Seattle in the hands of workers: Seattle General Strike

[Hannah Bell]

THE REVOLUTIONARY atmosphere and activities that took hold in the U.S. in the early 20th century have been systematically written out of popular history textbooks, leaving generations of workers, students and activists without the stories and lessons of a rich history of working-class radicalism.

One of these stories is the Seattle general strike in 1919...set off by a 35,000-strong strike of shipyard workers on January 21, 1919. Within two weeks, 110 union locals granted authorization for a general strike, and formed a 300-person strike committee to run the strike. They were eventually joined by thousands of unorganized workers, members of the IWW and Japanese workers...



(Serving food to striking workers in one of the cooperative restaurants established by the General Strike Committee and the Central Labor Council)



(Shipyard workers leave work)





Despite pleas by the city government of Seattle to call off the strike, workers began taking control, forming in practice, a counter-government to the official one. Practically every aspect of the city's life came before the strike committee for a decision...

Despite the hysteria whipped up by the city government and media, Major Gen. John F. Morrison, in charge of the U.S. troops that were later called into the city, said that in his 40 years of military experience, he had "not seen a city so quiet and orderly..."


http://socialistworker.org/2009/07/16/seattle-in-workers-hands

http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/strike/

[stuball111]

1. Those were the good ol days

We can't even strike now or our unions will be fined under "no strike or lockout" laws. I think it was a Reagan era thing. As a result, wages have climbed slowly, and conditions have dropped. It sucks...

[stuball111]

2. And up north..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-to-Ottawa_Trek

Little known stuff of union struggles in Canadaland

[Mythsaje]

3. I'd wondered about that... the textbooks, I mean.

The kids today are definitely under-informed about the labor movement (as opposed to me, who saw the Ballad of Joe Hill when I was quite young). I tell the kids "Take your breaks and vacations--people died to give them to you."

[Selatius]

4. Those were the all-or-nothing days.

Back then, if workers did not succeed in getting concessions, then they were more than willing to band together and take the beatings the police and company thugs were all too willing to hand out, and they dished some of it back in return. It was possible not only because of relatively modern communication but also because of a sense of comraderie that existed between a lot of workers.

Today, the comraderie seems pretty fragmented if non-existent. There is no sense of class consciousness in America, not anymore. It has been excised out of the American consciousness, a gigantic lobotomy. Workers today are tame compared to their grandparents and great grandparents. Polls show--at last recollection--about half if not more workers would like a labor union in their workplace, but they are afraid of initiating one, ostensibly because they feel they would not be backed up by fellow workers. Is it fear of the boss? I don't think so. Fear of the boss was a big issue in 1909 as well as 2009. The difference is workers have different sets of beliefs now compared to then. We're more individualistic, more materialistic, more consumerist.

Who here knew about Eugene V. Debs before coming here to DU and spending several years here reading threads, for instance?

I didn't know about him. Never heard of him until he was mentioned here. Then I researched, and my ignorance was dispelled. I've found other notables in my research. Emma Goldman was another. "Big" Bill Haywood was yet another big figure in the Labor Movement of the early 20th Century.

Nobody knows about them. They have been tossed down the memory hole for all but a small number of individuals. It is a shame.

[warren pease]

7. Our history has been systematically stolen and, along with it, our rights and freedoms...

... and sense of self as citizens of the planet. Not some lines on a map drawn by politicians and land speculators represented by little pieces of cloth, but actual human beings with common, universal interests.

If you don't know where you came from, you have no idea of how warped the present is and how repressive and inhuman the future is likely to be if things proceed at the current pace and in the current directions.


sf

[Norrin Radd]

5. kr

[warren pease]

6. And I just ran into the weirdest bit of labor history I've encountered in some time...

I was looking up some stuff on Debs and ran into this astonishing use of the Sherman Act to suppress labor. I had the usual suppositions that it was a tool to keep the goddamn capitalists from doing what they do best, but here it's used as just another union-busting hammer. Typical of the US, I suppose.

From this utterly biased piece-a-shit article: (Boldface type mine)

In June, the ARU convened in Chicago to discuss the ongoing Pullman Strike. On June 21, the ARU voted to join in solidarity with the strikers and boycotted Pullman cars. ARU workers refused to handle trains with Pullman cars and the boycott became a great success, especially along the transcontinental lines going west of Chicago.

In response, Pullman ordered Pullman cars be attached to U.S. mail cars creating a backup of the postal service and bringing in the Federal Government. Under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which ruled it illegal for any business combination to restrain trade or commerce, an injunction was issued on July 2 enjoining the ARU leadership from "compelling or inducing by threats, intimidation, persuasion, force or violence, railway employees to refuse or fail to perform their duties." The next day President Cleveland ordered 20,000 federal troops to crush the strike and run the railways.

By July 7, Debs and seven other ARU leaders were arrested and later tried and convicted for conspiracy to halt the free flow of mail. The strike was finally crushed while Debs spent six months in prison in Woodstock, Illinois. The ARU eventually dissolved and Pullman reopened with all union leaders sacked. During Debs' time in jail, he spent much of his time reading the literature works of Karl Marx.

