The First Red Scare, Part 3

Various strikes, basically

All right, welcome back. Just a reminder, if you haven’t read the first two parts, maybe go back. Not because I don't want you here, I don't know why I would be making anything I didn’t, but because there is so much context that you are not going to have. Even if you are an expert on the first Red Scare, and I don't know what you would be reading this if you were, there's a lot of fun stuff that you probably never learned in your many hours of academic study. Probably about the man who was the worst Postmaster General ever, mostly because he was a horrible human being, not because he was bad at being a postmaster general. Or why a town in California has a bunch of stuff named after a relatively famous Seattle mayor. Or the research I had to do to figure out how to pronounce his name.

But that's not what we're talking about. That's what I talked about previously, and if you haven't learned about that and you for some reason don't want to, or if you read the previous parts, let's get into the First Red Scare.

When I originally wrote my first post, I thought that I would be able to get into the Palmer raids in the second part. And then I learned about the Seattle general strike and I thought that you also needed to know about it because it was a really cool piece of history which I had never learned about in class. I know a lot of people say things online like “Of course you didn't learn about it in history, you were too busy doodling eyes on your paper and staring out the window.” I can say that's definitely untrue, because I have my old notebooks from the only American history class I took right next to you to show you. Also, while I was sitting fairly close to the window, my desk was in fact angled to the front of the classroom. Also, I really liked history, shocker.

I'm not saying this to brag or anything, because saying that you were really good at your high school history class is not at all cool, and in fact, bragging about that would make you actively lamer. I'm saying that because this is history that we don't get taught, not because our teachers were bad or anything - mine was actually really cool, and she taught us about a lot of stuff that I had never heard before and was also the kind of stuff that “you don’t get taught in schools” - but because these little moments just can't make it in. And it's a shame because we seem to be repeating history. So why don't we learn about it, in case anything back then helps. Unfortunately, the Palmer raids happened in November, and we're only up to June right now.

In late June, Palmer appointed William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service and one of the nation’s most noted detectives, as chief of the Radical Division, which would later be Bureau of Investigation, the precursor of the FBI. I know I mentioned them a little before, but they were part of the justice department, which Palmer headed as the Attorney General. I don't know why the Attorney General isn't the Secretary of Justice, but that's what they've chosen to be called and I respect that.

Congress wasn't sitting idly by at this time either. Senator King of Utah, who I mentioned previously as part of the Overman committee and said that I wasn't going to tell you his first name because I didn't care, comes back into the story. I guess I need to tell you his first name, which is William. If you can’t guess by where he was from, he was, in fact, a Mormon, which I only need to tell you because he got reelected in the House of Representatives because his opponent got denied a seat for being a polygamist, a wild fact that I felt like you needed to know. He also studied law, because everyone in the story apparently studied law. The only person that I'm letting slide is Palmer, because he was literally the Attorney General.

Anyway, King had managed to get elected on his own merits to the Senate and proposed a bill that would make transporting a bomb across state lines a felony based on the interstate commerce clause, which is kind of the loop-hole of the Senate. I mean, even with all of the ridiculous things that I've seen which used the interstate clause, this is a little bit of a stretch. I don't think they were going to sell anything, anarchists aren’t big fans of capitalism, and also they were planning to use those bombs. The bill would also make it a capital offense to belong to an organization favoring violent overthrow of the government, which is very far. I think he might have been a little bit worried. Anyway, we wouldn't pass a law like that until like when we started drone striking people at weddings. Also that isn't technically a law

Speaking of people who were a little worried, and with good reason because they had gone after him twice, Palmer, who pointed out that in his estimation, the old Espionage and Sedition Acts didn't apply anymore because they weren't at war. I mean, 50% right on that front, Alex, I'm not going to hold it against you. I did legitimately forget that his first name was Alexander and I had to look it up again, so it just sounds like I'm doing a Jeopardy reference. But if you cast your mind back to the first part, you will remember that the Espionage Act is still in effect and has been used multiple times. Occasionally for capital punishment! Fun!

While he was worrying about that, Congress was passing a law allocating half a million dollars, which is about $9,242,745.66 in modern dollars, to the Justice Department to “carry on an extensive hunt for anarchists, bomb throwers, and enemies of law and order,” to which I have to say are you implying that those are different things? Because the wording definitely implies that they are different things, and I do not think that you meant that.

Kind of a long quote, but I think it explains things pretty well: “While Congress and the Justice Department made these plans to curb the activities of bomb plotters and their kind, the combined police forces of the nation failed once again to trace the origin of a single bomb. As in the case of the May Day bombs, such failure lent credence to the charge that emissaries of organized world bolshevism had planned the explosions. Numerous newspapers such as the New York Times were piqued by the obvious lack of success and asked,

“Has the gift of skill and genius in ferreting out criminals been denied to our present-day detectives?”

To the Liberator, the answer was an easy one.

“We believe that the reason the perpetrators of these extensive and elaborate dynamitings have not been discovered is that some important person does not want to discover them.”

Obviously, this is untrue. There were basically no high level politicians who were socialists. There were two people in the Socialist party of America in the US senate at the time, Victor Berger and Meyer London. Victor Berger was an immigrant from Austria-Hungary, which really made me remember how long ago this happened, because Austria-Hungary doesn't exist anymore and hasn't since the first World War. He went and spoke at the prison Eugene V. Debs was in and helped convince him to be a socialist. Apparently he signed a copy of “Capital” (the Marx one) for Debs, which Debs kept in his personal library and cherished. He got indicted by the Espionage Act, but still got voted back in. He wasn’t allowed to take his seat, which is the least cool reason that anybody was refused their seat in this episode. It's happened twice, and I’m barely three pages in. He won his seat again in 1919, in a special election. Finally his conviction got overturned, and he won his seat back. He would eventually lose and die of injuries sustained in a trolley accident. I get that it’s very sad but dying of a trolley accident is kind of the most old-timey way to go that isn't a disease.

Meyer London was a Russian immigrant who was the only socialist in the house at the point we’re talking about. He was the only one who voted against the resolution to fight Austria-Hungary and voted against the espionage and sedition acts.. He was not technically serving in the house I was talking about, because he got voted out in 1918, but he was elected back in 1920. He was apparently a candidate for a justice of the Supreme Court, because, get this, he also studied law and passed the bar. He represented trade unions, so I'm saying that he did something cool with it. In case you're wondering how he died, he got hit by a car. I really hope that our current socialist politicians are very good at looking both ways when they cross the street, because that is apparently the curse on socialist house members. He was cool about it, and said that the person driving the car who hit him shouldn’t be charged. They used to just give you everything about how people died in obituaries, although I think that saying he “apparently became confused by the traffic” was a bit mean.

