1837: The Murder of Elijah Lovejoy

by Chris Mahin

His killing by racists shocked the conscience of America – and led to a nationwide outpouring of indignation, just as the murder of George Floyd did many years later. His murder constituted a brutal attack on freedom of the press – long before a president denounced “fake news” and cheered on physical assaults against journalists. This year, as the United States grapples with its long history of racial oppression and the ongoing efforts to muzzle the media, it’s important to honour the memory of 19th century anti-slavery journalist Elijah Lovejoy, killed 183 years ago.
    At about three o’clock in the morning on November 7th  1837, the steamboat Missouri Fulton unloaded a printing press it was delivering to the Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois. The printing press was brought into a warehouse owned by a businessman sympathetic to the fight against slavery. That printing press was supposed to produce the Alton Observer, an anti-slavery newspaper edited by Elijah Lovejoy, a 34-year-old Presbyterian minister. Soon, a drunken mob of 200 people began throwing stones. When attempts were made to set the warehouse’s roof on fire, Lovejoy emerged from inside the building in an effort to stop the burning. Five shots rang out, killing him.
    The mob broke apart the printing press and threw the pieces into the Mississippi river. It was not the first time that one of Lovejoy’s presses had been destroyed. Lovejoy began his journalistic career in St Louis in the mid-1830s. There, his printing press had been demolished and his home burglarised because of his anti-slavery editorials. In May 1836, Lovejoy was forced to flee St Louis. He moved his family across the Mississippi river to the town of Alton in the free state of Illinois. There, he continued to editorialise against slavery. Pro-slavery mobs in Alton destroyed his presses several times. Each time, Lovejoy obtained a new printing press and continued to speak out against slavery.
    The death of Lovejoy set off a chain of events which transformed America. Public meetings of protest were held throughout the North and Midwest. Former President John Quincy Adams described Lovejoy as America’s first martyr to freedom of the press and the freedom of the slave. Abraham Lincoln denounced the killing. The great orator Wendell Phillips launched his life-long campaign against slavery and injustice with a heartfelt speech in Boston’s Faneuil Hall condemning Lovejoy’s murder. At a meeting in Ohio, John Brown stood up, raised his hand – as if swearing an oath – and pledged to dedicate the rest of his life to the fight against slavery.
    The horrific murder of Lovejoy helped people understand that slavery was wrong and that it not only destroyed the freedom of the enslaved, but also endangered the freedom of the people of the North and West as well.
     Like the young activists protesting in the streets today, the abolitionists of the 19th century felt an obligation to speak out against the most horrific wrongs of their generation. In Lovejoy’s time, the 10,000 families that controlled the largest Southern plantations (and owned most of the slaves in the United States) completely dominated the political life of the country. That handful of people, a tiny percentage of the 30 million human beings then residing in the United States, were prepared to do anything necessary to maintain their political control. (They certainly showed that by killing Lovejoy.) Today, one per cent of the population of the United States controls the vast majority of the wealth and dominates the political life of the country.
    Elijah Lovejoy was forced to flee the city of St Louis in May 1836. The Dred Scott case which ended with a vicious, racist US Supreme Court decision denying the humanity of African Americans was first filed in St Louis in April 1846. In November 2020, Cori Bush, an African American nurse active in the fight against police brutality, was elected to the US House of Representatives — representing St Louis. The spirit of Elijah Lovejoy and Dred Scott lives on in all those who continue the struggle for justice today and who persevere in the fight to end the domination of this country by the wealthy one per cent.

US history: The Great Textile Strike of 1934

By Chris Mahin

In a Northern state, the governor declared martial law after striking workers armed with rocks, flower pots, and broken headstones from a nearby cemetery battled troops armed with machine guns. In a Southern state, the governor declared martial law and then ordered the National Guard to arrest all picketers in the state, holding them in a former First World War prisoner of war camp for trial by a military tribunal.

September marks the anniversary of the Great Textile Strike of 1934, the largest work stoppage in the history of the USA at the time it took place. Although this nationwide walk-out was defeated, it ultimately helped pave the way for some of the most important laws enacted during US President Franklin D Roosevelt’s administration.

The textile strike of 1934 stretched from New England to the Southeast. It involved more than 400,000 workers. Whilst it included workers in the worsted mills of Massachusetts and the silk mills of the Mid-Atlantic region, the strike’s centre of gravity was located in the cotton mills of the Southeast.

