Many Americans are viewing current regime change in the Middle East with an attitude of phony superiority that is not sustainable from a historical perspective. Our history is full of bloody uprisings, put downs, labor wars, lynching and repression—much of which has been fueled by a government which believed its actions and the actions of the managerial/owner elites were divinely ordained.
by Monica Davis (muckracker1)
In 1909, after more than 20,000 female garment workers went on strike, many were arrested. News reports say a judge told the arrested women, “You are on strike against God.”
The history of labor rights and civil rights in the US spans 300 years. It is a long, bloody history, which involves killing, assassination, jailing and disenfranchising millions of US workers, protestors, unfavored minorities and immigrants. It involves the use of federal troops, state militias, local cops and sheriff deputies, and private security companies. In essence, our history is as bloody as any in the Middle East, no matter how self-deluded and ignorant we are.
As in the case of Middle Eastern despots, kings, and dictator, our ‘leaders’ have invoked God, religion, patriotism and “the natural order of things,” in defense of human rights abuses, assassination and labor abuses. These “leaders”, along with a host of conflicted cops, armies and police have existed for generations.
As agents of the government and “keepers of the peace”, the police and military have been “the thin blue line” between what the overlords deem chaos, and order. Thus, for Americans looking at what is happening in today’s Middle East, the crisis is because we either don’t know, or deny our own nation’s bloody and violent history.
Going back three centuries in the United States, police, soldiers and private security forces have knocked heads and killed labor leaders, unionists, blacks, suffragettes, Native Americans, war protestors, Hispanics, and poor whites. Anti-government demonstrators and activists have been demonized—from the original Tea Party protestors, to the Native American leaders in AIM, to Black Power leaders and civil rights activists and, yes, the group that the far right loves to hate—the ACLU.
Researchers say the US has experienced more bloody labor violence than any other industrialized nation on the planet.
The United States has experienced more frequent and bloody labor violence than any other industrial nation. Its incidence and severity have, however, been sharply reduced in the last quarter of a century. The reduction is even more noteworthy when the larger number of union members, strikes, and labor-management agreements are considered. The magnitude of past violence is but partially revealed by available statistics. One writer estimated that in the bloody period between January 1, 1902, and September 30, 1904, 198 persons were killed and 1,966 injure in strikes and lockouts.230 Our own independent count, which grossly understates the casualties, records over 700 deaths and several thousands of serious injuries in labor disputes. In addition, we have been able to identify ove 160 occasions on which State and Federal troops have intervened in labor disputes.
The most common cause of past violent labor disputes was the denial of the right to organize through refusal to recognize the union, frequently associated with the discharge of union leaders. Knowledge of workers' resentment at their inability to join unions encouraged employers to [380] take defensive measures during strikes and lockouts. These measures often included the hiring of guards who, by their provocative behavior, often created the very conditions they had been engaged to minimize.
The melancholy record shows that no section of the United States was free from industrial violence, that its origin and nature were not due to the influence of the immigrant or the frontier, nor did it reflect a darker side of the American character. Labor violence was caused by the attitudes taken by labor and management in response to unresolved disputes. The virtual absence at present of violence in the coal and copper mines, breeding grounds for the more dramatic and tragic episodes, are eloquent testimony that labor violence from the 1870's to the 1930's was essentially shaped by prevailing attitudes on the relations between employer and employee. Once these were changed, a change accomplished partly by legal compulsion, violence was sharply reduced. (Philip Taft and Philip Ross, "American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome," The History of Violence in America: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, 1969)
From 1806 to 1989, American labor unions have battled criminal conspiracy charges, jail and prison sentences. Two hundred years ago a Philadelphia union was convicted and bankrupted after staging a strike for higher wages. The tactics of charging unions and union activists with conspiracy charges for striking for higher wages set the tone for federal prosecution of unions and activist for more than a century.
Even the child laborers fought for their rights. In 1835, child workers in a New Jersey silk mill went on strike. The goal: to get an 11 hour day, 6 day work week. Rail road strikers were shot and killed. New York cops beat men, women and children with billy clubs during an 1874 labor rally of unemployed workers. The then police commissioner called it: “…the most glorious sight I ever saw.”
Miners, textile workers, railroad men, and laborers have paid a terrible price for trying to get labor rights--lynching, hanging, beatings and incarceration. As an example to other would-be labor rights organizations who defended themselves, the government hanged so-called “Molly Maguires”—activist coal miners, in Pennsylvania in 1877. In the same year, when a general strike stopped railroad traffic, the President called out federal troops. The result?
At the "Battle of the Viaduct" in Chicago, federal troops (recently returned from an Indian massacre) killed 30 workers and wounded over 100. (http://www.lutins.org/labor.html)
Black workers were dealing with more than just labor rights. They sought civil rights as well. And they paid a price—often their lives. In 1887, more than 30 unarmed black sugar cane workers in Louisiana were killed—after trying to get a dollar a day wage. A lynch mob lynched two strike leaders in the so-called Thibidaux Massacre.
It doesn’t end. According to historians:
The Bayview Massacre in Milwaukee resulted in the death of seven people and at least one child, after more than 2,000 Polish workers walked off their jobs and gathered at a local church to denounce their ten hour work day. After calling for other workers to join them, they marched through town and gathered 16,000 workers in support. The state governor called out the militia, which shot into the crowd, leaving seven dead, with eight more dying within hours.
The local newspaper commended the governor for his “quick action.”
The divide and conquer strategy, using black non-union workers against white union workers, bringing in black Buffalo Soldiers to put down strikes by white workers, or the passage of anti-Japanese/Chinese/Mexican immigration laws, all stem from a divide and conquer strategy which remains a cutting edge tool for management to manipulate domestic labor and labor unions.
And then there are all of the beatings, shootings, riots and insurrection of the Sixties and Seventies in the United States. Given our history, in terms of civil rights, worker rights, the right of assembly and freedom of speech, the United States remains as conflicted as any of the “Banana Republics” or Third World nations we stick our noses at.
This article originally published as http://beforeitsnews.com/...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Monica Davis is an editor, columnist, author, activist and broadcaster. She is published in 5 countries and the US. Her latest book, Fuel on the Fire: Veterans and Farmers Under Siege, may be ordered from:
http://www.lulu.com/...