The early 1900s were not a good time to be crossing the street, apparently, because all the articles around the end of his obituary were just about different car accidents. Maybe that was just a section that they had. Apparently a Zeppelin Works director was slightly injured in an accident (I'm not saying that the past was better, I'm just saying that it would be entertaining to live in a time where you could pick up the newspaper and see “ Zeppelin Works director slightly hurt in Berlin accident”), two articles about regular car crashes, an article about some people stealing a taxi and going on a joyride which killed someone, and an article about George the 5th and the Queen hitting a cyclist with their car. The cyclist was fine. Reading old newspapers is really entertaining, because the other things on the page are about people hating on the KKK, which is good, discovery of dinosaur fossils in China, a monument at Ypres, and a bunch of Catholic priests in Germany asking people not to vote to take the money of the old ruling families. The article even mentions Hindenburg and still puts the Von in front of his name. It’s also titled “Catholics Attack Reich Referendum” which really shows how that word had changed meaning. The religion section is also very impressive because it features a reverend saying that fundamentalists were afraid instead of using religion when they were anti-evolution, a reverend saying that men actually gossip just as much as women, and a reverend saying that conservatism is a hindrance to religion. How are these people more progressive than people that I know right now? There’s also an article about a missionary talking about how Puerto Rican children have no Santa Claus because the three wise men bring them gifts instead.

Honorable mention to Fiorello La Guardia (born Fiorello Raffaele Enrico La Guardia, because we haven’t had enough Italian names in this post) (yes, the guy that the airport was named after), who was Republican at the time, but would get voted into the house in 1923 as a socialist.

Anyway, this was a page in my notes, meaning I think it might have been the longest digression I went off on. All of this is to say that the Senate was going a little bit over-the-top, and the Liberator is probably the most idiotic paper possible. Who are these high level… oh no, I think I went off on this when they went something antisemitic. Pretend I didn't try to debunk them, please.

What was going on at the time? Red Scare sums it up in a way that I would just have to try to rewrite if I didn't quote it.

“Nevertheless, through misreporting, exaggeration, misinterpretation of fact, and excessive claims and charges, what was a mere theoretical possibility of radical revolution gradually became in the minds of many a horrible reality. In fact, by the conclusion of the June bombings some citizens were prepared to believe almost anything. It was this exaggeration which provided the matrix that held the developing Red Scare together.”

The Red Scare was held together by a lot of things. Most of them were people. Whether it's Attorney General Palmer, telling the Senate they need something else now that they can't use the Espionage and Sedition acts against people, or the press, who were publishing hysterical articles about anything that happened, implying that it was all some national Bolshevik conspiracy behind everything, prominent public figures - Ole Hanson - on speaking tours about how the nation was being taken over, or groups that proclaimed themselves patriotic societies, but were actually headed by businessmen who wanted to push economic conservatism and public property.

“Amply aided in this work by two governmental investigations, these various elements made absolutely no attempt to distinguish among democratic liberalism, evolutionary socialism, and revolutionary communism. Instead, they blindly labeled all persons who did not agree with them “Bolsheviki,” and repeated their charges as often as possible. In that sense, they rapidly mastered the favorite technique of the demagogue or dictator — achieve by repetition and exaggeration what you cannot secure by the truth.”

If that doesn't apply to the things happening right now, I don't know what does. People not being able to tell liberalism from leftism from things they don’t like. People say that everybody who doesn't agree with them is part of the group that they don't like. People repeating things that aren't true to convince others.

Speaking of other things that are unfortunately very similar to what's happening right now, the various patriotic societies. After wars or things that aren't technically wars because we never declared them, there's a wave of patriotism. And when people come back from the wars and everybody slowly goes back to normal, or occasionally “why did we do that?”, there's a certain group of people that want the wartime patriotism to continue.

By 1919, there were three that I'm going to write about. Well, there are more later, but I don't want to mention them right now because they currently exist. The ones I'm talking about are the normal right wing mess of patriotic words. National Security League, the American Defense Society, and the National Civic Federation. All of those names could exist right now as right wing movements advocating for children in factories or building spike pits at the border. But we aren’t talking about right now, because if we start drawing historic parallels to everything that happened, we're going to be here all day and we're literally never going to get to the Palmer Raids, which I keep thinking I'm going to get to, and then I forget that they happened in November 1919, and the first Red Scare only lasted about a year.

Now, what did these organizations do? Mostly they promoted a spirit of patriotism within the country. They also pushed themselves as the defenders of the public against the red radicals. However, would you like to guess where they got most of their money?

“The active support which these patriotic societies received came mainly from other conservative pressure groups rather than from the general public. Specifically, their major contributions came from corporations and businessmen who saw in the patriotic crusade an opportunity to benefit the position of organized capital.”

Why would they do that? That's a joke, I think you know why they would do that. more money. but it wasn't just more money, it was about getting the public back on their side. Remember how I talked about the progressive movements a while ago? Of course you do. I brought up the American Protection League at the time. But now it's time to talk about some other societies. I didn't say patriotic, because they were not patriotic societies. You’ve probably heard of both of them. The first one is the American Legion.

You might not have actually heard of them if you aren’t from a military family or you aren’t into military history. It's a bit hard to actually study their history, because they are very good at putting out their own history, and really don't want to mention the Centralia Massacre. Hey, else happened November 10th-12th? What else happened? It's 3 days, and something very important happened on the 11th.

Because I respect the not-actually-troops-anymore, which is a lie, I will use their official history. At least, the books from the Internet Archive, because that was before they got a PR guy apparently. One is dedicated to a guy’s mom! It was 1923, they didn't know that you had to dedicate it to the troops. If you have any problems with me making fun of the American Legion, this is not the section for you.

After a completely interminable amount of yapping about how soldiers have always existed, I learned about how the legion was formed. A bunch of Americans realized that they didn't have any friends outside of the military, and so they needed to start up a military at home. Not to fight a bunch of wobblies in Washington or anything, just hang out. We have a real male loneliness epidemic, guys will start hanging out with their war buddies instead of getting therapy. All right, hanging out with your buddies may have been a better thing to do than get therapy in 1919, that’s Freudian shit. They met up in a circus in Paris. A fun little story from the official book that the legion put out in 1990, the french orchestra that they hired had a lot of trouble with American patriotic tunes, but when they played Dixie, the crowd joined in the lyrics. That is an American tune from the people who fought America. That's why we name all our bases after the people who loved that song! The 1923 unofficial one mentions how the Legion was the descendent of the UCV in the South. Guess what that stands for. That’s right, a guy from the legion was perfectly willing to mention that they were the descendants of the United Confederate Veterans. No, the Legion isn’t the worst or most racist group we’ll be discussing. They won’t be the only people descended from Confederate veterans either.

Theodore Roosevelt - no, not that one, his son - was the temporary chairman. Blah, blah, blah, I really couldn't care less, they technically were founded officially on May 8th, 1919. The two things that they did were advocate on behalf of veterans and service members and violently oppose anyone left of center. The first issue of their magazine had an article by, you guessed it, Ole Hanson. It was on, you guessed it, Bolshevism. They also had “something from Sergeant Alvin York”, a name I did not think would come up in this, who will probably never show up again, and is only important because I heard about him in a LLBD episode. Do you want to guess who showed up in the second issue of a different magazine they published? Ole Hanson! About his first-hand experiences with labor disruptions! This is how the man afforded an entire town in California.

Their goals were “To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America; to maintain law and order; to foster and perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism.” Everyone - well, the newspapers - loved them. Now did the legion technically tell them to form their own groups and run radicals out of towns? No, they technically said not to do it, but only because they wanted the government to do it instead with jail sentences and deportations.

