The Hundred Year War Against the American Worker

[McCamy Taylor]

If asked What was (or is) the longest running U.S. war? most people would say the conflict in Southeast Asia. However, in this journal I will make a case that our federal government’s longest war has been the one waged against workers, both here and abroad, who attempt to obtain a decent wage and safe work conditions. Since this battle began during the very first national strike back in 1877, it is a Hundred Year War .

Many other so called “wars” like the War Against Black Folks (aka the War on Drugs) are actually part of this largest conflict, since racial minorities are oppressed in this country in order to depress all wages. The current right wing War Against Immigrants is also a skirmish in the Hundred Year War, designed to keep Mexican immigrants living in fear, so that they will accept low pay and poor work conditions. Women are denied a fair wage for the same reason. Divide and Conquer has become a favorite strategy of the business class, because the one thing that workers have going for them is strength in numbers. If they can be pitted against each other, then they will lose--- and the bosses will win.

Do not be fooled by the seemingly milder, more law abiding behavior of the nation’s business owners in recent years. Employers in the United States have been at war with their workers for a very, long time, and their allies in the battle have been (except for a few years during the FDR administration) our own elected officials.

I. “A Diet of Lead for the Hungry Strikers”: The Railroad Strike of 1877

Sometimes it just amazes me how (bad) history keeps repeating itself in the United States. You would think that we would learn from our mistakes.

Bush v. Gore was not the nation’s only fixed election. Way back in 1876, the president of the largest company in the United States, Thomas Scott, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, crafted a deal in which the man who got fewer votes----Rutherford Hayes---was elected president. In exchange, Scott got federal bailouts for bad investments in the Texas and Pacific Railroad. The cost of this bailout was high---Hayes supporters courted Southern Democrats in Congress by promising to end Reconstruction, effectively abandoning Southern Blacks to a century of Jim Crow and the KKK. In that election and its aftermath, the foundations for United States policy towards American workers were laid. That policy was, in a word, war.

The nation’s economy was in a shambles. Investors had been up to their usual dirty tricks. In 1869, Black Friday was precipitated by two investors, Gould and Fisk who conspired with family members of then President Grant to corner the gold market and drive up prices. When gold prices returned to normal, many investors were ruined. A few years later, gold was in the news again, as the feds stopped buying silver thanks to the Coinage Act of 1873, also called the Crime of 1873. Domestic money supplies were reduced. Also in 1873, the major investment firm Jay Cooke & Company went under due to its bad investments in the nation’s railroad industry. The New York Stock Exchange closed for 10 days. Railroads failed----and it was the American worker who suffered the most as the nation entered the Long Depression.

A bank panic on Sept. 18, 1873 disintegrated into depression. "Weekly the layoffs, wage cuts, strikes, evictions, breadlines and hunger increased," wrote Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais in Labor’s Untold Story. The winter of 1873-74, especially in large cities, was one of great suffering for the tens of thousands of unemployed workers and their families who were starving or on the brink of starvation.
As the depression stretched into 1874, the unemployed demanded work and unions fought wage cuts. But the depression itself became a powerful weapon in smashing unions.
Millions suffered through months upon months of mounting misery. "By 1877 there were as many as three million unemployed ," according to Boyer and Morais. "Two-fifths of those employed were working no more than six to seven months a year and less than one-fifth was regularly working. And the wages of those employed had been cut by as much as 45 percent, often to little more than a dollar a day." Newspapers reported cases of starvation and suicide.

http://www.ranknfile-ue.org/uen_1877.html

In 1877, when the railroads attempted to trim the already low wages of their employees by another 10% and cut their hours and finally brought out scab laborers when regular employees objected, the American workers decided enough was enough, and they organized the country’s first nationwide strike.

