This Week in Working Class History
"We see but one way out. In place of two classes competing for the fruits of industry, there must be, eventually, only one class sharing fairly the good things of the world."
From the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum:
On February 7, 1913, one of the most infamous acts of the Mine Wars unfolded when the “Bull Moose Special”—an armored train with a mounted machine gun and staffed by National Guardsmen, Kanawha County Sheriff's Deputies, and Baldwin-Felts mine guards—barreled through the Holly Grove tent colony. Although only one miner was fatally wounded due to the unwieldy nature of the weapon, the attack left the community reeling and outraged. The assault was seen as a brutal provocation, further inflaming tensions in the strike zone.
Be on the lookout for a full blog summarizing the events that happened during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike during February 1913 later this month!
From Working Class History:
On 4 February, 1913, legendary civil rights activist Rosa Parks was born. While many histories of her life depict her as a "quiet" woman who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white passenger because she was "tired", Parks was a lifelong, committed militant in the struggle for a better world.
As a 6-year-old, she would sit with her grandfather who had armed himself with a shotgun to protect their family home from the KKK. Later on in her youth she armed herself with a brick to confront a white bully, and she described Malcolm X as her personal hero.
Most famous for triggering the Montgomery bus boycott, she was involved in too many campaigns to mention, like supporting Joan Little, a Black woman who killed a white prison guard who sexually assaulted her, supporting other Black women and girls who had previously been arrested for defying segregation, like Claudette Colvin, fighting for women's reproductive freedom and taking part in the Black power movement in Detroit alongside the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and others.
As Parks herself once said: “Freedom fighters never retire". And she never did, until her death in 2005.
From Working Class History:
On 6 February, 1919, perhaps the most spectacular strike in US history took place: the Seattle general strike. Nearly 100,000 downed tools in support of striking shipyard workers but, more importantly, then elected a general strike committee and began running the city and essential services themselves.
While the shipyard workers did not get their pay increase, the five-day general strike was a historic and successful experiment demonstrating that workers could run society ourselves.
After the strike ended, the newspaper of the Central Labor Council, the Union Record, explained its importance:
"We see but one way out. In place of two classes competing for the fruits of industry, there must be, eventually, only one class sharing fairly the good things of the world. And this can only be done by the workers learning to manage.
When we saw in our General Strike: The Milk Wagon Drivers consulting late into the night over the task of supplying milk for the city’s babies; The Provision Trades working twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four on the question of feeding 30,000 workers; The Barbers planning a chain of co-operative barber shops; The steamfitters opening a profitless grocery store; The Labor Guards facing, under severe provocation, the task of maintaining order by a new and kinder method; When we saw union after union submitting its cherished desires to the will of the General Strike Committee: then we rejoiced. For we knew it was worth the four or five days pay apiece to get this education in the problems of management. Whatever strength we found in ourselves, and whatever weakness, we knew we were learning the thing which it is necessary for us to know.
Someday, when the workers have learned to manage, they will begin managing. And we, the workers of Seattle, have seen, in the midst of our General Strike, vaguely and across the storm, a glimpse of what the fellowship of that new day shall be."
From Working Class History:
On 7 February, 1919, construction union activists representing 75,000 members in Essex, New Jersey voted to strike in the event of alcohol prohibition coming into force on 1 July.
Two days later it was reported that 200,000 workers in New York City also voted to strike, with a further 150,000 due to vote in the following fortnight. New York unions received letters from union branches in LA, Cincinnati, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Dayton, Ohio, St Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee and elsewhere. Workers who supported the movement wore pins which declared "No beer, no work".
However, union leaders called off the action the following month. Labour Federation secretary Henry H. Hilfers claimed that: "A general strike for beer by laboring men on July 1 would make us look ridiculous".
Prohibition was subsequently introduced in 1920, with disastrous effects until it was repealed in 1933.
From Working Class History:
On 4 February, 1924, around 175 radical Industrial Workers of the World union members took on the Ku Klux Klan, patrolling the streets of Greenville, Maine, after the KKK tried to threaten IWW union organizers.
Logging workers in the area were organizing for better pay and conditions when around 40 Klansmen had visited a boardinghouse where IWW members (known as Wobblies) were staying and ordered them to leave. Local wobbly organizer Bob Pease charged that the KKK was doing the bidding of lumber companies, and told the local Press Herald that they opposed the IWW “because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen on our bunks".
The IWW was also ordered to leave the town by local authorities, but they defied both the government and the KKK, and instead organised and took to the streets, declaring “We are going to stick, and if the Klan wants to start something, the IWW are going to finish it”.