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I Saw It Happen
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Historical SummaryVIOLENCE has traditionally been associated with the epochal clashes between capital and labor in this country. In the early seventies the Molly Maguires, a terrorist society numbering many unemployed Civil War veterans, warred against mine superintendents and strikebreakers, wrecked trains, and blew up collieries. When, later in that decade, the railroad companies slashed wages, strikes occurred on a national scale. Federal troops and state militia were called up and fighting broke out, culminating in a summer’s blood bath at Pittsburgh, when the proud Philadelphia Hussars killed twenty-one and wounded twenty-nine, among them women and children. The May Day riots and the bombing in Haymarket Square, Chicago, on May 3, 1886, brought a revulsion of feeling against labor, although the convicted demonstrators appear to have been innocent of the bomb throwing. When, in the great Homestead strike of 1892, Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s manager, hired three hundred Pinkertons to guard his mill, the steel workers opened fire on barges laden with these private police as they floated down the river. Ten persons were killed. Those were heroic and extremely risky days for labor leaders. Terence V. Powderly, later head of the Knights of Labor (in spirit much like the C.I.O.), related how, in walking home one dark night from a union meeting about five miles outside of Scranton, he tripped on a railroad track and lay stunned, while a freight train of some twenty cars passed over him. His worst fears were not realized. Hot coals did not fall upon him; an axle did not break; and he lived to fight many labor battles. In her Autobiography Mother Jones, a fearless labor organizer (freed as a result of a Senate committee report from a twenty-year imprisonment sentence on charges of conspiracy to murder), recounts how militant labor organizers went into nonunion towns in imminent danger of their lives. "The brutalities" of the coal company "bloodhounds," she declared, would fill volumes. When one of the union men was savagely assaulted, she sought unsuccessfully to procure a warrant for the arrest of the offending gunman, but failed because the "coal company controlled the judges and the courts." What gunmen, company-owned towns, and terror failed to accomplish, espionage, "yellow-dog" contracts, scab labor, and the injunction succeeded in achieving. The mass production industries remained impervious to the attacks of union organizers. Under the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935) the right of labor to bargain collectively was recognized. One by one, the great anti-labor bulwarks fell—Mining, Steel, Textiles, Motors,—but the way was bloody. In the late 1930’s a Senate subcommittee, headed by Robert M. La Follette, Jr., made a searching investigation of the anti-labor techniques perfected by Big Business to fight unionism. Espionage, strike-breaking services, black lists, and other devices were exposed. Large corporations were shown to have their own private armies and to employ widespread espionage to terrorize workers and prevent labor organizing from making headway. Harlan County, Kentucky, was traditionally a nonunion field. Miners lived in company-owned houses and signed company house leases which required the occupant to vacate the premises immediately upon leaving the employ of the company. Those discharged for violating the "yellow-dog" contract (forbidding joining a union) were summarily dispossessed. Miners were forced to buy at company stores and independent merchants were not permitted to open competing shops. These company stores often charged exorbitant prices and made swollen profits. The county officials worked hand-in-glove with the companies, and a large number of deputy-sheriffs were constantly employed, many of them desperate criminals. Union organizers were run out of town (company private property) and were not even permitted on the streets in which miners lived. The appearance in Harlan County of a group of union organizers at this time was followed by a reign of terror. The first excerpt from the Senatorial testimony relates to the murder of Bennett Musick, the young son of Marshall A. Musick, a union organizer, selected by the deputies and company thugs as the first victim. Attacks and threats were made on Musick and his family. Although Marshall decided to abandon the county in which he had lived for over fourteen years, his action came too late to save his family from attack. In spite of a subsequent series of anti-labor incidents, both the high sheriff and his deputy continued to main-rain "law and order." Governor "Happy" Chandler dismissed the charges against the former, whom he complimented as being a "competent, efficient, and energetic official," but the company was forced to deal with the union and to reinstate discharged union employees. On May 30, 1937, there occurred the Memorial Day Massacre outside the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago. This tragedy was the culmination of a bitter struggle to unionize "Little Steel." Tom Girdler, Republic’s head, was the C.I.O.’s most determined foe. The Senate investigation disclosed that, even where a company did not control public officials, its own private police system constituted a threat to civil liberties and checked collective bargaining. Girdler had previously been an official at the Jones and Laughlin Steel plant at Aliquippa, Pa. A reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of June 29, revealed that the plants in the town had been in the grip of an amazing espionage system. "Incoming trains were met. Organizers, suspected organizers—in fact, anyone who didn’t look right—were taken into custody, sometimes beaten, and put on the next train back to Pittsburgh." If anyone talked too freely, he was likely to find his home raided and to be given short shrift. The great strike of 1937 was preceded by an organizing effort two years earlier at the plant of a subsidiary of the Republic Steel Corporation in Canton, Ohio. On May 26th, 1935, an altercation between company police and strikers took place, as a result of which fourteen persons were hospitalized. The second excerpt gives eyewitness testimony to this affray. In this incident, as in the Memorial Day Massacre just two years later, uncompromising business leaders, in their devotion to property rights seemed to hold human rights in contempt. The Massacre marked the apogee of the anti-labor war of the thirties. Little Steel was forced to give in and to follow Big Steel into the union camp.