But now it’s time to get to the thing that I was mentioning. Quite a bit, actually. Like I said, the IWW was very involved in the Washington labor scene. While it wasn’t as involved in the Seattle general strike, it was definitely involved elsewhere, and one of those places was Centralia, Washington. You might have heard of Centralia before, but that might have been in the context of Centralia, Pennsylvania, because there’s been a coal fire burning under it since 1962. Centralia, Washington, is a perfectly liveable town that is not on fire. Unless it is wildfire season, in which case it could totally be on fire, because our world is burning.

Anyway, the year is 1919. It’s Armistice Day, which is November 11th, or Veterans Day now, at least in America. The war ended a year ago, and the American Legion decided that they needed a parade, because there was nothing else to do in Centralia at the time. The IWW had opened up a union hall, after getting evicted a few times. On the day of the parade, the Wobblies heard that the legionnaires were planning on taking a bit of a detour. Well, they had changed their parade route so it went past the union hall.

I think you can guess what the Wobblies were feeling at the time. So some of them came to the hall armed. And when the hall was in fact surrounded, they fought back. When I call this the massacre, it was the Legionnaires killed at first. Now it wasn't all of them doing this, but they certainly all got implicated.

Wesley Everest, an IWW member, ran out the back being chased by a mob. He ended up shooting multiple legionnaires, one of which died. He was dragged to jail, along with a bunch of the other members.

That night, the power went off because someone cut the power. Well, cut, turned off, whichever. Wesley Everest was taken from the jail and I'm sure you can guess what happened next. He was hung, then shot, and then his body was dumped back into jail with the rest of the prisoners. Everyone in charge of finding out what happened shrugged their shoulders. This included the people who were supposed to bury him, meaning that the officials forced prisoners to do it. That's not the only thing that prisoners are forced to do, thanks to that carve out from the 13th amendment.

But what happened to the rest of them? They were charged with murder but you can bet that they got a fair trial. Oops, I mean they didn’t get a fair trial. Who would have guessed. Their sentences were extremely long, and they said that they didn't get to see all the evidence. Eventually, after years, they were released, except for the one that died in prison. I’m sure the people who started the raid or murdered Everest were - just kidding, we all know what happened, or didn't happen, no one was ever charged.

Anyway, that's the American Legion for you. Described as “basically sound in its principles, although on the matter of radicalism it was certainly overzealous” by Robert K Murray! Who didn’t join the legion when given the chance because he wasn’t a joiner. He got in a bit of trouble for that one when the second Red Scare started. We can disagree with how good its principles even were, but we definitely can all agree, including the man from the fifties, on the next group. The actual KKK.

You wouldn’t think of the KKK as an anti-radical organization. They were not. Their guiding goal was “be racist” and I think you can guess how well that fits in with everybody else around here. Am I saying that their main goal wasn’t anti-black racism? No. They loved doing that. When I'm talking about their other beliefs, please don't forget that they were literally founded by a bunch of confederate veterans. But they were also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and anti everybody who was not the specific kind of white that they were. Were they pro anything? The temperance movement! For the previously mentioned reasons. Racism. I’m sure that you know what the KKK is, so I will not give you an in-depth history. but just know that they were one of the groups opposing radicals.

The other things that happened that summer were strikes. The Boston police were upset about their wages and hours. Before we start anything, I need to say two things. One, police unions are bad. Straight up, I support almost every union, unless they are for cops. Everything bad you hear about unions is true about police unions - the idea that they let people who are bad at their jobs continue working, the idea that they will support their members even if they are wrong, not exactly the idea that they're going to take all your money, because that isn't true, they earn you more money, but if it was true for police unions, I wouldn't be mad. Of course, this is so much worse when it's the police, because they kill people. I will link a Teen Vogue article about it. Honestly, even if you know how much police unions suck, I would read the article because it's really good. But we'll just say there's a reason that the IWW doesn't let police unions in.

Secondly, we need to remember that police are useless. I will say nothing else about it because I am sure you have an opinion. But when talking about this, just remember the Seattle general strike. Not even a fistfight in a city of hundreds of thousands of people. But just remember that none of these people need this job, and so I don't want to remind you every line that they could just quit. They could quit, they don’t need to be doing this. I will of course make comments, because you know what I'm like.

If you want to hear a much more fun accounting of the Boston police strike, listen to the Dollop episode. They basically talk about historical events in a very fun way, and they did an episode on this that was very enjoyable. Otherwise, you can keep reading.

The Boston police weren't getting paid enough. Boo hoo, remember that the average salary of a police officer now is around $63,000 a year. The low end is around $44,000. These people aren’t just class traitors for fighting against the interests of the working class, they are all paid well. And we’re not even getting into the police budgets, which just keep rising. But that wasn't the truth in 1919 Boston, because they got paid $1,400 a year maximum, or $25,879.69 max. They had to pay $200 for equipment, which is $3,697.10 in modern money and was not optional. They also had to work 12 hour shifts, which usually meant that they had to sleep in the police houses, which were not great. They were also not paid for this, and the stations were full of various creatures. Apparently, the rats would eat the leather off of police helmets. Again, I really do not care, because this was the 1919 Boston police and I am sure they were doing so many hate crimes. Do I have any citations for it? No, because the only thing that comes up when you search 1919 Boston police is this strike. even if you put controversy in there, it just comes up with the strike. 1919 was not a good time in Boston, apparently, because it started with the molasses flood. I tried very hard to find any documentation of Boston police crimes from 1919, guys, just imagine the horrible things they were doing. I never pretended to be neutral.

But, assuming I was going to be empathetic to them, I could see where they were coming from. Their working conditions were less than ideal, much like the prisons that they were sending people to and still send people to. They wanted to affiliate with the AFL, and the AFL already had 37 police unions there. You know what I feel about the AFL, let’s move on. The Boston fire department was also organized with them, which I support. because fire departments can’t murder people.

Who was going to stop them? It’s time to introduce Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis, who I’m just going to call Curtis, because I have an attachment to a different guy named Edwin, who is from the era, and is also from a TV show. Technically a comic series, but the show and comic versions are different… this isn’t even a history tangent. But Police Commissioner Curtis, who had previously been one of the youngest mayors in Boston history, made a rule that police couldn’t join any non-police organizations, unless they were veteran organizations. Like the American Legion! The police union, which I’ve been calling it even though it was the local police organization, the Boston social club, was a strictly police organization, but when they got affiliated with the AFL, it wasn’t. Now, it sucks that your boss can tell you what to do outside of work, but I don’t feel bad for them. His main argument was that city workers shouldn’t be allowed to strike because the city depends on their labor. Which it does. And most of them should be allowed to strike, because if the city depends on your labor and you aren’t being paid fairly for it, then that sucks and you deserve better. In fact, everyone whose labor the city depends on should be able to strike because everyone deserves to be well treated, but we know my opinions on the necessity of police. He also argued that police would align with workers instead of the capitalists, which is why this guy also sucks and why he’s wrong, because police unions are incredibly strong and they definitely don’t align with the workers.