In the summer of 1877, a nationwide upheaval brought the United States to a standstill. 80,000 railroad workers stopped work. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans soon followed: men and women, black and white, native- and foreign-born. It was America's first national strike; many observers thought a second American Revolution was at hand.
The strike started in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 16, and spread along the rail lines. During the next two weeks, strikers virtually took over Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis and exercised new power in scores of smaller cities, such as Hornellsville, New York, and Louisvile, Kentucky.
The Great Strike of 1877 marked the end of America's first century and the beginning of a new age of industrial conflict and change. New industries were bringing wealth to some Americans and hardship to others. By striking and rioting on a massive scale, "ordinary" Americans opened a new era of debate over the meaning of equality--who should reap the benefits of the industrial age?

http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/1877/1877-1.html


The federal government responded to the nation’s first strike in a way that should be familiar by now. They resorted to murder. Because the strike was popular with locals, police and many state militias refused to do the bidding of the railroad companies that wanted the strike broken.

Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad had recommended giving strikers "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread."

Fortunately for railroad executives like Scott, President Hayes was in their pocket. Federal troops were sent to Pittsburg to deal with the strikers.

"It was readily apparent that the state, whether with the National Guard or federal troops, was more than willing to make use of those troops against regular folks on behalf of interests of corporations," Stowell said.
Trying to move the crowd off the tracks, a number of Philadelphia militia men charged and stabbed several people, Stowell wrote.
The crowd threw rocks in retaliation. The militia fired their weapons. Twenty died, including one woman and three children, and 30 more were wounded.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_579635.html

In response, the citizens of Pittsburg went wild.

Nearly 1,200 freight cars, 104 engines, and 39 other railroad company buildings were destroyed, according to an online database maintained by the University of Houston. The night sky lit up from the flames. About 25 more people died in the riot overnight, including five guards.

The American public has been consistent in its support for oppressed workers. Too bad that officials in Washington answer to different bosses than the ones who elect them.

II. The Ludlow Massacre of 1914: Murder Paid For By the Rockefeller Family

“Then came the killing of Louis Tikas, the Greek leader of the strikers. We saw the militiamen parley outside the tent city, and, a few minutes later, Tikas came out to meet them. We watched them talking. Suddenly an officer raised his rifle, gripping the barrel, and felled Tikas with the butt.
“Tikas fell face downward. As he lay there we saw the militiamen fall back. Then they aimed their rifles and deliberately fired them into the unconscious man’s body. It was the first murder I had ever seen, for it was a murder and nothing less. Then the miners ran about in the tent colony and women and children scuttled for safety in the pits which afterward trapped them.
“We watched from our rock shelter while the militia dragged up their machine guns and poured a murderous fire into the arroyo from a height by Water Tank Hill above the Ludlow depot. Then came the firing of the tents.
“I am positive that by no possible chance could they have been set ablaze accidentally. The militiamen were thick about the northwest corner of the colony where the fire started and we could see distinctly from our lofty observation place what looked like a blazing torch waved in the midst of militia a few seconds before the general conflagration swept through the place. What followed everybody knows.”
Eyewitness Account of the Ludlow Massacre

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5737/

The Rockefeller family did not take kindly to the mine workers in Colorado who responded to poor wages, high death rates and restrictions of civil liberties by organizing a union. In response, they hired a gang of thugs to scare the mine workers back into submission.

http://libcom.org/history/1914-the-ludlow-massacre

Through various agencies the company was able to hire men to take a more aggressive stance against the striking workers, armed guards were supplied to harass strikers and union organisers. An armoured car with a mounted machine gun was even built which was appropriately named the ‘Death Special’ by the company guards. As tensions escalated between CF+I and the strikers, miners dug protective pits beneath their tents to shield themselves and their families against random sniping and machine gun fire from the company guards. On October 17th the ‘Death Special’ was used to attack the Forbes tent colony resulting in the death of one miner. A young girl was shot in the face and another boy’s legs riddled with machine gun bullets also. Confrontations between striking miners and scab workers were also resulting in additional deaths. On October 28th the Governor of Colorado, Elias M Ammons called out the National Guard to take control of the situation.

