New Orleans, November 1892

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 24^th 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 8^th 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 10^th 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 19^th 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.

The First National Hunger March confronts the US Congress

By Chris Mahin

They travelled in automobiles so dilapidated they were nicknamed “tin lizzies.” They had only gunny sacks and blankets to protect them from the extreme cold. There were 1,670 of them but each was a delegate representing many others. They had come to confront the US Congress, to insist that it give aid, not charity, to the unemployed.

December marks the anniversary of the First National Hunger March, which arrived in Washington, DC on 6^th December 1931, and marched to the US Capitol and the White House the next day.

When the Great Depression began, there was no such thing as unemployment compensation or welfare in the USA. What little help the poor received, they obtained from private charities, mainly religious ones. Employers took advantage of workers’ desperation to slash wages – sometimes as much as 10–20 per cent. A wave of evictions took place.

The call for the march demanded:

(1)            unemployment insurance;

(2)            the seven-hour workday with no cut in pay;

(3)            a federal work programme paying union wages;

(4)            an end to racial discrimination, and an end to deportations of immigrant workers;

(5)            support for the demands of the veterans and poor farmers; and

(6)            that all funds being built up for making war be used instead to help the unemployed – and be administered by the Unemployed Councils.

The National Hunger March was carefully organised. The first step was a series of actions at the state level. In April 1931, five columns of unemployed marchers started out from different points in Ohio. They met in Columbus. Despite a heavy rain, 3,000 people came out to greet them. During the last week in May, four columns of marchers started out from different parts of Michigan. As they marched, large gatherings of workers greeted the contingents in Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Pontiac, Wayland, and Detroit. Some 15,000 people were present when the columns met in Lansing, the state capital. These protests were followed by hunger marches in at least 40 other cities.

Whereas the state-level marches were meticulously organised, the national march to Washington was planned with military precision. The caravan was not a mass procession of the jobless; it was strictly limited in size.

Here is how historian Franklin Folsom described the huge logistical challenge facing the march’s organisers: “Plans called for the formation of four separate columns, all of which would meet in Washington on 6^th December to be on hand for the opening of Congress the next day. On 1^st December, Column One was to leave Boston and Column Two would leave Buffalo. On 30^th November, Column Three would leave Chicago and Column Four would leave St Louis. Delegates from the West Coast would leave cities there on 23^rd November and would join columns in either Chicago or St Louis. …

“It was no simple matter to get 1,670 delegates transported, fed, clothed and sheltered – all on a strict schedule. Each delegate wore an armband reading ‘National Hunger March, December 7 1931.’ Each truck, which typically carried 10 delegates, elected a captain, and each column of trucks elected a guiding committee and a leader. In every truck there was a map telling exactly the route to be followed, and with each column went a scout car, sometimes pushing ahead to look for difficulties and sometimes following behind to watch for breakdowns. Each column also had a medical aid squad and a mechanic.”

En route, the National Hunger March had to deal with local authorities who were often very hostile and had to respond to a media campaign designed to discredit the march. In Hammond, Indiana, the police tried to stop a rally called to support the march, but the crowd was so large and militant that the police gave up. The {New York Times} claimed that the marchers would be “furnished with rifles.” This was completely untrue and even the Secret Service felt compelled to dispute the claim.

When the marchers entered Washington, there were as many cops lining the streets as there were marchers. Secretary of War Patrick J Hurley had ordered all soldiers at nearby Fort Myer to be ready for active service. Two companies of Marines had been called up. Nearly 1,000 additional Marines were brought from Virginia to the Marine barracks in Washington. Four hundred police officers were also brought in from Eastern cities to bolster the Washington, DC police force.

On the morning of 7^th December, the marchers met at John Marshall Place. On their picket signs were slogans such as: "We demand unemployment insurance equal to full wages"; "Down with charity slop; we demand cash relief"; "Milk for our children"; "We American workers refuse to starve"; "Not a cent for war – All funds for the unemployed."

At John Marshall Place, Washington's commissioner of police, Pelham Glassford, sped around on a bicycle, dressed in civilian clothes and smoking a long-stemmed pipe. He had deliberately laid out the longest routes for the marchers to march, to tire them out.

Rows of policemen -– about 1,000 officers in all – stood along the line of the march. More than 400 additional police officers were stationed at the Capitol. There, the marchers were forced to move into a roped-off area where they were a wide distance from the thousands of people who had come to watch them. Machine guns were pointed at the marchers. The police officers present were armed with sawed-off shotguns and tear-gas guns. (One journalist reported that there were also hand grenade launchers.) An ambulance stood by.

Vice President Charles Curtis had decreed that the marchers could not enter the Capitol grounds with signs that criticised the president or Congress or that were offensive. But since the authorities had not issued any regulations about music, the marchers' band struck up the battle song of the world's working class, The Internationale. On the steps of the US Capitol, the anthem's words rang out:

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

     Arise, ye wretched of the earth,

For justice thunders condemnation,

     A better world's in birth.

The march's organisers had wanted to send committees of delegates on to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate to present their demands, but marchers were not admitted to either the Republican-controlled Senate or the Democratic House. (In fact, on the Senate side of the Capitol, the delegates had to present their demands to the sergeant at arms whilst they were standing at a basement door.)

