"...government... is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or those who have some property against those who have none at all" Adam Smith, 1776.

"The standing army everywhere and in all countries is intended for use not so much against the external as the internal enemy." Frederich Engels, 1857.

"Ireland is the only pretext the British government has for maintaining a large standing army,

which ...can be used against British workers...." Karl Marx, 1870

There has been a curious reluctance to deal with the subject of armed force in the repression of labor in Britain and America. It is to be expected that governments would be hesitant to admit to using arms against there own people but that should not deter historians from examining the question. Yet, looking at the enormous amount of ink that has been spilled on the question of why America's working class is so weak or the related question of why there is no socialist or labor party in America, little mention of the role of armed force is found. There are studies of strikes in which the army, the police and\or the Pinkertons are given credit for breaking a strike, but few make reference to armed force as a major factor in determining the lack of a strong socialist movement in America. Most of the major studies of the question focus on divisions within the socialists themselves. racial and ethnic divisions, the upward mobility of the American worker, the strength of the middle class and frontier ethic in America. Yet, as Rap Brown so graphically acknowledged, violence is as American as apple pie.

Blacks, of course, had been subjected to violence from their arrival as slaves until the end of lynching as a common occurrence in the rural areas of America in the 1960's. America saw over 100 lynchings annually in the ten years before 1900 and 75 to 55 annually in the period from 1901 to 1920. Violence as extension of labor disputes is also a matter of record. The difference between these earlier forms of violence as a means of repression and that which occurred after World War I as directed towards both Blacks and workers in America is the extent to which Army Intelligence and the Army itself was involved in crushing the labor movement and eliminating radical elements in both areas. In both Britain and America, it was the bureaucrats in the Intelligence community that fostered the Red Scare and provided the rational for the attacks on the labor movement that effectively neutralized the most militant elements within that movement.

Among the first recorded uses of armed force against striking workers occurred in 1717 when British troops moved in to break a strike among shipyard workers in Newcastle.(1) Since then, workers have been cut down by soldiers' bullets wherever factories have been built. While the actual slaying of workers is today quite rare, they are still on occasion subject to intimidation by the introduction of armed might into industrial disputes, and, as a measure of last resort, it is always a factor to be considered by striking workers. The use of soldiers to solve industrial disputes is costly both in the immediate expense of raising and maintaining troops and in the lasting hostilities such use of naked power generally creates. Sophisticated employers in America and Britain soon developed cheaper, more dependable ways of dealing with striking workers, many of which focused on the creation of union‑preventing devices.

In America before the New Deal, the Blacklist, the rustling card, and the yellow-dog contract were among the best known of the techniques designed to keep unwanted union organizers or union members away from non‑union workers. Industrial spies kept the employers informed as to how well his system was working. If all else failed and the workers did organize and strike, private companies stood ready to bring in strikebreakers and guards to defend them against angry workers. The judicial system stood poised to issue an injunction against the striking workers allowing local police and the military to be used as a last resort. In spite of all these obstacles, labor unions and radical political parties continued to make progress in the period before and during WWI. This progress was abruptly terminated and the direction of the American labor movement was changed forever by the armed repression of strikes and the removal of socialist militants in the Red Scare that accompanied and preceded the use of armed force. Although the New Deal and its accompanying labor legislation changed the legal situation for American workers and allowed the organizing successes of the 1930's, American workers never rose to the heights attained by the British who were able to use the Labor Party to introduce cradle to the grave welfare measures and nationalize some of the major industries in the post WWII period.

This failure on the part of the American labor force can be explained by the battering it took after WWI; its strikes broken by the army and many of its most militant organizers jailed and/or deported. Others, whose ideological attachment to socialism made them susceptible to "red" smearing were either rendered quiescent or reduced to ineffectiveness. Where British and European movements were fueled by the heat and light of its most radical socialist elements and the interplay between socialist political leaders with those in the unions, American unions were relatively deprived of this energy. Membership dropped in the Socialist Party dropped from over 100,000 in 1919 to less than 7,000 by 1929. Labor leaders claiming socialist political preferences fell from 37.7 percent in 1900 to 27.5 in 1925 (by 1946 the figure had fallen to 8.1). Socialist leaders, especially the left wing of the party that split off to join the Communist Party , were decimated by government attacks. Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs was imprisoned under the Espionage Act. On January 2, 1920, some 10,000 people were arrested in massive federal raids and 3000 of these were held for deportation. In the period from 1919 to 1920, 1,400 more suspected radicals were arrested under state anarchy and sedition laws.(2)

These are just the publicized facts. The difficult part of assessing a "scare" involves all those unregistered acts of bullying that resulted in meetings not held or broken up, strikes not called, speeches not made, and votes withheld. Untold numbers of Black leaders, union members, liberal school teachers and just plain outspoken citizens were informally harassed by the zealous efforts of the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, the Immigration Service, the American Civic Federation, U.S. Army Intelligence, and legions of individual Public School Board members and church officials who had rigid standards about what good Americans should or should not say.(2) Socialist periodicals were forced out of business as the Post Office refused to deliver them. Hence, there is no way to know or even guess the number of individuals who would have subscribed to socialist ideals had they been made aware of them. The political culture created by the scare proved hostile to those who openly became advocates of even relatively innocuous ideas, such as; higher wages, union solidarity, pacifism or racial equality.

Some aspects of the problem are easier to measure. Clearly, for example, the greater tolerance for dissent on the part of the British government and the nation as a whole meant that the socialist leader of the Independent Labor Party, Ramsay Macdonald could openly oppose British participation in the war and still lead both the ILP and then Labor Party in the post war period while, in America, Eugene Debs was jailed for his anti-war stance, leaving the American Socialist Party without its most popular leader during the most critical period in its existence. No doubt, the ability to speak and take positions on political issues even during war time without fear of being arrested or otherwise intimidated is vital to the success of any political party or labor union organizing effort.

The attack on the left dovetailed well with a simultaneous effort promoted by business interests to reduce or eliminate union influence. Launched under the auspices of the National Civic Federation and associated Chambers of Commerce, the "open shop" movement took advantage of the disarray on the left to wipe out union organizing efforts and reduce union membership in their own businesses. American labor unions were placed on the defensive throughout the 1920's until they were revitalized briefly by the new legislation of the 1930's. But without socialist leadership and dominated by the pragmatism of John L. Lewis, the unions were left without a vision and unable to fully seize the opportunities presented by the labor shortages of WWII and the prosperity of the postwar period. In recent times the power and influence of the of unions in America has withered away. From the one worker in three that claimed a union membership in the post WWII period, only one worker in six, or 11% of the work force claimed membership in 1995. Socialist political parties have such a marginal existence that they are usually not even considered as a factor in elections. Only one U.S. Representative, Barry Sanders of Vermont, claiming a socialist perspective sits in the U.S. Congress.(3)

American workers have been left to drift in an increasingly hostile economic environment. A study published by the U.S. Office of Economic Development shows the U.S. has the largest gap between rich and poor of any major industrial country. From the perspective of the mid-1990's it is clear that America's rich has been garnering more than it's expected reward from the increasing prosperity and productivity of the American economy. From 1980 to 1989 the share of the national income of the most affluent 20% of Americans rose from 21 to 26% for an average increase in yearly income of $10,000. For the remaining vast majority, their share of America's wealth fell. Incomes for the lowest 20% declined an average of $1,200. Wages for working Americans fell 7%. The number of Americans living in poverty increased from 33 to 37 million in the ten years from 1985 to 1995, a period of general prosperity and economic growth. While workers' earnings fell behind the rate of inflation for most of the nineties and barely kept up with inflation in the best years, the wealthy 1% of Americans who own 40% of the wealth saw the value of that wealth soar. In 1995, a good year for the American economy, workers earnings rose 2.7% barely keeping up with inflation which rose 2.5%. Meanwhile, the stock market soared well over 20% with technology stocks leaping 50 to 100% increasing the paper wealth of the stock owners and creating large numbers of new millionaires. Executive salaries, especially those for CEO's, rose dramatically from an average of about forty times the average workers income to 200 times as great in less than ten years.

All these facts reflect the inability of unions to play their historical role in winning a fair share of the fruits of their labor and of socialists who would be expected to be the natural allies of workers and those living in poverty. Other trends liketechnological innovations and mergers in the 1990's did away with millions of jobs in established

industries affecting both white and blue collar workers. Immigration made competition for jobs even fiercer. Even highly skilled technicians such as computer programmers faced competition from Asians willing to work for far lower wages. Mexicans and Caribbean monopolized the lower wage unskilled service and agricultural jobs. Movements to low wage third world countries by corporations after larger profits and seeking to take advantage of new trade agreements like NAFTA made the situation worse. Greater use of temporary help added to the disappearance of full time jobs. The largest single employer in the U.S. in 1995 was not Wal Mart or General Motors but Manpower, the country's foremost supplier of temporary help - a company that pays wages close to the minimum wage with no health insurance or other benefits. The number of Americans employed by Fortune 500 corporations decreased dramatically. Phone companies, led by AT&T with the dismissal of 77,000 employers in one swoop and followed closely by the Baby Bells, were relentless in their quest for increasing productivity by decreasing the number of their employees. Blue collar workers, especially in heavy industries such as auto or steel were hard hit as whole factories closed and/or left the country. With a moribund union movement and no socialist political party to address these issues in any significant fashion, the outlook for American workers who lack the education and training which would allow them to seek higher paying jobs looks increasingly dismal.

Unlike the labor movement in Great Britain, the American labor movement never recovered sufficiently from the damage to its leadership and the vital spirit that had fostered the movement for workers' democracy and other labor reform efforts during and after WWI. Hence when the depression and WWII brought new opportunities for labor movements in the western world, American labor was not able to bring to America the benefits of socialism that were installed in Britain by the Labor government that took office in 1945.(2) Although anti-union sentiment existed in Britain, union prevention never became the obsession there that it was in America. The British unions earned their right to protection under the law through clever use of parliamentary tactics in the nineteenth century that made it extremely difficult for British employers to use the techniques of their American counterparts. As American products began eating into British markets, British employers increasingly pointed to this unfair advantage held by their competitors. But if the British workers were better organized than the American and their legal position was stronger, they were by no means free from exploitation or from conflict with the armed might of the state. In fact, the very size and strength of the British unions contributed to the concern about their intentions that permeated the upper reaches of British society in the post World War I period and contributed to the postwar demand for legislation limiting the power of the unions. To effect this decrease in the relative power of the unions, employers needed the aid and support of the British government. Like the Americans, the British found that the dependence upon the use of the military might of the state to rescue industries in trouble was an expensive and risky way to oppress workers.

To meet the post war labor crisis, the British developed a system that used a mixture of governmental force combined with volunteer help coordinated by a special Cabinet committee. Early experiments with this system in the railway strike of 1919 and the coal strike of 1921 were heavily dependent on the military and special emergency legislation passed during WWI. The demobilization of the military and the lapsing of war-related legislation caused the politicians in charge of the system to turn to a volunteer dependent system that would be far less expensive. The post-war industrial strife had demonstrated that British citizens would come forward in large numbers to handle the logistic problems involved in providing the necessities of life to a large population. The primary virtues of the British system were its relative cheapness since it depended largely on unpaid volunteer help, and, since the military were kept in reserve, mostly unseen, it did not arouse the hostility that direct use of the military would. This dependence upon the British tradition of unpaid volunteer service, meant that the system would not work elsewhere, and, indeed, it is difficult to imagine the system working effectively in contemporary Britain where the custom of voluntary service has largely been eroded by the expansion of paid civil servants (3).

The volunteer aspects of the British system as well as the large‑scale organization that it entailed were missing from the American response in 1919. The Americans depended far more heavily on the use of troops to break strikes. This excessive use of armed force was rationalized largely through the use of"red scare" techniques. Why Americans proved so susceptible to the "red scare" syndrome is a bit of a puzzle. One explanation is that American red baiting is related to the tension created by the waves of immigration and the hostility that each new ethnic group felt. The association between socialism and foreigners was commonplace. Americanization programs encouraged aliens applying for citizenship to prove their Americanism by attacking socialism.

The fact that many socialists were native Americans was no deterrent to such attacks. Courses in the virtue of the free enterprise system became part of the regular curriculum not only for those recently arrived in the United States, but for the young as well. Attempts by trade unions to counteract this barrage of anti‑union, anti‑socialist propaganda were doomed to failure as schoolteachers around the nation knew very well that their jobs depended on their carrying on the work of political socialization of the kind recommended by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Legion.

The connection between red‑baiting and racism has also been historically very close for every racist knew that socialist ideology promoted solidarity among workers of all races. This had helped keep one whole section of America, the south, relatively free from both trade unions and socialism. Border areas like West Virginia were won over to unionism only after enormous expenditures of blood and major portions of the resources of unions like the United Mine Workers of America. Pitched battles between workers and company guards were common occurrences in the entire Appalachian mining region and intervention by the national guard and, occasionally, federal troops was accepted as the inevitable result of any strike that threatened to be successful.

The use of Black strikebreakers in such situations served a double purpose for employers as they could not only use Blacks as an alternate pool of cheap labor but by doing so ensured that racial tensions would increase, thus preventing the growth of a unified labor movement. The great race riot in East St. Louis in July 1917 was triggered by the introduction of Black strikebreakers into an aluminum plant after a walkout of white employees. Before it was finished, forty‑eight people, mostly Black, were dead and hundreds were injured. Blacks migrating from southern rural areas to cities like St. Louis generally saw unions as organizations of white men formed to keep Black men from getting jobs. This view was reaffirmed by the teachings of Black leaders like Booker T. Washington who advised Blacks against joining unions on the grounds that such action would impede the acceptance of Black labor by white employers. Where unions were able to establish themselves in the south, locals were usually all white.

All these factors that made unionizing in the South virtually impossible, added considerably to the difficulty of organizing in the great northern cities to which the Blacks were attracted during World War I by the promise of jobs. The race riots that hit many of these cities in 1919 were perhaps the inevitable result of the conflict over jobs that was created once the wartime labor shortage was ended. The incident that brought federal troops to Gary, Indiana during the steel strike of 1919 was race related. Angry strikers, had overturned a street car bearing strikebreaking Blacks on their way to work.. Such frequent use of Blacks in the Chicago area had earned them the derisive title of the "scab race".(5) Surveys of white workers after the strike were filled with racist slanders against strikebreaking Blacks as "worse than immigrants".(6) These strong feelings were long lasting and permeate sections of the labor movement to this day. It would take the great depression and the organization of the CIO before Blacks could be brought into unions with whites in large numbers.

If racial tensions were used to keep workers divided, the anti‑immigrant component of the "red scare" provided further opportunities. Unions organizers who were also members of socialist or either of the two communist parties encountered ethnic prejudices which hampered their efforts because of the association of socialism with foreigners. Communists in America and in Britain, because their loyalty laid elsewhere than in the country where they operated, were widely suspected of receiving "foreign gold" and taking direction from the Soviet Comintern, were ideal targets for the "red scare". Both charges have been verified by the recent publication of Comintern documents

Even before it split and became the Communist Party, the left wing of the Socialist Party was the target of FBI infiltrators. The left wing with its large percentage of Russian immigrants provided a broad target for "red scare" tactics. The FBI saw the advantages of splitting the party and reducing its size and effectiveness and there is some evidence that infiltrators were active in leading the left wing out of the main party thereby isolating the Communists and making them easier to watch.

The Russian revolution was the result of a relatively rare conjunction of factors that, to the dismay of most Marxists, never happened elsewhere in the industrialized world. The American government was determined that it should not happen here, but beyond that goal there were uses to which the fear of revolution could be put. The usefulness of the "red scare" is that it provides both the rationale for such use of the state's police power and that it drives a wedge between unions and socialist leaders who might otherwise have joined in a fruitful partnership. Communists, because they were susceptible to the "red scare" and their Leninist theory was well‑known and had been extensively studied by security forces everywhere, were relatively easy to deal with. The police could predict how Leninist revolutionary groups would respond and, hence, take measures to ensure their defeat. And, while it is necessary for the revolutionary to wait for a crisis in the ruling class, there is no good reason for the state to

similarly restrict its actions. It can simulate crisis to draw out the rebels. By the use of agent provocateurs it can provoke unwise and premature actions for which the party can be held

responsible and jailed or engaged in costly legal battles. It can pass legislation hamstringing the actions of revolutionary groups. It can conduct propaganda campaigns against the most

offensive ideas of the opposition and ensure through its monopoly of public education that its own ideology is propagated. Both American and British security agents used these tactics to contain and diminish the trade union and socialist movements in their respective countries.

Both countries also used the period between crises to draw revolutionary groups and leaders into the mainstream of society; defusing their zeal for revolt by installing them in well‑paid bureaucratic positions giving them a stake in the status quo. The richer the society, the more extensive its power of absorption is. Rare, indeed, was the revolutionary who could follow the saintly path marked out by Lenin when the good life was there for the asking. Thus, by the

time a crisis came, the revolutionaries might be too corrupted to take advantage of it. Unwilling to risk today's certainties for tomorrow's possibilities, the bureaucrat becomes revolution's

greatest enemy ‑ even when he works for an organization whose expressed goal is revolution. As Langston Hughes has put it, a dream too long deferred may wither and dry "like a raisin in the

sun". Bureaucrats, whether they are part of the government, a trade union organization or a socialist party suffer a steady erosion of revolutionary zeal and an ever‑increasing reluctance to get involved in situations that cannot be controlled. In Britain, the classic study of the socialist "careerist" is Ralph Miliband's Parliamentary Socialism. This syndrome is important to this study in that it explains the process by which radicals are converted to union bureaucrats or become participants in strikebreaking activities while part of a "Labor Government." There is a great reluctance on the part of the bureaucrat to change the system that he or she has prospered under. No one understood this better than John L. Lewis and no one ever converted more militant socialist organizers into union bureaucrats than he did.

Leaders in both countries were frightened by the success of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union and by the threat of revolution elsewhere, but neither country was in serious danger of suffering a Communist takeover at home. Each took stringent measures to protect its government. But, America, which was perhaps threatened least, seemed to have been frightened most and the measures taken. by the Army and the Justice Department seemed to be far in excess of what was called for. Evidence given in the body of this study from the files of Army Intelligence helps to answer this seeming paradox and sheds new light on the origins of the "red scare." in America. The British seemed on the whole to have made a more intelligent assessment of the threat they faced and correspondingly their reaction to the problem created much less of a stir.

Both countries achieved their immediate goal; the suppression and elimination of radicals from positions of influence within the labor movement and the attainment of control over labor unions so that they presented no threat to the existing economic or political system. Though the means used in Britain were more sophisticated and far less violent than in America, in both places the faceless bureaucrat replaced the rebels in the labor movement. Although the Labor Party retained its socialist ideology, it was a tamed and moderate socialism that contented itself with the nationalization of a few sick industries and the introduction of increased welfare and social security measures when it finally took power in 1945. The vital spirit that had moved the workers' control movement in Britain and the demand for industrial democracy in America was purged in both places - never to emerge again in any significant way.