Since the result of violence is always more violence, the strikers’ reaction should have been anticipated by the Rockefellers. The two sides---strikers and strike breakers—entered a stage of armed combat. And as always, it was the innocent who suffered.

On the morning of April 20, the day after Easter was celebrated by the many Greek immigrants at Ludlow, three Guardsmen appeared at the camp ordering the release of a man they claimed was being held against his will. This request prompted the camp leader, Louis Tikas, to meet with a local militia commander at the train station in Ludlow village, a half mile (0.8 km) from the colony. While this meeting was progressing, two companies of militia installed a machine gun on a ridge near the camp and took a position along a rail route about half a mile south of Ludlow. Anticipating trouble, Tikas ran back to the camp. The miners, fearing for the safety of their families, set out to flank the militia positions. A firefight soon broke out.

The fighting raged for the entire day. The militia was reinforced by non-uniformed mine guards later in the afternoon. At dusk, a passing freight train stopped on the tracks in front of the Guards' machine gun placements, allowing many of the miners and their families to escape to an outcrop of hills to the east called the "Black Hills." By 7:00 p.m., the camp was in flames, and the militia descended on it and began to search and loot the camp. Louis Tikas had remained in the camp the entire day and was still there when the fire started. Tikas and two other men were captured by the militia. Tikas and Lt. Karl Linderfelt, commander of one of two Guard companies, had confronted each other several times in the previous months. While two militiamen held Tikas, Linderfelt broke a rifle butt over his head. Tikas and the other two captured miners were later found shot dead. Their bodies lay along the Colorado and Southern tracks for three days in full view of passing trains. The militia officers refused to allow them to be moved until a local of a railway union demanded the bodies be taken away for burial.

During the battle, four women and eleven children had been hiding in a pit beneath one tent, where they were trapped when the tent above them was set on fire. Two of the women and all of the children suffocated. These deaths became a rallying cry for the UMWA, who called the incident the "Ludlow Massacre.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre


As usual, the owners won the war. President Wilson sent in troops. The mine worker’s union ran out of money. None of the miners’ demands were met. Though public sentiment was with the (murdered) miners....

"All over the country there were meetings, demonstrations.
Pickets marched in front of the Rockefeller office at 26
Broadway, New York City. A minister protested in front of the
church where Rockefeller sometimes gave sermons, and was
clubbed by the police.

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/us/sp000937.txt

President Wilson and the federal government sided with big business. Just a few years later, Wilson used WWI as an excuse to persecute the IWW—the only union in America that accepted women and minorities into its ranks---out of existence.

The government used World War I as an opportunity to crush the IWW. In September 1917, U.S. Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on forty-eight IWW meeting halls across the country. In 1917, one hundred and sixty-five IWW leaders were arrested for conspiring to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes, under the new Espionage Act; one hundred and one went on trial before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1918.
They were all convicted — even those who had not been members of the union for years — and given prison terms of up to twenty years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World

III. From the Autobiography of Mother Jones “Murder in West Virginia”

In February of 1903, I went to Stanford Mountain where the men were on strike. The court had issued an injunction forbidding the miners from going near the mines. A group of miners walked along the public road nowhere near the mines. The next morning they held meeting in their own hall which they themselves had built. A United States deputy marshal came into the meeting with warrants for thirty members for violating the injunction.
The men said, "We did not break any law. We did not go near the mines and you know we were on the public road."
"Well," said the deputy, "we are going arrest you anyway."
They defied him to arrest them, insisting they had not violated the law. They gave him twenty-five minutes to leave town. They sent for his brother, who was the company doctor and told him to take him out.
snip
The next morning I went to the station to get an early train. The agent said to me, "Did you hear what trouble they had up in Stanford Mountain last night?"
"I think you are mistaken," I answered, "for I just came down from there myself last night."
"Well," he said, "they have had some trouble there, all the same."
"Anyone hurt?"
"Yes; I was taking the railway messages and couldn't get all the details. Some shooting."
I said, "Take back my ticket. I must go up to those boys."
I took the short trail up the hillside to Stanford Mountain. It seemed to me as I came to-ward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror. Everything was deathly still. As I came nearer the miners' homes, I could hear sobbing. Then I saw between the stilts that propped up a miner's shack the clay red with blood. I pushed open the door. On a mattress, wet with blood, lay a miner. His brains had been blown out while he slept. His shack was riddled with bullets.
In five other shacks men lay dead. In one of them a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father's corpse. When the little fellow saw me, he said, "Mother Jones, bring back my papa to me. I want to kiss him."
The coroner came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept; shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company.
The coroner went. The men were buried on the mountain side. And nothing was ever done to punish the men who had taken their lives.

