One city’s heroic
general strike defies racial divisions
by Chris Mahin
“Tie the town up!” was the workers’ battle cry – and
for several days, they did.
The strike hit just as the commercial season began.
The delivery of food and beverages ceased. Street cars stopped running. Street
cleaning and fire-fighting ground to a halt. Electrical and gas workers walked
out, plunging the city into darkness at night.
Manufacturing stopped.
The New Orleans
general strike began on November 8, 1892. One historian called it “the first
general strike in American history to enlist both skilled and unskilled labor,
black and white, and to paralyze the life of a great city.” It involved 25,000
workers – half the city’s work force – and lasted four days.
The general strike
was a response to the arrogant refusal of the New Orleans Board of Trade to
negotiate seriously with three unions which had gone on strike on 24th
October. The original strikers were members of the Teamsters, Scalesmen, and
Packers unions. They comprised the Triple Alliance, and they walked out because
the Board of Trade refused to grant them a 10-hour day, overtime pay, and a
preferential union shop (a situation in which the employer goes first to the
union when seeking to hire new employees).
The Board of Trade
soon announced that it would sign an agreement with the Scalesmen and the
Packers unions, but not with the Teamsters’ Union, whose membership was
predominantly African-American. Under no circumstances, the Board of Trade
said, would they “enter into any agreement with ‘niggers.’ “ To sign an
agreement with the Triple Alliance including the Teamsters, the Board of Trade
asserted, would be to place the employers under the control of blacks, for soon
the man who would control the Alliance “would be a Big Black Negro.”
The bigotry of the
Board of Trade was matched by the New Orleans newspapers. They rushed to print
accounts of “mobs of brutal Negro strikers” roaming around the city, “beating
up all who attempted to interfere with them.”
To their credit,
the workers of the Triple Alliance stayed united, despite the attempts to split
them along color lines. The Scalesmen and Packers publicly declared that they
would never return to work until the employers signed up with all three members
of the Triple Alliance. The members of other unions in New Orleans began to
call for a general strike in support of the Triple Alliance.
On 8th
November, the general strike began. Each of the 49 unions on strike demanded
union recognition and a closed shop. (In many cases, individual unions added
their own specific demands for shorter hours and higher wages.) Several of the
unions involved – including the street car drivers and the printers – violated
their contracts in order to join the general strike. The unions were organized
into a citywide central labor body called the Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council.
The general strike was led by five labour leaders known as the Committee of
Five.
Louisiana Governor
Murphy Foster assumed control of the city on 10th November. He
placed several battalions of the state militia on alert. Despite the fact that
the strikers had been peaceful and orderly, Foster issued a proclamation ordering
citizens not to congregate in crowds. The proclamation implied that the militia
would be called out if the strike continued. Foster’s edict amounted to a
declaration of martial law, and warned labour of possible bloodshed ahead.
Unwilling to stake
their unions’ very existence on a confrontation with the militia, the Workingmen’s
Amalgamated Council called off the general strike. Under the final agreement,
both sides agreed that arbitration would settle the economic issues. The next
day, an arbitration board granted the Triple Alliance small wage increases and
a reduction of hours. However, the striking unions failed to win their most
important demand – the closed shop. Hundreds of union workers, especially the
freight handlers, street car drivers, and employees of Standard Oil Company,
lost their jobs to “replacement workers.” The fired workers, both black and
white, denounced the Committee of Five for “treachery.” Many unions withdrew
from the Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council over the next several months.
The failure of the
strikers to secure the closed shop ultimately undermined their other gains.
Within a year, the Panic of 1893 would mark the beginning of the 19th
century’s worst economic crisis, producing high unemployment and deep wage cuts
for African-Americans and whites alike. The solidarity across color lines displayed
in 1892 was soon replaced by bitter hostility as wages plunged and many white
dockworkers in New Orleans fought to deny African-American workers access to
the few good jobs available.
The general strike
in New Orleans came at the end of a remarkable year that saw strikes by
steelworkers in Homestead, Pennsylvania; train switchmen in Buffalo, New York;
coal miners in east Tennessee; and silver miners in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
One month after
the New Orleans general strike ended, a fiery labour editor named John Swinton
spoke to the national convention of the American Federation of Labor.
Responding to those who claimed that “labour was defeated in all those fields
and fights, from Buffalo to Coeur d’Alene, from Homestead and New York to New
Orleans,” Swinton replied: “Halt! … We must take a broad view of the warlike
operations of which these strikes were incidents. Skirmishes may be lost by a
regiment which may win. Regiments may be defeated in the battles of a
triumphant campaign. Campaigns may end in dismay for the army that conquers in
the war. Be not in haste. … The thing is not over yet. The forces of the
advance have but begun to learn their drill. Serious revolutions move in large
arcs, along a course which is orderly, though it may appear to be zig-zag. …
“The 50,000 brave
men who, in the six great strikes and many lesser strikes of this year, stood
the enemy’s onslaughts, rendered a service of incomputable worth to the working
masses of the United States. … If they had failed to strike a blow before they
fell – what do you think would have happened elsewhere? Do you doubt that
cowardice would have invited further reprisals, that the conditions of labor
would have been made harder in other places and other industries? …
“If, therefore,
many of the hostile schemes of the enemy were checked or balked this year … due
credit for this must be given to … the strikers who resisted aggression, set
their comrades on the watch by raising the alarm. …
“I ask you to bear
it in mind, to hold it in grateful memory, that American labor in general has
been benefited by the action of the brave strikers of Homestead, Buffalo, New
Orleans, who took the field in its defense and fell while battling for a few of
the items of its rights.”
It’s a point well
worth remembering today, as we again face an uphill battle for our rights.
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