Where this study breaks new ground is in two areas: First, in the examination of the use of volunteers organized through a governmental committee as a strikebreaking force in Britain following World War I, and, secondly, the use of the United States Army in a similar capacity in America during the same period. The release of governmental papers in both countries bearing on these subjects makes it possible to reassess the role played by the government in Britain and the Army in America in establishing the limits of acceptable working‑class activity, and in the control and prevention of revolutionary activity. It proceeds from the premise that by comparing the strikebreaking of the two countries, key problems that affect both can be clarified that explain the use of varying approaches to the repression of the labor movement in each country.

There are also key areas of similarity in approach between the two countries. Both learned well from the lessons taught by Bismarck in an earlier era regarding the uses of a mobile armed force and a well-trained bureaucracy; both aided and abetted by the work of spies and intelligence officers. The danger to a democratic state stemming from a too powerful bureaucracy was best laid out by Max Weber who pointed to the authority that bureaucrats developed through their virtual monopoly of knowledge garnered over years of service to the state. The bureaucracies of all nations grew during WWI - especially those directly related to the war effort. Weber saw the only cure for the problem of bureaucratic power in greater democracy with expanded political control of the bureaucrats. Unfortunately, the wartime process tended to do the reverse - expanding bureaucracies were at the command of increasingly more centralized wartime governments. Spies and Intelligence Officers turned their attention to both the enemy at home and those abroad. The very nature of their work precluded supervision through the normal procedures which provide democratic control. Working in secrecy, shielded from press and public, it is only now the full impact of the misguided, exaggerated and overblown reports which formed the basis of action by the Army Generals and bureaucrats is becoming part of the historical record.

In April of 1917 when the U.S. declared war on Germany. army intelligence had only two officers and two clerks in Washington. A handful of national guard officers trained in intelligence were scattered around the nation. By the end of the war this force had grown to over 272 officers and over 1000 clerks at headquarters with additional officers attached to every important army post in the country (the national guard had by this time been federalized). This force was supplemented with aid from Navy, Post Office and State departments that took on various roles in censoring radical literature and determining passport eligibility. Meanwhile, the Justice department was expanding its own Bureau of Investigation from about 300 agents in 1917 to some 1500 agents at the war's end. In addition, the Bureau created a civilian auxiliary known as The American Protective League designed to keep an eye on suspicious neighbors and fellow workers. Weekly meetings between departments to coordinate activities were established and information exchanged. Initial concerns with domestic subversion were translated by the end of the war into attacking economic and political radicalism - which, in turn, came to mean strikebreaking and union busting. All this activity was justified under the Espionage Act of 1917 and associated amendments.

Britain had gone through a similar expansion of its war time intelligence capacities and, indeed, elements of the American system were copyed directly from the British (this was also true of the post war British strikebreaking system). The two countries shared similar concerns; for example, leaders in both countries were frightened by the success of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union and by the threat of revolution elsewhere. Neither country was in serious danger of suffering a Communist takeover at home, but both saw opportunity in fanning the fears raised by the Bolshevik coup in Russia. Each government took stringent measures to protect itself. But, America, which was perhaps threatened least, seemed to have been frightened most and the measures taken. by the Army and the Justice Department seemed to be far in excess of what any realistic assessment would have justified. Evidence given in the body of this study from the files of Army Intelligence helps to answer this seeming paradox and sheds new light on the origins of the "red scare." in America. The British seemed, on the whole, to have made a more intelligent assessment of the threat they faced and correspondingly their reaction to the problem created much less of a stir. A key factor that emerges is in the use of armed force which in Britain was controlled and restrained far more than in America, and that this difference helps explain the relative success of British working class politics as expressed in the Labor Party. A large part of the credit for the more restrained and in most ways more effective use of armed force comes from the longer war time experience of the British War Cabinet. The overlap especially in the lower levels of the bureaucracy was crucial. While the Home Office had its J. Edgar Hoover clone in the person of Intelligence Chief Basil Thomson, both consummate bureaucrats and both obsessed with exaggerating militant threats as a vehicle for building there own power, Hoover was encouraged by Attorney General Palmer and a weakened and otherwise absorbed Wilson left an opening that never happened in Britain where the orderly procedures of the Lloyd George Cabinet continued even with changes in personnel after he left office (indeed, the strikebreaking mechanism is left intact throughout the Labor Government of 1924). Basil Thomson remained firmly restrained by the collective will of the Cabinet and its special committee.

Other cultural and political variables are examined in the course of this study, but by and large, there has been an attempt to focus on this underlying reliance on armed force and the manner in which this shaped the outcome of post war labor disputes in these two countries.

NOTES ‑ INTRODUCTION

1. Christopher Hill, The Making of Modern English Society,

1530‑1780: Reformation to Industria1 Revolution, London, 1964,

p.267.

2. Statistics for the decline of socialism have been conveniently assembled in John Lasslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, (eds.), Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism, Garden City, 1974. See especially James Weinstein's article, "The Problems of the Socialist Party Before World War One," in which he summarizes his earlier book on the decline of socialism in America that remains the classic statement on the internal problems that led to the division of the party in 1919. One missing statistic is the number of socialists who fell victim to the great influenza epidemic. My grandfather was one of those socialists who was stricken in his prime in 1919 and, without his leadership, his large family drifted back to more traditional Democratic politics until the events of the 1960's brought some of us back under the red flag.

3. Capturing a culture where fear is the most pervasive element is extremely difficult. The best and most vivid examples of what the southern version of this was like can be found in David Halberstam, The Children, New York, 1998. While the focus of Halberstam's work is primarily on the leaders of the civil rights struggle in the 1960's, his description's of the complex layers of oppression in the towns he examines, especially Nashville, Selma, and Birmingham, are the best in modern literature. He effectively answers Herbert Marcuse's "great question" of history - why the masses rebel so infrequently given the obvious exploitation under which they live.

4. Our best source for information on the use of armed force against American workers is the manuscript and files of Abraham Glasser in the National Archives. For the use of industrial

spies and strikebreaking companies the reports of the LaFollette Committee are indispensable. Those have been digested and condensed by Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket, New York, 1937, and Gerald Auerbach,Labor and Liberty: The LaFollette Committee, New York, 1966.

5. For the British government's strikebreaking committee see my unpublished dissertation, The Supply and Transport Committee, 1919‑1926, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1970. Articles

based on the dissertation have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 6, Number 2: and Volume 8, Number 4. Cf. A. F. Thompson, Trade Unions and Government, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1972.

6. Books on the "red scare" are numerous. Perhaps the most useful of these is Robert K. Murray, Red Scare; A Study in National Hysteria, Minneapolis, 1955. More recent and more

narrow in scope, but far more carefully researched is Robert Preston's Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903 ‑ 1933, Cambridge., 1963. The Americanization

programs are outlined in the multi‑volume reports of the New York State committee investigation headed by Clayton R. Lusk. Commonly referred to as the Lusk Reports, they are officially entitled, Report of the Joint Investigative Committee of the State of New York Into Seditious Activities, Four Volumes, Albany, 1920.

7. S. Julius Jacobson, The Negro and the American Labor Movement, New York, 1968, p. 10, and William M. Tuttle, "Labor Conflict and Racial Violence", Labor History, 1969, 10,.3, pp. 408‑414.

8. Wisconsin, State Historical Society, Saposs Papers, Box 26, contains interviews with workers recorded shortly after the steel strike of 1919.

CHAPTER I

THE U.S. ARMY AND THE SHAPING OF THE

AMERICAN LABOR FORCE

There have been two constitutional routes whereby federal troops may be used in domestic disturbances. The most common occurrence, historically, was when federal troops were requested by a state governor, with or without the participation of the state legislature. This was the case in the great railroad strike of 1877 and in the steel strike of 1919. The other route is through the power of the President to protect federal property and to regulate interstate commerce. This was the rationale used by President Cleveland in the Pullman strike of 1894 when he brought in federal troops over the opposition of Illinois governor, John Peter Atgeld. A third route was devised to meet rather unique circumstances that developed during World War I. Then, because the state militias were nationalized and because of the wartime need to guard against sabotage, federal troops were stationed at various strategic points throughout the country on guard duty. Large numbers of these troops were called to duty in areas such as the woods of the Northwest and the metal mines of Montana and Arizona where strikes had developed or were threatened. In these cases guard duty became strike duty. It was under these quite special circumstances that the use of Army Intelligence agents in strategic industrial areas grew along with this unique use of federal troops. To rationalize and, at times, to glamorize such activity, many army agents indulged in an exaggeration of the radical nature of American workers and often infused legitimate trade union activity with revolutionary intent, thus providing incentive for increased use of their own services and that of the troops who were called in to support them. That which the army had begun under wartime conditions was continued and accelerated in the red scare that followed on the heels of the war.

The importance of this development has been neglected by most historians of the period partly because the documents were not available and partly because of the tendency of historians to artificially separate wartime from peacetime activities and neglect the continuity that exists. This study attempts to use newly‑available documents to correct that problem. It also attempts to deal with a type of history that has been traditionally overlooked ‑ that which outlines the repressive role of government. Both conservative and radical historians have been equally guilty of this. To take one example from the left, near the end of a long book dealing with mass strikes in American history since 1877, Jeremy Brecher confesses that, although he has focused on the actions of the workers, "this is of course only half the story ‑‑ the other half is the action of those who oppose them." He then proceeds to deal with the "other half " in a short chapter of less than 13 pages.

This kind of shoddy treatment of a critical historical problem has most recently been given attention by Arno Mayor in his brilliant book on the methodology of counter‑revolution. In this profound work, Mayor notes that although we have a great many notable studies of revolution, particularly of the French and Russian revolutions, we have a serious insufficiency of works dealing with the process of counter‑revolution. Too many historians, like Brecher, wish to deal at length with the glamour of struggle and ignore the mundane process of containing strife. As a result, we know a great deal about how and why revolutions get started, but relatively little about their defeat. Yet, most revolts end in defeat and most revolutions, ultimately, as Crane Brinton and others have pointed out, come to be dominated by conservatives.

Most important, most situations that have the potential to become revolts never do so at all; humans, it seems, have an enormous capacity to endure exploitation without complaint. Even when, as Herbert Marcuse has demonstrated, the overwhelming strength belongs to those who would be likely to rebel, rebellion fails or does not take place at all. Marcuse hints that the explanation may have something to do with the psychological principle of identification, the identification of those who would revolt with the power that oppresses them. But, he concedes, like Mayor, that "the ease with which they [those who revolt] have been defeated demands explanations." And, in a sense, his book, One Dimensional Man, is a pioneering effort to answer his own question as it related to contemporary society.

Marcuse's work in most respects focuses on the "carrot" aspects of repression, the rewards given to men and women in return for obedient performance at work and in their community. While the promotion of conformity is today heavily dependent on rewards, the enforcers of social control rely ultimately, as in all previous societies, on a substantial element of force. The use of the National Guard to control several college campuses in the late sixties, culminating in the Massacre at Kent State, was the most dramatic recent example of this. Now the campuses are quiet again, and no one, to my knowledge, has adequately explained why, although conceivably it is because the carrot has once more made the stick unnecessary. Like the students in the contemporary period, the workers of America underwent a similar transition ‑‑ from spirited attempts to transform the conditions under which they produced wealth to conformist behavior, which accepted these conditions in return for guaranteed rewards. It is this period of transition (roughly from 1917 to 1920) that provides the major focus of this study; the age when U. S. society witnessed the last working class struggles in which the use of force by the federal government would figure as the significant element in the suppression of labor disputes.

Not that there was no violence or use of force in the industrial disputes of the post‑1919 epoch, but that there is a marked change in the government responses to the rise of labor in the 1930's. Instead of forcefully suppressing labor organization, the government allows, and indeed encourages, unionization that it had fought with the use of its armed might in the earlier period. Thus, with the 1930's we enter the age of Marcuse, the epoch of the carrot, at least in industrial relations. The stick remains in the closet except for occasional use, not so much against organized labor, but at Blacks and students their spirit is sufficiently aroused to present a challenge to federal authority.

Why did the government support in the thirties what it fought in the postwar period? Some time ago, this was the subject of an interesting essay by David Brody in Labor History in which he questions the standard interpretation both new left and old right and lands somewhere to the right of middle. That is, he accepts the general outlines of Selig Perlman's conservative contention that the nature of the workers' struggle was always basically a bread and butter struggle against the leftist view that the workers' struggle contained a vision of a new social order. Unions were accepted in the thirties, according to Perlman because by then the corporations were in the economic position to be able for the first time to engage in collective bargaining and to adhere to the long‑term contracts that it demanded. What Brody does not accept in this explanation is the ease with which the process is explained, and he attacks both Perlman and the left for being too simplistic in their analyses. He correctly points to the ambivalence of the Roosevelt administration towards labor and the intensity of the struggle for union recognition in some areas of the economy. He sensibly maintains that any new theory would have to take this ambiguity and complexity into consideration, and, while it is not the purpose of this study to offer the kind of analysis that Brody finds necessary to cope with that complexity, it does give some insight into one element that goes into the argument, and thus is a contribution to the building of a new analysis.3 What has been missing from previous discussions of the question has been a full appreciation of the extent to which the government had not only forcibly suppressed the labor movement in the postwar period ‑‑ in league, of course, with employers and supporting elements in the communities ‑‑ but the extent to which that suppression shaped the kind of labor movement that emerged in the thirties. While it is easy to agree with Perlman and Brody that the workers in the thirties were primarily concerned with economic issues and wanted to avoid clouding their economic demands with political questions, we need to explain how the workers got that way. We are not even sure that they did in fact limit their vision to pocketbook questions; some workers, as Staughton Lynd has demonstrated, most certainly did not. We only think they did because the leaders of their unions expressed themselves in these limited terms. So what Brody and others are really asking is how the leaders got that way, and if they were any different in 1935 than they were in 1917. 4

And of course the answer is yes. In 1917, the most important element among the miners and lumberjacks of the far west was the International Workers of the World. In 1919, the leader of the steelworkers was William Z. Foster, perhaps the most famous "red" of the era. In the postwar period, John L. Lewis had trouble containing the radical elements within the United Mine Workers, and it was not at all inevitable that he should have been ultimately successful in subduing those elements.

But by the thirties, these elements were either gone or reduced to ineffectiveness, and how the U. S. Army helped accomplish that is what this study seeks to explain. For the role of the army in structuring the course of American unions is important in two senses. One is the most obvious role that armed intervention brings to strikes; it stops the strike from spreading into areas that would threaten political control ‑ the army's primary role is to protect property and support local authorities. Further, in almost every case of military involvement, the striking workers find that soldiers restrict picketing, limit assemblies of workers and otherwise inhibit workers from vigorously prosecuting their strike duties. The mere presence of troops is often enough to discourage wavering workers from joining the strikers. Above all, the presence of troops allows the peaceable introduction of strikebreakers.

Secondly, during World War 1, the increased use of Army Intelligence agents to watch over labor relations in critical industries fostered the role of the army as a vehicle for the suppression of radicals, enemy aliens, draft dodgers, and other undesirables. As this activity heightened, it was almost inevitable that the army would be led to confuse legitimate trade unionism with subversive activities, and hence under the guise of protecting war industries, it would break strikes and labor organizations. Its first victim would be the IWW, but, in the post‑war period, it would attack the AFL as well. The rationale for such attacks was provided by Army Intelligence agents who generally cooperated with local authorities and employers in sharing information about suspects and subversive activities. Since for the employers there was a natural benefit involved in having the army intervene, there was built into the relationship a proclivity to exaggerate the influence of radicals on the workers. This worked to the benefit of all except the workers, since the employer got the army to help break the strike, and the army got credit for saving.the community from Bolshevism, anarchy, or whatever evil influence, real or imagined, was currently in vogue. Local authorities benefited by saving money on police expenditures, and, as in the case of the mayor of Seattle in 1919, national attention created unique possibilities to be exploited either politically or, as Ole Hanson chose, as a Chamber of Commerce after dinner speaker on the red menace and how to fight it.

For the unions subjected to the combined onslaught of redbaiting and strikebreaking by the army, there was little that they could do. They could not match the army's capacity for violence, nor could they muster the public relations effort necessary to counter the employers' efforts to smear them. Misled by company spies and agent provocateurs, it was difficult for workers to know where to turn. The only safe route seemed to be to do one's job, keep quiet,and not join any union. Such a situation changes the dimensions of the usual discussion about the American worker and whether he was more conservative than his European counterpart. Or, as both Lenin and Selig Perlman put it, whether left to himself the worker would only arrive at "bread and butter" consciousness. For the American worker, there never was any choice ‑‑ he could not choose socialism because those who offered socialism along with unionization were systematically eliminated from the labor movement as they were removed from political life. By the thirties, only those who (like John L. Lewis) were noted opponents of Bolshevism were allowed to succeed. Communists who were also good trade union organizers assumed positions, temporarily, in unions that had need for their services, but only if they (as Robert 0zanne has put it) "kept their Marxist ideology well‑hidden as they led their unions to bread and butter gains." Only by keeping radical or socialist issues out of the picture could the unions also keep the armed might of the government out of the strikes. Workers were, in a word, to be allowed to reach for carrots, but not to decide how and by whom the carrots were to be grown. 5

As Melvyn Dubofsky has shown, this does not mean that the rhetoric of the class struggle was not used; Lewis himself indulged, along with Franklin D. Roosevelt, in attacks on the "economic royalists", but both Lewis and FDR were in agreement that what was good preaching was not good policy and that the point was to reform capitalism and not to remove it. Lewis had suffered from the "red scare" in 1919 and had nearly landed in jail. He had not forgotten that experience, and although willing to use Communists as organizers, he was not about to let them create questions about the "Americanism" of the CIO.

Thus, it makes no sense to argue that American workers chose "business" unions over socialist unions. They had no such choice and knew, or at least their leaders knew, that the armed might of the government would smash any significant attempt to form ranks under a red banner. In fact, the majority of American workers never got an opportunity to choose any kind of union other than what the employer would allow, and, since he has never chosen, it is rash to assume that, free from the coercion of the stick and the subversion of the carrot, he would choose to

continue with the present system.6

While the above seems to be generally true for industrial unionism, it seems to be less true in rural America where in the 1930's socialist led tenant farmers unions pulled off major organizing successes in the cotton fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri. The Department of Agriculture ventured into "socialist" resettlement experiments puting farmers back on the land using communal arrangements on government purchased land. Farmers used the crisis in over‑production to put together and expand farmers cooperatives. The socialist nature of this activity seemed to be widely overlooked by the people involved. Their judgement of a program was largely determined by whether it promised to improve their lives. Where that improvment was obvious, even FDR's Republican critics backed off from smearing "Uncle Sam's" farmers (at least until the 1950's when the large farmers and the Farm Bureau began oppossing those aspects of the programs that did not help big farmers and were therefore "socialistic."} and the programs that were keeping them alive. To this day farmers demand and get special, "socialist" treatment from the government in the form of set asides, subsidies, subdsidized water, free technical help, and disaster relief. Huddled together in producer cooperatives, they are hardly the rugged entrepeneurs of classical capitalism. Some of have gotten so good at milking the system, they are the welfare queens of contemporary capitalism with big cars, trucks, and houses all paid for by benevolent agricultural socialism. Given their choice, rural Americans chose socialism with a vigor seen nowhere else in the world. Surely if workers had been given the same opportunity to choose the benefits of government protection the way the farmers did, they too would have chosen producer organization, subsidies, free education and other government help available to every farmer.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A FEDERAL STRIKEBREAKING FORCE ‑‑1917‑1919‑‑

America approached the end of World War I with its major institutions seriously out of proportion. The Wilsonian attack on bigness had never approached the scale implied in the rhetoric of the Progressives' election propaganda and, with the coming of the war, production to make the world safe for democracy took precedence over problems of monopoly. In fact, not only was the government not actively prosecuting trusts during the war, but it was encouraging cooperation between competing industries for the sake of war‑time efficiency. Thus, businesses grew unhindered and were encouraged by Bernard Baruch and the War Industries Board to "rationalize" production. Those who could not rationalize lost war contracts and fell by the wayside. If the war boosted the size of America's corporations, it also encouraged the growth of "loyal" AFL unions and membership in the Federation doubled from two million in 1914 to almost five million in 1919. But the rate of union growth was not nearly enough to enable them to approach the corporations on anything like equal terms, and this relative weakness of the American labor movement would be made dramatically evident in the postwar period.