The textile industry had started moving South in the 1880s. By 1933, Southern mills produced more than 70 per cent of the cotton and woollen textiles of the USA. These mills were more modern than those of the Northeast. The owners of these mills relied on the South’s large pool of dispossessed farmers willing to work for 40 per cent less than Northern workers.

The Great Strike of 1934 was the culmination of processes that had been at work for many years. The demand for cotton goods declined sharply after the First World War ended, leading to a crisis of overproduction. The owners attempted to resolve this crisis by squeezing as much work as they could out of each worker. This procedure was known as the ‘stretch-out system’. The ‘stretch-out’ involved speeding up production by increasing the number of looms assigned to each factory worker, limiting break times, paying workers by the piece and increasing the number of supervisors (who pushed the workers incessantly).

The ‘stretch-out’ system sparked hundreds of strikes throughout the Southeast. It led to more than 80 strikes in 1929 in South Carolina alone. Almost all of these strikes were spontaneous walk-outs, without any formal leadership. The year 1929 also saw the massive strikes that began in Gastonia, North Carolina and Elizabethton, Tennessee. Both were violently suppressed by local police officers and vigilantes.

The stock market crash of October 1929 ushered in the Great Depression. This had momentous consequences. The Depression bankrupted some manufacturers. Those who survived laid off many workers and increased the amount and pace of work for their remaining employees even further.

In response, textile workers all over the East Coast engaged in hundreds of isolated strikes, despite the fact that thousands of unemployed workers were willing – even eager – to take the strikers’ places.

The victory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 US presidential election seemed to present an opportunity for labour. In June 1933, a Roosevelt-supported measure, the National Industrial Recovery Act, was passed by the US Congress. This measure called for “co-operation” between business, labour and the government, and established “codes of conduct” for businesses. It created the National Recovery Administration (NRA).

Despite all the rhetoric surrounding its formation, the NRA soon proved itself to be toothless. The National Industrial Recovery Act did, however, contain a provision that seemed to legitimise unions. Even this ambiguous language – which only implied the possibility of a right to join a union – was inspiring to many desperate industrial workers. After the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the main union representing textile workers – the United Textile Workers of America (UTWA) – dramatically increased its membership. The union had at most 15,000 members in February 1933; by June 1934, the UTWA contained 250,000 members, half of them cotton mill workers.

The National Recovery Administration issued a code for the cotton industry that regulated workers’ hours and established a minimum wage. It also set up a committee to study the problem of workloads. The employers responded to the new minimum wage by speeding up the work. When the labour board decreed a 40-hour work week, the mill owners simply changed the rules to require that the same amount of work be done in those 40 hours as had been done in the previous 50–60 hour week.

By August 1934, textile workers had filed 4,000 complaints to the labour board protesting “code chiselling” by their employers. The board found in favour of only one worker.

Tensions in the mills mounted, as union supporters lost their jobs and found themselves blacklisted. In May 1934, the mill owners reduced the cotton mill employees’ hours still further without raising their hourly rate. (This was done with the blessing of the NRA.)

The UTWA called a special convention in New York City on 13^th August 1934 and drew up a list of demands for the industry as a whole. These included: a 30-hour week; minimum wages from $13 to $30 per week; elimination of the ‘stretch-out’; union recognition; and reinstatement of workers fired for union activities.

The delegates – especially those from the South – voted overwhelmingly to strike the cotton mills on 1^st September 1934 if these demands were not met – and to bring out the woollen, silk and rayon workers at a date to be set later.

After the employers refused to even meet with the union, the strike swept through the Southern cotton mills. Within a week, more than 400,000 textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the textile industry was shut down. Within days, governors from Maine to Georgia were calling out the National Guard.

The strikers displayed great determination. At the Victor Mill in Greer, South Carolina, the union staged a brief sit-down strike on the company’s railroad siding, preventing the mill from unloading coal at its own boilers. At one point in the 22-day conflict, about half of the textile workers in North and South Carolina and about three-quarters of those in Georgia were on strike.

Despite the bravery of the workers however, the strike’s weaknesses soon became apparent. The UTWA had only shallow roots in the South and just a few regular organisers there. In the South, local governments refused to provide any relief assistance to the strikers, and there were few sympathetic churches or other unions willing to help. Although the union had pledged before the walkout to feed the strikers, it was utterly incapable of keeping that promise.