http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/mj/bl_mj09.htm

Murders committed by thugs in the employee of Big Business. Federal government collusion with the owners. Justice denied. Just another skirmish in the war against the American worker.



IV. Banana Massacre: Protecting American "Interests" Abroad

Our government has been particularly brutal in its oppression of workers in other parts of the Americas, all in the name of protecting American interests abroad.

I have the honor to report that the legal advisor of the United Fruit Company here in Bogotá stated yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military authorities during the recent disturbance reached between five and six hundred; while the number of soldiers killed was one.

Telegraph from US Bogotá Embassy to the US Secretary of State, dated December 29, 1928

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre

An honor indeed. The folks back in Washington---and in the headquarters of United Fruit Company---must have been jubilant.

The Columbian government later claimed that it only opened fire on a crowd---in the process murdering anywhere from 47 to 2000 workers, their wives and children---because of the presence of U.S. war ships off the coast. Presumably, if the government of Columbia did not step in the “protect American interests”, U.S. troops would have taken matter into their own hands. “America interests” were actually the interests of the United Fruit Company, which has since become Chiquita.
The fruit company’s name may be different, but the tactics are the same. Almost 80 years after the Banana Massacre, Chiquita admitted to buying the services of the Columbian paramilitary group, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

http://www.pacifica.org/program-guide/op,segment-page/segment_id,413/

Chiquita claimed that it was paying “protection money”. However, the group they were paying off is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations, which lead to this indictment

http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/corru/doc/indictment.html

What did Chiquita buy with its $1.7 million investment in a right wing death squad?

According to the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), more than 6,000 people have been murdered for political reasons during the first term of President Uribe (2002-2006), 61 percent by the paramilitaries and 25 percent by Marxist guerrillas. With the establishment of the justice and peace law in 2004, a part of the AUC - the main paramilitary organisation - was demobilised and given an amnesty. But it was replaced with a network of organisations more fragmented and therefore more difficult to control. Since then, the number of murders committed by the paramilitaries has gone down, but according to the CCJ, there have been 1,060 in the past year, particularly among the peasants and indigenous people.

http://www.humanrights-geneva.info/article.php3?id_article=1353

Paramilitary groups specifically target union organizers, which makes you wonder if Chiquita was buying the services of professional strike breakers.

The Colombian labor movement has been the target of a campaign of intimidation unparalleled in the contemporary world. More than 3,800 union leaders and activists have been assassinated since the mid 1980's; more than one hundred have been killed in the first six months of 2002 alone. In the past several years, links between the right wing paramilitary groups that carry out the majority of these killings and both US based corporations operating in Colombia and US military assistance to the country have become increasingly evident.

http://henningcenter.berkeley.edu/gateway/colombia.html

And of course, the federal government has lavished aid upon Columbia’s government, which, all too often, has been complicit in the attacks against union organizers.