The power of the office of the Presidency also grew tremendously, as did the executive branches of every nation involved in the war. Taking on the enormous administrative tasks involved in fighting a modern total war required new government agencies and a flock of new executives to man them. Power was centralized in the White House where, as Commander in Chief, Wilson retained final responsibility for the prosecution of the war. With the encouragement of Wilson, Samuel Gompers was led to believe that the wartime growth and prosperity of the AFL would continue into the postwar period bolstered by the support of a powerful president grateful to Gompers and the unions of Federation for their contribution to the war effort. That Gompers was left to face the overwhelming power of American corporative might largely alone, without significant help from, Wilson, was due to a combination of factors. First, there was the fact that Wilson never was very responsive to the needs of labor. Aside from the Seaman's Act, none of his legislative accomplishments were directed specifically towards the welfare of organized labor. Wilson's wartime pose as a friend of Gompers and the AFL was the result of a war‑time necessity to help insure that production would not be hampered by strikes. In return for Gomper's loyalty, the Federation received favorable treatment from the Department of Labor. But the President's commitment to Gompers was never as deep as Gompers imagined it to be, and lasted only for the duration of the war.1 Secondly, there was the president's over‑riding concern with foreign policy and his struggle over the League of Nations, which left him without time or interest for anything else. Ultimately, of course, it led to his stroke in September, 1919, which almost completely incapacitated him. Thus, even had Wilson wished to use the imposing powers he retained in the immediate postwar period, his disability would have prevented him from acting during the period when Gompers and the labor movement needed him most.2

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, without a leader firmly committed to any particular policy in regards to the relationship between employers and workers, the government naturally responded to those who placed the greatest pressure upon it. Those agencies most sympathetic to business needs responded first. The Department of Labor under the leadership of ex‑United Mine Workers official, William B. Wilson, held out the longest. But by 1920, the combined attacks of the War Department, the Department of Justice, and the federal judiciary, in league with state and local authorities, vigilantes, citizen's groups, veterans organization, and private strikebreaking companies had left federal mediators with little to do but to watch over the destruction of the bargaining power of American labor.3

To some extent Gompers and the AFL shared some responsibility for setting up the anti‑strike mechanisms that were to be turned against them in 1919. In their eagerness to demonstrate their loyalty, Gompers and the AFL indulged in war‑time attacks on the anti‑war Socialists and the IWW. Gompers himself participated in the formation of military schemes such as the development of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen by the Army to break the hold of the IWW on the lumberjacks of the Northwest. He also cooperated with Felix Frankfurter in the plans of the wartime Mediation Board to end the strikes in the copper mines of Montana and Arizona by making offers to the AFL skilled workers at the expense of the lesser‑skilled members of the IWW union. These techniques were indeed successful in destroying the effectiveness of the Wobblies as a labor organization, but the methodology once developed could and would be turned against the AFL once the IWW was removed. Thus, by contributing to the attack on one section of the labor movement, Gompers was weakening his own position. Perhaps worse, he was contributing to the lack of faith of the rank and file in trade union leadership of any kind. The old imperialist tactic of divide and conquer was to prove extremely effective in the context of the war‑time and post‑war industrial struggles.4

Potentially the most ominous element in the nation's labor problems during the war was the increasing use of the military in rather novel ways. Federal troops had of course been used to break strikes and contain riots in the past, most dramatically in the great railway strike of 1877 and the Pullman strike of 1890. But usually the state militia was expected to handle difficulties arising. from industrial disputes,and federal troops were only called in cases of extreme emergency. With the federalization of the national guard as part of America's preparedness plans in March, 1917, states like Montana and Arizona that had been frequent users of troops to crush strikes especially in the mines began to feel concerned about being caught without sufficient military force to quell future disputes. In the Northwest, increasing activity on the part of Wobbly organizers worried the lumber operators in the area. Such fears caused enormous pressure to be placed upon Washington by western business interests and state officials who wanted protection from "potential disturbances" (strikes) caused by the IWW, enemy aliens, and/or unnamed others who, they claimed, would seek to profit from the disruption of the flow of wartime material.

In response to this pressure, and because of its own concern with maintaining wartime production, the government took a variety of actions: the Justice Department launched a legal attack on the IWW, the Immigration Service accelerated its efforts to deport "disloyal" aliens, the Labor Department increased pressure on "loyal" unions to mediate disputes, and the army sent federalized units of the national guard to protect strategic mines, railroad trestles and public utilities. The army also was used as an illegal posse comitatus, aiding local authorities in red hunts and raids on IWW meeting places, and in several areas it soon found itself serving as strikebreakers.5 The first recorded use of federal troops as strikebreakers during the war came in the Arizona copper mines in June‑July, 1917. The troops were not sent in to break the strike; most of the troops had in fact already been stationed on the scene as "public utility" guards. Gradually, however, the terms of their duty changed to encompass strike patrolling, which in turn amounted to creating conditions under which the failure of the strike was assured, or strikebreaking.

The U. S. Army Intelligence Division had kept a watchful eye on events in the Arizona mining districts throughout May and June of 1917. The reports which they sent to Washington showed an increasing concern with IWW activity in the area and especially with the Austrian and German influence within the organization. In addition, the Army agents claimed that the "IWW has stated its purpose is to destroy society ‑‑ to overturn civilization ‑‑ to stamp out individuality and to erase the laws of private property..." The headquarters of the IWW in Globe, Arizona, where some of the largest mines were located, had drawn attention to itself as early as April, 1917, by its refusal to display the American flag, an act that was much condemned by the local press, and this might help explain why the Globe‑Miami district was the only one of the Arizona mining districts where federal troops were sent. 6 The series of strikes in the summer of 1917, however, were started not by the IWW but by the remains of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in Jerome, Arizona. Once part of the the IWW, the WFM had drifted away, becoming increasingly conservative, and, in the years preceding the strike, it suffered from a decreasing membership and a declining treasury. The strike began on May 25, 1917, over union demands for higher wages, the closed shop and the check‑off. The IWW immediately declared a simultaneous though separate strike. The strike was effective and with the aid of a Labor Department mediator, it was settled by granting a wage increase to the miners. The credit for the settlement went to the conservative WFM and the Wobblies were ignored. Thus, although the WFM demands for a closed shop and a check‑off were not met, the strike was proclaimed a

success.7

The developments in Jerome were followed closely by strikes in Bisbee on June 27, in Clifton on July l, and in Globe‑Miami on July 2, and finally back to Jerome again on July 6. These new strikes were quickly disowned by the WFM to avoid association with the IWW and non‑Wobbly unions that had called the strike. These strikes were treated differently from the first Jerome strike. On June 29, Governor Thomas B. Campbell warned of a "sinister German character ... discovered at work in the Bisbee or Warren district." (Bisbee was also the district where the IWW maintained greatest control). Federal mediators were called in by the Governor, but initially at least, they failed to settle the strikes. Vigilante groups in Jerome and Bisbee took matters into their own hands and drove thousands of miners and some innocent bystanders out of the towns and into the surrounding desert in the first week of July. The army was called upon to sort out the innocent victims from the aliens and undesirables among the deportees. To do this, camps had to be set up out in the desert to feed and house these homeless men until their fate could be decided. This ended the strikes in Jerome and Bisbee, but the strikes in the other districts continued. 8

Meanwhile Gompers, outraged by the treatment of the Arizona miners at the hands of the citizens of Bisbee and Jerome, demanded that Labor Secretary Wilson investigate the situation. Ultimately, on September 20, 1917, a commission was appointed to study labor conditions in the west. The committee was headed by the Secretary of Labor, William B. Wilson, but its actions would be dominated by its secretary, Felix Frankfurter. The Commission arrived in Arizona on October 4, 1917, and by October 22, the strikes were ended on terms recommended by commission mediators. The miners of Bisbee and Jerome, however, did not benefit from the settlement, for strikebreakers had been imported to take the places of the deported miners, and production had been largely restored by the end of July.

But as far as Gompers and the AFL unions were concerned, the settlement was a good one, and it appeared that the AFL was already reaping the rewards of loyalty. Besides gaining wage increases, the miners won the right to organize, to elect grievance committees free from employer influence, and all strikers were to be rehired ‑‑ except, as the Commission report put it, those "who were guilty of seditious utterances ... or who were members of any organization whose principles were opposed to belief in the obligation of contract." This meant that the IWW was to be outlawed and its members blacklisted.9

The Report of the Commission to the President is in most respects an intelligent document reflecting Frankfurter's legalistic mind and basic good sense. Most important, it stressed that behind the strikes were "the underlying labor conditions of the mining industry ... which were devoid of safeguards against strikes and, in fact, provocative of them." It put to rest at least temporarily the spector raised by Governor Campbell of "sinister" or IWW influences accounting for the strikes and found the explanation in "unremedied and remediable industrial disorders." All told then, the work of the Commission reflected an apparent victory for an enlightened approach to problems of wartime production that maintained efficient production, eliminated strikes, and yet gauranteed that the workers would be able to express their grievances. So pleased was the President with this, that the Commission was soon put to work on problems in other industries and ultimately the technique was given structure in the form of the War Labor Board.

However it is easy to see with advantage of hindsight that the position of labor was highly vulnerable under this system. The primary power was left in the hands of the employer who could, through the use of standard devices such as the blacklist and company spies, ensure that his work force was kept docile and undemanding. Without a closed union shop, the employer was free to hire as he pleased and to select those least likely to join unions. Above all, the agreement in the mines had depended on behind‑the‑scenes pressure on the mineowners by Frankfurter, and once that pressure was removed, conditions could be expected to return to normal. 10

In the summer of 1917, with most of the government's attention focused on Jerome and Bisbee, the miners of the Globe‑Miami district were also subjected to federal intervention. Federal troops were brought into the district on July 2, 1917 at the request of Governor Thomas E. Campbell. The governor apparently had convinced the army that the "influences" in that district were more sinister than in any of the others. There were no apparent disturbances to warrant the use of troops, and once there, the troops commander, General Parker, was uncertain about just what he was supposed to do. In reply to his request for specific instructions, he received the not‑very‑helpful advice to "take such action as you deem necessary." What had been at question and was not answered here was whether in the absence of martial law the Army had the power to exercise police power and arrest civilians on the grounds that they were "alien enemies", potentially "hostile to the interests of the U. S. at a time when public utilities are in danger." Fortunately, Parker found no need to make any arrests, since the local authorities proved more than able to do their own arresting and proceeded to launch a wholesale clean‑up of all known IWW members and "enemy aliens" in town. The presence of troops was of considerable help, for even though they did not directly participate, their presence provided assurance that a massive protest against the arrests could not be launched. The troops also prevented parades and mass meetings and limited pickets to the "authorized number." These actions not only allowed local authorities to make their arrests without interference, but also seriously limited the effectiveness of the miners' strike, which would have ended in complete defeat had it not been for the intervention of the Mediation Commission. Thus, for the employers, the obvious moral to be drawn was that federal troops were much better to have around than federal mediators ‑ not only did the troops ensure that the strikers would be defeated, they stayed around longer, for while the mediators soon packed up and went back to Washington, the troops stayed on until 1920. 11

In fairness to the army, it should be pointed out that this was, for the Commanders, at least, a new role, for which they had not been trained. Some of the officers and soldiers, however, had seen duty as members of the national guard when it had been used to break similar strikes back in the days when they had never bothered with any pretense of neutrality. Although the regular army officers may have wanted to be fair, their natural desire to promote discipline and order pitted them against the strikers,who needed mass meetings and forceful picketinq to keep the strike alive and to prevent scabs from taking their jobs. While without the army there might have been a repetition of the Bisbee and Jerome deportations in the Globe‑Miami district. Certainly all the ingredients of the earlier incidents existed here as well. But it is perhaps of little consequence to those who were arrested "legally" to know that, but for the U.S. Army, they might have been illegally deported. And, for the Wobbly, the mass deportations of Bisbee and Jerome at least had propaganda value, whereas arrest in Globe‑Miami meant a mundane stay in just another jail.12 The result in either case was the same - the IWW was removed as viable representative of the miners in all three areas.

Since the exact role of the any on strike duty was never clearly defined, either during the war or in the immediate post‑ war period, great discretion was left in the hands of the officer in charge of the troops on the scene. His actions were subject to review by those higher up, and, ultimately, by War Department Secretary, Newton D. Baker, but these higher officials had graver problems to contend with than whether or not troop commanders were violating the rights of strikers, and, with the Army's Central Department under the supervision of General Leonard Wood, a man who would become famous as a red hunter in the steel strike of 1919, most army officers knew they had little to fear from excessive zeal in the fight against Wobblies and enemy aliens. Since the line between the IWW and more conservative, local unions tended to become blurred in strikes supported by both, employers came to expect that the army would not only help them attack the Wobblies, but would help them break the strikes as well. The army also profited from the relationship since red hunting not only relieved the monotony of stateside guard duty but provided career‑conscious officers with their only opportunity for a measure of glory. Thus, there was in this dangerous game seemingly something for everyone.13

In his eagerness to prove his loyalty to his president and to reap the rewards, forthcoming and expected, Samuel Gompers and the AFL, by not protesting the use of troops and the practice of blacklisting, were setting themselves up for attacks which would ultimately ruin the AFL hopes of becoming the major force in shaping the fortunes of the American worker. But for the duration of the war at least, "Gomperism" was proving profitable, and, for the AFL, it was perhaps unfortunate that the war did not last longer.

‑‑Notes‑‑

NOTES

1. Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco, 1972), p.250; Crane

Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1938), passim.;

Arno J. Mayor, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870‑

1956, (New York, 1971, P. 35 and passim.; Herbert Marcuse, Eros

and Civilization (Boston, 1955), pp. 82‑83 and One Dimensional

Man (Boston, 1964).

2. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, especially Chpt. 1, "New

Forms of Control."

3. David Brody, "Labor and the Great Depression," Labor

History, XIII, 2, Spring, 1972, pp. 231‑244; Selig Perlman, A

Theory of the Labor Movement( New York, 1928), passim.

4. Staughton Lynd, "Personal Histories of the Early C.I.O.",

Radical America, V,3, May‑June, 1971, pp. 49‑76; and his "Crowd,

Rank and File, and Party in the organization of the CIO", an

unpublished paper delivered at the Midwest Radical Caucus of the

American Historical Association, October, 1972; and his "The

Possibility of Radicalism in the Early 1930's", Radical America,

VI, 6, Nov.‑Dec., 1972, pp. 65‑84.

5. Robert Ozanne, "American Trade Union Ideology: Mainstream",

unpublished paper read at the Conference on Labor and Ideology,

Madison, March, 1972. There is also agreement on this point of

the role of Communists in the CIO from new left. See, for

example, Ronald Radosh, American Labor and U. S. Foreign Policy

(New York, 1969), p. 20, which claims that" Communists who won

leadership positions in the CIO" became allies of those who

sought to fit labor into the corporate structure."

6. Melvyn Dubofsky, "Radicalism and the American Labor

Movement", unpublished paper, Conference on Labor and Ideology,

Madison, March, 1972.

1a. Samuel Gomper, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, An

Autobiography (New York, 1925), II, 303‑350; Frank L. Grubbs,

The Struggle for Labor Loyalty, Gompers, the AFL and the

Pacifists, 1917‑20 (Durham, 1968), passim.

2a. Gene Smith, When The Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of

Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1954), passim.

3a. For the attitudes and roles of the separate government

departments toward the IWW, see Melvyn Dubofskv, We Shall

Be All (Chicago, 1969), PP. 399‑422. For a more general

treatment, see Dallas Lee Jones, The Wilson Administration and

Organized Labor (Ithica, 1954).

4a. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, PP. 415, 421; Harold Hyman,

Soldiers and Spruce: Origins of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and

Lumbermen (Los Angeles, 1965), Chpt. II.

5a. Abraham Glasser, unpublished ms., "Arizona", Glasser Files,

National Archives, pp. 1‑5, and passim.

6a Sargeant Leon C. Barker to Department Intelligence Officer,

Southern Department, Army Intelligence Files, 10110‑941; Parker

to Adjutant General, June 22, 1917, War Department Files; both

cited in Glasser ms., "Arizona".

7. Glasser ms., "Arizona", P. 4; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp.

369‑71.

8. Tucson Citizen, June 30, 1917, cited in Glasser ms.,

"Arizona, p. 4; Glasser ms., "The Bisbee and Jerome Deportation";

Dubofsky, pp. 385‑391.

9 . "Report of the President's Mediation Commission", pp. 12‑16,

reproduced in Glasser ms., pp. 8‑19.

10. Ibid; for Frankfurter's influence, see Dubofsky, pp.416‑420;

also, Bureau of Labor Statistics, "History of the War Labor

Board", Bulletin #287, pp. 1‑10.

11. Glasser ms., "Arizona", pp. 13‑15, Parker to Adjutant

General, July 5, 1917, War Department 370.61; McCain to

Commanding General, Southern Department, July 5, 1917, War

Department, 370.61, McCain to Parker July 15, 1917, War

Department, 370.61, all cited in lbid, pp. 30‑36.

12. For a description of a trial of fifty of the strikers as

"rioters",see Tucson Citizen, July 19, 1917.

13. For a defense of the army’s neutrality, see Parker to

Adjutant General, July 16, 1917 and July 27, 1917, War

Department, 370.61, cited in Glasser ms., pp. 35‑36.

CHAPTER II

Soldiers and Wobblies:

The Emergence of an Anti‑Red Military

Looking at its progress in the summer of 1917, the leadership of the International Workers of the World had some reason to be proud. Membership was swelling from coast to coast; the IWW's Lumber Workers Industrial Union claimed 10,000 members and was growing rapidly. Among the western metal miners, Wobbly influence was greater than ever, and holders of the red card threatened to overwhelm competing unions. But growth was partly the result of the previous destruction of unions by the employers of lumberjacks and miners, who, by 1917, had eliminated union influence in most of the major mining towns and lumber camps west of the Mississippi. These employers had grown to like running their industries without unions and aimed to keep things that way as long as possible. Thus, they viewed the growth of the IWW with special irritation. As we have seen, the declaration of war in April, 1917, found the producers of copper with problems with the IWW and the war allowed them to use the services of the army to help remove union representation. The same opportunity was presented to the lumber barons with curiously different results.1

As with copper, the war meant that the demand for lumber would soar. It also meant that labor shortages were almost certain to arise making blacklists against IWW members and yellow‑dog contracts more expensive to enforce. Adding to the potential for labor trouble was the removal of the anti‑union employers' ace‑in‑the‑hole, the state militias, which had been called into federal service upon the declaration of war. Hence, while able to maintain their usual assortment of company guards, like the mine owner, the lumbermen felt a certain insecurity.