But on August 15th, the AFl said yes. The police union had done it! Except they didn't. If you're at all familiar with labor history, you know that actually creating your union is like getting across the crevasse on Mount Everest. Sure, you just did something extremely dangerous that a lot of people haven't been able to do, but you aren't at the top yet. This is a good system that we have.

The Central Labor Union of Boston welcomed the police union. They also told Commissioner Curtis that police should be able to unionize. Since this man respected organized labor, he obviously listened to them… no wait, he refused to meet with the leaders of the union. And started trying 19 of them

The police commissioner is not the only person who is in charge of the police, at least in Boston at the time, because most laws are built on a foundation of confusing precedent set down in England in 1650 or whatever. The mayor of Boston, Andrew Peters, also had jurisdiction, and he was a little bit more reasonable. It must have been awkward to have the former and current mayor glaring at each other while you were just trying to get a little bit of money and do horrific human rights abuses. He tried to broker a compromise. This wasn't even anything radical, the idea was that the police union would be their own independent thing that wasn't affiliated with anybody else, but they were still allowed to have a union. He was supported by a lot of people, but he wasn't supported by the governor.

I'm sure you've heard of the governor of Massachusetts at the time. Future 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. I hoped that I could remember which one he was and the internet told me that I was right, so all that time I spent memorizing the presidents was a good thing actually. The slightly more successful Ole Hanson, Coolidge would become the vice president to Warren Gamliel Harding, the man whose middle name you did not know. Warren g Harding was the president after Wilson, which shows you that Coolidge’s rise was astronomical after the events we will discuss. Of course Coolidge is one of our most famous presidents, he… didn't make any laws about trading stocks on margin, which kind of led to the Great Depression, but he wasn’t president at the time so it doesn't need to be his fault. he was our coolidgest president, and thats all you need to know.

Speaking of the proposal, Curtis hated it. He completely ignored it, and proceeded with the trials. And then he tried 19 leaders of the Union on August 26th. He didn't actually sentence them, he gave them suspended sentences which he promised not to enforce… assuming that they stopped leading the Union. The police union members held a vote to decide if they would strike, and strike won. 1134 to 2. I hope for those two’s sakes that the vote was secret, because it would really suck if it wasn't. But I also don't like the police, and those two seem like they would be the worst, so I also don't really feel bad for them. The police was full of former teamsters and longshoremen, both groups who were very willing to strike. Some of the police said that they could go back to their old jobs if they got fired, and they should have. Not being a police officer is always the best choice.

Their stated reason for the union was “to lodge a strong protest against Curtis for the arbitrary manner in which he had acted, to compel the return of the nineteen suspended leaders to the force, and to cause the city administration to recognize the Social Club’s right to affiliate with the AFL.” They decided to strike on September 9th, and Curtis realized that he couldn't stop it. So he needed somebody else to police the city. Now, what kind of horrible people would be scabs for the police? Just imagine these kinds of people in your mind… it’s American Legion members and Harvard students. Most of them were student athletes. And that's why police don't strike that often, because they get everything that they want. If they didn’t then these people would be policing our cities, and there would be bricks through the windows so fast that the Harvard football players wouldn’t have time to get out of their pads.

But other than Curtis, most people weren't actually prepared for the strike to happen. When 1117 of the city’s 1544 members didn't show up on September 9th, most people were completely unprepared. If you're wondering who did show up, it was mostly older members who didn't want to lose their pensions. That night, the city dissolved into chaos. If you're thinking that this is why we need police, just know that the commissioner was perfectly willing to let there be a little bit more chaos than normal. Just to prove to the normal people of the city that these people could not be allowed to unionize.

People threw rocks at streetcars, stole tires off cars, and knocked people's hats off. There was so much illegal gambling in the city, because people love illegal gambling. There was also a lot of looting. Where the citizen volunteers and loyal policemen were trying to enforce the law, they found themselves pelted with mud. Since a bunch of Harvard athletes are not exactly knowledgeable about the many, many laws and didn’t do all the training… 6 months. You need to study for 6 months to be a police officer, meaning I'm sure they know all the laws. but they still hadn't done that required 6 months of training, meaning that they were not comfortable or good at enforcing the law. So the Provost Guard of the Boston Navy Yard was brought in at midnight and stayed until morning to keep the peace. Now don't think that the entire city had turned into a conservative’s nightmare, there were plenty of perfectly nice places where people were able to sleep all night, but there were one or two places where people threw dirt at scab cops.

The newspapers realized that they could use this to sell so many newspapers, referring to the police as “deserters,” “agents of Lenin,” and “bolshevists.” They took a few pictures of destruction, pretended that was what the entire city looked like, and convinced Coolidge to send in 5,000 members of the state guard. This entire situation had become a bit of a political nightmare for everyone involved. Mayor Peters wanted to negotiate with the police, the commissioner and governor Coolidge wanted to break the strike violently, and the people of Boston wanted to play their dice games in the street. One of these groups won the next night, and it was the people of Boston. Businesses were better prepared, meaning some were boarded up and some had armed guards, but there was still theft and gambling.

Now, how many people actually died? and who actually killed them? I think you can guess, assuming that you have listened to this long enough or you just think too hard about it. Rifles and machine guns were turned on crowds in South Boston, leaving two dead. Evidently, bringing weapons out from war and using them on the people is a proud American tradition. A riot broke out and another man died, which is the only information I got, so that’s what you’re getting. By September 11th, a day which is famous for only this, the city was basically under control. 6 more people died, but that's fine. Basically all of them were shot by police, except for one, who was shot by a car parts dealer. I didn't know that was a job that you could have in 1919.

The total claims for the losses in Boston was about $34,000, or $628,506.71 in modern money. Helpfully, I am informed that that is about the cost of a small fire. Now what was the organized labor scene doing about this? Well, the Central Labor Union voted to decide if they would call a general strike, but the Seattle general strike hung over all of their heads, and they decided that maybe they wouldn't. Again, I'm usually in favor of solidarity, but police don't deserve solidarity.

On September 12th, AFL president Samuel Gompers, a man who I really should have brought up earlier, told the strikers to go back to work. Gompers was a fairly conservative man for the labor scene. He was even in favor of the war. But the police listened to him, and went back to work. While they were doing this, Gompers sent a telegram to Curtis and Coolidge to ask them to give the policemen their jobs back. The public was oddly not on the police’s side and said that they would be lucky to just lose their jobs.

Curtis agreed with them. He sent back a telegram saying that the strikers definitely weren't getting their jobs back, and recruited another police force. Because veterans got preferential treatment, that was essentially the entire new police force. On the slightly cooler side, the Garment workers were also unionized, and refused to sew the new police officers uniforms. Since this is not solidarity with police and is in fact anti-police, I think that this is sick and they never should have sewn them uniforms. let them walk around in normal clothes, it would be funny.