Of greatest concern are the alarming links between the official Colombian military and the ultra-right wing paramilitary organizations of the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), who are responsible for 90% of trade union assassinations in Colombia (and a majority of political killings in general).11 In a recent report prepared for the US State Department, prominent international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, found clear evidence of extensive military-paramilitary cooperation. The report makes sobering reading: "…military units and police detachments continue to promote, work with, support, profit from, and tolerate paramilitary groups, treating them as a force allied to and compatible with their own." The report goes on to outline the details of this working relationship, which has included everything from the sharing of equipment and intelligence, to the hosting of paramilitaries on military bases, to active cooperation on the battlefield. Active duty soldiers from the regular army serve in the paramilitary forces and are on the paramilitary payroll.12 Under these conditions, it is often difficult to find any distinction between the military and the paramilitaries, causing many in Colombia to label the paramilitaries as the army's "Sixth Division."

Because of the extensive paramilitary-military cooperation in Colombia, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that US aid to the Colombian military is facilitating the persecution of Colombia's trade unions--and that the only "interests" that interest the people in Washington are those of their corporate masters.

V. The Hundred Years War

In 1912, a massive strike in the wool mills of Lawrence, MA showed where employer violence overstepped its bounds and backfired. Despite the deployment of the militia and the arrest of strike leaders, the company could not break the strike. In order to survive economically, unionists planned to send their children to supporters in other states. The company and its supporters declared that no children would be allowed to leave the city. When the strike committee undertook to take the children to the railway station, the police and militia surrounded the station, the police closed in and began to beat mothers and children mericilessly. Despite the jailing of 296 strikers, public protest and continued resistance forced the company to raise wages although the union was never recognized.

http://www.nathannewman.org/EDIN/.labor/.files/.archive/.strike.violence.html

The above link, entitled “Unions and Violence” lists various other anti-union atrocities which have been committed during the Hundred Year War against the American worker. The FDR administration is described as the only period in our nation’s history in which the might of the federal government was not actively used to oppress the working class. Almost as soon as FDR was out of office, the war resumed with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which Truman vetoed without success---too many Democrats as well as Republicans voted for it.

The Taft-Hartley Act prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, "common situs" picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. Union shops were heavily restricted, and states were allowed to pass "right-to-work laws" that outlawed union shops. Furthermore, the executive branch of the Federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike "imperiled the national health or safety," a test that has been interpreted broadly by the courts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft-Hartley_Act

Sixty years later, the nation finally has a Democratic Congress and a President who is on record as supporting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would attempt to level the playing field between workers and employers. However, the nation’s executives are not going to give up without a fight. Recipients of bailout money got together last fall to plot how they would use those funds for a political attack on the Employee Free Choice Act.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/27/bank-of-america-hosted-an_n_161248.html

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Snip

Donations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars were needed, it was argued, to prevent America from turning "into France."

"If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs," Marcus declared.

I wonder whom the employers will hire to do the shooting this time.

[Donnachaidh]

1. Blackwater, or Xe will be the new shooters. n/t

[FiveGoodMen]

2. Off to greatest!

[mikehiggins]

3. The longest war is against the native american population

Not to downplay the abysmal record of the "government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich" but the "merican Injun" was being gunned down, raped and burned to death long before Debs or any of the famous union leaders were even born, even before the US itself was born.

Just wanted to point that out. I'm a union member myself, and have been all my life, but accuracy is accuracy, y'know?

By the way, did you know that marbles in the street stop police horses in their tracks? Honest. Just something I learned in the labor movement
O8)

[McCamy Taylor]

5. Good point, except I would call that one Genocide, which is worse than war.

In the war against workers, the elite are trying to capture something valuable---our labor--so that they can exploit it. In the genocide against the Native Americans, the elite has no use for their victims. Sort of like the difference between what Nazis did to Poland and what they did to the Jewish people of Europe.

But I can see how you would characterize it as war to claim the American continents.

[tomp]

9. an example of the imperialistic mindset...

....which seems to be in the american ruling power's dna.

were it not for the efforts of the media, in general, this perspective would be more prevalent among the people.

thanks for a great history lesson.

