2. "Fight to the Death"

The victory for working people and for democracy in 1935 sent a chill through the business community. The National Association of Manufacturers warned in 1938 of the "hazard facing industrialists" in "the newly realized political power of the masses"; "Unless their thinking is directed we are definitely headed for adversity." A counteroffensive was quickly launched, including the traditional recourse to murderous state violence. Recognizing that more would be needed, corporate America turned to "scientific methods of strike-breaking," "human relations," huge PR campaigns to mobilize communities against "outsiders" preaching "communism and anarchy" and seeking to destroy our communities, and so on. These devices, building upon corporate projects of earlier years, were put on hold during the war, but revived immediately after, as legislation and propaganda chipped away at labor's gains, with no little help from the union leadership, leading finally to the situation now prevailing.¹⁴

The shock of the labor victories of the New Deal period was particularly intense because of the prevailing assumption in the business community that labor organizing and popular democracy had been buried forever. The first warning was sounded in 1932, when the Norris-LaGuardia Act exempted unions from antitrust prosecution, granting labor rights that it had received in England sixty years earlier. The Wagner Act was entirely unacceptable, and has by now been effectively reversed by the business-state-media complex.

In the late 19th century, American workers made progress despite the extremely hostile climate. In the steel industry, the heart of the developing economy, union organization reached roughly the level of Britain in the 1880s. That was soon to change. A state-business offensive destroyed the unions with considerable violence, in other industries as well. In the business euphoria of the 1920s, it was assumed that the beast had been slain.

American labor history is unusually violent, considerably more so than in other industrial societies. Noting that there is no serious study, Patricia Sexton reports an estimate of 700 strikers killed and thousands injured from 1877 to 1968, a figure that may "grossly understate the total casualties"; in comparison, one British striker was killed since 1911.¹⁵

A major blow against working people was struck in 1892, when Andrew Carnegie destroyed the 60,000 member Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) by hiring scabs -- yet another anniversary that might have been commemorated in 1992, when the UAW was laid low by the very same methods, revived after a sixty-year lapse. The leading social historian Herbert Gutman describes 1892 as "the really critical year" that "shaped and reshaped the consciousness of working-class leaders and radicals, of trade unionists." The use of state power for corporate goals at that time "was staggering," and led to "a growing awareness among workers that the state had become more and more inaccessible to them and especially to their political and economic needs and demands." It was to remain so until the Great Depression.

The 1892 confrontation at Homestead, commonly called "the Homestead strike," was actually a lockout by Carnegie and his manager on the scene, the thuggish Henry Clay Frick; Carnegie chose to vacation in Scotland, dedicating libraries he had donated. On July 1 the newly-formed Carnegie Steel Corporation announced that "No trade union will ever be recognized at the Homestead Steel Works hereafter." The locked-out workers could reapply individually, nothing more. It was to be "a Finish Fight against Organized Labor," the Pittsburgh press proclaimed, a fight "to the death between the Carnegie Steel Company, limited, with its $25,000,000 capital, and the workmen of Homestead," the New York Times reported.

Carnegie and Frick overcame the workers of Homestead by force, first sending Pinkerton guards, then the Pennsylvania National Guard when the Pinkertons were defeated and expelled by the local population. "The lockout crushed the largest trade union in America, the AAISW, and it wrecked the lives of its most devoted members," Paul Krause writes in his comprehensive history. Unionism was not revived in Homestead for 45 years. The impact was far broader.

Destruction of unions was only one aspect of the general project of disciplining labor. Workers were to be deskilled, turned into pliable tools under the control of "scientific management." Management was particularly incensed that "the men ran the mill and the foreman had little authority" in Homestead, one official later said. As discussed earlier, it has been plausibly argued that the current malaise of US industry can be traced in part to the success of the project of making working people "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be," in defiance of Adam Smith's warning that government must "take pains to prevent" this fate for the "labouring poor" as the "invisible hand" does its grim work (see pp. 18, 103). On the contrary, business called upon state power to accelerate the process. Elimination of the mechanisms "to consult our neighbor" is a companion process in the taming of the herd.

Homestead was a particularly tempting target because workers there were "thoroughly organized," and in control of local political life as well. Homestead held firm through the 1880s while a few miles away, in Pittsburgh, labor suffered severe defeats. Its multi-ethnic work force demanded their "rights as freeborn American citizens" in what Krause describes as "a workers' version of a modern American Republic," in which workers would have freedom and dignity. Homestead was "the nation's preeminent labor town," Krause writes, and Carnegie's next target in his ongoing campaign to destroy the right to organize.¹⁶

¹⁴ See Alex Carey, "Managing Public Opinion: The Corporate Offensive," ms., U. of New South Wales, 1986; Milton, Moody, op. cit., Sexton, War. Also Ginger and Christiano, Cold War.

¹⁵ Sexton, War, 76, 55.

¹⁶ Demarest, "River", 44, 55, 216. Krause, Battle, 287, 13, 294, 205ff. 152, 178, 253, 486 (quoting Gutman interview).