Labor History: Sacco and Vanzetti, Coal Miners, A Strike, And You

 

The Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and BartolomeoVanzetti were executed in Massachusetts on August 23, 1927 for a hold up and theft and for killing a guard and a paymaster, crimes that they most likely did not commit. The two men were arrested shortly after the hold up and murders and were first sentenced in July of 1921. Appeals and international protests and interventions by prominent politicians, public figures, and legal scholars followed. The defense had an answer for every argument made by the prosecution, and it was clear that the international protests supporting the two men had an effect on the judges and the prosecution and those they consulted with. Still, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in April of 1927 and an advisory committee charged with reviewing aspects of the case by Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller let the verdict stand.

We tend to think of the 1920s as a time of social excesses, mass consumption or consumerism, jazz, flappers, and people flaunting Prohibition. What we do not learn, or what we overlook, is that the 1920s were also times of increasing exploitation of workers, racist and mean-spirited restrictions on immigration, violent outrages against people of color, political repression, and strike-breaking by employers and losses for many unions. Coal mining and steel-producing regions were living in depression conditions well before the stock market crash of 1929. The labor movement and the Left were both deeply divided, although there were moments during the 1920s when both movements showed remarkable creativity and sometimes united around common objectives. By the standards of today the international labor and Left movements were large and deeply rooted in working-class communities, but by the standards of the 1920s these movements were in crisis and were trying to find their bearings after the devastation of the First World War and the failed strike waves and repression that followed the war. Moreover, the generation that had founded the modern labor and Left movements in many countries---including the United States---was passing on and the new leaders of these movements had only known the conditions of intense class war, repression, a world war, and bitter anti-colonial and often failing democratic struggles. It was in this atmosphere that Italian and German fascism formed and that industrial production and consumerism in the United States were reconfigured in the United States. And it was in this environment that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, tried, and convicted. Innocent or guilty, the laws that prevail today would likely not have allowed either their convictions or their death sentences.

The cases of Sacco and Vanzetti might not be of great interest to working-class people in the United States today. What lessons could they hold for us after 97 years?

On August 8, 1927, the revolutionary Industrial Workersof the World (IWW) called a strike in Colorado’s southern coalfields to protest the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Those coalfields employed thousands of mine workers, most of them employed by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. Memories of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 that had taken place in those same southern Colorado coalfields were still fresh in the minds of people there. The IWW had seen better days and was suffering from internal divisions and isolation. Depression conditions were prevalent in the coalfields at the time. Employment in some mines was sporadic and the state had four or eight or more distinct coalfields that produced for different markets and worked under different conditions. Immigrants and immigrant communities were facing special attacks. The Ku Klux Klan was on the march as a mass organization and had infiltrated state and local law enforcement. A bloody regional conflict between rival gangs over bootlegging and car thefts was underway. CF&I seemed all-powerful. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) officially opposed the strike. 

And still the mine workers of southern Colorado struck.

Thousands of mine workers, most of them with roots in Italy or Mexico or Eastern Europe, walked out and stayed out for three days with the hope that their actions would help prevent the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists being held on death row 2000 miles away, and lead to improvments in their working and living conditions as well.

There was no strike fund or strike pay.
There were no lawyers ready to help.
Most of the strikers were not affiliated with any union.
Many of the strikers could have been deported for having joined the strike.
All the strikers knew that they could be blacklisted.
One of the leading strike activists was a young woman named Milka Sablich, or "Flaming Milka," who was known for her red hair and wearing red to the picket lines on the prairies and for being especially tough.

The "Sacco and Vanzetti strike," as it was called, shut down all of the major mines in the southern Colorado coalfields.

Can you imagine this?

Milka Sablich

The mine workers returned after three days, reorganized, and struck again in September and October for a long list of union demands. The strike spread, and for the first time mine workers in all of Colorado’s coalfields struck together for a common set of demands.

The strike faced repression. A mineworker and a boy who was watching an IWW demonstration were killed in Walsenburg. Six striking mineworkers were killed at the Columbine Mine in northern Colorado. Union halls were raided and destroyed by the police and company thugs and vigilantes kidnapped strikers and transported them over state lines and left them in the middle of nowhere. The Governor of New Mexico ordered troops to the New Mexico-Colorado state line. The Catholic Bishop in Denver was said to have decreed that no member of the IWW could receive a Church funeral, although local clergy seem to have disregarded this. Strikers and strike supporters were held without charges and were moved from jail to jail. Homes were raided. Martial law conditions were imposed, although martial law was never declared, and these conditions were enforced by the Colorado National Guard and a state police unit that was reassigned from enforcing Prohibtion laws to strike-breaking. This special unit often acted with violence and was perhaps infiltrated by the Ku Klux Klan. Strikers and their supporters were blacklisted.