Key Quote"I saw women struck with those iron bars just as mercilessly as though they were men."
Senate Report, 76th Cong., 1st Sess.
"Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor."
The War Against Labor in the Thirties
[1935–37]
II
Republic Steel Goes to War
Darrell C. Smith, business agent of the Milk Drivers Union, which was not involved in the strike, gave an eyewitness account of this first riot. He was in his car at a filling station across the street from the entrance to the Berger plant when the affray started. He first became aware of the trouble when he observed company police shooting tear gas from the roof of the Berger plant. He testified:
 CHURCHILL’S ENEMIES MEET AT FLORENCEThe dictators, Mussolini and Hitler, and Ribbentrop meet at Florence just preceding the Italian attack on Greece October, 1940
 THE HORROR CAMP AT BELSENWhen the allies advanced into Germany in 1945, they saw scenes of staggering horror—thousands of emaciated, rotting human corpses stacked in piles, and thousands more lying among the still-living prisoners. This photograph shows British soldiers forcing SS men and women at point of gun to bury the corpses.
 D-DAY"We will fight on the beaches"—Winston Churchill
 GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, 1944
"This tear gas kept on shooting. I heard the explosions all around me. I saw at least two or three shells fall out into the parking lot which was adjacent to the filling station and saw some fall out on Eleventh Street among the crowd. At that time a truck has just come out of the plant gate. I did not see it come out of the gate because of my concern with these other things. It was proceeding down Eleventh Street, and it got to a point about 200 yards down Eleventh Street. There were guards standing on the running board and in the cab. When it got to that point down there I saw it stop, and the guards on the running-board got out and opened the rear gate, and out of the back of the truck about 15—in my judgment, about 15 or 20 guards came out of the rear of the truck. They all had dubs and they began to wield these clubs, attacking the people around them.
"And then I saw at the plant gate another group of 15 or 20 guards come out of there, and they, too, began to attack the people around them.
"I saw a fellow I knew, diagonally opposite me, who was out on the sidewalk, a fellow named Stanley Pritchard; I knew him because of his association with the union there. I saw him struck over the head about five or six times by this one cop, or plant cop, or whatever name you choose to call him, until they knocked him to the ground. And then I saw him beaten after he was down on the ground."
According to Mr. Smith’s account, there were about 200 people trapped between two advancing contingents of Republic police, "who were just mowing them down."
Senator LA FOLLETTE: Describe what happened next.
Mr. SMITH: It was almost beyond description, Senator. It was just about the bloodiest scene possible of enactment in America, I believe; at least in peace times. It would be hard, I believe, for anyone who witnessed that scene to describe it with any degree of justice at all.
I saw women struck with those iron bars just as mercilessly as though they were men. I saw a group of school children across the street running around in a panic, scared, crying at the top of their lungs because they were frightened out of their wits by this tear-gas shooting that was going on all around them. These guards were rushing around the people, and beating the people to the brick pavement, and then beating them after they were down.