For the IWW, these advantages meant an immediate improvement in their bargaining position. They had more of an opportunity to organize and, seemingly, less to fear from the reactions of employers. These advantages, however, had to be balanced with the national campaign for support of the war effort which targeted all those, like the IWW, whose support of the war was less than enthusiastic. The Wobblies were vulnerable, because although 95% of the members who were called to the colors went, the organization itself was officially opposed to the war ‑‑ indeed it was opposed to all conflict unconnected to the class struggle. Disagreement with the war became equated with treason as nationalist fervor was actively promoted by government agencies, such as, the Creel Committee on Public Information, and vigilante groups emerged to seek out and punish those who were reluctant to support the nation's effort.

But the IWW's most serious offense was its refusal to cooperate with the government as did the AFL and to call off strikes where there was some possibility that the strike would hinder the war effort. On the contrary, Wobblies responded to the war crisis with increased organizational efforts and by participation in strikes in the lumber and copper industries. Strikes in these areas could be defined as seditious interference with wartime production. So defined, the strike activity became the concern of the federal government. In other areas where strikes occurred which were led by the patriotic AFL, the response of the government was flexible and included for the most part the use of Labor Department mediators. However, when faced with strikes supported or led by the IWW, the reaction of the federal government was to call upon the U. S. Army ‑ at first, largely at the urging of western business interests and local officials. Later, once Army Intelligence agents became adept at seeking out and reporting on real or imagined seditious elements, the army proved able to call attention to situations that its agents considered worthy of intervention by federal troops. In a word, before the war was over, the army had created a new role for itself as the guardian of industrial order.2

As noted above, the first use of federal troops in the west was as special protection for public utilities, power plants, railway crossings, etc.; these troops were for the most part federalized units of the national guard. In theory the main focus of their job was to prevent sabotage by enemy agents. Since there were no bonafide German agents to speak of in the Northwest where many of the troops were sent, it did not take long for the army to follow the lead of its intelligence officers and define Wobblies as enemy agents and proceed to harass the IWW in whatever way it could - by inspecting railroad cars and arresting any holders of the red card found in them, aiding local police authorities in pursuit of radicals, raiding IWW halls and meeting places, and otherwise making it difficult for the Wobbly organizers to go about their business. All of this was opposed to the traditional codes governing the uses of the military and obviously in violation of individual IWW member's civil rights. The IWW soon brought these abuses to the attention of the Wilson administration. But Wilson was no friend of any critic of his war policy, and indeed, rather than being concerned with protecting the civil liberties of IWW members, the Department of Justice was in the process of preparing to launch its greatest single attack upon the Wobblies.

This occurred on the morninq of September 5, 1917, when Justice Department officials with aid of local police raided almost every headquarters it could find in the entire nation. With the documents seized on these raids, the government built its case for the arrest of over 100 of the IWW's leaders. From this, it should have become clear that Washington was not the place for a Wobbly to go to seek justice.3 With the launching of a general strike in the Northwest lumber camps and the outbreak of strikes in the mines of Montana and Arizona, conditions became ripe for further experimentation with the use of the Army as a vehicle to promote the flow of materials considered essential for the war effort. The main rationale for the use of federal troops in industrial disputes was that to the degree that the IWW initiated or supported strikes it was guilty of interrupting vital supplies and thus hurting the war effort, making it a legitimate target of the military. The trouble with this view is that it failed to recognize that Wobbly influence among the lumberjacks and the miners of Butte and the Miami‑Globe districts was the result of worker discontent and not the cause of it. Lacking any other vehicle to express their dissatisfaction over legitimate greivances, these men turned to the IWW, not so much because they shared the Wobbly vision of world peace although some may have, but because the IWW was interested in helping them launch an effective protest. Realizing this, more forward‑looking advisors to the government, like Felix Frankfurter, who had studied the situation in the mines, and Carlton Parker, who was an authority on the lumber business, agreed that in order to ensure industrial peace, it would be necessary to reform the conditions under which the men worked. They also agreed that the men needed some effective organization that would look after their interests so that the men would not be tempted to turn to the IWW. To accomplish this, Frankfurter backed the introduction and support of the AFL in the mine areas to provide the men with a "loyal" instrument for the expression of grievances. Because of opposition from the mine owners, Frankfurter's attempts to create effective avenues for the expression of miners' grievances failed. Parker, who also leaned toward the AFL, had no better luck with lumber operators, but he did have some influence on Army Lieutenant Colonel Brice P. Disque, and thus achieved some responsibility for that unique experiment in industrial relations, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen or, as it was called, the 4 L's.

Brought into existence by Colonel Disque in the winter of 1917‑18 after the faltering of the IWW strike of the previous summer, the 4 L's, while it never could claim title to being a substitute for regular trade unions and, indeed, was never intended to be, was able to bring certain reforms to the lumber industry as well as to end the influence of the IWW. The men of the 4 L's were soldiers recruited to work the forests of the northwest in return for lumberjack pay minus their regular Army pay. In return for the services of the 4 L's, the employers were expected to bring their lumber camps up to Army standards in terms of comfort, cleanliness and quality of food. But the biggest step forward was the agreement on the part of the operators to end the ten‑hour day, which had been the workers' major complaint. Thus by militarizing the work force, the production of spruce for the nation's emerging air force was assured, and the end of the IWW as a significant factor in the forests of the Northwest.4

The story from the copper mines in terms of maintaining production was not nearly as happy from Washington's viewpoint. The IWW had received national media attention in Butte, Montana after a major fire broke out in Butte's Speculator Mine on June 8, 1917, trapping miners underground and causing the death of 164 men. The disaster triggered a major strike which began on June 11 with the walk‑out of from ten to twelve thousand of Butte's miners, led by the Wobblies but organized in a new Metal Workers Union independent from the IWW. Despite wild stories in the press about the radical leadership of the strikers and the dire predictions of the employers about inevitable violence, the strike was remarkably peaceable. Future U. S. Senator (and then U. S. Attorney) Burton K. Wheeler was on the scene and left a report on the strike situation that is worth quoting at some length:

In the spring, the monotony was relieved somewhat by a confrontation between the soldiers and the local Pearse‑Connelly Club over the annual St.Patrick's Day parade. The Irish miners held their parade in spite of the fact that their request for a permit was refused. The attempt by the army to disperse the illegally‑assembled and parading Irish resulted in a wild melee in which 140 marchers were arrested, of which 44 were ultimately turned over to the Justice Department as "aliens, disloyal persons or draft‑dodgers." Again, a somewhat unique role for the U. Army ‑ as policer of parades. 7

In all of this, the Army's image took a beating. After all, with American soldiers dying on the Western front in Europe, this business in Butte and in the woods of Washington appeared not only inglorious but even a bit ridiculous. Aware of the less‑than‑heroic dimensions of hisposition Colonel Disque repeatedly asked that he be relieved ofhis command of the 4L's and be sent overseas. Each time,however, his requests were refused on the grounds thatmaintaining spruce production was an important job, for which hewas was uniquely qualified. However true, it was of smallcomfort to Disque, who realized that rapid advancement in theArmy would depend unon combat service. Disque had won his battlewith the Wobblies by the summer of 1918 and found himself in theawkward position of the soldier without an enemy. The otherproblem with Disque was that he was too honorable a manto fight phantom foes created to give his command an allure ofglamour. Not all Army officers would share Disque's sense of honor and the miners of Butte would fall victim to a group ofglory seekers in the fall of 1918.8

A foretaste of things to come in Butte was contained in the Army's rationale for intervening in the St. Patrick's Day parade mentioned above. Its behavior was justified on the rounds that those arrested had been tainted with some form of disloyalty. A logical extension of that argument led to more action to root out more potentially subversive persons who would otherwise be free to disrupt copper and zinc production. To this end, the Army extended its intelligence services to Butte on April 21, 1918, to be headed by Lieutenant Will P. Germer. Lt.Germer pursued his job with a consuming zeal. Convinced by local authorities that Butte was hotbed of radicalism fed by German gold, Germer soon involved himself in a controversy with U.S. Attorney Burton Wheeler, who was according to the Lieutenant, not doing his job of prosecuting aliens with sufficient enthusiasm. Germer added his voice to that of local citizens who were attempting to have Wheeler removed. Wheeler, aided by the support of the FBI field agent, E. W. Byrn, Jr., appeared to be getting the better of this debate when the IWW came to Germer's aid by launching plans for a general strike in the west in in the fall of 1918.9

For the Wobblies to talk seriously of launching a general strike in the fall of 1918 was to indulge in a romantic, grossly over‑estimated assessment of their strength and of the potential radicalism of the western worker. With their top leadership decimated by the federal raids of the previous summer, with many of their lesser leaders facing deportation procedures in Seattle and elsewhere, with their memerbership still weary from the unsuccessful strikes of the previous summer, and, above all, with the enormous growth of the repressive forces arrayed against them, it was sheer folly for the Wobblies to consider any aggressive action. Ultimately, this effort in 1918 by the IWW would lead to their destruction as a viable organization, and in a sense, they had already ceased to be a labor organization and had become the harried scapegoat of America’s underemployed and overmanned police forces, military and civilian. 10

Butte was selected as the place where the general strike would start because, according to U.S. Army reports, it was regarded by the as IWW as their stronghold in the west. The strike was called on September 18 with the announced aim of freeing all political prisoners and, secondarily, to achieve the eight‑hour day, $6.00 a day minimum wage, along with the abolition of the rustling card system ‑‑ the card which employers used to allow "loyal" workers to seek work and prevent Wobbly or other suspicious applicants from getting work. As the demand to release political prisoners was clearly in violation of the Espionage Act of 1918, those leaflets containing the demand were withdrawn after the first day. 11

There is some question as to whether the "Wobblies" who called the strike were really bona fide members of the IWW as the army claimed or whether they were agent provocateurs, working with both the Anaconda Copper Company and U. S. Army Intelligence, as Attorney Burton Wheeler would charge. Was the Army working in cooperation with the mineowners to manufacture a strike in order to rid Butte of Wobbly influence once and for all? What evidence there is strongly suggests that army and Anaconda spies high in the ranks of the IWW had instigated the strike, that the army used the strike to conduct a series of raids, some led by Lt. Germer himself, against suspected Wobblies, alien strikers, and draft evaders, and that the company used the strike to attempt to eliminate not only the IWW but the miners' capacity to bargain collectively to improve their status.12

The man who wrote up the strike order in Butte was one Burn T.Thorpe, later found to be a Pinkerton detective employed by Anaconda and also suspected of being Army Intelligence operative C‑758, a double agent. The strike was supported at first by only a small number of miners, about 300, however, as reports of the vindictiveness of the combined Army and company agents of strikers and their supporters drifted back to the men, the strike grew until, at its height around the first of October, anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 men left the mines reducing copper production by 20%.

As more men left work, the size and number of raids on the strikers and headquarters and IWW meeting places accelerated until the jails of Butte were filled to overflowing. The situation became so bad that Attorney Wheeler and FBI agent Byrn both complained to Washington about these seemingly unnecessary if not illegal activities by the army. Byrn complained of "indiscriminate arrests" made "unjustifiably" and without due process. He went on to condemn the military on the ground that it acted "without the slightest regard for the law" and that, as a representative of the Justice Department, he could not "countenance any such action." Wheeler abhorred the fact that prisoners were "brutally treated" and warned that such treatment could only lead to further trouble with the miners. On October 18, Wheeler resigned his post as U. S. Attorney. One of his final acts was to expose the double agents being used by the army and the copper companies. He later offered his assistance to some of the lawyers who were defending those arrested during the strike. Wheeler's resignation was viewed as "a matter of some satisfaction" by the Army District Intelligence Officer.13

These complaints did have the effect of heading off a major roundup of all "slackers" under the newly‑passed draft that had been developed by the ever active Lt.Germer and the Company Comander, Captain Game. Byrn had been especially concerned that such an effort would have ruined chances for ending the strike. In an inquiry held into the activities of the army, both Germer and Game denied being guilty of any violation of military or civilian codes. Captain Game was cleared on the grounds that although his actions may have been excessive it was because he was "uncertain of his duties," but Germer was eventually reprimanded for organizing improper espionage and for conducting raids. Major Omar Bradley, who had preceded Captain Game as Commander of the troops until his departure on September 18, was also never reprimanded for his participation in the raids of September 13 against IWW headquarters. To avoid any further embarassing repetitions, the Army laid down a specific code of behavior for troops on similar duty.

It was made clear, for example, that unless martial law was declared, U.S. troops had no general police powers and no powers of arrest. At the most, they were only supposed to detain wrong doers caught in some unlawful act. In spite of these clarifications, it would prove impossible to restrain Army agents from indulging in red‑hunting.14 The strike gradually came to an inconclusive end as the miners were once again driven back to work by the specter of hunger. The troops would remain to be used again in February of 1919 in much the same, if more restrained, manner. It should be emphasized that the restraint, such as it was, came from fair‑minded officials connected with the Justice Department and that by the end of the strike one of these, Burton Wheeler, had resigned. He was replaced with E. C. Day, whose views proved more receptive to the growing anti‑IWW campaign. Agent Byrn also would be replaced with the take‑over of the Justice Department by the notorious red‑hunter, A. Mitchell Palmer. Then there would be no restraining voice in this important department, the only one with strength enough to challenge the U.S. Army.15

NOTES

1. Robert L. Tyler, Rebels of the Woods: The IWW in the Pacific NorthWest, Eugene Oregon, 1967). The Wobblies and the miners are best treated in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago, 1969). The judicial aspects of the suppression of the Wobblies are massively documented in William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903‑1933 (Cambridge, 1963).

2. The most valuable source for the use of the army against the IWW and other radicals and as a strikebreaking device is the unpublished Abraham Glasser Manuscript and the documents used in the ms located in the Glasser Files, National Archives.Both Preston and Dubofsky have made extensive use of the files,which are now sorted and easier to use than when they were researching. Cf., Dubofsky, chpts. 14, 15; Preston, Chpt. IV; Glasser ms, "Butte"; Tyler, Chpt. V.

3. According to official reports, by august 31, 1917 the military had arrested and imprisoned 141 Wobblies in Oregon alone, C. E. Dentler, Commanding Officer, Portland, Ore. to H. Liggett, August 10, 1917, War Department File 370.6. Similar arrests in Washington caused the U. S. Attorney in Seattle to recommend that internment camps be built,as the jails were all full. Glasser, Ms, "The Lumber Strike in the West, 1917," p. 26.

4. The story of the 4L's is meticulously traced in Harold Hyman, Soldiers and Spruce (Los Angeles, 1963);. Frankfurter's activities are described in Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 420‑24.

5. Burton K. Wheeler to the Attorney General, August 21, 19l7, Department of Justice, File No. 186701‑186727, cited in Glasser Ms, "Butte."

6. The files of the Military relating to troop movements for this period are not in very good order, and my own search, like Glasser's before me, failed to turn up the necessary documents. See Glasser, ms, "Butte," pp. 51‑61, 70.

7. Ibid, pp. 82‑84.

8. Disque's position on trade unions shifted considerably as he became increasingly embittered about his role in the war, and ultimately he came to vcice the same anti‑union ideology as did the lumber operators; cf. Hyman, Soldiers and Spruce. In return for employer support of the 4L's, he is suspected of having promised to discourage union organization, C. 0. Young to Dept. of Labor, August 2, 1918, cited in Glasser ms, "The Lumber Strike, 1917," P. 43, 53.

9. Glasser ms, pp. 90‑93.

10. For details of the judicial and extra‑legal steps taken against the IWW, see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, chpts. 15, 16, and Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, chpts. V, VI, VII.

11. File 10110‑753, January 24, 1919, cited in Glasser ms.

"Butte", 114‑115.

12. Lt. Germer’s participation is described in Glasser ms. p. 120. Germer's defense is in Lt. Germer to Barker, September, 1918, FBI Files 291596. All of the evidence about the use of agent provocateurs is reviewed in Glasser ms, "Butte", pp. 190‑199.

13. Glasser ms, "Butte", pp. 110‑16; E. W. Byrn, Confidential Report, October 1, 1918, cited in Ibid, p. 114; B. K. Wheeler to T. W. Gregory, October 4, 1918, cited in Ibid, P. 117; for the Army's reaction to these charges, see Capt. J. H. Mengel to Director, G‑2, November 8, 1918, G‑2, Files 10110‑753.

14. Ibid, pp. 120‑35, 135‑40, 200. The new army regulations are in, Adjutant General to Morrison, Commander General, Western Dept., November 2, 1918, War Dept. Files, AGO 370.6.

15. Appreciation for Attorney Day and his cooperation with red‑hunters in 1920 as compared with Wheeler, who was "not as diligent" as he might have been, was expressed by the Governor of Montana in April, 1920. See S. V. Stewart to A. Mitchell Palmer, April 25, 1920, cited in Glasser ms,"Butte".

CHAPTER III

SEATTLE AND BUTTE, 1919:

THE MILITARY ORIGINS OF THE RED SCARE

According to the old Wobbly battle cry, every strike is a "dress rehearsal for revolution". Many European socialists, most notably the great Polish theoretician and revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, agreed and her sophisticated Marxist analysis in her most famous pamphlet of 1906, The Mass Strike gave the concept historical credibility. Simply put, the scenario of revolt as she described it follows the example of the Russian revolution of 1905; strikes lead to councils or "soviets" which give political content to the economic struggles and ultimately offer an alternative to the existing government. The attractive element in the argument for revolutionaries is that the workers initially involved in the strike are free of revolutionary intentions and act "spontaneously" in accordance with the thrust of historical or environmental conditions. The existence of trained revolutionary groups on the scene ready to guide the workers onward to their historical duty is helpful but not as crucial in Luxemburg's view as it was in Lenin's, to whom it was all important. Both, however agreed with the Wobblies that strikes were an essential ingredient to working‑class revolution. Regardless of how one feels about the applicability of such theories to the American scene, there is little doubt about where the logic of such arguments led if one was in charge of preventing revolution; strikes must be halted, or, if that was not possible, at least they must be contained within limits that assured the preservation of the capitalist system. No doubt, then, it was at least disconcerting for American capitalists observing events in Russia and in parts of Europe in 1919 to know that there were people in America who hoped to duplicate the revolutionary feats of the Bolsheviks. That they would take action to protect themselves was inevitable. But, unlike the theories of Rosa Luxemburg which were guided by historical experience, what little theory there was behind the actions of American anti‑strike activity stemmed from the distorted views of army agents, company spies and self‑proclaimed authorities on the "Red" menace like the Mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson. Their distortions of reality were made credible by the support of federal governments most powerful agencies; the army, and, later, the FBI and the Department of Justice. Guided by warped theory, it is not surprising that the actions they took have been branded by historians as hysterical. But, to the army, and especially those officers and men who had spent their time on the relatively unheroic task of guarding America's mines, railroads and forests, the magnification of the potential for revolution of the IWW and other radicals was a way to justify their wartime role and ensure that this kind of domestic red hunting would continue into the post war period. After all, to many Americans, saving the nation from Bolshevism could be roughly equated with making the world safe for democracy - tasks worthy of America's armed forces, and with the Armistice in November 1918, the fight against Bolshevism was the only action on the historical horizon.