The police officers who struck definitely didn't get the job back. I would assume that they went back to the old jobs that they said they could get if they were fired and I completely support any strikes they did at the time. Coolidge became famous, and managed to leverage it into a much more successful political career than Ole Hanson, even though he shows up less in the story. Maybe it's because he did something, maybe it's because he became vice president and Warren Harding died, who can say? Remember, go for the slightly less prestigious position, then take over the top spot when your boss does the teapot dome scandal. or maybe when they die of something. No one actually knows what Warren G Harding died of. It was probably a heart attack, but maybe Coolidge called in a favor with Curtis. Or maybe people just died a lot back then. I don't want to do conspiracy theories about president deaths, it's a job full of very old people who are disliked by most of the country

All right, time to talk about a strike that I actually like. It contains no police that we have to sympathize with, meaning that it is much more fun to talk about. The police strike is actually a lot of fun, ignore the jokes. But what I’m talking about is the 1919 steel strike.

As Red Scare says, the police strike had been going on for 2 days when the newspapers announced that there was going to be a strike. While I would argue that that meant that the police strike was over when the steel strike was announced, it was a good start to a chapter and I'm not going to fault him for it. The man is very good at titling and starting chapters. Big Steel - Pink or Gray is great, and it connects to the next chapter in a very satisfying way. But, like everything in the story, we do need to go back to the beginning, August 1918.

24 trade unions met in Chicago to discuss forming a committee, the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers. They named Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL if you remember, as the honorary chairman. Of course, he had things to do, but naming him honorary chairman was because the AFL helped bring them together. They had actual leadership: John Fitzpatrick as acting chairman, and William Z. Foster as secretary-treasurer. William Z. Foster wrote a book, which I always love. Primary sources that aren’t extremely anti-labor, my beloved.

Between 1918 and 1919, the committee, led by the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, managed to organize people across the country. Well, steel working country, which is now called the Rust Belt. Mostly because there aren't many steel working jobs anymore. But back then, steel was important. Think of the railroads spanning the country. The first Transcontinental Railroad was finished in 1869, which was just 50 years before the period we're talking about. Sure, Henry Ford was bringing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I'm sorry, the car, to the country, but the highway system was an LBJ thing. Railroads were the big thing. and what do they run on? Tracks. and what are the tracks made of? Steel. Not to mention that the first World War had just ended, and the US was building so many things at the time out of steel.

I'm sure you’ve heard of Andrew Carnegie. If you haven't, remember when I was talking about the robber barons who were very worried about what the radicals were making people think about them? Well Andrew was kind of a standout. He was born poor, and I don't mean lower middle class, I mean actually poor. Then he became the richest man in the world. and he only had to hire the pinkertons a few times to do it. It did backfire on him once, but if I start talking about the Homestead strike, we are going to be here all day. and it happened in the 1800s, so it is in no way relevant to this. It was a bunch of Pinkertons that were beaten by a very angry town that shot a civil war cannon at them. It’s a lot of fun to learn about.

But we're talking about the steel workers. and they really needed to be organized. In 1910, 30% of the workforce worked a 7 day week, and 75% worked a 12 hour day. If you're thinking about this, that isn't exactly conducive to living a normal life, or living a life, or sleeping a lot. The people that worked there were mostly immigrants. At the start of the steel industry, the people were working skilled jobs and were mostly American. I'm not saying that speaking the language of a country and being a skilled worker in that country are connected, I'm just saying that with mechanization, hiring immigrants who may not speak the language well is much easier because the bosses don't need to find somebody with skills, they need to find somebody who can do a repetitive job that you don't need specialization to do. Of course, bosses don't consider their workers to be any different from machines, they don't care about the people who are working for them, they just want the cheapest labor they can find. Capitalism provides a type of amorality that allows capitalists to make awful decisions for the sake of their wallets instead of for the sake of being a horrible human being.

As for the unions that the committee had organized, they weren’t looked upon fondly by the companies. Firing union members, preventing union meetings from happening, even kidnapping union leaders. Foster, the secretary-treasurer, whatever that job entails, had been run out of multiple towns for trying to organize people. He’s a fascinating man, I will be breaking tradition and making my final biography about him instead of a horrible person.

Foster was a pretty radical guy for a member of the AFL. He was a member of the IWW when he was younger - well, he was a lot of things when he was younger, we will talk about it. While he left over union drama, because the left has always been the same, he left over ideological ideas, not arguments with someone specific. The thing he was arguing about was dual unionism, which is when two unions claim the right to organize the same workers. The IWW liked it, he didn't, it's complicated. But he was always willing to organize unskilled laborers, unlike the rest of the AFL, who were mostly craft unionists. He was called “Red” Foster, making him probably the first half Irish guy to be nicknamed red for a reason that was not related to his hair. I don't actually know if his hair was red, the only photos I've seen of him are in black and white.

But by 1919, the AFL had managed to organize essentially all of the big steel towns, even Pittsburgh, which was the headquarters of US Steel. Like I said, the AFL was the group that made the deal with the government to not strike during the first World War, which is when the steel workers were getting extremely busy. After that ended, the businesses realized that they hadn’t given the workers anything and they were still working. They might not have been making a living wage, but they couldn't get any other job.

I think you can see why a bunch of steel workers joined the union, and on June 20th, 1919, the AFL asked Judge Elbert H. Gary, the man that Gary, Indiana is named after, who was also the chairman of US Steel. He did in fact, study law, as you can guess by the title judge. Check off a square on the shitty guy bingo. Why was he a shitty guy? Well, he didn't say anything when the AFL reached out to him. The last time I had this much trouble scheduling a meeting, I was trying to schedule a DND game. Much like that game, the committee decided to go on without him. It was me that my DND game went on without, I had essays to do. Foster hates him in the book by calling him Czar Gary, which is imbued with a lot more meaning when you know about his later life. Big fan of the Soviet Union.

By August 20th, all 24 unions had registered a desire for a strike. Now that they had something to actually back them up, they went back to Gary. Gary the guy, not Gary the town. It's a little bit impressive that there are two guys in this story connected to a town. He didn't think he had to give them anything, so he just told them that the corporation wasn't going to discuss employees with representatives of a labor union because of their open shop policy. In case you are wondering, an open shop policy means that workers don't need to become part of a union to work at a company. A closed shop means that to get a job, you need to say that you will become part of the union and then actually do it when you get the job.

It was obvious that something was going to happen. He refused to listen to them, they had already said that they wanted to strike if he didn't listen to them. Wilson tried to stave off the incoming strike by announcing on Labor Day that he was going to hold an industrial conference to discuss ways of bettering the relationship of capital and labor. He was on a tour trying to convince everyone about the League of Nations. Of course, you can't start a Rube Goldberg machine, or let someone else start it, and then stand by and say “Someone needs to stop the broom before it falls onto the seesaw!”

And the broom would fall onto the seesaw. The national committee voted to start the strike on September 22nd. And then they issued 200,000 copies of the strike call in seven different languages. I really wanted to see if I could find what those languages were, but I can't even find a copy of the strike call in English. They published so many of them, how did nobody save one? of course, they were pushing for extremely radical things like: the right to collectively bargain, The reinstatement of the people who were fired for organizing with full pay for the time that they did not have a job, the 8-hour work day with one day off a week, and the abolishment of the 24-hour shift, a living wage, double pay for overtime, the check off and seniority, and the abolishment of company unions.

