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Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America

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This book is a fine contribution to labor history, making heavy use of primary sources.

The author opens with discussion of participation in strike-breaking in the early 20th century by male college students. The latter often viewed strike-breaking as an exhilaratingly masculine activity.

Then he deals with urban streetcar strikes in the early 20th century. These strikes turned major cities into war zones as armed strikebreakers, hired from professional union busting firms, attempted to operate the streetcars. Strikebreakers shot 4 strikers or strike sympathizers dead in Indianapolis in 1913. 30 people were killed and 1000 injured in the San Francisco streetcar strike of 1907. Streetcar companies were very unpopular in urban areas and streetcar strikes could often count on the support of the working class in the cities they struck. Strikers and their supporters engaged in extensive efforts to sabotage streetcars operated by strikebreakers, including sometimes making use of explosives. Streetcars operated by strikebreakers often were fired at from surrounding buildings and alleys. In some instance police were sympathetic to the strikers and were lax in protecting strikebreakers.

The author moves on to discuss African Americans and strike-breaking. African Americans were mostly excluded from all but the most menial labor and white dominated labor unions generally tried to keep it that way. Black Americans who tried to rise above their subordinate position were not uncommonly targeted for violence by white racist mobs. African Americans had little reason not to become strikebreakers. Strikebreaking was an activity that black men seized on because it was a way to express their own masculinity in a society that denigrated it. Anti-union metropolitan newspapers, usually not friendly to blacks, praised the courage of the black strike-breakers. Particularly fierce racially charged street battles involving white strikers and black strikebreakers took place in Chicago in 1904 and 1905

Next is a discussion of mine workers and strikebreaking. The author shows how miners in places like the upper Michigan peninsula, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Colorado invariably described their predicament in the same way. They complained of living in towns where the land, housing and businesses were all owned by the mine company. They complained of having to pay for their goods at exorbitant prices in scrip at company owned stores. A US labor department investigator described the mining communities of the upper Michigan peninsula in 1914 as feudal entities. A New York Daily News reporter described mining families in a Pennsylvania town in 1928 as living in miserable conditions, fearful of the iron & coal police, a force that was nominally overseen by the state of Pennsylvania but effectively controlled by the mining companies. In 1931, Pennsylvania Republican governor Gifford Pinchot ordered the mining companies to disband the notoriously anti-union iron and coal force, declaring that it terrorized mine workers and their families. The miners complained of a long list of incidents where company security agents forced their women folk to engage in sexual acts or committed sexual harassment against women. In West Virginia mine company towns, the de facto town police, from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, engaged in espionage against workers and were always ready to deliver a beating to a union organizer who tried to enter the town. After a tent colony of miners who had been evicted from their company owned housing was attacked during the night by mine company forces, killing one person, the miners responded by launching an attack on a Baldwin Felts encampment, starting a gunfight that killed 16 people. In Ludlow Colorado in 1914 Colorado national guardsmen emptied their guns into a colony of striking miners, then returned later in the day and set the colony afire while looting the miner's possession. Around 23 miners were killed during this event. The commander of the National Guard battalion that carried out the Ludlow massacre, Karl Linderfeldt, expressed profound contempt for the striking miners because they were primarily of southern and eastern European descent. Linderfeldt had struck the skull of a strike leader with the butt of his rifle and then his subordinates fired three shots into the striker as he lay on the ground.

The next chapter deals with the secret police system that Harry Bennett set up in the Ford Motor Company. Norwood notes that, by the early 20's, Henry Ford largely abandoned the benefits system he established for his workers in the 1910's. In the 1920's Ford began to rely on fear as a primary motivator for its workers. Henry Ford established Harry Bennett as his right hand man. He appreciated the fact that Bennett associated extensively with underworld figures because such connections could help Bennett foil plots to kidnap Ford's grandchildren. Bennett staffed the Ford Service Department (security force) with violent ex-convicts and former boxers and wrestlers. Ford security men engaged in kidnapping and beatings. One CIO organizer lost several teeth and was blinded in one eye by Ford's thugs. Another had his skull pistol whipped and assaulted with hammers, breaking his skull. Then, of course, there was the battle of the Overpass in May 1937 when Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen were savagely beaten and women CIO activists were punched and kicked in the stomach.

Norwood deals with other anti-union violence prevalent in the auto industry. He discusses the terrorist activities of the Black Legion and how it was eventually put out of business. He discusses General Motor's efforts to foment violence against unionists in Anderson Indiana.

The epilogue is very fascinating. He discusses how physical violence against union organizers, outside of the southern states, largely disappeared in the post-World War II period. Employers favored psychological manipulation over violence in compelling their workforces to reject unionization. With the coming of the Reagan years, the use of physical force to crush unions became somewhat more prevalent. Union busting consultants became increasingly popular with business leaders in the 1970's. Soon union-busting had become so respectable, Norwood observes, that prominent universities sponsored seminars given by consultants advising businesses how to avoid unions.