In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action by Vicky Osterweil

Author:Vicky Osterweil [Osterweil, Vicky]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Amazon: 1645036693
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

From here, labor histories leapfrog through the decades from major flash point to flash point, tracing the ebb and flow of union membership and class consciousness, as the labor movement marches toward its supposed apotheosis in the sit-down strikes of the thirties, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the New Deal.

These histories trace how the tradition of craft unions gives way, slowly and painfully, to industrial unionism.* There’s the eight-hour movement, bursting onto the scene in a furious wave of strike and organizing activity in 1885–1886, culminating in a general strike in Chicago and ending in infamy with the Haymarket bombing, the execution of four anarchists for a bombing they did not commit, and the creation of May Day. This movement is often told in tandem with the story of the Knights of Labor, a cautious and conservative organization that, as a fluke of a strike victory in 1885 by a radical local over notoriously antilabor steel baron Jay Gould, suddenly became the largest mass worker organization in American history. Its effectiveness emerges largely from the fact that it was necessarily decentralized, having grown too large too fast for its antistrike, antiaction “Grand Master Workman” Terrence Powderly to handle, despite literal attempts on his part to stop and to sabotage the strike wave, to have effective repressive control.

But in the aftermath, the K of L faded, as the AFL, the American Federation of Labor, took its place at the center of the labor story. The AFL, organized on craft principles and run by the hardnosed, racist, antistrike Samuel Gompers, dominated official labor politics until the 1930s, and everywhere militancy and insurrection appeared, the AFL attempted to tamp it down. Still, AFL locals were often at the heart of strikes throughout the period: the AFL was, often, the only game in town, much to the detriment of the strikes and struggles it came to represent. In 1892, the bitter lockout at the Carnegie-owned, Jay Gould–managed Homestead Steel Works in Pennsylvania would see AFL-affiliated mill workers engage in and win a gun battle with a barge full of Pinkertons, who had sailed up the Monongahela River to break the workers’ siege on the mill. In 1892, a multiracial general strike also shut down New Orleans.

An even more violent and drastic struggle broke out in 1894, as more-or-less military conflicts raged between strikers and strikebreakers and militias in the coal mines, with strike action reaching from Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado. Miners, who lived in utterly desperate poverty in isolated rural communities owned and managed by the coal conglomerates, banded together not just to fight but also to loot company stores and groceries to keep the strike going, as they would again in West Virginia during the infamous mine wars of 1912–1921.

The year 1894 was also when the famous Pullman Strike, a mass boycott-cum-strike on the railroads led by Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union (ARU), “rapidly came to be understood as a general struggle between all workers and corporations as a whole.

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