I have to define a few of these, because I didn't know what they were. The check off is when a company automatically takes union dues out of your wages and sends them to the union. it's a little bit like taxes. Foster says it needs explanation, but all that he gives is “the check-off was to apply only to the mining end of the steel industry”. Seniority is… well I think you can guess what it is, but it's basically when you get more benefits for being there longer. A company union is something I did know about, but I don't think it’s a thing people know about. A company union is something a little bit like what the mayor of Boston suggested. It's a union unaffiliated with larger unions, but unlike the thing that the mayor suggested, it's essentially run by the company. They pretend to be a union, but if you bring your problems to them, like you do with a union, they aren't going to solve anything because they are run by the people opposing you. It’s just the facade of a union, with the bosses behind it telling you no.

These were obviously not radical demands. I mean, there was a company that had an 8-hour work day in 1918 that got abolished. People want to sleep. The average work week for the company was just under sixty-nine hours, which, nice, but also not nice. That is so much work. As someone who knows a lot about the healthcare industry, I can confidently say that nobody can do 24-hour shifts. especially not nurses and doctors, because those are the people you really don't want to be sleep deprived. A steel mill is also not a very safe place to be sleep deprived, because there is a lot of hot steel around.

Samuel Gompers, a man who never met a presidential order he didn’t want to listen to, Who was also the honorary chairman of the committee, suggested that maybe they should abide by the president's request. John Fitzpatrick, I brought him up earlier, the acting chairman, and Foster told him that if they told everybody to postpone the strike, they would get demoralized. Gompers… well I'm not going to say that he stood up for them, but he didn't tell them not to, so it's the most radical thing that he ever did. he probably did it because a lot of Steel organizers were pretty radical, including Fitzpatrick, who said that “We are going to socialize the basic industries of the United States.” He was a horseshoer by trade apparently. I don’t know, I ran into it in the book and I had to tell you. The newspaper gleefully reported on this, which you would assume means that everybody hated the union, but no one liked Gary either. Not talking to the union got the newspapers annoyed, but they expressed it by saying that “his actions would push even the most conservative unionist into the arms of the Reds.” They also call him an extreme reactionary, so I guess they were right about something.

The strike started though. 275,000 workers left their job that day, and thousands more left over the next week. 365,000 workers had decided to strike by the end. The strike was about 90% effective, although according to Foster, it was only about 75% effective in the Pittsburgh area. This blindsided the public. Before, they had been arguing about who was at fault for this, and that it actually happened. I'm sure you can guess what happened. Say it with me. Most of the public was actually sympathetic to the strikers demands at the start, and opposed to the seemingly arbitrary actions of the steel company. So I think you can guess what the steel interests tried to do. say that this strike was another attempt at revolution, even though most of the workers just wanted a few workplace protections. They had enough previous guides to do it pretty well.

So how did they? They started spreading rumors that steel workers received up to $70 a day, which is $1,293.98 in modern money. Of course these people couldn't be striking for more money, they were earning so much. They also said that all the “native american workmen” which obviously does not refer to actual Native Americans, it means white people, were refusing to leave their jobs because they were opposed to the radicalism of the foreign workers. They made so many stories about how everyone was returning to work that, if you added them all up, you would end up with 4.8 million people. It's really impressive how many people just spawned on the picket line to come back to work, because about a third of a million people had left by that time. Through advertisements that us steel put in newspapers - in nine different languages, I can't believe that the company tried tried to speak to more people with their propaganda - they told people to go back to work and implied that, because they were named US Steel, and they were somehow part of the United States government and any strike against it was part of a rebellion against the United States. I love it when companies just decide to lie to you, that's right, I am talking to you, oil and gas companies.

But the actual workers aren't having a great time. the steel companies tried to stamp out pesky things like free speech and free assembly. They managed to ban all mass meetings without approval from politicians in Pennsylvania, the heart of the steel industry. and when meetings they could hold were usually run by the police. Foster refers to them as Cossacks which is very confusing, but again, a big fan of the Soviet Union.

Across the area where the strike was, more police and guards were hired, both to protect the steel mills and to put down any riots that would happen. Anyone who wanted to defend themselves… Well, I think you can guess what happened. Multiple people died in the strike.

There was one strike with a little bit of radicalism in it, and that was in the town of Gary Indiana. That's right, you didn't think Gary, Indiana would be important. I didn't think Gary Indiana would be important. From what I hear about Gary, I'm not going there anytime soon. Apparently, it was essentially the Western version of Pittsburgh at the time. The steel industry was a major force. 97% of the workforce walked out. Everything went peacefully at first, but the United Steel Corporation was not going to take this lying down. The Gary Tribune started printing lies about the union movement in 1918, saying that they were against the draft. they published it in 16 languages, which… congrats on that, I guess, I didn't think that you guys were going to have the most languages.

On October 4th, some strikers ran into some scabs and they had a little fight. One person was slightly injured. But this is easy to spin into a major story. An important thing that you need to know about the racial composition of the strikebreakers is that they were mostly black. It was much harder to get jobs as a black person in 1919, and the unions were, it bears repeating, very racist. So, they had to work as strikebreakers and scabs. I’m not saying they were wrong for this. I don't think I could say they were wrong. It's just a historical note that you need to know, because not mentioning it would be kind of a dereliction of my duty. I say duty like I’m being forced to do this. No, it's just a historical fact that has to be mentioned. Foster has a whole section about this is his book, and as you would assume from a radical labor leader in the 1900s, it veers wildly between reasonable and racist. he seems to have the general idea that the union is racist and they need to let black people in, but he also blames them for wanting to take strike breaking jobs because they’re being deceived by white employers and black people with better jobs. Again, I'm not an expert on any of this, and your opinion of the reading of the text is going to change every time as you pick up on different things, but the general impression that I get from it is a guy with the right ideas but some stereotypes that he hasn’t examined.

The governor of Indiana ordered 11 companies of the state militia, plus 500 special police and 300 deputies, into Gary and East Chicago. Google Maps tells me that they are very close, so the temporarily geographically confused part of my brain that said “Wait, Chicago isn’t in Illinois? no, I was just in Chicago over the summer,” has been placated. The troops were sent in to send people to the hospital, jail, or back to the factories. They sent an actual general in, who got Army intelligence to ferret out the radicalism. He declared martial law, and the strike broke.

In the end, the oddest thing about it is the name. I mean, how many company towns were named after the guys around them? Or at least, that's what I thought, until I remembered Hershey, Pennsylvania. If only steel was slightly more tourist friendly. And then I remembered what Pennsylvania was named after, or rather who. Technically, it wasn't the guy who got the land although his name was also Penn, it was named after his dad. But silva means forest in Latin, so it translates to Penn's Forest. That's also why Transylvania is named that. As you may guess by the name, the Romans took over Romania, which is why they have a romance language, which is what we all learned in middle and high school Latin. I'm not Catholic, I'm just that kind of nerd. My middle school Latin teacher was also that kind of nerd, which is why he taught us defenestration on the first day by throwing someone's shoe out the window. It was the first floor, it was fine. But the prefix trans in latin just means across, so the entire name of the region is “across the woods” which I guess it would have been for the Romans, because Romania is a very heavily forested country. I mean, until they sold a bunch of wood to Ikea during the communist days to fund their secret police.