Gradually, workers began to drift back to work. Struck plants began reopening, even if only with skeleton crews. Then, the mediation board that President Roosevelt had appointed in the first week of the strike issued its report. The report equivocated. It called for further study of the problems in the industry and suggested that the president create a new Textile Labor Relations Board. Roosevelt quickly announced his support for the report. He urged the workers to return to the mills and the manufacturers to accept the commission’s recommendations.

The UTWA responded by declaring that the strike had been won and by organising a number of parades to celebrate the end of the strike. Despite this bravado, the strike was a stunning defeat for the union, especially in the South. The union did not force the mill owners to recognise it. The UTWA did not obtain any of its economic demands. Employers in the South refused to reinstate strikers; thousands of workers never returned to work in the mills.

The bitter memory of blacklisting and defeat soured many Southern textile workers on unions for decades. It would take more than 40 years for unions to win major organising drives in the South.

Although the 1934 textile strike ended in defeat, that strike and a series of other strikes in 1934 by truckers, rubber workers and dock workers helped to pave the way for major changes in the way labour and the employers dealt with one another. A section of the capitalist class of the USA eventually realised that its interests would be better served if there was class peace rather than outright industrial warfare on the factory floors of the USA.

In 1935, the US Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This law made unions legal in the USA and created the modern grievance and arbitration procedure. The passage of the NLRA marked the beginning of a social contract, an unspoken agreement between labour and the employers of the USA. That agreement said that if workers worked hard and played by the rules, they could have an opportunity to obtain a good life – at least some workers in the largest and most important industries could.

That social contract prevailed for several decades but today it is being destroyed. The textile factories that began moving to the South in the 1880s have now largely left the USA entirely. De-industrialisation and the rise of electronics are creating a poverty greater than that which inspired the 1934 textile strike. In this environment, we need new tactics, a new spirit and new forms of organisation. Without romanticising what happened in the 1934 textile strike or covering up the mistakes made, we should learn from the fighting spirit of the Great Textile Strike of 1934. We need that spirit again as we face the challenges of today.

The “Molly Maguires” labour war in coal country

By Chris Mahin

As they mounted the scaffold together, the two miners joined hands. The older man said to the younger one: “Let’s die like men.” Then the trapdoor was pulled from under their feet, and two bodies dangled in the air.

            “The degree of nerve of both men … was extraordinary,” a newspaper reported. The gallows were cleared. Four more leaders of the miners’ struggle were executed in rapid succession. On the same day, on another Pennsylvania scaffold, four other miners were hanged.

            Ten union leaders were executed in eastern Pennsylvania on 21^st June 1877. These men were accused of committing various murders, and of belonging to a secret, violent, conspiratorial organization -- the ‘Molly Maguires’. During their time, these men were denounced by the powerful as “terrorists.” Today, most historians agree that they were the first martyrs in the fight to build industrial unions in the United States, and that, in fact, no such organisation as the Molly Maguires ever existed.

            The story of how these men came to be framed and executed has much to teach us about the nature of the justice system in the United States, the lengths to which capital will go to thwart workers’ fight for a better life, and the role that immigrant workers play in the labour movement.

            During the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, some 20,000 Irish workers made their way to Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Like millions of workers before and since, they came to the United States fleeing hunger and political persecution in their native land. And like millions of others before and since, they found that they would have to fight here against injustice just as they fought in their birthplace.

            Hard coal was first discovered in Pennsylvania by Abijah Smith in the first decade of the 19^th  century. At the beginning of the mining industry, there were no provisions for safety or proper ventilation within the pits. Mine inspectors were unheard of. (Until 1870, mine owners were not even required to build second exits in mines.) Often, miners ended up owing so much to the company stores that they did not receive any wages at all.

            Miners crawled underground in mud and water, breathing coal dust and smoke. If they were not blasted to death or maimed on the job, they emerged from beneath the ground and returned to homes unfit for human beings to live in. Meanwhile, the mine owners and the investors in coal companies were making huge profits.

            After the American Civil War, industry expanded rapidly, the demand for coal grew, and the conditions of miners worsened. Naturally, the workers fought back.

In 1864, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Society of Carbon County, Pennsylvania was formed, and in 1868, the local societies of the southern district were united in the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) of Schuylkill County.

            Many of the leaders of the miners during this time were English, Welsh, and Irish immigrants who had taken part in the labour movement in the British Empire and the fight against the injustices of the British crown.

            In addition to the WBA, which included miners of all nationalities, the Irish miners had their own semi-secret organization, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). The AOH had been founded in Ireland, where it was part of the fight of Irish peasants against English landlords. In Ireland, the AOH had no choice but to be a strictly secret society.

