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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]
I
Murder in Harlan County
The murder of Bennett Musick occurred at about 8:30 p. m. in the evening of February 9, 1937. Mrs. Musick and her three sons were sitting about the fireplace and her daughter was busy at household tasks when a shower of bullets tore through the walls of the house. Mrs. Musick, the boy’s mother, described what took place:
"Well, I could not tell how many shots, it was so excitable and unexpected. The first shot that I heard, I was reading the paper next to the baby boy who had just come back from Evarts and brought the day’s paper and handed it to me, and I was reading the paper, and the first shot, I thought just for a second it was something exploded in the grate. I was setting in front of the grate, and I looked down, and by that time there was another one, and at that time of course, I did not remember seeing Bennett go out of the room at that particular time. It was a week before it come to me that I never did think I saw him leave, but in a week I remembered seing him just kind of crawl to go into the bedroom, and he must have fell. This boy that is 14 was setting on the studio couch at the end that came around to the door to go into the bedroom, and he said Bennett just rose out of his chair and went in the front room, and just fell into the bedroom, but he had turned. He was lying right around a trunk just to the left of the door. He crawled around and his feet were past the door."
After the shooting had stopped.
Mrs. Musick called the roll of her family:
"We hushed for 2 or 3 seconds, or 2 or 3 minutes maybe, then the shooting stopped, and I thought—well, I said, "Are any of you shot?" And the baby boy said, "I am shot in the arm," and Pauline said, "I am not shot," and Virgil went behind the door, the 14 year old boy got behind the door, and two bullets went in just above his head. He just scattered down behind the door that stood open just a little, and I took Bennett by the shoulder."
It was then that Mrs. Musick discovered that Bennett was dead.
"I shook Bennett, and he was dead. We did not have a light in the room, and Pauline and I just drug him to the door where that light shined in from the living room and seen he was dead."
A revulsion of sentiment swept Harlan County as a result of the cold-blooded murder of Bennett Musick by the night riders of Ben Unthank. Voices were raised in protest, even among the deputies. Henry M. Lewis, chief deputy under High Sheriff Theodore R. Middleton, tendered his resignation on February 20, 1937. He explained his action by saying:
"Well, there were things going on all over the county that I did not approve of."
He amplified this statement:
"Well, lots of things had happened that I did not know how they happened or who done it. You take killing the Musick boy in Harlan County was a bad piece of work by somebody. I don’t know who did it, or anything about it. It was about as bad a crowd as ever happened to be in our county. That house being shot up in the night and that boy killed, that was a had piece of business. . . ."
[After the Musick killing, Frank White, active in the ambushing of labor organizers, warned Hugh Taylor, one of his confederates, not to talk about the affair, and threatened that if he went "down" for the killing "somebody would go right down with me, too."]
On February 20, 1937, Frank White made good his threat. That evening Hugh Taylor was in a saloon with David Sullenberger, whose father operated the Clubhouse at Shields, where the Berger Coal Co. deputies stayed. Wash Irwin noticed him and said, according to Taylor: "You don’t belong here," he says, "you better go back down to Shields." Taylor and Sullenberger left the saloon and drove back in the direction of Shields. They were overtaken by a car driven by Frank White, who had with him Wash Irwin and a third man. White sounded his horn, and Taylor drew his car to a halt to see what he wanted. White approached Taylor, who was at the driver’s seat, and Irwin and his companion came up on the other side. After a brief greeting, White and Irwin suddenly drew their pistols and fired point blank at Taylor and Sullenberger, hitting them five times, though not fatally. Taylor described what took place as follows:
"The car came up behind me. His car came up behind me and he blowed his horn for me to stop. I told the boys I better stop and see what he wants. I stopped and Frank got out. I saw him getting out. I waited for him to come up there. He says, "Where are you going?" I says, "I am going to bed." I cast my eyes to the side and I saw somebody else walk out from the car; I saw Wash Irwin and somebody else right alongside of him, and
Wash Irwin had a pistol; it looked to me like a bright-looking automatic; and Frank says, "You will like hell." He stuck the pistol alongside of my head, and when he stuck the pistol alongside of my head I grabbed the pistol with my left hand and jerked it up, and when I jerked the pistol up he fired on me."
Senator LA FOLLETTE: Were you hit?
Mr. TAYLOR: Yes.
Senator LA FOLLETTE: Where?
Mr. TAYLOR: I was hit in the fingers, the last finger right here (indicating); it hit that finger there and went through here (indicating) and came right out through here (indicating).
Senator LA FOLLETTE: That is the left hand?
Mr. TAYLOR: That is the left hand. That is the hand I grabbed it with.
Taylor then reached for the pistol with his right hand, and White fired through the knuckles, breaking the hand. Taylor was left helpless. He managed to struggle out of the car and ran for the side of the road. He testified further:
"The door of the car came open; I don’t know how I could get it opened, but I got it opened, I don’t know how, but, anyway, the door came open, and I had two 45’s, and I reached for them, but I could not do nothing with them; I could do nothing with my hands to get them, and then I turned to ran, and when I broke into a run he shot me. I started to go on a run, and just as I started to there he shot me through the hip, out through the groin here (indicating), and that run me down."
As he lay helpless on the ground, White and Irwin drew dose to deliver a final blow. But they decided it was not necessary.
Mr. TAYLOR: Then I laid down. They came to examine me. I laid there flat dead. Wash Irwin got to me there. My right hand was spurting blood; the artery was cut, and the thought struck me that I could not run, I could not get away, and I held my arm up to my breast, and I held it up so that blood got on my breast so it would look like I was shot through the chest somewhere, so he would not shoot me again. I laid there, letting the blood come down on my chest, and they turned me over and examined me. He says, "He is as dead as he will ever be." Frank White said, "Let the damn son-of-a-bitch lie there. He will quit talking." Then he took my two pistols. I was afraid to wiggle my head, so I lay down there and every once in a while he would reach over there and see the blood spurting, and then he came back down again and turned me over and examined me again, and he said, "He is as dead as he will ever be."
I lay like a possum again, and he looked at me and examined me again, and then he took my flashlight, my blackjack, my fountain pen, and stuck them in his pockets and went on.
Contents:
Chicago: "The War Against Labor in the Thirties: Murder in Harlan County," 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 November 23, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=RSS4XE9U4IHWTJG.
MLA: . "The War Against Labor in the Thirties: Murder in Harlan County." 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. 23 Nov. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=RSS4XE9U4IHWTJG.
Harvard: , 'The War Against Labor in the Thirties: Murder in Harlan County' 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 23 November 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=RSS4XE9U4IHWTJG.
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