Anyway, a lot of places are named after the guys who paid to own them. Like Jamestown, a place founded by a company that King James invested in. literally the first British settlement in this country was a company town. Or North Carolina and the inferior Carolina. Of course, I mean inferior as in lower geographically, in the directional sense of the term. Come at me, I'm sure you'll miss, much like all of the shells at the fort and tree or whatever’s on your flag. The US lost that war, but I'm sure you don't want to memorialize the war that you guys actually started on your flag. Just look up what state was the first one to secede. But both states were both named after King Charles.

But if I start talking about the etymology of words, we are going to be here all day and also never talk about the steel strike. But while this was all happening, the conference that Wilson wanted to hold was still happening. It was a collection of representatives of labor, business, and the public. I don't exactly know what a representative of the public means, but the Secretary of the Interior ran it, so I think it just might mean government officials who aren't involved in business or labor. Samuel Gompers was there, of course. He had asked everybody to wait until this, it would be pretty hypocritical if he didn't come. But even he was getting too annoyed by the meeting. The press had decided that talking it out was the thing that would allow labor and capital to understand each other. I mean, I don't think understanding each other was the main problem. I think they understood each other very well, but understanding someone doesn't always mean agreeing with them. Because the union then the company weren't going to agree with each other on little things like time off or not killing workers, nothing was going to happen.

On October 21st, Samuel Gompers offered legislation for “the right of wage earners ... to bargain collectively... in respect to wages, hours of labor, and relations and conditions of employment.” And the conference, which had been humming along nicely and doing fuck all, heard a record scratch. “What do you mean you want something completely normal? You know, the thing that unions do.” This was the main problem that the companies didn't want to acknowledge. They obviously weren't fighting radicalism, they were fighting a bunch of people who wanted the right to ask for things. no, I should probably explain what collective bargaining is. It is the basis of a union, so it's kind of an important thing to know. If you go into your boss's office and tell them that you think that working seven days a week is too much and you'll quit if they keep making you do this, they are going to tell you to leave, then. However, if you go to your boss's office and say that “I and also everybody else who works for you thinks that working for 7 days a week is too much and that we will leave if you don't cut it down," they will probably consider it. The actual description is “the ongoing process of negotiation between representatives of workers and employers to establish the conditions of employment.”

It sounds eminently reasonable, and like a normal thing to do. But there's a thing that humans do, or if they hear a word that they're scared of, they won't like it even if it's in their best interest. Or in the best interest of other people, I guess. And everyone was convinced to vote it down. Shocker. Samuel Gompers finally grew a backbone for the second time in the video and walked out the next day.

The response was what you think it would be. if you’ve ever seen a right-wing debate guy debate somebody, you know. Since they don't have any personal principles, and you aren't arguing about their right to exist or anything, they won't get as mad as you will. and when it looks like you will not win, because you can't win, because they argue like first graders who really like their hypotheticals, and then walk out, they're going to say they won. You've been defeated by their superior facts and logic. and that's why you never need to waste your time talking to them. You aren't going to beat them because they're never going to admit that you beat them. Again, much like a first grader.

After both of those, it was kind of doomed. People can't hold up a strike forever, especially if the AFL doesn't fund them. We live in a society, and in that society, you need money to pay for food and housing and heat for your house. On January 8th, 1920, when nearly 2/3 of the men striking had gone back to work, the committee announced that it was officially over. This is a bit like announcing that the game of Monopoly is officially over when you know you're going to lose so you don't have to play another half hour with your sibling. Except if your sibling had killed 20 people so that they could win. I don't think mine would, but who knows with Monopoly.

How did Foster summarize it?

“And the people, not yet recovered from war hysteria and misled by a corrupt press, cannot perceive the outrage. They even glory in their degradation. Free speech, free press, free assembly, as we once knew these rights, are now things of the past. What poor rudiments of them remain depend upon the whims of a Burleson, or the rowdy element of the American Legion. Hundreds of idealists, guilty of nothing more than a temperate expression of their honest views, languish in prison serving sentences so atrocious as to shock the world—although Europe has long since released its war and political prisoners. Working class newspapers are raided, denied the use of the mails and suppressed. Meetings are broken up by Chamber of Commerce mobs or thugs in public office. The right of asylum is gone—the infamous Palmer is deporting hundreds who dare to hold views different from his. The right of the workers to organize is being systematically curtailed; and crowning shame of all, workingmen can no longer have legislative representatives of their own choosing. In a word, America, from being the most forward-looking, liberty-loving country in the world, has in two short years become one of the most reactionary. We in this country are patiently enduring tyranny that would not be tolerated in England, France, Italy, Russia or Germany. Our great war leaders promised us the New Freedom; they have given us the White Terror.”

Now, I’ve definitely been running a little long on this, so we're going to discuss one more strike and we are going to go over it very quickly. Both because it would be repetitive if I discussed what happened, and because I kind of want to do a thing on the Coal Wars later. As you can probably guess, we're talking about the coal strike.

They also had some things that they wanted, because surprise, being a coal miner isn't fun. Black lung is real and we should probably pay out benefits for that more. Capitalism exploits whoever it can, and Appalachia is being chewed up and spit out like it always has been. But back before we invented mountaintop removal, we needed to actually send people down to mine the coal. It’s also why miners are so involved in union stuff. Again, I'm going to talk about that later.

But what you need to know is that wages were basically static because of an agreement made in September 1917, which was supposed to run through the war or until April 1st, 1920. However, the wages were still static in 1919, which you will note, is after the war ended. However, the war had technically been declared over, meaning that the company obviously wasn't going to negotiate with them. and things weren't going well in the talks for the official end of the war. Wilson… wasn’t doing well. I don't know if that's the best way to describe a man who literally had a stroke, but he was trying to convince everyone to join the League of Nations, stop the steel strike which was still going on, and run a country. He mostly wasn't in the country, because he was trying to convince the UK and France not to take revenge on Germany for those 4 years.

But through the magic of technicalities, the war was not over. The coal industry had gotten massively wealthy because everything ran on coal back then, especially if you wanted to do a war. but just because something is technically true doesn't mean that you can do it without people getting mad at you. Sure, you give them a job, but also you don't have a company if they don't work for you. People were mad and the United Mine Workers, their union, wasn't able to control them. There is a series of wildcat strikes, which are when people just walk off the job instead of saying that they're going to walk off the job in 5 days, like most of the strikes we've been talking about. A few people were even calling for the coal industry to be nationalized, which I will admit is one of the first things that is actually very radical in the entire strike part.

The chairman, John L. Lewis (not the John Lewis you’ve heard of, unless you’re really up on your coal union history), was an anticommunist, meaning that the first guy who was actually anti-communist instead of anti-radical or anti-bolshevik. He was obviously not in favor of nationalizing anything, but he had to do something or no one in his union would listen to him, which is a big problem when you are supposed to be in charge of it. The UMW met and came up with a list, which again, were more than most unions asked for. They asked for a national contract, a 5-day work week, a 6-day work day, and a 60% raise. The companies said no, they weren’t going to renegotiate until April 1st, 1920, which was just them telling all themselves that they were never going to acknowledge the war was over. Legend says that the coal companies are still fighting World War I just so they don't need to pay their workers more. Or maybe, the Secretary of Labor told them that they had to meet with the unions, and they did on October 21st. They didn't agree to anything except for a modified (meaning lower) wage increase. The union said they'd strike on November 1st, Lewis said that all they wanted was more money and better working conditions, and everybody lost their minds.