            All these economic and social factors gave the miners’ struggle a particularly bitter quality. In 1868, nearly 20,000 anthracite miners went out on strike for the eight-hour day. They stayed on strike for four months.  In 1871, there was another strike. Then, in 1875, came what has gone down in history as ‘The Long Strike’.

 Even before the Long Strike was defeated, the coal operators had made up their minds to crush the miners’ union. In the first phase of this campaign, they used what has since become a time-honoured tactic. They moved to isolate the workers’ leaders – by accusing them of being thugs, criminals, communists, and terrorists. In particular, the coal operators charged the leaders of the miners’union -- many of whom were Irish immigrants or of Irish descent – with being part of a secret criminal gang –the Molly Maguires.

            The Pittsburgh Gazette of 9^th May 1876 summed up the propaganda stance of the owners: “The Molly Maguires represented the spirit of French Communism and enforced their views by secret murders. The principle involved was simply that of permitting them to dictate the operations of labour.Their men were to be employed, their prices admitted and their directions obeyed. …

            “The absolute extinction of the spirit of lawlessness and murder is essential … and the full disclosure and punishment of the band under consideration is an absolute necessity.”

             The effects of this propaganda campaign were described well by a reporter for the Irish World in its 1^st June 1876 edition. Writing from the coal country, the correspondent pointed out that the mine owners had created such a hue and cry about “terrorism” that they obviously wanted “to make Molly Maguirism such a frightful bugaboo that no workingman will henceforth dare to protest against any act of the boss, however arbitrary and unusual, lest the awful charge should be hurled at him: ‘You are a Molly!’ ”

            At the same time that the coal operators attacked the miners with propaganda, they also attacked them with a new method of subversion: the labour spy. Two years before the Long Strike, a leading representative of the coal operators contacted Alan Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and asked for his help in destroying the miners’ union. For a starting fee of $100,000, Pinkerton obliged by arranging for one of his agents – a 29-year-old native of Ireland named James McParlan –  to infiltrate the AOH.

            When McParlan was unable to get incriminating information on the leaders of the miners’ union, he resorted to making things up. At a series of trials, he testified that various leaders of the miners’ union had freely confessed to him that they had committed various murders. His testimony was corroborated by various prisoners at several of the county’s jails – men even less trustworthy than McParlan.

            One of the men who confirmed McParlan’s testimony was a figure named ‘Kelly the Bum’, an individual who cheerfully admitted that he would “squeal on Jesus Christ” to get out of prison. Another was a shady character named Jimmy Kerrigan. Kerrigan’s own wife testified in court that Kerrigan had killed a policeman, the very policeman that Kerrigan accused mine union leaders of murdering!

The trials of the miners were marked by serious violations of legal procedure. In one case, a man was tried a second time for a murder for which he had been previously tried and acquitted. Despite all this, ten labour leaders went to their deaths in 1877.

            The list of the executed includes Tom Munley, who had fled Ireland in 1864 at the age of 19 after fighting for his homeland’s freedom; Hugh McGeehan, a young Irish miner who had been blacklisted for his activities during the Long Strike of 1875; Mike Doyle; James Carroll, who was born in the United States of Irish miner parents; Thomas Duffy; James Boyle, an American who for five years before his arrest had been employed at the No. 5 colliery in the Panther Creek Valley; Andrew Campbell;  Edward Kelly; “Yellow Jack” Donahue; and James Roarity, who had come to the United States from Ireland in 1869.

            These men died with their heads held up. Huge crowds of silent miners surrounded the two jail yards where they were executed.

            The struggle waged by the Pennsylvania coal miners of the 1870s should not be forgotten. It was in that struggle that labour’s enemies developed some of their worst methods, particularly fear-mongering, wholesale slander, and the industrial spy system. Just as capital continues to use the methods it introduced in the ‘Molly Maguire’ era, so labour should learn the lessons of what happened then.

            The era of the ‘Molly Maguires’ labour war vividly demonstrates that the immigrant workers have always been part of the labour movement, and often produce the first leaders of the labour movement. That era shows that the wealthy of this country are willing to use provocateurs to destroy the movement for a better life. Today, defending the working class means defending the immigrant worker and opposing all attacks on civil liberties. It means moving decisively to prevent the isolation of our leaders when they are under attack. If we take those lessons to heart, we will pay homage to those who died so bravely on the gallows in eastern Pennsylvania in June 1877.