The IWW could not hold the strike together and state and company repression took a toll. The union was forced to the margins. The UMWA intervened and got a contract at the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company that shut the IWW out and gave the UMWA a base for future organizing. That contract and the UMWA’s later organizing helped bring some stability to the northern Colorado coal fields and helped steelworkers employed at the C&I-owned steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado to get a union contract years later. It also helped Josepine Roche, the progressive owner of Rocky Mountain Fuel, and her liberal cohort gain national attention and secured a place for her and some of those around her in President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. She became a major force behind the New Deal coal codes and she later served as an administrator of the UMWA’s Welfare and Pension Fund.

The Columbine Mine was owned by Rocky Mountain Fuel. Roche and her closest advisors denied being responsible for the deaths of the six who died there and the sixty or so people who were wounded there on November 21, 1927. She managed to survive charges that she and the management team under her were responsible for the violence and other charges that she interfered and prevented the families of those killed from receiving settlements for the deaths of their loved ones. Roche was forced from her position as a Welfare and Pension Fund administrator in 1971 as militant mine workers and their families and allies fought for democratic control of the UMWA. To this day, I believe, there is no accurate account of Roche's relationship to the violence that occured at Columbine and its aftermath and her role as a Welfare and Pension Fund administrator and her removal from that position.  

 

The IWW’s great organizer Sam Embree was hounded out of the union in the aftermath of the strike. He later became an organizer for the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. But before the strike was over the IWW opened an organizing campaign among western agricultural workers that had limited success. The mine workers’ strike and the campaign among the agricultural workers became foundational to Colorado’s Chicano movement of the 1960s.

The strike ran, more or less, from September or October of 1927 to February or March of 1928. For a brief time after the strike, Colorado mine workers were the highest paid mine workers in the world. Mine owners forced the workers to surrender their wage gains once the IWW was gone and the UMWA was tied up with trying to make the contract at Rocky Mountain Fuel work. 

Many of the strike's leaders and participants went on to make lasting contributions in politics, the labor movement, the Chicano movement, and Depression-era social movement organizing. They passed on what they learned in 1927-1928 to others who carried these lessons well into the 1960s. And so it is, I think, that Sacco and Vanzetti have given us lasting legacies, however indirect or difficult to trace these are.

I have been documenting the 1927-1928 Colorado mine workers’ strike and the legacies left by the strike’s participants and organizers since 1982. In the meantime, Leigh Campbell-Hale has come out with a worthyintroduction to the strike and Michael Robert Gonzalez has written his dissertation on the strike and has offered us a special look into the radical and ethic-communal origins of the strike. The book Slaughter in Serene gives an account of the violence that occured at the Columbine mine.

My hope is that we will read working-class history to place ourselves in our own history as collective owners of our destinies.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti had in his possession a draft of a leaflet when he was arrested that may still resonate with many of us today. It read:

Workers, you have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruit of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being?

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) turned 119 years old today

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) was founded on today's date in Chicago in 1905. The original Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW read as follows:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.

The rapid gathering of wealth and the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands make the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class, because the trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars.

The trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These sad conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

This was later amended to read

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same Industry, thereby helping to defeat one another in wage wars.

Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wages for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system." It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

The change in language marked an evolution in the organization and changing times in the United States. In just a few years after the founding of the IWW a significant body of the union's members had come to feel confident in their rejection of political action by labor and in their sharpening criticism of other unions. Conservative, liberal, and revolutionary political action and craft, trade, and rival industrial unionisms were all rejected in favor of a revolutionary industrial unionism that hoped to unite the workers of the world in one international union that would not only organize workers by industry but that would also be prepared to take dramatic action, dispossess the capitalists through a general strike, and abolish the political state and replace it with the collective economic administration of production and distribution by these same industrial unions. These ideas and goals are most often referred to as revolutionary syndicalism, and these doctrines have appeared and found bases in most industrialized countries and labor movements. They have been, at least for a time, a necessary or inevitable part of our working-class experience.