In both Britain and America, the first major industrial battle of 1919 turned into a general strike in a key seaport‑‑Glasgow leading the way in late January followed by Seattle on February 6th. Neither strike lasted long enough to determine any of the fundamental questions about the nature of the working class in either country, but both raised the specter of revolt and added some reality to the fears, real and imaginary, that were beginning to permeate large segments of the populations of Britain and America. The Glasgow strike was quickly and ruthlessly broken with the aid of British troops. As we shall see the use of troops in Seattle was less brutal, but the result was similar ‑‑ the strike called off with both the labor leaders and their followers in disarray.

Besides being the first and most complete general strike in America's history, the Seattle episode is significant in that it is the first post‑war industrial dispute involving the federal government in key roles through the Shipping Board and, more important, through the use of the military. Not only were troops involved in patrolling the city after the strike was under way, but U. S. Army Intelligence agents had the situation under surveillance long before the strike began. In addition to these activities, the government was extremely active in Seattle throughout 1918, weeding out "dangerous" aliens and processing them for deportation. Therefore, it was well‑informed about the composition and attitudes of Seattle's working men. Whether or not it used its knowledge wisely depends upon one's point of view. Certainly it did the workers of Seattle no favors, and by providing, Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson, with the armed force necessary to protect his position, did much to promote his career as the self‑proclaimed savior of Seattle and the world from the clutches of anarchy and rebellion. It is also perhaps more than coincidental that Seattle's military intelligence agents were privately promoting the "Red Scare" ideology that Hanson was to become famous for. Hence it is feasible that the army provided an ideology along with its protection, and it is on this possibility that this essay will focus. The details of the Seattle Str ike have been admirably laid out by Robert Freidheim and others; thus there is no need to give more than the briefest outline here. But since some of the relevant government records were not available to those historians, some corrections in the record of the struggle in Seattle need to be made.1

The immediate cause of the general strike was the refusal by the employers in the shipbuilding yards of Seattle to consider a wage increase requested by the Metal Trades Association. The situation was complicated by the unfortunate intervention of Charles Piez, head of the governments Emergency Fleet Corporation. Piez issued a telegram to the shipbuilder's urging them to stand firm against the workers' request for a wage hike. The telegram was mistakenly delivered to the workers and caused them to cease negotiations with the builders. The conflict was expanded when, on January 22, the Seattle Central Labor Council voted to strike in sympathy with the Metal Trades Association. Exactly why the Labor Council and the trade unions affiliated with it were willing to strike in sympathy with the Metal Workers remains something of a mystery ‑‑ such spontaneous expressions of trade union solidarity are relatively rare in American labor history. At any rate, on February 3, the official call for a general strike to commence on the 6th of February went out to Seattle's unions. On the first day of the strike, Seattle grew very quiet and the extent of the strike became apparent as street cars stopped running, stores closed and all work except that deemed essential for the welfare of the city by the Labor Council ground to a halt.

Considering his later performance as strong man and super patriot, the initial reaction of Mayor Hanson appears curiously irresolute. On the evening before the strike was to start, Hanson agreed to meet the Labor Councils Committee of Fifteen ‑the duly elected supervisors of the strike. Arriving at Council headquarters shortly after midnight, the mayor consulted with the committee until after 3:00 A.M. The main topic of the meeting was over whether or not the city's lights would operate. The mayor argued that the lack of lighting would cause serious hardship for the hospitals in the city, would encourage crime, and otherwise wreak havoc. He also threatened to request military assistance to operate public utilities if he was faced with a blackout. After Hanson left, the committee voted to accede to the mayor's request and order the electrical engineers to supply light for public but not commercial use. Since the Council had little influence with the city engineers, it made little difference what they ordered, but the episode has some importance, as it illustrates the lengths to which the mayor was willing to go in dealing with the workers' representatives at the beginning of the strike.

By the second day of the strike, February 7, Hanson was taking a harsher line. He announced to the people of Seattle that he would guarantee their "absolute and complete protection." To back his promise, he pointed to Seattle's fifteen hundred policemen whose forces had been supplemented with an equal number of soldiers from nearby Fort Lewis. Two days later in a release to the nation given to the United Press (but not to local newspapers), he branded the strike as revolution and announced that he would not deal with revolutionaries. "There was an attempted revolution," he said,"It never got to first base." No doubt Mayor Ole Hanson deserved the major share of credit for

Seattle non‑revolutionary status.

Was the mayor farseeing enough to risk his political career in order to reap the rewards of red‑baiting on the Chamber of Commerce circuit? If so, we must credit him with quite remarkable vision for in early 1919 Red Scare had not yet taken its ugly hold on American society although it had, as we have seen above, already made an impression on elements in the U.S. Army. Pressure from the shipbuilders and other employers is also a possible explanation for Hanson's quick conversion into an anti‑union redbaiter. The record shows there was indeed a stream of visitors from the business community to the mayor's office before and during the strike. A good politician like Hanson seemingly would have seen it to his advantage to maintain a protective cloak of neutrality if he had wished to succeed in local politics. Ole Hanson was not a fool. In the campaign for Mayor in 1918, Hanson had been opposed by the Seattle Union Record, the voice of organized labor in the area. During the election James Duncan foremost leader of the militant element on the Labor Council, had personally attacked Hanson accusing him of running the "vilest campaign of misrepresentation he had ever seen". In January of 1919 the Labor Council demanded Hanson's recall because of alleged mishandling of his mayoral duties and the bias towards the shipyard owners that he had shown in his comments on the labor problems in the city. Yet, despite this record of animosity, the union leaders took Hanson into consultation, and gave him a chance to cooperate with them in ensuring that no one suffered unnecessarily as a result of the strike. What they did not know was that Hanson had already committed himself to a course of action that reflected his fundamental agreement with the version of the strike being presented by Army Intelligence.4 Before meeting, with the strike leaders on February 5th, Hanson sent a telegram to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. It read as follows:

General Strike declared against all industries in Seattle

including light, power, food, shops, storage houses,

transportation, telephones, express companies, etc., to

start tomorrow morning at ten o'clock stop It is a

revolution against the United‑States Government and not a

strike stop It is imperative that the Government furnish

protection ...enormous suffering will result....It was

initiated by IWW's and Bolsheviki who believe they can

bring about a revolution stop Not one International Union

headquarters has endorsed the strike stop Will you furnish

troops to police the situation? Wire quick.5

The telegram was sent at 9:08 P.M, three hours before Hanson met with the strikeleaders. It is unlikely that Hanson had received a reply to his telegram by the time of the meeting, however, the army was already considering action in response to the strike. On 5:00 P.M. on February 5th, Major General John F. Morrison, Military Commander of the U. S. Army Western Division, sent the following request to the Adjutant General in Washington:

"Civil authorities apprehend danger of seizure

or destruction ship yards and other commercial

plants Seattle, Washington, Tacoma, Washington

by radical element during general strike called for

tomorrow. Suggest as matter of precaution you ‑ obtain

authority to use First Infantry as guard when needed.

Leiton, Post Commander, Camp Lewis, Washington.6

At about the same time Secretary of War Baker was also receiving urgent requests for troops to be placed on "quick call" from Fort Lewis and the naval and marine bases in Seattle from Washington's Governor, Ernest Lister.7 In response to these requests‑ the Army Chief of Staff ordered General Morrison to Seattle to "take charge of the situation from a military stand point" Morrison then contacted Fort Lewis and gave the orders by which officers from the fort established a military headquarters in the federal building in Seattle by 3:l5 P.M. on February 6th. The naval and marine forces in Seattle had in the meantime been put at the disposal of Governor Lister by the Secretary of the Navy. The first troops arrived in Seattle at 1:00 A.M. on the morning of February 7th. Two battalions of the First Infantry were kept in Seattle while a third was sent to Tacoma. The effect of the arrival of these troops was later described by Hanson as follows:

In the grey dawn of the morning . . . army truck

after army truck filled with regular troops ...

rumbled through the city and we were ready.8

Backed now by the Governor and the armed forces of the federal government Mayor Hanson held a strong hands and as we have seen, his proclamation issued on February 7th reflected that strength. Had he not overplayed his hand in the following days, his political fortunes would have improved immensely. With the troops at hand there was no chance that the strike could succeed and all Hanson had to do was to wait for its end. Instead, he elected to indulge in the grandstanding that was to make his name appear on the front pages of papers throughout the nation, but was to rob him of any chance, at higher political office.9

By February 5th, which is the day of Hanson's infamous press release to the UP representative in Seattle in which he branded the strike as revolution, the city's streetcars were back in operation, the power stations were all safely under military guard, and the strike was showing signs of weakening as pressure mounted from AFL Internationals on their Seattle locals to get their men back to work. Hanson thus far had given no indication that he ascribed to the, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, "policemanlike" theory that the whole modern labor movement is an artificial, arbitrary product of a handful of "conscienceless demagogues and agitators." Why then did he suddenly spring forth with his simplistic "red scare" analysis on February 9th?

Here again the role of the military affords a clue as to the source of Hanson's behavior, for if the military provided Hanson with the strength to stand up to the workers, could they not also have imbued him with their "policemanlike" theory which he adopted as his own? We know that Hanson had been in consultation with the officers from Fort Lewis on February 6th, the day they arrived in Seattle,and that he remained in contact with them until they left. We also know that the Army intelligence reports were making a great deal out of so‑called "Wobbly" and "Bolsheviki" influence on the strike's leaders. The man responsible for Military Intelligence in the Seattle area was Captain F.W. Wilson. His reports to Division Headquarters in San Francisco and to Washington fluctuate from a pre‑strike tendency to dismiss the influence of the Wobblies as negligible to an increasing concern with them as the strike developed. For example, in his report of November 22, 1918, he claims that:

As to the I.W.W.'s, too much weight must not be given to

their constant agitations and threat that they are going to

do something big in the way of a general strike ... Such

talk is propaganda ... to create labor unrest ...

If trouble came, Wilson thought, it would more likely come from the AFL for they "seem to have that desire (for a general strike) and they have the strength." He went on to warn against giving them publicity, for that "is what they desire"10 However, on January 20, 1919, his reports have started to raise the specter of Communist influence. In one report, for example, he accuses A. E. Yiller and Fred Nelson, both members of the Metal . Trades Council, of being "open Bolshevists and are in absolute control of the Bolsheviki element in the shipyard." By January 23, he is lumping the IWW and the "Bolsheviki" together and claiming, that "two‑fifths of the delegates of the Central Labor Council ... were extremely radical in their ideas and seemingly or Bolsheviki thinkers." Other reports issued just before the strike claim that the shipyard workers union was in the hands of the that the soldiers, sailors and workmen's councils were controlled "by reds absolutely", and that they were "being formed with the expressed purpose of overthrowing the government."11

Wilson was especially concerned with the propaganda being circulated and asked that Congress pass legislation preventing the publication and dissemination of pamphlets like the infamous "Russia Did It" which advocated that the workers take over the management of the shipyards as the Russian workers had done. On February 9th, the Equity Printing Company that printed the above mentioned pamphlet and other IWW literature was raided by civil authorities and closed for the duration of the strike. Walker C. Smith, the operator of the plant and editor of the Wobbly newspaper, the Industrial Worker, was arrested and charged with violating the State of Washington's newly‑passed anti‑syndicalism law. Later thirty‑one other Wobblies were arrested under the same law, all of which indicated that the civil authorities were acting in accordance with Wilson's recommendations, although we have no proof that he had any direct connection with the raid or the arrests.12

After these events, army spies reported that "the Bolsheviki's (sic) and the IWW's are... less inclined to speak their beliefs and do not talk except to their friends." Not surprisingly, they reported that non‑Wobbly union leaders had also lowered the tone of their rhetoric. 13 All of this was not lost upon Mayor Hanson. After all, if the U. S. Army was going to blame the strike on the reds and the Wobblies, why shouldn't he? Especially since the strike leaders had not responded to his ultimatum of February 7th demanding that the strike be called off by the following morning, he perhaps concluded that a little redbaiting would inspire these men who Hanson knew were not revolutionaries to call off the strike. Thus, on February 9th, the Mayor made his debut as a public defender of American institutions by the simple expedient of branding the strike as attempted revolution and the leaders as revolutionaries that he had already defeated. This naturally infuriated the General Strike Committee, but there was little they could do. Support for the strike was rapidly diminishing and they had to call it off on February 11th.

Perhaps without realizing it, Hanson had struck a responsive chord in a nation that was not in a position to question his analysis. Was labor really infected with the dread sickness that was causing so much turmoil in Russia and elsewhere in Europe? If so,should not steps be taken to isolate or remove those who were contaminated? Hanson was a man who presumably knew how these things could be done. And certainly the results of the strike in Seattle made the Mayor look good; not only were the Wobblies reduced to impotence but organized labor in that city would never fully recover from the blows dealt to it after it was forced to call off the strike. Thereafter the AFL Internationals would keep their Seattle locals firmly on the path of bread and butter unionism ‑‑ if those locals were not completely eliminated by the open shop movement which swept Seattle in the wake of the

strike.

The importance of Hanson and the whole of the experience in Seattle was in the development of this rationale for attacking the labor movement. Redbaiting combined with a protective and approving military cover provided employers with a virtually unbeatable defense when threatened by workers made militant by a combination of inflationary pressures and pent‑up frustrations developed by years of sacrifice during the war. If the workers in Seattle had been prevented from achieving what they considered a just settlement through such a combination, then why not use that method elsewhere? Thus the pattern was set for the main industrial struggles of the postwar period. Even before the Seattle strike was ended some of the soldiers from Fort Lewis were ordered to similar duty at the scene of the copper miner's strike in Butte, Montana. Here, in the coal mines of the east and in the steel towns of the midwest, federal troops would "keep the peace" while Hansonism combined with the older techniques of strikebreaking broke the back of the workers' struggle. struggle.

The Butte Strike and the

Streamlining of the Army's Strikebreaking Role

The copper miners of Butte were, unlike the shipyard workers of Seattle, quite familiar with uses of the U. S. Army as a strike‑breaking vehicle. The army had been sent in large numbers in both the strike of June‑July, 1917 and that of September, 1918. The net result of the combined efforts of the army and the Anaconda Copper Co. was that the workers had no union to officially represent them but had achieved a heightened sense of the brute realities of class warfare. And as the events of February, 1919 were to prove, they had not lost their ability or their willingness to struggle. 14

In the period following the end of World War One, the price of copper dropped dramatically. The copper companies responded with an announcement that, because of the drop in the market price, the miners would have to suffer a cut in wages of $1.00 a day beginning on February 7. While the price of copper was going down, the prices of the goods that the miners needed to stay alive were rising rapidly, making the proposed wage out especially difficult for them to sustain. Added to this inducement to strike was the release from the obligations of producing copper for the war effort that came with the Armistice, which they also hoped would end the interference in their affairs by the army, Further, some of the miners expressed the view that they would also be striking as a gesture of sympathy with their fellow workers in Seattle. Thus, on February 7th, the day the wage cuts were to take effect and the day after the general strike began in Seattle, pickets appeared at the entrances to the mines. By the following day, the mines were completely shut down.

Troops of the 44th Infantry company were already in Butte when the strike began. Since the summer of 1917, these troops had patrolled the streets of Butte on a daily basis. As the strike progressed, they increased their activities to include patrolling the mines and dispersing large gatherings. Despite these actions, sympathy for the miners continued to build up among the craft unions in Butte who threatened a sympathy strike, and was further evidenced in a new organization, similar to that developed in Seattle, the Soldiers, Sailors, and Workers Council.15

With the general strike in Seattle ended, General John Morrison, Commander of U,, S. Army Western Division left Seattle in charge of subordinates and arrived in Butte on February 13th. As we have seen in Seattle, Morrison had publicly assumed the role of the fair‑minded defender of the public's interest. In Butte he continued to voice this position, stating upon his arrival that he would use his troops only "in case of (a) riot too serious for the civil authorities to handle." The miners, he said, "had a right to quit work but they also had an equal right to work if they so desired." 16 But privately Morrison was expressing the sort of red scare attitude that had been the hallmark of Army Intelligence in Seattle. In a telegram to the Adjutant General dated February 14, Morrison reported:

Situation here is serious. Civil Government

apparently helpless but the radicals are afraid of the

troops and so far have not gone to extremes but are

threatening. It is not so much a strike as an effort at

revolution the radicals openly preach bolshevism. There are

troops enough here for the present but will send more if

necessary. Have ordered Brigadier General Watson to come

here and take command. Believe it necessary to have an

experienced officer here. I will return to Seattle tomorrow

night to be there at the attempt to start work in the ship

yards. Believe this situation could be solved by the prompt

deportation of undesirable aliens, mostly Finns and Irish

with a few other nationalities. Even if (only) a few of the

worst are promptly deported the effect would be excellent.17

Shortly before the arrival of General Morrison, three companies of troops had been added to those already on duty. With this demonstration of the seriousness with which the federal government viewed the situation, the sympathy of the craft unions in Butte for the miners quickly eroded, the lessons of the futility of tangling with employers and troops at the same time having been absorbed in the earlier disputes of 1917 and 1918. Those craftsmen who had left their jobs returned to work. The miners, realizing the hopelessness of their position, gave up and returned to the mines on February 17th.

The Army Intelligence Officer in Butte, our old friend Lieutenant William P. Germer, was even more zealous in his red‑baiting than his boss, General Morrison, or his counterpart in Seattle, Captain Wilson. In his report on the events in Butte, Germer claimed that the cause of the difficulty was not the labor grievances of the miners "but a deliberate effort to start a Bolsheviki regime in the U. S. having originated in Seattle and spread to this city."18 Germer, however, was more ambitious than Captain Wilson and had already gotten into some difficulty because of his disregard of the civil rights of the workers in the Butte strike of September, 1918. The issue then had been Germer's over‑zealousness in arresting strikers without due cause. Ironically, in view of its later role in the 1920's, the FBI was, at this time, a moderating influence in Butte, and the reports from its Chief of Staff in Butte, E.W. Byrn, bolstered the charge against Germer. Byrn considered the use of the military in the arrests of miners unjustified. In addition, he raised the possibility that army intelligence agents had been active as agent provocateurs in the 1918 strike and had worked in collusion with company spies hired by the Anaconda Copper Co. which, he claimed, helped to explain the swiftness with which the strike in 1919 once a huge military presence was established. 19

The Butte affair demonstrated again that the military could be used effectively in the postwar industrial conflict if an excuse for its introduction into the dispute could be found. No Butte equivalent of Seattle's Ole Hanson appeared to dramatize the event but the result in both places was similar. The Army's ready‑made red scare ideology provided the perfect rationale. What remained to be accomplished was the convincing of the Department of Justice and the FBI that Army Intelligence was correct about the threat of the IWW and Bolshevik sympathizers so that the effort at stamping out their influence could be unified and the embarrassment of conflicting reports like those issued by the FBI at Butte could be avoided. In March, 1919, A, Mitchell Palmer assumed control of the Justice Department and this ideological difference was eliminated and a unified "policemanlike" ideology permeated the action of both the military and legal arms of the federal government.