The Union continued to stay afloat but eventually lost most of its members. The American Railway Unions was the first industrial union and biggest of its time.

Lovely, eh?

sf

[Hannah Bell]

13. weird, I saw a similar cite just yesterday in some period text: sherman act

used to hit labor while JP Morgan told gov't it couldn't break up one of his financial trusts because it would destroy the economy.

I'll try to find the reference.

edit: Gustave Meyers, History of the Great American Fortunes (copyright 1910 & 1936)

CHAPTER XII

MORGAN AS “THE SAVIOR OF THE NATION”

In the difficult financial position of the Trust Company of America, the Morgan and Rockefeller interests, working in unison, saw their great opportunity of eliminating the competition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. To prevent itself going into bankruptcy, the Trust Company of America needed large and immediate amounts of cash, which was scarce. Morgan and his clique had the cash. The condition insisted upon by Morgan was that the company should sell him the stock of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company that it was holding as collateral for loans. Hard pressed, the Trust Company had to yield, and sell the stock at the low price offered. The next move was to make the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company a part of the Steel Trust.

There was, however, an obstacle. The Federal antitrust law prohibited such combinations. How could this situation be overcome ? President Roosevelt was incessantly and gustily threatening the great magnates with the enforcement of this law. But apparently Morgan knew Roosevelt much better than the country knew him. He undoubtedly reckoned that Roosevelt’s talk was mere words, and that Roosevelt would prove his subservience anew in acts.

The report went that Morgan, through emissaries sent to the White House, informed Roosevelt that unless the merger of the two steel companies was allowed by the Government, the Trust Company of America would go down in failure, causing a train of other bankruptcies, and the panic would be manifold intensified. Whatever were the reasons for Roosevelt’s submission, he gave his consent. At that very time the courts were enforcing the anti-trust law with a construction that no one had dreamed of when the law was passed. The eminent judges discovered that labor unions were trusts, and issued writs against them on the ground that they were conspiracies in defiance of that law ! Roosevelt was bitterly denounced ;6 his action, however, mattered little so far as the merging of the two corporations was concerned ; had not the Steel Trust obtained control at that particular time it would have inevitably done so at some other time, and by another process.7 According to disclosures before the Senate Committee on judiciary, the Steel Trust made a profit of $670,000,000 by forcing the Trust Company of America to sell the control of the enormously valuable plants and mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company at a preposterously low price.

http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/myers/myers_index.html

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. another name lost to the memory hole is Upton Sinclair, of Ca.

who is often confused with Sinclair Lewis, both were radicals.

Upton ran for Governor of Ca. in the 30's and damn near made it. He was a Socialist.

Oh, those strikes? Huge big deals in my old home town of Everett Washington.
that is where the name Wobblies came from.
My grandfather was very proud to have been a Union man.
" Never trust the Gov'mint" he'd say.

[lumberjack_jeff]

9. Thanks for this Hannah Bell.

Much of early 20th century history is really labor history.

The Seattle strike was remarkable, we forget that people died to fight fascism here.

Centralia Massacre

They guys who lynched a wobbly, have a statue in the city park. The guy that got lynched? Unmarked grave.

[Kid Dynamite]

10. There is SO much history

just in this one strike and it was one event among 1000.

Phenomenal

[starroute]

11. This strike was part of what led to the foundation of the "Family"

I haven't been able to pin down the chronology, because the general strike was in 1919 and the Family was founded in 1935. But at least one of the sources I have says that the two were connected -- that the establishment of the Family was a result of conservative Seattle businessmen who'd had the pants scared off them by labor activism and were looking to use religion to undermine union militancy.

Reminding people of the history of working-class radicalism is marvelous and long overdue. But it needs to be accompanied by an awareness of the owner-class crackdown that came about in reaction to that radicalism. Unfortunately, these days the radicalism is long gone but we're still living under the thumb of that crackdown without ever realizing how or why we're being oppressed.

For example, the real reason it's so difficult to get health care reform passed is that the bosses are afraid if workers weren't kept in line by their dependence on job-based health insurance, they might start to get radical ideas in their heads again.

So please do keep digging out the history -- we need to get it back. But never forget that it isn't merely historical -- that it's intimately tied in with what's happening right now.

[Hannah Bell]

12. That connection is one of the reasons I posted this - I saw the same reference.

I think this is the connection:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_West_Coast_Longshore_Strike

"The strike began on May 9, 1934 as longshoremen in every West Coast port walked out; sailors joined them several days later. The employers recruited strikebreakers, housing them on moored ships or in walled compounds and bringing them to and from work under police protection. Strikers attacked the stockade housing strikebreakers in San Pedro on May 15; two strikers were shot and killed by the employers' private guards. Similar battles broke out in San Francisco and Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. Strikers also succeeded in slowing down or stopping the movement of goods by rail out of the ports."

[Hannah Bell]

14. kick