The Broken Heart of America by Walter Johnson

Author:Walter Johnson [Johnson, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

In St. Louis, as elsewhere, the legal struggle against Jim Crow tapped into a deeper and more radical history of grassroots organizing and direct action led by Black workers, especially Black women, and by communists. As in the nineteenth century, the working class in St. Louis was hit hard by economic depression. Industrial production in the city fell by almost 60 percent between 1929 and 1933, and unemployment increased from about 9 percent to 30 percent in the same period; 70 percent of Blacks were either unemployed or severely underemployed. During these years, a radical and powerful working-class movement emerged in Black St. Louis, threatening both the hegemony of the middle-class Black civil rights organizations, like the Urban League and the NAACP, and the racial and economic order of the city itself. For a time, working-class Black people in St. Louis, especially working-class Black women, managed to revive the revolutionary alliance of red and Black radicalism that had first been formed during Franz Sigel’s 1861 march across Missouri and the St. Louis Commune in 1877.21

Following on from the history of the communists of the 1860s and the working-class German clubs of the Turnverein of the 1890s, St. Louis at the time of the First World War was a hub of anti-imperialist communism and anarchism. Both The Communist and The Anarchist, which circulated nationally, had been published in the city since the nineteenth century, and a noteworthy leftist literary circle gathered around William Marion Reedy, the editor of the literary journal The Mirror and the author of a history of the 1877 General Strike, and Alice Martin and Harry Turner, editors of the political and cultural journal Much Ado. Martin and Turner were friends of the anarchist Emma Goldman, who stayed with Alice Martin when she was in St. Louis. The literary and bohemian scene in St. Louis shaded imperceptibly into radical politics. In addition to Goldman’s frequent visits to the city, chronicled in Living My Life, the city was home to Kate Richards O’Hare, the Socialist Party candidate for governor of Missouri in 1916 and chair of the Socialist Party’s Committee on War and Militarism. In 1917, O’Hare was convicted under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the draft and imprisoned at the Missouri State Penitentiary, where she served time with Goldman, who was imprisoned for the same offense in 1919.

Kate O’Hare’s husband Frank was the founding editor of the National Rip-saw (later Social Revolution), published in St. Louis, which served as an intellectual clearinghouse for the Socialist Party in the United States. St. Louis was also home to Roger Baldwin, who began his career together with Emma Goldman in organizing resistance to the 1917 Selective Service Act during the First World War. Baldwin went on from the struggle against militarism and the draft to join the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and then became the founding director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The city was also home to the Globetrotter Publishing House, which, in the

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