From the Capitol, the demonstrators proceeded to the White House. The White House grounds were swarming with police officers. Ambulances and patrol wagons were stationed nearby. President Hoover was inside the White House when the delegates from the Hunger March called but he refused to see the marchers.

Unable to secure meetings with members of Congress, the hunger marchers headed home. At each place along the return route that the caravan stopped, mass meetings were held, with marchers reporting on what had happened when they tried to speak to the president and the members of Congress. Although some newspapers sneeringly described the marchers’ return to their original assembly points as a "retreat," that term was not accurate; the marchers proceeded back to their starting points exactly as planned.

Determined, militant and impressively organised, the National Hunger March of December 1931 re-asserted the right of the American people to go en masse to the capital city to petition for change. It showed unemployed workers that they could organise themselves. It forced Depression-era America to admit that the hunger stalking the land could not be ended simply with charity. It compelled the federal authorities to face the fact that to end the massive poverty in the country, the economy was going to have to be restructured in some way.

Within a year, another Hunger March had taken place. This time, the vice president and the speaker of the House of Representatives had no choice but to meet with marchers. Later, the first Unemployment Insurance Bill was introduced in the US House of Representatives by Congressman Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota's Farmer-Labour Party. Ultimately, the first system of federal Social Security, including a national unemployment compensation law, was enacted early in the New Deal administration of President Franklin D Roosevelt.

The National Hunger March – and the preparatory marches that took place before the main march to Washington occurred – had far-reaching effects. They helped to spur on the fight not only of unemployed workers but of employed workers as well. A state-level hunger march that took place in Pennsylvania before the national march helped inspire 40,000 miners in Pennsylvania to go on strike. Local hunger marches in Ohio stimulated efforts to organise steel workers into a union.

The Hunger March of 1931 helped pave the way for the establishment of a social contract in the USA. Today, that social contract has been torn to pieces by developments in the economy. But even as different as the world is today from what it was in 1931, there is still much to learn from the First Hunger March. The delegates and captains of that protest understood that nothing would change until people spoke up. They understood that pressure had to be put on Congress (even the part of it controlled by the Democrats). They deliberately timed their protest to coincide with the opening of a session of Congress.

The more news that comes out about Congress, the more timely the demands of the Hunger March of 1931 seem to be. That's especially true of the demand to stop all deportations of immigrant workers and the demand that all the money being set aside for war preparations be used instead to help the unemployed. Clearly, our predecessors in the fight against hunger were on to something!

Rochester: Kent’s other city

By Carole Barclay

the cathedral from the castle wall

Rochester was once overshadowed by Gillingham and Chatham, whose Naval Dockyard, along with the navy base and army garrison, employed thousands during the hey-day of the Royal Navy. The navy left in the 1980s and all three towns are now part of Medway, a unitary authority with powers much like the old ‘county boroughs’ that were abolished in 1972.

Rochester is the oldest of the three towns. The settlement by an ancient crossing place on the River Medway goes back to Celtic days. The Romans built a bridge and a small walled town to guard it in their time, and their defences continued to define the parameters of the medieval town that followed.

Medieval Rochester was dominated by the Norman castle whose keep still looms above the bridge and the medieval cathedral that lies in its shade. The cathedral is the older of these. It was founded in 604 by Ethelbert, king of Kent, the first English Christian ruler, who was converted to Christianity in 597. The king was baptised by Augustine, whose mission to convert the pagan English came directly from the Pope in Rome. Nothing remains of the early church apart from the outline of its walls marked out on the floor and grounds of the mighty Norman edifice that replaced it.

The cathedral was closed during the Civil War by the Puritan parliamentary authorities who abolished the Anglican church and proclaimed the short-lived Republic of England or Commonwealth in 1649. It re-opened when the monarchy was restored in 1660 and it remains the seat of the Bishop of Rochester today.

The building of the Norman cathedral was overseen by Gundulf, a monk from Normandy, who also designed and directed the construction of the nearby castle whose ruins still tower over old Rochester.

The castle survived two epic medieval sieges, but the last battle on its grounds was in 1381 when it was seized and looted by Wat Tyler’s army when they marched on London during the Peasants' Revolt.

There’s plenty to remind us of feudal days in the old town bound by a defensive wall whose strength can still be seen in the north of the city. But this is also the home of one of the Victorian era’s greatest novelists, whose characters have been popularised on screen and TV and whose works are still part of the school curriculum.

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth but his early childhood was spent in Chatham. He later returned to Kent, finally moving to Gads Hill Place, a house originally built for the Mayor of Rochester in 1857.  Dickens features Rochester more than any city apart from London in his works and many of the buildings mentioned can still be seen today. Dickens died in the house in 1870. His last work, which remained unfinished, was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, set in a thinly disguised Rochester called 'Cloisterham'.

There’s plenty to see in Rochester. It’s close to London. There is a good rail service and good road links. But beware the festivals that are held in the old town throughout the year. The city gets swamped with visitors and parking is almost impossible within the vicinity of the major attractions!