Notes

1. The most thorough treatment of the Seattle episode is Robert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle, 1964). The workers' viewpoint is expressed in the pamphlet published by the Seattle Labor Council's History Committee, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle, 1919). A good summary can be found in Robert Tyler, Rebels of the Woods (Eugene, 1967), pp.187‑94, which concentrates mostly on the role of the IWW. The most important source of government documents is in the Glasser file in the National Archives (henceforth cited as NA, Glasser). These were not used by either Friedheim or Tyler, although the former did use some of the same documents which are in the Justice Department files.

2. The Army Intelligence agent reporting on the meeting of the Seattle Central Labor Council at which the decision to support the Metal Workers was made explained the workers' decision as stemming from "I.W.W. or Bolsheviki" influence, Report by Agent C‑371, U. S. Army Intelligence, Seattle, NA Glasser.

3. Friedheim, pp. 122‑5,131,136.

4. Friedheim's speculation is that Hanson gave in to pressure from local employers, bankers, merchants, etc., and that he had made his decision as to which side to back before his midnight meeting with the Strike Committee on the night of February 5th, Ibid, PP. 136‑37.

5. Ole Hanson to Newton D. Baker, Adjutant General, February 5,

1919, Adjutant General File 370.6, NA Glasser.

6. Major‑General John Morrison to Adjutant General, February 5,

1919, A.G. 370.6 NA Glasser.

7. Ernest Lester to Newton D. Baker, February 59 1919, A.G.

370.69 NA Glasser.

8. U. S. Army Chief of Staff to Major‑General John F. Morrison February 6, 1919, A.G. 370.61, Commanding Officer, U.S. Military Forces, Seattle, to Major‑General J. D. Leitch, Commander, Camp Lewis, February 20, 1919, NA Glasser.

9. The point needs to be stressed, for to completely alienate organized labor in America has serious consequences for those who aspire to national office and need the electoral votes of industrial states with dominate trade unions. This built‑in limit to the political possibilities of red baiting in 1919 is not made clear by the "red scare" historians, cf. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare, A Study in National Hysteria, 1919‑1920, Minneapolis, 1955 and Murray B. Levine, Political Hysteria in America (New York, 1971).

10. Captain F. W. Wilson to the Intelligence Officer, Western Dept., San Francisco, November 22, 1919, NA Glasser.

11. Report of January 20, 1919 is mostly based on Wilson's agent #108, that of January 23, 1919 on agent C‑371. Both reports, however, were reviewed by Wilson and passed on to his superiors, NA Glasser.

12. Captain F.W. Wilson to Director of Military Intelligence, Washington, D. C., January 27, 1919 and February 8, 1919, NA Glasser.

13. Reports by Sgt. B. L. Barry and Sgt. George E. Smith,

February 11, 1919, NA Glasser.

14. For the best brief treatment of the miners of the west, see Melvyn Dubofsky, The Origins of Western Working Class Radicalism, 1890‑1905, Labor History, Vol. 7, Spring, 1966, pp. 131‑154, and his, We Shall Be All, A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago, 1966), Chapters 3, 13 and 14.

15. Unpublished manuscript, Abraham Glasser, Butte, NA

Glasser, pp. 214‑218.

16. Helena Independent, February 14‑15, 1919, quoted in

Glasser, p. 220.

17. Morrison to Adjutant General, February 14, 1919, G‑2

files 101105903, Glasser, p. 221.

18. Germer to Captain J. C. Fisher, February 17, 1919, G‑2 files

101105903 , Glasser, p.222.

19. Confidential Report, October 1, 19182 E. W. Byrn, Jr. to Bruce Bielaski, Chief, F.B.I. Files 29156, cited in Glasser P. 114. The provocateur role of the agents of the Anaconda Co. was first pointed out by U. S. Attorney Burton K. 1,Vheeler, Ibid. p. 196. The connection between the Anaconda agents and the Army is circumstantial but convincing. Because of this connection, Glasser concludes that in 1918 the army was guilty of provoking a strike which it, in turn, "very dutifully crushed." Ibid, p. 1 98‑99, and Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, P. 452.

CHAPTER IV

THE ARMY AND RED SUMMER ‑ 1919

The title "red summer" was first used to designate the summer of 1919 by an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.1 He might have more accurately called it black summer for there were more blacks than reds in action during the period from May to October of 1919. Riots blossomed in the ghettos of several major cities as well as numerous lesser ones. Of the twenty some odd major riots, three brought forth interventions by federal troops and hence are of interest to this study; these were Washington, D.C., Omaha, Nebraska and Phillips County, Arkansas. As in earlier cases where the army was used to intervene in industrial disputes, the troops were brought in at the request of local and state officials to prevent violence that the local police forces seemed unable to contain. Also, as in the industrial disputes, federal intervention in urban riots was both preceded. and followed by reports from Army Intelligence officers in the area. These reports exhibit, with some exception, an overriding concern with "Bolshevik" subversion and are quick to blame most problems on "red" agitation, Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, proclaimed this view in October of 1919 when he announced that the violence of both the race riots and the industrial conflicts stemmed from "so‑called Bolsheviks and radicals urging... Social revolution."2

The views of Army Intelligence officers had, then, by the end of the long red summer, permeated the highest ranks of American government. The attention of America was focused not upon the real needs of the rioters and strikers, black and white, but upon the fevered pronouncements of imminent revolution that were the hallmark of the "red scare". The most unfortunate result of this misdirection of America's energy was that by branding those who supported improving conditions in the cities and the factories as "radicals", the "red scare" defeated the possibility of reforming the relations between the races as it had already retarded the growth of trade unions. The NAACP and AFL were set back along with the destruction of alleged revolutionaries. The Army's contribution to this process is the subject of this chapter.

The first use of federal troops came in July, 1919 in Washington D.C. it was the fifth major racial disturbance of the summer, but because of its intensity, the necessity to use federal troops, and the fact that it occurred in the nation's capital, it was the first to capture the public's attention and to arouse deep concern by both the government and the citizenry about the extent and depth of the nation's racial problems. The roots of Washington's problems were in the rapid population growth that took place during and after World War One. The population of Washington grew from 359,997 in 1916 to 455,428 in 1919. About 15,000 of these newcomers were southern blacks drawn to the city, as they were to other cities further north, by the lure of higher wages and less confining environments. In 1919, roughly one‑fourth of the population was black.4

Black and white in Washington suffered from the fact that the city failed to keep up with the influx of workers in the provision of housing, transportation and other services. In addition to these shortages, the post war decline in war‑related jobs and the return of discharged servicemen soon produced a scarcity of employment and a pool of restless men looking for something upon which to focus their disappointment and hostility. Tension between the races increased throughout the summer as competition for scarce jobs grew more intense along with the rising temperature of a sultry Washington summer. The riot itself was triggered by a report that a sailor's wife had been assaulted by two black men on the night of July 18th. A mob of angry whites collected in the area and before police could disperse it several blacks were beaten.

The next day, a hot and humid Sunday, attacks upon blacks continued as groups of servicemen and civilians roamed the streets seeking out victims. On the following Monday, after consultation with local officials and police, Secretary Baker mobilized all federal troops in the Washington area. Meanwhile the blacks had begun to arm themselves in self defense and a retaliatory attack on a white soldier was made on Monday morning by blacks firing guns out of a speeding auto. Later rioting that evening differed from the earlier one‑way violence of the previous day in that now the blacks were fighting back and there were now white casualties as well as black.

By nightfall on Tuesday, July 22nd, some two thousand federal troops, under the command of Major William G. Haan, were sent out on the streets to assist the Washington police. In spite of this massive force used to preserve peace a few isolated incidents occurred, but by and large the city returned to normal. When the final tally was made, four blacks and three whites were counted dead. An uncounted number of black and white were injured. What was perhaps of greatest concern to the nation was the evidence presented that blacks were no longer going to passively submit to attacks on their persons or their "communities". They could and would defend themselves with arms if necessary. This lesson was reinforced in the Chicago riot which broke out on July 27th, only four days after things had quieted down in Washington.

To help explain this unwillingness on the part of blacks to peacefully accept any longer their role as victims of white violence, the army took its cue from a British Military Intelligence Officer who had written a report on the problem and qualified as an authority presumably because of his experience in dealing with Africans on duty in the British colonies. The officer, identified only as one Captain Snow, fixed the blame for this behavior on, "a secret society known as the 'Boule', the members of which have agreed to stand out against the white population". According to Snow, the society originated in Dahomey and its official name was the Ogboni Council. Its oath was "similar to that of the anarchists" and consisted of a pledge to "die defending their brothers and to exterminate white rulers.'14

Along with the Boule, Snow and other intelligence officers pointed their finger at such well known black leaders as Marcus Garvey, the leader of the ill‑fated Back‑to‑Africa movement, William Trotter of the Equal Rights League, and various officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and, that radical negro organization" the Urban League. White groups such as the I.W.W. were also culpable for, as Major J.E. Cutler reported to the Director of Military Intelligence, "The doctrines preached by I.W.W. agitators and radical socialists are daily winning new converts among the negroes...". Cutler was perhaps somewhat unique among military intelligence officers in that he possessed a Ph.D. in political economy from Yale and had written a well‑known text on lynching. Cutler was too sophisticated to swallow some of the nonsense that his fellow officers were reporting. For example, far from agreeing with the labeling of the Urban League as a "radical organization", he credited it with easing racial tensions in East St. Louis. Still, the overriding impact of his reports was to lend his reputation to generally hysterical, conspiratorial accounts of the riots and their cause that led not to an amelioration of the underlying causes but to further witch hunting.5

The Army's next call to riot duty came in Omaha, Nebraska on September 28th. Omaha, a meat‑packing town of 200,000 people, had a black ghetto of some 10,000 inhabitants. A town in which western vigilante traditions still held w sway, Omaha's response to racial tension revealed a frightening disregard for law and order that combined race prejudice with mob action. During the long summer of 1919, Omaha citizens had shown increasing concern with reports of s riots elsewhere and press coverage given to cri me rates in Omaha's black community. The NAACP, concerned with the bad publicity blacks were receiving complained of unequal treatment by the police and of the racist attitude of Omaha's police chief, but nothing was done and tension continued to build. The riot itself was triggered by the rape of a young white girl by someone she thought was black. The police used the occasion to force some forty black "undesirable's" to leave town, but did not arrest and charge anyone with the crime until September 28th when it took into custody a young black named William Brown. A crowd soon gathered demanding that Brown be turned over to them for lynching. When the Mayor of Omaha, Edward P. Smith, refused to do so, the mob turned upon him and had nearly hanged him before police officers were able to cut him down. The crowd swelled and after setting fire to the jail succeeded in getting the other prisoners to turn Brown over. He was then shot and hanged from a lamp post.6

Federal troops were called and arrived too late to save Brown. The presence of the troops did, however, keep further violence from occurring. On September 30th, General Leonard Wood, Commander of the Central Department of the Army, arrived to personally supervise the arrest of those responsible for the lynching of Brown. Wood virtually took over the town and with aid of groups like the American Legion he kept the town peaceful and his pressure on the municipal authorities resulted in the trial and prosecution of some of those who had formed part of the lynch mob. But in his analysis of the cure for Omaha's problem, Wood's was sadly deficient for his report to Washington emphasized the need for more arms for the city's police force and went no further into the causes of the lynching.7

Wood's performance and that of the army in Omaha as a whole insofar as it preserved life and brought to justice men who would otherwise have never been tried for a vicious crime, certainly is to be commended. In fact, the Omaha experience caused black groups like the NAACP and the Urban League to talk seriously of the creation of a neutral police force to be used in racial confrontations. Unfortunately, this fruitful suggestion was never carried out.8 Instead, the idea of Wood's that police forces be strengthened and the private sale of guns be limited was taken up by cities faced with similar problems. The ultimate effect of this was to insure that in those towns where the police was merely the strong arm of racist sentiment, the newly aroused black spirit of fighting back would be denied the means to effectively express itself against overwhelming police power. Southern towns like Memphis, Tennessee began to rapidly increase the power of the police while they watched more carefully the sale of guns to their citizens. The Omaha experience indicated that if police powers were mobilized quickly and massively then rioting such as that seen in Washington and Chicago could be avoided, and every city wished to avoid that.

The last significant riot of red summer, unlike the others, took place in a largely rural setting‑‑the Mississippi delta farmlands of Phillips County, Arkansas. Known locally as the "Elaine" riots after the town near which much of the violence occurred, the riots had their origin in the increasing dissatisfaction of the tenant farmers in the area with the terms they were getting from the white plantation owners for working their land. A tenant union known as the Progressive Farmers and Household Union had been formed largely through the efforts of an organizer by the name of Robert Hill. The union's goals' resembled to a great extent those of the Colored Farmers' Alliance of the 1880's. In fact, the events in Phillips County closely paralleled those of 1889 across the river in Leflore County, Mississippi where attempts to expand the alliance led to a massacre of black farmers by whites out to destroy the union. The difference between the two episodes was primarily in the fact that the blacks of Phillips County fought back and a number of whites met their deaths as well. Also, the events in Phillips County received national attention whereas the Mississippi blacks went to their graves practically unnoticed, and, where Mississippi whites were aided by the state militia in 1889, Federal troops were used in 1919.

The event that triggered the riot in Arkansas is still a subject of controversy for which there is a white and a black version. There is, however, agreement that on the night of September 30th, one W.A. Adkins, a special agent of the Missouri‑Pacific Railway was shot and killed and Charles Pratt, a deputy sheriff was wounded outside a black church in Short Spur, a bend in the railway two miles north of Elaine. The black version of the killing is that Adkins was trying to spy on a meeting of the Progressive Union that was going on in the church and was slain after firing on armed sentries posted around the church. The white version is that Adkins was on his way to assist in the arrest of a moonshiner in the area and had stopped to repair a flat tire when he was ambushed by blacks.9 To add to the complications, a white Little Rock lawyer, T.A. Bratton, was found discussing business with a number of black union members in the area who had contracted with his father's law firm to help get a better deal from their landlord. He was immediately implicated and jailed as an "outside agitator". He was taken to Elaine where he was nearly lynched and was only released thirty days later after the intervention of Arkansas' Governor, Charles Brough.

Meanwhile armed bands of whites roamed the county rounding up blacks and in the process exchanging shots with those who fought back resulting in a number of black deaths along with a few white deaths. The Army was requested to send in troops by the governor on October Ist, and the first battalion arrived in Elaine on the morning of October 2nd. Commanded by Colonel Isaac Jenks, the troops got off to a rather bad start by marching off into a nearby canebrake where one soldier lost his life and no "outlaws" white or black were found. Jenks did try to maintain the appearance of neutrality by calling for the disarming of all citizens, black and white, and by preventing any lynchings. Yet, there seemed to be little doubt that Jenks and the Army generally acted in behalf of the goals of the white community and for the most part accepted the white view that the responsibility for the trouble rested in the actions of the blacks who tried to use the tenant's union as a guise to conspire against the whites and had indeed planned a black uprising. As one army intelligence report put it:

"I am of the opinion, that the riot was the outcome of a

moneymaking plan by a few half educated negroes. They

organized a so‑called union, representing to their victims,

that they were working under authority of orders from

Washington, D.C., and by right of the Constitution of the

United States. They incited the unfortunate ignorant class

of negroes to believe that the white people were cheating

them. By joining this union, holding themselves together

and fighting if necessary, they would get their so‑called

rights. These organizers would hold these meetings and

speakers would excite the mass by false and glaring

statements. The mass was instructed to get guns and

ammunition and to be prepared to fight."10

Believing in this conspiratorial view, it was natural that the Army would aid local officials in tracking down, arresting and questioning large numbers of blacks and the man charged as the leader of the black conspiracy. In the process, the tenant's union was, of course, broken, but the union's leader, Robert Hill, was never captured. Army Intelligence reports indicated that their patrols accounted for the rounding up of over 400 blacks. The same reports indicated that in the process the soldiers killed 20 blacks for resisting arrest or "refusing to halt when ordered."11 Only the one soldier noted above was killed. The total number of blacks killed by soldiers and civilians will, perhaps, never be known. Estimates vary from twenty‑five to eight hundred with the best estimates ranging in the fifty to seventy range. Five whites were killed. No whites were brought to trial for killing blacks, but twelve blacks were tried and found guilty of murder by the Arkansas courts. They appealed and after a long battle ending with a Supreme Court decision, Moore, et. al., vs. Dempsey, in 1923 that called for a new trial, they were finally released by the State of Arkansas.12

In one respect, the Army had indeed advanced by the end of the long, "red" summer. They finally found in the Phillips County riot a disturbance which even their most industrious intelligence officers had to admit was not caused in any way by I.W.W. agitation.13 But, by the following January, reports of Wobblies in the area stirring up the blacks did make their way to the Washington office. By this time, public concern had been further aroused over the alleged activities of radicals in the black community by the release of FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover's report in mid‑November.14 In writing his report, Hoover and the FBI seemed to have leaned heavily on data supplied by Army Intelligence. The FBI admitted as late as August of 1919 that they had not given the problem of the radical subversion of blacks much attention because "they did not consider it a very serious matter."15 Red summer and Army Intelligence reports changed their minds and FBI special agents were ordered to obtain as much information as possible related to propaganda being spread in the black community or other radi cal activities. Reliable blacks were to be hired to help in accumulating the desired material. Army Intelligence officers briefed FBI agents and copies of their reports on past riots were transferred to the Justice Department where the Army view of the causes of the riots worked their way into Hoover's report.16 In this report, he claimed that the events of the summer showed "an identification of the negro with such radical organizations as the I.W.W. and an outspoken advocacy of Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines." Hoover also raised the specter of a "well concentrated movement" among certain blacks to formulate "a radical opposition to the government, and to the established rule the government, and law and order."17

Hoover's report made up a substantial part of the report submitted to the Senate Judicial Committee by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. That Hoover's conspiratorial views buttressed his own is also revealed in Palmer's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee and his in his speeches to the general public. The NAACP, along with fair‑minded whites, also appeared before the Congressional Committee and rebutted the Army‑Hoover‑Palmer thesis by placing the blame for the riots on the conditions under which blacks were forced to live and work. But Congress and the American people had no patience in 1919 with environmental arguments. The public wanted action taken against the reds and Palmer did his best to satisfy that demand with a series of raids beginning in November, 1919 on 'radical' organizations.18 These raids added to the general hysteria which had captured the public's attention, and fostered the continuing neglect of the nation's racial problems. What little progress had been made in race relations during the war was wiped out by the end of the year.