[New Dawn]

4. K&R

[spag68]

6. Labor war

You left out one of the worst in our history. In 1892 Pinkertons brought in by forefathers of the Scaife -Mellon family's murdered 7 steelworkers and wounded hundreds more.
here's another factoid about Taft-Hartley. Who do you think was the republican lawyer that crafted that piece of reprehensible law? Answer Richard Nixon, somehow I don't think this would surprise anyone here.

[LittleGirl]

7. wow

I am learning so much about history...I'm 2/3 through the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and that's another lesson for me. It upsets me so I can't read too much at a time. Thank you for your time putting this post together.

[pnorman]

8. From my (union) point of view, this is one of the most valuable postings I've seen here lately!

I'm saving the entire thread for future use!

pnorman
PS: The Homestead strike mentioned by another poster, most certainly deserves mention here also. Google it.

[kenfrequed]

12. I agree 100%

Good snippets of the kind of history that you don't (but should) learn in school.

The battles for wages, benefits, working conditions, and basic human rights need to be elevated in our collective consciousness or we all just assume the rights that we have earned, and that some would take away, are just a natural evolution and just sort of happened by way of the benevolence of the bosses and the philanthropy of our politicians.

[pleah]

10. K&R

[underpants]

11. interesting

will read later thanks

[amyrose2712]

13. Kicked! Rec'ed! and Bookmarked for later. Thanks. nt

[underpants]

14. The Battle of Blair Mountain (WV)- US Army air power attacks citizens

The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest organized armed uprising in American labor history and led almost directly to the labor laws currently in effect in the United States of America. For nearly a week in late August and early September 1921, in Logan County, West Virginia, between 10,000 and 15,000 coal miners confronted company-paid private detectives in an effort to unionize the southwestern West Virginia mine counties. Unionization had succeeded elsewhere as part of a demographic boom that was triggered by the extension of the railroad and was characterized by unprecedented immigrant hiring and exploitation in the region.

The battle
The first skirmishes occurred on the morning of August 25. The bulk of the miners were still 15 miles away. The following day, President Warren Harding threatened to send in federal troops and Army Martin MB-1 bombers. After a long meeting in the town of Madison, the seat of Boone County, agreements were made convincing the miners to return home. However, the struggle was far from over. After spending days to assemble his private army, Chafin was not going to be denied his battle to end union attempts at organizing Logan County coal mines. Within hours of the Madison decision, reports came in that Sheriff Chafin's men were deliberately shooting union sympathizers in the town of Sharples, West Virginia just north of Blair Mountain - and that families had been caught in crossfire during the skirmishes. Infuriated, the miners turned back towards Blair Mountain, many traveling in other stolen and commandeered trains.
A group of miners display one of the bombs dropped by Chafin's airplanes

By August 29, battle was fully joined. Chafin's men, though outnumbered, had the advantage of higher positions and better weaponry. Private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. On orders from the famous General Billy Mitchell, Army bombers from Maryland were also used to disperse the miners, a rare example of Air Power being used by the federal government against US citizens. A combination of gas and explosive bombs left over from the fighting in World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair. At least one did not explode and was recovered by the miners; it was used months later to great effect during treason and murder trials following the battle. Sporadic gun battles continued for a week, with the miners at one time nearly breaking through to the town of Logan and their target destinations, the non-unionized counties to the south, Logan and Mingo. Up to 30 deaths were reported by Chafin’s side and 50-100 on the union miners side, with many hundreds more injured. By September 2, federal troops had arrived. Realizing he would lose a lot of good miners if the battle continued with the military, union leader Bill Blizzard passed the word for the miners to start heading home the following day. Miners fearing jail and confiscation of their guns found clever ways to hide rifles and hand guns in the woods before leaving Logan County. Collectors and researchers to this day are still finding weapons and ammunition embedded in old trees and in rock crevices. Thousands of spent and live cartridges have made it into private collections.