This planned attack upon the people assembled at Eleventh Street was reported by an eyewitness in a special edition of the Canton Repository, issued on the evening of May 27, 1935. The star reporter of the Repository, Dwight L. Buchanan, corroborated every witness cited above, including Darrell C. Smith’s statement that the Republic guards started hurling tear gas bombs into the crowd from the top of the Berger plant:
"The actual trouble began shortly after 4 p. m. as the first shift was leaving the plant. Two large steel-topped trucks, including the one which later was burned, were filled with workers in the yards behind the main gate.
"At a given signal, guards swung the gate open and the track backed out, backed north on Belden ave and then swung west into 11th st. Strikers, gathered on both sides of the street, pelting the truck with bricks as it roared down the street.
"On the first two trips out of the yards, guards who rode the running boards and hung from the sides of the cabs were stoned and clubbed. Apparently none was injured seriously.
"Later private cars were pressed into service to get the beleaguered workers through the crowds of angry strikers dotted about the main entrance. As the cats shot across Belden ave into 11th st., the crowd bombarded them with rocks, sticks and stones. Many windows were broken and several of the passengers sustained cuts.
"The excitement had died down and many of the onlookers who had watched the stoning nearer the plant had started to walk back to their automobiles parked near Mahoning rd when the last truck pulled out of the plant. Few of those who watched the track roll along 11th st had any idea it contained the armed guards.
"Many of the persons lining the sidewalks were so taken by surprise when the firing started that they stood staring as the guards tumbled out of the truck. Several of those who failed to flee at once were struck down as the guards surged across the field in pursuit of strikers.
"The trouble was precipitated when company police, heavily armed, leaped from an armored truck on 11th st NE and opened fire upon a crowd of persons lining the sidewalks on the south side of the street. Among the crowd were women and children who had gathered to watch strikers stone autos emerging from the plant at the close of the first shift.
"As the plant patrolmen opened fire the crowd scattered, running across vacant lots and between houses on the south side of 11th st. The plant police started after them, firing as they ran. Those too slow afoot were clubbed down and left lying where they fell. After the guards had passed on, neighbors carried the injured to private automobiles and removed them to the hospital.
"One front porch was converted into an emergency dressing station. The less seriously injured were brought there and their wounds bound up. Some later were taken to hospitals.
"After chasing the crowd the guards reassembled on 11th st and returned to the intersection of 11th st and Belden ave near the factory entrance to the plant. Scores of strikers who had doubled back after the chase had taken up positions there also.
"Again the firing started. Four company guards standing in front of the Berger office directed their aim across Belden ave into a crowd which had gathered in a restaurant owned by George Pelay. In this crowd were 15 children caught in the gunfire as they were returning from Burns school.
"When the group of armed guards surged down 11th st to join with those stationed about the plant, front windows in the restaurant started to crash as bullets flew. One bullet broke a large plate glass window in the Belden ave side of the restaurant, zipped across the heads of children huddled back of the counter, and buried itself in the paneling on the opposite side of the room.
"Others came crowding into the restaurant as the firing continued. Company guards atop the two story office building at the Berger plant hurled tear gas bombs into the street. Guards on 11th st also bombarded the place with tear gas."
Contents:
Chicago: "The War Against Labor in the Thirties: Republic Steel Goes to War," I Saw It Happen in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Co., 1951), Original Sources, accessed January 15, 2025, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=69SF94ULPIPUZYN.
MLA: . "The War Against Labor in the Thirties: Republic Steel Goes to War." I Saw It Happen, in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, edited by Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris, Harrisburg, Pa., Stackpole Co., 1951, Original Sources. 15 Jan. 2025. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=69SF94ULPIPUZYN.
Harvard: , 'The War Against Labor in the Thirties: Republic Steel Goes to War' in I Saw It Happen. cited in 1951, History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. , Stackpole Co., Harrisburg, Pa.. Original Sources, retrieved 15 January 2025, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=69SF94ULPIPUZYN.
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