A large crowd of striking coal miners and their families gathered at Indian Mound in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, 1909. (Pic: PICRYL/ Library of Congress)
On 26 August 1919, a small picket of striking miners outside a coal mine in Brackenridge, western Pennsylvania, was attacked by company guards.
They beat one of the picketers, Joseph Starzeleski, to death. But their real target was the union organiser, Fannie Sellins. She was a particularly effective organiser, who had been arrested and imprisoned on a number of occasions and was tremendously popular among the miners.
The unarmed forty-seven year old Fanny Sellins was shot down in cold blood while protesting about Starzeleski’s killing.
One of the company guards made certain she was dead by beating her skull in. He then paraded around wearing her bloodied hat.
All this took place in front of numerous witnesses, but a hand-picked coroner’s jury later found that her killing had been “justified and in self-defence”. She became a symbol of defiance and a photograph of her dead beaten face hung on the wall in every union office.
This horrific episode was far from unusual. The American capitalist class has a long history of opposing efforts at union organisation, often using brutal and murderous methods.
Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, attempts to organise were broken by victimisation and blacklisting, by beatings, by assassination and by the lynching of union organisers and activists.
Attempts at picketing were often met with gunfire, beatings and mass arrests, indeed union members were sometimes rounded up, interned or deported, replaced by scabs. Across much of the South and West of the country, the mining and other companies were the effective government.
They enforced an “open shop” regime, in which workers and their families lived in what was effectively a privately-owned police state.
One peculiarly American aspect of the US capitalist class war was the use of private detective agencies, both to spy on their workers and to strike-break. The scale of this operation was massive.
In the early 1920s there were some 230 private detective agencies engaged in this business, running more than 40,000 agents and informers in workplaces and unions across the country at a cost of $80 million a year. The best known were the Pinkertons, but there were many others.
Many companies also had their own company police keeping the workplace union free and the workers cowed and intimidated.
Henry Ford was notorious for running his car plants like a private police state with the workers and their families even kept under surveillance at home.
For many workers, America was to all intents and purposes a privatised police state. And yet, the workers fought back, again and again, against all the odds, with militancy and solidarity triumphing.
The history of working class struggle in the United States is an inspiration for socialists everywhere. One notable example is the strike at the Pressed Steel Car Company plants at McKees Rocks in Pennsylvania in July-September 1909.
Wages were low and working conditions were horrendous, on average one worker a day was killed in industrial accidents with many more injured. The workforce was made up overwhelmingly of immigrant workers, sixteen different nationalities, but they came together in protest against a 10 percent pay cut.
On 10 July over 5,000 men walked out on strike, demanding better pay and conditions. The company hired the Bergoff detective agency to break the strike and starting to evict the strikers’ families from their homes.
The New York Times described the strikers as ‘illiterate foreigners…so many savages’. In fact, many of them had been union activists and socialists back home and there were a number of veterans of the 1905 Russian Revolution on the picket line.
The strike got national attention on 22 August, “Bloody Sunday”, when strikers stopped a tram and ordered Harry Exler, a well-known company thug off the vehicle. He pulled a gun and was shot dead.
For two days, state troopers, police and company guards ran riot, beating men and women on the streets, invading and wrecking people’s homes, and carrying out mass arrests.
By the end of the two day rampage eight strikers, two scabs and one state trooper had been killed. After “Bloody Sunday” the left across the country rallied to the strikers’ cause. On 25 August, the Socialist leader Eugene Debs spoke to 10,000 people at a rally in the town. He described the strike as “the greatest labour fight in all my history in the labour movement”.
The strikers stepped up their struggle. Following the death of another picket, five company guards were shot. None died, but the forces of repression backed off. The union also sent a number of men posing as scabs into the plants to organise a walkout.
Many of the scabs were effectively held prisoner and a number who had tried to escape had been killed by the Bergoff thugs and their bodies disposed of in the furnaces.
The union infiltrators organised a mass walk-out of the scabs with the company guards standing by helpless. On 7 September Pressed Steel surrendered and the next day the workers marched back to work triumphant.
1920 saw a determined effort to unionise the West Virginia coalfield. The US Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in the world, had substantial mining interests in the area.
One union stronghold was the town of Matewan. On 19 May, twelve gunmen from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency tried to kidnap the pro-union sheriff, Sid Hatfield. Their attempt ended in a shoot-out with Hatfield and his deputies, all striking miners. Seven detectives, the town’s pro-union mayor and two deputies were shot dead.
The fight to unionise the coalfield culminated in a march by more than 15,000 workers, black and white, to liberate Logan and Mingo counties from company tyranny.
They were bombed from the air by private aircraft hired by the Logan county sheriff, but pressed on. Victory seemed certain, but the US Federal government sent 2,000 troops in to save the day for the bosses. In the aftermath of this defeat, thousands of miners were blacklisted and hundreds were arrested and imprisoned.
In 1967, the radical film maker, John Sayles made a powerful film, Matewan – it is still worth watching.
In the aftermath of the First World War, the unions were beaten back across the country by bloody repression. This was exacerbated by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.
In the early 1930s, a fight back gathered momentum with massive strikes led by militant socialists in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco.
The fight back was to culminate in the great wave of sit-down strikes and factory occupations that broke the bosses’ resistance in much of the country.
These began towards the end of 1936, but dramatically escalated the following year. In the course of 1937 there were 477 sit-down strikes involving over 400,000 workers. Factory workers, miners, seamen, hotel workers, shop workers all joined in.
In the city of Milwaukee, workers in nineteen hotels staged a sit-down strike.
The General Motors occupation in Detroit was decisive. The workers barricaded themselves in the plants and were supported by mass pickets of sympathisers outside.
When the police attempted to storm the Flint plant on 11 January 1937. They met determined resistance even when the police opened fire.
The police were driven off by freezing hoses drenching them and a barrage of car parts. Subsequent days saw thousands of workers coming from nearby towns and cities to support the sit-down, joining the picket, many of them armed and ready for a fight.
On 11 February the GM management capitulated. This victory sparked off a wave of sit-down strikes by some 35,000 workers at nearly 130 factories, offices and shops across Detroit.
On 27 February, women workers, many of them in their teens, at a Detroit Woolworths occupied the store. When workers at another Woolworths joined in, the company capitulated, conceding union recognition, a pay rise and half pay for the duration of the occupation.
The Woolworths workers celebrated with a dance at a local hotel where, inspired by their example, the staff proceeded to sit-down and the management promptly surrendered.
The fight back transformed much of the United States, but the union advance was beaten back in much of the South where racism was used to divide the workers. And the Ford motor company successfully resisted unionisation.
Henry Ford was a vicious anti-Semite. He thought trade unions were a Jewish plot. He was a great admirer of Adolf Hitler and the admiration was mutual. In July 1938, Hitler awarded Ford one of his regime’s top honours, the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.
We have seen the most heroic struggles taking place in the face of the most savage repression. We have to learn from and be inspired by the workers who won.
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