It would be grossly unfair to blame all of this on the Army, but there the Army made a substantial contribution. It was the Army Intelligence that gave credibility to the thesis that the link between labor violence and race riots was to be found in red propaganda and radical agitation and that the cure for both problems was to destroy the "reds". The I.W.W. was brought into practically every case sooner or later and it bore the brunt of the Army's wrath. If we were to believe Army Intelligence, the Wobblies must have had a veritable army of organizers penetrating every corner of American society. But, if real live Wobblies could not be found there were plenty of surrogates available; the Progressive Union in Phillips County, the Boule in Washington, and the NAACP in Omaha all were tarnished with the same sort of attack. Like the I.W.W. they were presumed to be engaged in an organized attack upon the American system and thus had to be defeated. That the Army's views found responsive politicians like Attorney General Palmer to take up the cause as we have seen was no accident. As a politician, Palmer could see the usefulness of red‑baiting as had Ole Hanson, Calvin Coolidge, and the chief Republican contender for the 1920 presidential nomination, General Leonard Wood. Palmer's chief advantage in the race for public attention and for the Democratic nomination in addition to his position as Attorney General was his wisdom in selecting the Communists as his primary target. By January, 1920, when the main Palmer raids took place, the U.S. had about run out of Wobblies. Also, the Communists because of their link with the Third International and their revolutionary ideology made for better targets.

The other link between race and labor violence was not made by the Army, but its importance was obvious to anyone familiar with the use of Black labor to break strikes by employers. That Blacks could be used as strikebreakers and, by doing so, help keep workers from forming unions was a major factor in the defeat of the steelworkers in 1919 and in other labor struggles around the country. By maintaining that when workers went on strike and blacks rioted, they were acting as victims of red agitators who were using them for their own subversive ends, the Army and those who followed the Army's lead in this analysis kept the grievances that blacks and whites shared in common from being examined and, hence, prevented them from joining together in their solution.

NOTES

1. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way, (New York, 1940), p.

341.

2. New York World, October 16, 1919, quoted in Arthur Waskow,

From Race Riot to Sit In: 1919 and the 1960'(Garden City, 1966),

p. 188.

3. The best description of the Washington Riot is Lloyd M.

Abernathy, "The Washington Race War of July, 1919", Maryland

Historical Magazine, LVIII, 4, December 1963, 309‑324. See also,

Waskow, pp. 21‑38.

4. Report of a Captain Snow, British Military Intelligence, July 28, 1919. This document has been reproduced along with others taken from the files of Abraham Glasser in the National Archives, Dept. of Justice Files, Record Group 60, by William Cohen, "Riots, Racism, and Hysteria: The Response of Federal Investigative Officials to the Race Riots of 1969", The Massachusetts Review, Summer 1972, 37 ‑400. Snow's report can be found on pages 391‑394. In all cases I have used the original as the Cohen reproductions are accurate but not complete. 5. Report of Major J.E. Cutler to Brig. Gen. Marlbrough Churchill, Director of Military Intelligence, Washington, D.C., August 15, 1919, Glasser, N.A., and Cohen, pp. 394‑6. 6. The Omaha Story has not been given the attention it deserves. It is best told in Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit In, p. 110‑119. 7. General Leonard Wood to Adjutant General, Washington, D.C., October 2, and 3, War Department, National Archives, Record Group

60.

8. For an elaboration of the various suggestions made relating

to the use of police powers, see Waskow, pp. 199‑218.

9. For events in Mississippi, see William F. Holmes, "The Leflore County Massacre and the Demise of the Colored Farmers' Alliance" Phylon, XXXIV, September 1973, 267‑274. Phillips County's riot has been much written about. The best account is available in a pamphlet; B. Boren McCool, Union Re‑action and Riot: A Biography of a Race Riot, (Memphis, 1971) and Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit In, pp. 121‑175. The "white view" of the riot is in; J.W. Butts and Doris James, "Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot", Arkansas Historical Journal, XX, Spring 1961, pp. 95‑104. For the black view see O.A. Rogers, "The Elaine Race Riot", Ibid., XIX, Summer, 1960, pp. 142‑150.

10. . Captain Edward P. Passailaigne to Major Robert 0. Page, Assistant Chief of Staff, G‑2, 3rd Division, October 7, 1919, War Department, National Archives, Record Group 60.

11. Ibid.

12. The court struggle is detailed in Waskow,

Race Riot to Sit In, pp. 143‑175.

13. Major Eugene E. Barton, Intelligence Officer, Camp Pike, Arkansas to Acting Intelligence Officer, Chicago, Ill., Oct. 9, 1919, War Department, National Archives, Record Group 60.

14. Lt. Colonel M.D,. Wheeler, Intelligence Officer, South Eastern Department, to Director, Military Intelligence, Washington, D.C., January 22, 1920, War Department, National Archives, Record Group 60.

15. This was the expressed opinion of the Assistant Director of the F.B.I., Frank Burke as related to Army Intelligence. See, Memorandum For Colonel A.B. Coxe, by Captain Henry G. Sebastian, Intelligence Officer, War Department, National Archives, Record Group 60.

16. Ibid. and Brigadier General Marlbrough Churchill, General Staff, Director of Military Intelligence to Frank Burke, Assistant Director, F.B.I., August 19, 1919, Glasser Files, National Archives, Record Group 60.

17. J. Edgar Hoover, "Radicalism and Sedition Among Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications", Exhibit 10 of A. Mitchell Palmer, Investigation Activities of The Department of Justice, 66th Congress, 1st Session, 1919, Senate Document 153, XLL, 162. For details of Hoover's preparation of this report see Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit In, p. 189 and Cohen, "Riots, Racism, and Hysteria", p. 382.

18. Perhaps the best synopsis of A. Mitchell Palmer's views is given by Robert Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters, Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903‑1933, (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 193‑94. It also contains the best descriptions of Palmer's "Red Raids" Ibid. pp. 208‑238. See also, R.K. Murray,Red Scare, A Study in National Hysteria, 1919‑1920, (St. Paul, 1955), pp. 190‑222.

CHAPTER V

THE ARMY AND THE STEEL STRIKE ‑ 1919

There never has been much question about the importance of the steel strike of 1919. It was, at the time, the largest strike in American history involving more than 300,000 workers and twentyfour craft unions. In David Brody's work on the strike, the historian of the steelworkers argues that the defeat of the 1919 strike set back trade unionism fifteen years. It set the stage for the defeat of the coal miners a few months later, and for that of the railwaymen in 1922; thereby, clearing the major obstacles to the company unionism of the 1920's. But if the consequences of the defeat of these major labor unions are clear, the reasons for their defeat are still the subject of controversy. Three approaches to that problem have been made: The first from the organizer of the strike himself, William Z. Foster who argued that the strike collapsed because of insufficient support from Samuel Gompers and the AFL. The second view came from the Commission of Inquiry of the Inter‑church World Movement which stressed the overwhelming power of the steel industry and the support given to the industry by a largely anti‑union press which turned public opinion against the steelworkers by branding their strike as revolutionary and un‑american. The third view came from Brody in his Labor in Crisis, the work referred to above. Brody took the eclectic approach citing the above reasons plus a number of additional ones; such as, racial and ethnic prejudice and the reluctance of the federal Government to intervene. He concluded that it was the conjunction of all these factors and not any single one that was behind the defeat of the strikers. Documents released after Brody published his work by the National Archives provide the basis for a fourth view of the cause of the steel strike's failure centering on the role of Army Intelligence in the period preceding the strike and of the U. S. Army in breaking the strikeby the steel-workers in the Chicago‑Gary area using the methods developed and refined in the west against the copper miners of Arizona and the shipbuilders in Seattle. Since this was the area upon which Foster and the unions had concentrated their efforts, the decisive role played by the army in breaking the strike in Gary, allowed the military to garner a major share of the credit for the ultimate route of the steel‑ workers as a whole. By placing the steel‑workers' strike within the context of the earlier labor struggles in the west, especially those in Butte and Seattle, the defeat of the workers can be seen as the almost inevitable result of the steady growth of a sophisticated strikebreaking system encompassing an ideological solidarity beginning with Army intelligence and extending through the FBI and the Justice Department with the Army supplying the brute force that allows the imposition of a settlement that serves the interests of the companies involved. The failure of historians like Brody and Dubofsky to see the pattern which was emerging, stemmed from a lack of appreciation for the crucial role of armed force backed by the ideological zeal which was at the core of the "red scare".

The steel strike did not begin until September 22, 1919 but for the U. S. Army Intelligence Officers stationed in Gary, Indiana, however, concern about an impending strike began early in January of 1919. And, as their counterparts in Seattle and Butte had been before the strikes in those cities, they were convinced and duly reported that, "the contemplated strike at the steel mills in Gary, Indiana was being instigated by the I.W.W. and Bolsheviki." Reports from their agents indicated that "radicalism is spreading rapidly among the different Slav nationalities employed at the Gary mills." Gary Mayor W. F. Hodges as well as other city officials were highly concerned about radical influences in the city. They also noted that the Justice Department and the Gary Chief of Police were investigating radical organizations on their own. These agents, along with the usual contingent of company spies, swelled attendance at local radical meetings.1

Fears of an imminent radical‑led strike veiled the most potent cause for industry's concern which was the burgeoning AFL organization drive under the leadership of William Z. Foster. Begun in the fall of 1918, it met with an immediate favorable response; by June, 1919, Foster reported that 100,000 steelworkers had signed up and, by September, 1919, membership had reached 500,000. Most of the new recruits were from the Chicago‑Gary area; a large number were unskilled and foreign‑born workers that had been traditionally neglected by the AFL. Throughout most of 1919, the leadership of the AFL was opposed to a steel strike; partly because AFL president, Samuel Gompers, felt that he was in a position to reap the reward of his wartime service to President Wilson and the nation and gain a substantial concession from the steel industry through negotiation supported by his friends in government. However, because Wilson was consumed with the battle over the Treaty and the League of Nations, he had little time for labor problems. Later his illness (his stroke occurred on September 26) reduced his available time for domestic problems even further. Of his cabinet members, the most sympathetic to labor , Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, was relatively powerless when opposed by the combined forces of the Army and the Justice Department and their effective use of "red scare" techniques (A. Mitchell Palmer became Attorney General on March 5, 1919). 2

Gompers attempts at negotiation were unproductive in this situation in which his supporters were leaderless and ineffective and his enemies were powerful and driven by a rising tide of anti‑red sentiment which they were skillfully directing against labor unions. The strike began September 22, 1919. Although most newspaper reports agreed that the first days of the strike were peaceful enough, Army Intelligence reports indicated an immediate concern over potential problems in maintaining order. A report dated September 23 stated that there was "talk of violence among radical strikers who cannot be kept in check by the leaders." It reported further that rumors of an "incendiary plot to burn the whole town" were being spread and that businessmen thought "the radical element might break loose at any minute." It also pointed to increasing tension between the strikers and Black workers who had not come out on strike. There was, according to the army agents, "talk of race rioting" and "threats to kill all the Negroes and wreck their homes." All this, they said, was creating a great deal of anxiety among "the forces trying to preserve law and order." And, as usual, it was the "radical or Bolshevik" element upon which the army agents focused the major share of the blame. 3

By October 3, the army agents had become even more alarmed by the situation in the Chicago‑Gary area. Acts of violence multiplied and, they alleged, the local police and plant guards seemed unable to stop them. Further, "the strikers were growing restless" and the agents warned "that the critical point is drawing near." These reports capped over a year's observation of radical activities in the area by army Intelligence, and as the author of a Justice Department review of these events put it they provided an "adequate foundation for the impression in military circles that the chief feature of the steel situation in the Gary area was the radical agitation." 4 At times, army agents distinguished between "legitimate" labor activities and leaders and "Bolshevik" actions and radicals. But, the distinction is never made very clear, and for many agents there seemingly is no difference at all; they brand all activity from sabotage to picketing or distributing leaflets as "red". The army leadership also never made clear what the differences between legitimate trade union activity and radical or revolutionary activity were. This ambiguity was exploited by those opposed to the workers by labelling all AFL organizers and strike leaders as Bolsheviks and their activities as unpatriotic and/or revolutionary. Local newspaper editors added to this tendency by making red smears, as in the following quotation taken from a clipping found posted on a steel company bulletin board just before the armistice:

There are agitators prowling about the

mills ... spreading German propaganda....

These IWW and Socialist vermin, working under

the guise of AFL organizers teach that war

is bad ....some of them [are] probably in the

Kaiser's pay.

During the steel strike, the nation's major newspapers took up the cry of revolution and did much to turn public opinion against the strikers. The New York Times, for example, called the leaders of the strike "radicals, social and industrial revolutionaries," while the Chicago Tribune proclaimed that the strike posed "a choice between ... individual liberty or the dictatorship of the Proletariat."5

The radical background of ex‑IWW member William Z. Foster, the man who led both the AFL organizing effort and the strike itself, aided the efforts of those who wished to portray all union activity appear as inspired by revolutionary intention. Not only was a lot of publicity given to his IWW past, Foster was inept in his own public defense and alienated Gompers further by not openly repudiating his earlier Wobbly‑inspired writings. The steel employers had Foster's pamphlet, entitled, " Syndicalism," reprinted and widely circulated among businessmen and editors. On the cover of the pamphlet they had duly inscribed that the author was "in charge of the present campaign to organize the steelworkers." For employers eagerly searching for links between the "reds" and the AFL which would provide excuses to crush the unions, this was proof enough. For the Army, with its proclivity for seeing radicals behind almost every expression of anger at the established order, this confusion between trade unionism and revolutionary organizations made it easier to rationalize the use of the Army as "peacekeeper" when additional troops were brought into Gary on October 5. 6

The first military personnel involved directly in the strike other than as intelligence agents were officers of the state guard sent from Fort Sheridan to see if troops were needed in Gary after strikers attacked a streetcar loaded with Black strikebreakers on Saturday, October 4. The next day they were followed by eleven companies of soldiers from the state militia. Despite this force, Army Intelligence agents, after surveying the situation in Gary on October 5 and 6, called for more troops. They argued that these troops were needed because the local police were too friendly with the strikers to be trusted, and the Mayor of Gary felt the soldiers from the state militia were not adequate to handle the situation.

Tension increased as the strikers were antagonized by the employers' announced intentions to open the mills again on Monday morning, October 6, using black strikebreakers. Large crowds of strikers massed sporadically in the streets of Gary and resisted police attempts to disperse them. The intensity of the situation peaked on Monday afternoon when a parade of ex‑soldiers and strikers marched in defiance of the mayor's ban on such demonstrations. The paraders jeered and hooted at both policemen and soldiers of the state militia as they passed their posts. That evening General Leonard Wood entered Gary, followed by a regiment of the Army's Fourth Division that had been stationed on standby at Fort Sheridan since September 29 at the request of the governor and the local authorities.7

General Wood had presidential aspirations and was in addition a bit of a red‑baiter. Two of the more widely‑quoted of his expressions were, "There is no room for the red flag in this country" and, when asked what to do about the IWW, he replied, "we should kill it as we would a snake." He also claimed that, "about 95% of American labor is square and right," and that most trouble was "due to alien leadership of the type I have been urging that we get rid of in this country." He swore to "do his part in rounding up the red element."8 Under the protecting and approving arm of General Wood's troops, a full‑scale red hunt commenced in Gary in which all "law and order" protectors, Army Intelligence, the FBI, local and state police took part. These officials were occasionally aided in their efforts by volunteers from the Gary "Loyal Americans League" and company police. As the coordinator of the raids, Army Lieutenant Van Buren (testifying before a Senate Investigating Committee) put it, "It was General Wood's express direction that we try to find out, if possible, what there was to this red thing." To do this, the Lieutenant admitted, so much red hunting went on by "...a great many agencies working to cross purposes" that a central clearing house under the Lieutenant had to be established.9

Between the Lieutenant and General Wood and serving as Wood's assistant was colonel W.L. Mapes who shared Wood's convictions about the main role of the Army and the root cause of the strike. The Gary Evening Post, a paper which had earlier told its readers in an editorial, "it is the duty of every citizen to believe the Army's reports," quoted Colonel Mapes that, on the basis of raids made on the evening of October 14th and the morning of October l5th, "the steel strike in Gary was fostered by the reds and the revolutionaries in the hope of plunging the entire country into a nationwide revolt against the United States Government."10. Since most red raids took place under the cover of darkness, Gary at night was a busy place. A reporter for the United News has left a description of what it was like:

As nightfall approaches there is an electrical

change in the atmosphere. The throngs of busy

shoppers give way to crowds of men off duty at the

mills. The soldiers take their posts in an alert

manner, and detectives mingle with the crowds.

Every third man on the streets in Gary today seems

to be a Government official in some capacity.

Towards midnight squads of soldiers slip into

the side streets without attracting any particular

attention.. A guard forbids pedestrians from some

certain block for the time, and presently the squad

marched down the road with another clique of alleged

Reds 11

The victims of these raids, the "alleged reds", were often trade union leaders. One of the first persons arrested was Paul Glasser, chief attorney for the striking workers. Other trade unionists were arrested merely for threatening strike action in sympathy with the steelworkers. Estimates of the number of strike‑related arrests run as high as three hundred for the month of October alone. John Fitzpatrick, Foster's organizing assistant and acting chairman of the National committee, has left an account of the Army's arrest and intimidation procedures.

... a mill superintendent would take a squad of

soldiers and go to the home of a striker. The sol‑

diers would be lined up in front of the house; the

superintendent would go in. He would tell the striker

that he came to give him his last chance to return

to work, saying that if he refused he would either

go to jail or be deported. Then he would take the striker

to the window and show him the ‑‑row of soldiers ....

Then the superintendent would ‑go to the next house

and repeat the performance. 12

The tactic was designed to be used against the large number of foreign born workers in Gary many of which had come from countries where such use of troops was commonplace and where refusal to comply with orders meant quick and arbitrary punishment.

More important than the attacks on the reds to the strikers were the limits placed on their actions by General Wood. On his arrival in Gary on October 6, he issued a proclamation establishing military control and prohibiting public assembly "in any park, street, or portion of the city." The strikers could still meet in union halls but since most of these were small and they were denied access to larger meeting places. Hence, they were effectively prevented from holding those mass meetings which are so important to morale and communication between leaders and rank and file. So concerned was the army with preventing the circulation of "red" propaganda that even petitions had to be cleared with military authorities. Also, processions, parades and demonstrations were forbidden,and picketing was severely restricted. Thus, the strikers were denied the right to use their main source of strength - their numbers - and, hence, were unable to prevent the mills from operating with scab labor.