Following the battle, 985 miners were indicted for "murder, conspiracy to commit murder, accessory to murder, and treason against the State of West Virginia". Though some were acquitted by sympathetic juries, many were also imprisoned for a number of years, though they were paroled in 1925. It would be Bill Blizzard's trial where the unexploded bomb was used as evidence of the government and companies' brutality, and ultimately resulted in his acquittal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

[Sherman A1]

15. Great Post

Thanks for collecting all these into one place.... Much appreciated.

[OwnedByFerrets]

16. Reagan put it into high gear though....

HE is most responsible for the place we are today. He and his regime set the domino's up and the repugs have been more than willing to knock them down.

[SammyWinstonJack]

19. So true.

:thumbsup:

[kleec]

17. K&R

thanks for this information. I did receive some of this through a wonderful civic's teacher that I had in high school many, many years ago!

[Echo In Light]

18. Thanks for posting. K&R

[AzDar]

20. K & R

:kick:

[Jakes Progress]

21. It has always taken strikes, riots, and bloodshed.

It may again. We can hope, but we cannot be turned around.

My mother used to talk about what her generation learned from the depression and said she hoped it wouldn't take another before people learned again. Looks like it is taking another one.

Many are too young to remember the riots from Watts to DC to Philadelphia and to lesser skirmishes all over durning those hot summers decades back. They don't know or don't remember the conditions that brought that seething anger to boil. We have dismantled many of the programs that were started to answer those conditions. We hope it won't happen again, but . . .

[dcsmart]

22. My friend, you had me at the title of your post.

you make this Marxist happy....

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

23. No need to be a Marxist to agree about this war. Or to be on the working people's side. -nt

[dcsmart]

24. that's true.. but that is the philosophy i use as my template

for analyzing issues and like Marx said, The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

I also am member of the Democratic Socialists of America and we are involved in a lot of workers campaigns.

but yes, Marxism is not a prerequisite " to be on the working people's side"

[RedCloud]

25. Lest we forget: Why May 1 is Labor Day around the world.

On May 1, they remember our fallen heroes in Chicago that day. I recall hearing union leaders speaking other languages remembering our fallen heroes. But what do we do? Labor Day isn't May 1 to keep the rich happy. And we have stupid sales and Jerry Lewis blabs, but NEVER when inconvenient for the rulers.

Inspired by the American movement for a shorter workday, socialists and unionists around the world began celebrating May 1, or “May Day,” as an international workers' holiday. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries officially adopted it. The Haymarket tragedy is remembered throughout the world in speeches, murals, and monuments. American observance was strongest in the decade before World War I. During the Cold War, many Americans saw May Day as a Communist holiday, and President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as “Loyalty Day” in 1955. Interest in Haymarket revived somewhat in the 1980s.

A monument commemorating the “Haymarket martyrs” was erected in Waldheim Cemetery in 1893. In 1889 a statue honoring the dead police was erected in the Haymarket. Toppled by student radicals in 1969 and 1970, it was moved to the Chicago Police Academy.



http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/571.html

[backtoblue]

26. K & R

I believe the riots and protesting is what lead to the birth of a "corporation". It makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint the greedy bastards who thrive on us, the working-class slaves.

[natrat]

27. good thing we have democrats in con trol now, sarcasm

[Better Believe It]

28. K & R You put a great deal of work into your post. Thank you!

[Raksha]

29. K & R, and bookmarked to read carefully later on.

This looks like a wonderful piece of research and synthesis. Thank you for your insight and hard work.

[liberal N proud]

30. K&R

[acmavm]

31. Brilliant! I really mean that. We are truly in bad times.

[mckara]

32. I'm Going to Save You Entry in PDF Format

Thanks!

[KG]

33. 1913 Massacre by Woody Guthrie (Calumet Copper Miners' Strike of 1913)

http://www.angelfire.com/mi2/1913/1913S.html

Take a trip with me in 1913
To Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country.
I'll take you to a place called Italian Hall
Where the miners are having their big Christmas ball.
I'll take you indoor, and up a high stair.
There's singin' and dancin', it's heard everywhere,
I'll let you shake hands with the people you see
And watch the kids dance round the big Christmas tree.

There's singin' and dancin' and songs in the air,
An' the spirit of Christmas is there everywhere,
Before you know, you're friends with us all
And you're dancin' around and around in the hall.

You ask about work and you ask about pay;
They'll tell you they make less than a dollar a day,
Just workin' the copper claims, riskin' their lives,
So it's fun to spend Christmas with children and wives.

A little girl sits by the Christmas tree lights
To play piano, she gotta keep quiet.
To hear all this fun you would not realize
That the copper-boss thug-men are millin' outside.

The copper-thugs thugs stuck their heads through the door
One of them yelled and he screamed, "There's a fire!"
A lady, she hollered, "There's no such a thing!
Keep on with your party, there's no such thing."

A few people rushed, and it's only a few.
"It's just the scabs and the thugs foolin' you."
A man grabbed his daughter and he carried her down,
But the thugs held the door and he could not get out.

And then others followed, a hundred or more,
But most everybody remained on the floor.
The scabs and the thugs they still laughed at their joke,
And the children were smothered on the stairs by the door.

Such a terrible sight I never did see,
We carried our children back up to their tree.
The scabs and the thugs they still laughed at their spree,
And the children that died there were seventy-three.

The piano played a slow funeral tune,
But the town was lit up by a cold Christmas moon,
The parents they weep and the miners they moan,
"See what your greed for money has done."

the Christmas Eve Italian Hall Massacre

http://www.angelfire.com/mi2/1913/

[Orwellian_Ghost]

34. Great post

I have a story for you about liberals that maybe you can use sometime:

Most everyone has heard of the Palmer Raids which occurred immediately after WWI. They were directed specifically against immigrants, radicals, and union types and together made up one of the greatest wholesale suspensions of "the Rule of Law" in American history.

The raids started at the behest of the great liberal and Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who warned as early as 1915 of, "hyphenated Americans who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out."

As the labor movement, draft resistance, and opposition to the war deepened with U.S. entry into WWI, Wilson ordered Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer to "put a stop to it". Palmer, in turn, raised the little tyrant J. Edgar Hoover from obscurity to lead the effort. What follows is a short excerpt of a mostly reactionary Wikipedia write-up on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_raids

Pressure to take action intensified after anarchists, communists and other radical groups called on draft-age males to refuse conscription and/or registration for the army, and for troops already serving to desert the armed forces. President Wilson ordered Attorney General Palmer to take action...

...Attorney General Palmer requested and promptly received a massive supplementary increase in Congressional appropriations in order to put a stop to the violence. Palmer then ordered the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Investigation to prepare for what would become known as the Palmer Raids, with the aim of collecting evidence on violent radical groups and arresting those in violation of federal criminal codes.

In 1919, J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of a new division of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, the General Intelligence Division. By October 1919, Hoover's division had collected 150,000 names in a rapidly expanding database. Using the database information, starting on November 7, 1919, BOI agents, together with local police, orchestrated a series of well-publicized raids against apparent radicals and leftists, using the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Palmer and his agents were accused of using various controversial methods of obtaining intelligence and collecting evidence on radicals, including harsh interrogation methods, informers, and wiretaps...

...In December 1919, Palmer's agents gathered 249 radicals of Russian origin, including well-known radical leaders such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and placed them on a ship bound for the Soviet Union (The Buford, called the Soviet Ark by the press). In January 1920, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World union. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 radicals were rounded up in a single night. All foreign aliens caught were deported, under the provisions of the Anarchist Act. All in all, by January 1920, Palmer and Hoover had organized the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, rounding up at least 10,000 individuals.

The public reaction to these raids was favorable, and, in fact, may have forestalled reactionary violence by the public in the form of vigilantes. A group of young men in Centralia, Washington, lynched Wesley Everest, an IWW member, from a railway bridge. The coroner's report stated that the man "jumped off with a rope around his neck and then shot himself full of holes."