The first of many strikes was the Seattle General Strike in 1919, just three months after the end of World War 1. This began after the shipyard workers went on strike, and two weeks later the thousands of the working population joined them as well. This large-scale strike crippled the city, but was quickly ended as the numerous sub-factions could not work together and the public image of the strikers was becoming negative.
Another massive strike was the Great Steel Strike of 1919, which happened in September of that year. This saw over 350,000 workers nationwide participate in the strike. This was not met with too much success, as the employers played on the many factors already dividing the nation. Employers manipulated the race tensions and told native workers the strike was merely an immigrant riot and told the immigrant strikers that it was just a sham created by the Native workers to sell them out. Employers then used racial divides, and one factory company was reported to say,"We want you to stir up as much bad feeling as you possibly can between the Serbians and the Italians. Spread data among the Serbians that the Italians are going back to work... Urge them to go back to work or the Italians will get their jobs". This was used in order to try and lessen the effects of the strikes.
Another major contributing cause to the failure of the strikes all over the nation was the overwhelming patriotism and fear of communism. While workers used to have the public support the strikes after world war one were immediately coupled with communism and strikers were labeled Bolsheviks. This exacerbated the already rampant fears of radicals and communists all over the nation and was a major contributing factor to the hysteria surrounding the time.
http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Great_Steel_Strike_of_1919
https://libcom.org/history/us-national-steel-strike-1919-jeremy-brecher
https://www.dvusd.org/cms/lib/AZ01901092/Centricity/Domain/4914/S5G24DAD%20697-698.pdf
Good job on the post Alan. I liked how you tied the workers strikes in the early 20th century to growing racial divides and communist hysteria. I found it particularly interesting how employers would try to pit workers against each other, resulting in an overall ineffectiveness of collaboration amongst workers such as strikes. Working conditions were very terrible during this time, and workers could not effectively gain public support to help them get better working conditions. People eventually realized this, and laws protecting workers were implemented.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great informative post about the working strikes that took place during this timeframe. In the piece you talked about two major strike, the Seattle Strike and the Great Steel Strike. There were other strikes such as the Boston Police Strike and the Coal Miner's Strike. The Boston Police Strike happened on September 9th of 1929 on the streets of Boston, protesting the low wages and lack of opportunities to increase the salary. Calvin Coolidge, back when he was the governor of Massachusetts, was avidly against the strikers, considering himself anti-anarchist and stating that nobody has the right to strike on public safety.
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