These restrictions were refined in a further proclamation issued on October 10, which limited the pickets in any one locality to two strikers. Any group larger than four persons was not permitted in public. Everybody was to be "kept moving" except "when waiting for streetcars." Discussions at meetings of a "disloyal, seditious or unpatriotic nature" were "strictly tabooed."13 On October 11, General Wood explained the purpose behind this

action:

The strike is only an incident in the placing

of troops here. Our purpose is to preserve order,

enforce the law and protect life and property. The

strikers themselves so far as they are concerned

collectively are all right in their conduct. The

trouble comes from a bunch of agitators ‑ red

agitators who are not American citizens ‑ who have

taken advantage of the strike to create lawlessness

and disorder, and it is to rid Gary of this element

that the troops are here and will remain until their

mission is accomplished. The details of what we are

doing can not, of course, be made public now, because

to do so would interfere with our object. But in

time the public will be given full information and

it will be seen that it was well we came.14

By this time, complaints about General Wood and the army's activities began to be heard in Washington. The Chicago Steelworkers Committee complained directly to the Secretary of Labor in a telegram dated October 10. They asked that representatives of the Secretary be sent to the Chicago‑Gary area to help protect the workers from illegal and over‑zealous actions of the Military and the Justice Departments. These actions which they claimed demonstrated "steel‑trust partisanship" causing the workers to lose "all respect for‑governmental agencies." Secretary of Labor Wilson immediately forwarded the complaints along with a letter of his own to General Wood, Newton Baker, the Secretary of Defense, and A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General. A series of communications followed involving charges and counter‑charge, denials of guilt and expressions of innocence. The most interesting of these was the reply of the FBI which blamed the all of the excesses on "the military authorities," whom they claimed did most of their raiding "between 12:30 and 5:00 each morning, routing the alleged "Reds" and their families out of bed ... with the assistance of former chief of the Chicago American Protective League, Robert A. Gunn, together with the members of the 'Gary Citizens' Committee' which ... is composed mostly of superintendents and foremen of the Gary Steel Mills." The FBI, the report claimed, was confining itself to "investigating the activities of alien radicals" under the immigration act of 1917.

An attempt to resolve the matter was made at a meeting held on October 15 between the members of the three departments concerned. At this meeting, the War Department agreed to investigate the actions of the troops in Gary. Not surprisingly, it found itself not guilty of any violations of the rights of the strikers or of showing favoritism to the mill owners, and attributed the complaints "to indefinite reports which were accepted without verification" by the strike officials and the Secretary of Labor.16 By this time, the raids had abated although they continued sporadically into November and December. Most targets worth raiding had been exhausted. By mid‑November the steel mills were operating at anywhere from 50 to 85% of capacity, with more strikers returning to work every day. Surrounded by troops, their leaders accused of revolutionary intention, subject to indiscriminate search and arrest, strained by a long difficult strike which was eating up their wartime savings while imported Black strikebreakers threatened to make their job loss permanent, this attrition among the workers out on strike is understandable.

The final blow to the strikers, and for Foster in particular came on November 5 when the special committee of the U.S. Senate reported on its investigation into the strike. The report was a victory for those who viewed the strike as a red plot. It found that:

"behind this strike there is massed a considerable

element of I.W.W.'s, anarchists, revolutionists,

and Russian soviets, and . . . some men not in

harmony with the conservative elements of the

American Federation of Labor are attempting to

use the strike as a measure of elevating them‑

selves to power within the ranks of organized

labor.17

By this time the outcome of the struggle was obvious, although the strike itself was not officially called off until January 8, 1920. Federal troops were pulled out shortly before that at the request of the governor of Indiana, and the municipal authorities resumed control of Gary on January 1. General Wood had left the scene in late October when threatened disturbances in the West Virginia coalfields drew his attention and the forces in Gary were left in charge of his subordinate, Colonel W.L. Mapes.18

With the defeat of the steelworkers, the possibility of creating mass industrial unions to replace the old restrictive craft unions ended, to be revived again only with the coming of the New Deal some fifteen years later. The red scare ideology that had been confined to over‑zealous Army Intelligence agents before the strike, blossomed into a national epidemic with red hunting almost replacing baseball as the nation's most popular sport. Employers throughout the country used the occasion to either do away with unions completely or to set up company unions that would not give them any trouble. The National Association of Manufacturers officially backed the "open shop" movement, and branded all attempts at creating restrictive unions as un‑American. Union membership as a whole fell from a postwar peak of about five million to three a half million by 1923. 19

In Gary itself, Army Intelligence continued to find evidence of IWW and Bolshevik activity, but since the workers as a whole were reduced to a divided, spiritless, thoroughly‑beaten lot, no one seemed to pay much attention. Gary seemed safely in the hands of the Loyal American League, that curious organization of super‑patriots that had served so diligently in aiding the military with the work of weeding out reds.20 The defeat of the steelworkers in 1919 was to mean more than just the temporary defeat of the idea mass industrial unionization, for the way the strike was defeated made a lasting impression on America's labor leaders. The hysterical reaction to the charge of red infiltration and instigation of the strike meant that henceforth most unions would be overly careful about exposing themselves to this charge. That would mean for most unions an almost blind adherence to bread and butter issues and a corresponding avoidance of political activity. In a word, out of the combined experiences of the events in the western mines and forests, the General Strike in Seattle, and the steel strike and the stage was set for full bloom of the red scare which followed. The coalminers were the next to feel the consequences of trying to seek economic justice in the face the red scare backed up by the U.S. Army. The sum of these experiences, would play a major role in molding the one dimensional, apolitical work force for which America has become renowned.

NOTES

1. Major Thomas B. Crockett, Head, Department Intelligence Office, Chicago, to Director of Military Intelligence, January 9, 1919; Crockett to Mayor %V. F. Hodges, January 9, 1919, War Department 10110‑988, National Archives, Abraham Glasser File (henceforth NA Glasser).

2. For Wilson's attitude toward labor problems, see Melvin Urofsky, Big Steel and the Wilson Administration (New York, 1970), pp. 299‑302. For the background to the steel strike, the best introduction is in David Brody, The Steel‑workers in America, the Non‑Union Era (Cambridge, 1960) and his, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919(New York, 1965). Also, there is a chapter on the steel strike in the unpublished manuscript by Abraham Glasser in the Glasser file, National Archives (henceforth, Glasser ms).

3. Report by Agents Campbell, Janovaky, and Rowen, Department of Intelligence Office, Chicago, Illinois, September 23, 1919, War Department 10534‑670, NA Glasser; racial tension had been increasing throughout the war. Three strikes in 1918 had witnessed the use of blacks as strikebreakers; waiters, egg candlers and garment workers all had lost jobs to black strikebreakers, cf. William M. Tuttle, "Labor Conflict and Racial Violence" 1894‑1919, Labor History, 10, Spring, 1969, pp. 408‑421.

4. Report by Agents Rowen, Janovaky and Campbell, Department of Military Intelligence Office, Chicago, Illinois, October 3,1919, War Department 10634‑670, NA Glasser; "The Steel Strike of 1919," Glasser ms., P. 26.

5. Newspaper citations are from Brody, Labor in Crisis, p.74, 128‑129.

6. Pamphlet cover is quoted in Ray Standard Baker, The New Industrial Unrest (New York, 1920), p. 45.

7. Captain Crockett to Chief of Staff, October 6, 1919, NA Glasser; Agents' Reports, Military Intelligence Office, Chicago, October 5,6,8, 1919, File 10634‑670, cited in Glasser ms.,p. 38; General Leonard Wood to Adjutant General, October 7, 1919, War Department, and Wood to Adj. Gen., Annual Report for the Fiscal Year, August 22, 1920, NA Glasser.

8. Leonard Wood, On National Issues (New York, 1920), pp. XVIII, 25; Wood to George Perkins, January 3, 1920, Perkins Papers, quoted in Brody, Labor in Crisis, P. 135.

9. Minutes of Senate Hearings, Investigations of Strikes in Steel Industries, II, 3820‑22, cited in Glasser Ms., P. 37.

10. Quoted in, James H. Maloney, To Strike at Steel: Gary Indiana and the Great Steel Strike of 1919, Honors Thesis, Harvard University,1982, pp. 80‑8.

11. Alexander F. Jones, "Gary Quiet During Day, Changes at Night U. S. Agents Seek Reds," Pittsburgh Post, October 16, 1919.

12. Gary Evening Post, Oct. 8, 1919. John Fitzgerald to William Z. Foster, quoted in William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons, New York, 1920, pp. 170‑71.

13. Major General Leonard Wood, Proclamation, Gary, Indiana, October 6, 1919, NA Glasser.

14. Proclamation of October 10 is contained in Col. W.S. Mapes, Commanding Officer, U.S. Troops, Gary, Indiana to the Inspector General, October 28, 1919, NA Glasser.

15. Indianapolis News, October 11, 1919, Glasser ms., P. 38.

16. John H. Deyung, Secretary, Chicago Steelworkers Committee to G. Wilson, Secretary of Labor, October 10, 1919, Department of Justice File No. 16‑154, NA Glasser; Wilson to Baker, et al, October 12, 1919, War Department File A.G.O. 230‑1404, NA Glasser; Brennan to Burke, October 13, 1919, FBI File No. 352037, cited in Glasser ms., p. 41.

17. Colonel A. L. Dade to General Wood, November 13, 1919, Inspector General File 3339, cited in Glasser ms., P. 42.

18. Investigating Strike in Steel Industry, Senate Report No. 289, p.14.

19. General Wood, Annual Report, 1920.

20. Allan M. Wakstein, "The National Association of Manufacturers and Labor Relations in the 1920's", Labor History, 10, Fall, 1969, pp. 163‑176. For the increasing acceptance of the idea among businessmen that unionism equaled communism, see his "The Origins of the Open Shop Movement," Journal of American History, LI, December, 1964, pp. 460‑475.

21. Col. A. B. Gone to J. Edgar Hoover, June 8, 1920, Department of Justice; Report of Agent No. 14, Department of Intelligence Office, Chicago, March 24, 1920; Lt. Donald Van Buren to Col. A. L. Dade, "Loyal American League," Headquarters Central Department, November 12, 1919; all in NA Glasser.

CHAPTER VI

COAL ‑ SEQUEL TO STEEL

Before the steel strike was over, the crisis in coalfields that had been developing since the end of the war came to a head. The miners who had not had a wage increase since 1917 demanded a 60% raise and a thirty‑hour week as a basis for negotiation. The owners, faced with the return of the coal industry's perennial problem of over‑supply in peacetime, were shutting down mines and refused to consider what they considered to be an excessive wage increase, especially as their interpretation of the old contract called for its continuing into 1920. Negotiations failed, and a strike was set for November 1. The federal government and the courts backed the mineowners' interpretation of the miners' obligations to continue working under the old contract and declared the strike illegal, and an injunction was issued to restrain the officials of the United Mine Workers (UMW) from participating in it. The strike went on in spite of the injunction and in spite of the UMW leaders' realization that, considering the mood of the nation, it was an unfortunate time to strike.

John L. Lewis and the leadership of the UMW were well aware of the public's hostile reaction to the steel strike, and that because of the approaching winter, a coal strike would be even less popular; but they had no choice ‑ the men had been threatening to strike with or without the union's leaders all year, and wildcat strikes had broken out in a number of mining communities already. The men, driven by spiralling post‑war inflation, threatened unemployment, and, with the closing of some of the mines, actual job loss, were desperate. Thus, the stage was set for a desperate, and, in some ways, ultimately tragic struggle.

The miners, however, had some advantages that the steelworkers had lacked ‑ especially when the attempt was made to apply the red scare tactic to their strike. For one thing, in the area that appeared most radical, the mining districts of southern West Virginia, over 75% of the miners were American citizens, many of them with roots extending back to the days of Daniel Boone. And, like miners the world over, the dangers involved in extracting coal from the bowels of the earth fostered a toughness and a sense of community among them that was lacking in workers from other industries. By 1919, the introduction of modern strip‑mining techniques and the use of Black strikebreakers in the southern mines had to some degree eroded the solidarity of the mining communities, but there still was a great deal of fight left in them. And, unlike the steelworkers' leader, William Z. Foster, whose syndicalist past had provided a vulnerable target for red‑baiters, the miners new president, John L. Lewis, not only was never a radical but was already renowned as a bitter foe of the IWW, Bolshevism, and all radicals. The UMW had one of the most conservative leaderships in the country. At their September Conference in 1919 they had, unlike practically every other miners' organization in the world, voted against advocating the

nationalization of the mines.

Therefore, since red scare tactics depend to a great extent on equating radicalism with aliens, and, almost invariably, blaming strikes on red influence among the trade union leaders, the miners presented a difficult target. But the ingenuity of the redbaiters was not deterred by this seemingly unquestionable array of loyal Americanist credentials possessed by the miners and their leaders. The argument to be used against the miners was first developed to attack Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) during the steel strike. As used by The New York Times, it claimed that with the increase in membership of the AFL during the war, the control of Gompers over his followers had accordingly diminished. Hence, wildcat strikes broke out in increasing numbers, and these strikes were caused by an "element", as the Times editorial put it, "which threatens it (the AFL) with anarchy." The Times then concluded that the "officers of the Federation may 'speak' for labor, but it is much too often the Bolsheviki, the syndicalists, who act for it." Variations of this argument would be used against Lewis and the UMW, especially when, on November 7, Lewis, acting under a second injunction that threatened him with jail, ordered the miners back to work and they refused to go.2

At the outset of the strike, Lewis made an attempt to forestall red smear tactics by emphasizing the narrow issue of the miners' right to a decent standard of living. This, he pronounced, "was the one object in view ... No other issue is involved and there must be no attempt on the part of anyone to inject into the strike any extraneous purposes." He also indulged in a bit of flag‑waving to put off anyone who would question his patriotism. He proclaimed, "I love my country...With Abraham Lincoln I thank God that we have a country where men may strike." All this, however, was to no avail, for by this time America's press was conditioned to respond with knee‑jerk red‑baiting to strikes of any significance, and charges of Bolshevism, syndicalism and corruption by Moscow gold against the miners and their leaders appeared in newspapers across the land. Similar attacks echoed in the halls of Congress where, by special resolution, the army was charged with task of keeping the non‑union mines open. The anti‑Bolshevism of Lewis and the conservative stance of the UMW was lost in the avalanche of red‑baiting that followed the announcement of the strike. Lewis, like Gompers before him, was vilified as both a tyrant who forced normally‑contented miners to strike and as a tool of radical elements that aimed at promoting revolution in America. There seemingly was no way of getting Americans to focus on the economic issues involved in the strike.

Meanwhile, the U. S. Army involved itself in a drama that threatened to tear the West Virginia hills apart. The trouble centered around the infamous Cabin Creek coal‑mining district, an area that had been the scene of a battle in 1912 between the miners and sheriff deputies after a striker had been killed by armed guards. Continued violence in the area, culminated in the use of an armored train (the "Bull Moose" Special) by hired company agents, who fired live ammunition into a sleeping tent‑colony of striking miners on February 7, 1913. This led to a pitched battle between the miners seeking revenge and a platoon of mine guards. At this point, the West Virginia Governor, proclaimed a state of martial law, and ordered the entire district be temporarily disarmed creating a period of uneasy peace. Six years later, according to the tradition of the hills, the miners of the district were reportedly back in possession of an ample supply of arms and had lost none of their well‑known marksmanship skills. In addition, the Cabin Creek area had gained a reputation as a center of left wing and socialist agitation.

The situation became inflamed when attempts by UMW members from Cabin Creek to unionize the neighboring Logan County coalfields were met with the use of violence on the part of Logan County mineowners. Tension mounted when, in early September of 1919, stories were circulated in Cabin Creek that miners were being shot in Logan County, and that women and children were being starved and murdered by area coal operators. On the night of September 5, a mass meeting was held at which some 5,000 miners from the Cabin Creek area gathered in the open air. The purpose of the meeting was to organize a march on Logan County, apparently with the goal of liberating the oppressed miners and their families. Governor John J. Cornwell rushed to the scene and, while "hundreds of rifle barrels glinted in the moonlight," he addressed the assembled miners. He left with the impression that his arguments had convinced the miners to give up their plans. However, the next morning the march began and was only halted at the urging of UMW official C. F. Keeney, who had purportedly been sent to intercept the men at the request of the governor to convince them that their march would only bring in federal troops which the governor had threatened to call. And, he warned, proceeding with the invasion of Logan County would do the miners' cause no good. At this the miners reluctantly turned back, but not before threatening a second invasion unless Logan County was cleaned up. The governor did in fact set up a committee to investigate the situation, but it did not get very far before the coal strike loomed on the horizon, making the situation even more dangerous. 5

Reports began drifting in to Army Intelligence that a new invasion was planned for November 1, the day the strike was to begin. In order to forestall this threatened second invasion, Governor Cornwell requested military assistance from General Leonard Wood in a letter to him on October 24, in which the governor reported large numbers of "high‑powered rifles" had been brought into the area and that the leadership of the miners was becoming increasingly radical. He went on to state that:

the talk among these people is revolutionary in the

extreme and I have every reason to believe that their

effort will be directed not only at the closing of the

coal mines, but likewise be an attempt to usurp authority

completely in the counties and in the State.

... therefore,...would (you) consider

sending to Nitro a regiment of soldiers and placing

them in the barracks there temporarily. Nitro...is only

fifteen miles distant from Charleston,

and, by having soldiers in close proximity to this

situation, many lives might be saved.

To which the General replied:

I wish to inform you that troops at Camp Zachary Taylor

are being held in readiness to proceed to Charleston

or vicinity whenever you deem it necessary to send them

to quell insurrection, maintain public order and guard

life and property.

The troops were sent in on October 31, but the expected invasion never occurred. None‑the‑less, the soldiers stayed on the scene until November 16. It was the opinion of the Army Intelligence officer on the scene that the governor had actually hoped for an incident requiring the use of federal troops in order to "disarm the entire radical district." To do that, the officer noted, the Governor "requires some sort of an event on which to hang such an action." As we have seen, the Commander of the Army's Central Department, General Wood, was inclined to view such red‑hunting projects with enthusiasm. But it was not as easy to find those who could be branded as "reds" in West Virginia as it had been in Gary, Indiana. In addition, the looking was bound to be far more dangerous even with the aid of federal troops and experienced counterspies like Captain John B. Campbell imported from the Gary area. For, as the Captain later reported, "90% of the adult males in this territory have one or more firearms, principally rifles of the high‑powered type." In addition, the miners were "easily agitated", although, the Captain admitted with a military man's respect for discipline, "they had a wholesome regard through fear or otherwise for their leaders." Another intelligence report indicated that in case of trouble the miners "would take to the hills where they have cached their arms and ammunition... . From then on the fighting would be bushwhacking."

It was in fact a puzzling situation for the Captain from Gary, for these well‑armed miners seemed not only not to mind the presence of federal troops, but were, in the tradition of the hills, positively friendly. The nonunion miners even sponsored a dance for the officers and men on the evening of November 7. Even in the Cabin Creek area the miners were not hostile and among "the radical elements" that had, Campbell's immediate superior, Major Charles S. Coulter, assumed, "caused the trouble here in 1912‑13, quiet also prevails. The miners and their leaders to all outward purposes being determined to achieve a reputation as peaceable and law abiding citizens."8

Still despite this outward peaceable exterior, Captain Campbell was sure that only the timely arrival of the troops had prevented "serious disorder and bloodshed." Further, according to Campbell, the majority of the locals of the UMW in West Virginia were "dominated by the I.W.W. through the local chiefs" who were members or belonged to "other revolutionary organizations." As examples of these revolutionary local chiefs who were "responsible for the unrest and disorder in West Virginia," he listed C. F. Keeney, President of UMW Local #17 and Fred Mooney, Secretary for Local 17. He neglected to mention, of course, that Keeney had been responsible for talking the Cabin Creek men out of their projected invasion of Logan County in early September, at the request of the governor. Keeney, if he had any radical affiliation, had certainly kept it well‑hidden and was considered by many of the men to be too conservative. Campbell concluded his report with the following rhetorical flourish: