 28 states had passed old-age pensions of their own, although many of these provided no more than a dollar day, required a state residency of ten years, and limited eligibility to those over the age of 70.



Francis Townsend.

Within Roosevelt’s Cabinet, no one advocated more for old-age insurance than Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Organized labor had opposed Perkins’ appointment as Secretary of Labor for three reasons: she was the first Secretary of Labor that did not come from the labor movement, she was a woman, and she was a reformer rather than a unionist. The American Federation of Labor did not trust the federal government to run any kind of social welfare program. Believing both that the government was always the tool of capital and that welfare would undermine the independence of the American worker, the AFL under William Green would oppose much of the New Deal, even if its rank and file loved FDR. Perkins had long advocated for old-age insurance. Roosevelt initially opposed any long-term program, seeking instead a quick fix for the elderly through emergency relief. But by 1934, he had come around to Perkins’ view on the necessity of a permanent program. FDR named Perkins the head of the Committee on Economic Security, combining politicians and academics, to create what would become Social Security.

At the same time the CES met, Townsend’s plan became famous. 25 million Americans signed petitions in support of the plan and 1200 clubs formed, mostly by the elderly, to promote it. Policymakers were not amused. Perkins called it “a very large gift….much larger than the income which they enjoyed during their younger and working years” while others said the high sales taxes to fund it would hurt businesses. In addition, policymakers feared a federal plan. Even FDR told Perkins that he preferred the states having a great deal of control because “Just think what it would be like to have the power in the federal government if Huey Long should become President.”

The final plan did preserve state old-age welfare programs but put the majority of power within the federal government. Roosevelt insisted that the program be entirely self-supporting, not wanting a huge initial outlay to create massive debts for future generations. This meant much higher payroll tax rates, up to 6% of taxable payroll by 1949.

Today, we think of Social Security as something that is almost untouchable; despite Republican attempts to privatize the program, people really like it the way it is. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t controversial in 1935. Roosevelt was so popular among the people that Democrats steamrolled the Republicans in the 1934 midterm elections. The giant congressional majorities that followed is how the bill passed. Much of Congress disliked the bill, particularly the increased federal presence. Most of it offered little short-term political value. Only FDR’s overwhelming popularity prevented more open opposition. Still, on March 20, 1935, the Times ran a story titled, “Hopes Are Fading for the Social Security Bill” that predicted the only piece of the bill that would get through would be some assistance for the indigent over 65 years old. No one really knew what would happen to the bill once it reached the House floor. Some thought the Townsendites would overwhelm it and make it politically infeasible. Others believed right-wingers would demand lower tax rates and thus not fund it.

FDR used every trick in his book to push the bill through, making voting for it a matter of personal political loyalty to the most popular president in 20th century America at the peak of his powers. And the bill did pass overwhelming, by a 372-33 margin. Still, that took a lot of compromising from Roosevelt, who accepted a scaled back bill that only covered about 60% of workers, excluding federal employees, professionals like doctors and attorneys, domestic workers, agricultural workers, and the self-employed. The CES had strongly fought for including domestics and farmworkers and giving these up was the last compromise FDR made. Even then, the Senate nearly made the bill voluntary instead of compulsory after passing an amendment by Champ Clark that would have allowed for plans with more liberal provisions to opt out. The Clark Amendment got dumped in reconciliation. Finally, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act until 1935.

Social Security proved immediately popular, even if AFL leaders grumbled. Despite the fact that union members loved Social Security, it was only the emergence of the CIO and the success the rival federation had in wrapping itself in progressive New Deal policy that moved AFL leaders to accept that Social Security might not destroy voluntarism. By 1938, the AFL joined the CIO in promoting expanded benefits. Republicans tried to make repealing it an issue in the 1936 elections. That didn’t work out so well for them. The plan was not implemented until the Supreme Court decided its constitutionality in Helvering v. Davis in 1937. Social Security meant something very real for the nation’s elderly. For instance, Roy Acuff had a hit off of his song about Social Security, “Old Age Pension Check:”

I relied on Edward Berkowitz, America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan and Dewitt, Beland and Berkowitz, Social Security: A Documentary History to write this post. Check those books out.

This is the 72nd post in this series. Other posts are archived here.

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