I cannot think of a union that has received as much scholarly attention as has the IWW (see here and here for starters and see here for the best mapping done of the IWW). The IWW has existed more as a movement than it has as union, although the IWW took notable steps in establishing itself among hardrock and metal miners, textile workes, coal miners, lumber and sawmill workers, maritime and longshore workers, auto workers and metal workers, and agricultural workers in its early years. This included much organizing here in Oregon. The IWW not only punched way above its weight but has also had a tremendous and continuing effect on working-class culture.

Five factors worked against the IWW in the first twenty-five years of its existence, greatly inhibiting its chances of future growth and constraining what it could reasonably be expected to accomplish.

Employer and government opposition effectively crimialized the IWW for a time and nearly caused the union to fold during and immediately following the First World War and the union's wartime strikes. Perhaps hundreds of IWW members were martyred, and hundreds or thousands more were jailed or sent to prison. The opportunities to build a strong labor movement in the United States after the First World War were mostly lost, some of the most anti-labor and anti-immigrant and racist forces took power instead, and all progressive and labor groups paid a steep price for their collective failures. Large numbers of workers in the United States engaged in dramatic struggles in these years and needed an organization like the IWW that sought to build working-class solidarity across political, racial, ethnic, class, sectional, gender, craft, and trade differences, but the IWW's dogmatic rejection of political action and other forms of unionism and particular forms of struggles used by workers of color and rural workers helped isolate the organization.

The IWW's philosophy and practice led its members to reject collective bargaining and signing contracts in most situations, and led as well to a misplaced faith in a "militant minority" of workers being able to harness working-class spontaneity for the common good. There were no national or international strike funds, no strike pay, no dues check-off, and few lasting political friends. The door was opened to factionalism and splits which were often nearly deadly and always unprincipled. The IWW and other attempts to build radical unionism from the mid-1920s into the early 1930s lacked cohesion and unity. The IWW essentially ceded its space, and the resulting vacuum was filled by the more conservative, and better resourced and primed, Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Another point is relevant here. Syndicalism is, at its core, a belief in taking care of one's own (however that is defined) without much regard to politics, and often without regard to others. This can be conservative or revolutionary, and it shows up in the conservative or liberal building trades unions as much as it does among decidedly more liberal or radical unions. Many of the workers who the IWW most wanted to reach, or who the organization most needed without realizing it, were often essentally conservative but were prepared to use radical tactics like sabotage, wildcat strikes, and local or regional general strikes to keep what they had and do better and take care of one another in ways that were excusivist. For instance, hardrock miners in the western states who were first- or second-generation Irishmen and who were living relaively stable and upwardly-mobile lives maintained an industrial unionism that ran parallel to or crossed paths with the IWW and its radical tactics but that also often excluded later immigrant hardrock mine workers who did not have the skill set or the stability of the older and established workers. Different political, cultural, and work values were in play even when the later immigrants were Irish. What appeared to be radical and inclusive was not always so, and this says much about class-consciousness in the United States.

Just so, the workers who the IWW most needed and whose support was most necessary had a material and ideological interest in winning acceptance and inclusion, if not assimilation, and were often prepared to use radical tactics and strategies to achieve what were essentially liberal or conservative goals. It is not that that these workers were not truly radical or revolutionary, but that the struggles over the terrms and conditions and limits of acceptance and inclusion by women, people of color and immigrants in the United States are the stuff of revolution even when revolutionaries can't see this.   

Following from this, the IWW projects a daily life of class struggle, constant organizing and mobilizing against the bosses and anyone who appeares to take their side, and protest and strike after protest and strike until we all get it right and spontaneously arise as a class against capitalism. But what do we do when workers need to take breathers or the daily fight-back isn't winning or when political action is necessary? Can a union really survive without dues check-off and strike funds? And what about the lives and identities of workers away from work and those spaces in our lives where race, gender identity, ethnicity, political and cultural identities, religion, and our subjective histories intersect and don't intersect with our identities as workers and our class-consciousness? 

 

IWW longshore union leader Ben Fletcher 

For all of that, and for better and worse, the IWW has left its imprint on the labor movement. We still beneit from the many civil liberties and other court cases won by members of the IWW. Labor historians have a difficult time defining the IWW, but the union has been an essential part of American history and culture (see here). Many of the union's instincts and core values carry good weight even if the IWW's overall theory and practice and the substance of its eventual goals are lacking. The IWW's shortcomings are not solely the fault of the organization but often reflect the grim realities and contradictions of working-class life. The IWW still exists and is on an upward swing. It is attracting some very smart and capable young people.