However, this strike wouldn't be ended by talks that slowly went worse. No, Palmer came to help me out by making this a little bit more interesting. and by a little bit more interesting, I mean he was going to use the law. If you look up the Lever Act, you will find the “Food and Fuel Control Act,” which does not sound like a union busting piece of legislation, but just look at the fuel control part. The act was created to save food during the war by creating an administration that would be in charge of food. but it would also be in charge of the fuel, because people needed that at home and at war. And because we were still technically at war, it could be used to tell the strikers to go back to work because we still needed fuel. It was a crime to interview with the production or transportation of necessities, though it was supposed to be protection against hoarding or profiteering, not unions. Palmer said that Wilson was okay with it, and no one really knows because Wilson just had a stroke. The strike happened, but all of its leaders were under an injunction. The final agreement came on December 10th, with a 14% wage increase.

This didn’t kill the movement though. No, the battle of Blair Mountain would happen next year. That isn't true for the steel workers, though. Steel unions were broken and wouldn't recover for at least 15 years. but the real damage was to the public's opinion of strikes. Disorder happened, and disorder is worse than anything that could be happening to people. Unions were now radicals, and the radicals were now taking over. and that justified anything that could be happening. which is why we're going to be getting to the Palmer Raids in the next part. Which means I have to go back through and take out any references to the Palmer raids happening in the next part in the last part. But the Palmer raids won't be the first thing. no, we're going to discuss the Red Summer. But for now, the guy I promised we'd get back to.

Honestly, sometimes I plan out who I'm going to do for the biographies (Palmer), sometimes I run into a guy and go “Ok, I need everyone to know everything about him” (Hanson), and sometimes one of my tangents just goes so long because the guy lives such an interesting life that he gets the spot (Foster). Also, I can finally tell you that I see Zoster every time I read his full name, and I have to remind myself that he is not the chicken pox virus. The varicella zoster virus has nothing to do with William Z. Foster, even though, statistically, he got it as a kid.

William Z. Foster. How did this man have time to do anything in his life? I'm not surprised he managed to write a book, it's probably a relaxing free time activity for him when he was riding the railroad between being thrown out of town. I looked for a list of his books, and guys? There were so many. This guy loved writing, I think. I really want to read “Communism versus fascism; a reply to those who lump together the social systems of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany,” because that seems interesting. What kind of arguments were they bringing up at the time, because I didn’t know that went back to 1941.

William Z. Foster was born William Edward Foster, in Taunton, Massachusetts. When someone's name causes a lot of controversy, you know that it's going to be an interesting one. You may see that the “z” stands for Zebulon. It does not. He added the middle initial, but it wasn't supposed to be short for a middle name, it was meant to add a little bit of interest to his name. He was born on February 24, 1884. If you do the math, that means he's about 25 during the events we're going to talk about. It's also why he's able to survive to 1961, which must have been a trip. For the people that managed to survive two world wars and the great depression, imagine being born in the literal Victorian era and surviving to see the television. His family was Catholic, so he had a lot of siblings. His mother had 23 children, but only 5 of them survived to adulthood. No wonder she died at 53, birth control is great, guys. His father fled Ireland after the failed Fenian Uprising, and raised his kids to hate England. He apparently also liked to fight Irish policemen, so I like this guy. It’s odd that his mom was English, but she was Catholic, and from what I’ve heard, being Catholic in England results in a weird dynamic, so maybe their marriage isn’t that weird.

His early life was spent “in the slums” of Boston, where he moved as a very young kid, so I think we can assume that it was not a great time. He attended school for 6 years. Before he left Boston, he participated in his first strike. At age 13 or 14, sources disagree. He apparently started working at the age of ten, apprenticing to a dyer (I don’t know if that’s how you spell it, someone who dyes fabric.) He was not a streetcar worker, he just saw that they were striking and decided to join them.

After being a sailor, he went on to have a lot more jobs. He worked at a white lead factory, which apparently was extremely unsafe and everyone knew it. What does one even need that much white lead for? He started working at 17 in a lead factory. That sounds like a joke that someone would make about the 1800s, I cannot believe this is an actual thing that happened to this man. He worked in the fertilizer industry in various jobs, which he of course wrote a book about. He then lived a life that only a man in the early 1900s could live. He went to Cuba, but there weren't any jobs after the Spanish-American War. He then went to Florida where he got a job at the railroad, then went to a sawmill. There, he saw just how racist the South was, when gangs of white people came to terrorize his colleagues, who lived in much worse housing than the white workers. Foster decided to leave, but that apparently almost got him arrested, so he had to sneak out of camp and get on a train up to New York.

He started working on a streetcar, which confused me when I read it at first, because I thought that the streetcar protest he was in was related to this job. This was the place where he officially got involved with the AFL. and then he got fired because an informer snitched. He got a job as a cook in Texas, and ended up in Portland, Oregon. I used to live there, and I can say that nothing surprises me less than the fact that this man found his way there. He decided to become a sailor. He apparently circled the world once, which is one more time that I've done it, so congrats to him. He was also 21 at the time. And then he became a homesteader, in the year 1904. This was basically the last time in American history you could do that. Eventually he sold his claim and started working in one industry, which makes this a little bit easier. He was working, if you can remember the steel strike, in the railroad industry. He became a member of the IWW in 1909, while he was in jail in Spokane, and got involved in the Socialist Party some time around then.

Since he was working on the Railroad, he was able to get around the Pacific Northwest, which was a hotbed of IWW organizing, like I said in the Seattle strike part. And then, some union infighting happened, and I had to cut something out here, so he eventually became part of the AFL. That's what you need to know. He sold war bonds in 1918 and didn’t say anything when a bunch of IWW people got arrested. He was still much more radical than the average AFL member, but complicated things happened involving dual-unionism that I still do not care about. he did get married, and they would remain happily and married for the rest of his life. he dedicated almost all of his books to her, which is sweet because he wrote so many books. You know what happens at the steelworker strike, so i don’t need to talk about that.

After his resignation from the committee, he didn't exactly have a path forward in life. He was still doing a lot of things, because he's William Foster, but it wasn't until one of his friends invited him to Moscow for a conference that he decided to join the Communist Party. He would run for President on the Communist ticket in 1924, 1928, and 1932. He was sent to jail in 1930, but he had a heart condition, for some reason. There are studies linking lead to heart problems, but I legitimately don’t know if that’s why, it might be anything else in his life. After this, most of the biographies are just about the petty drama of the Communist Party and the many, many names that it went under. He was also publishing a bunch of pamphlets and books and hanging out in Russia. He celebrated his 80th birthday there, and would die there 6 months later. Not bad for a man who literally worked in a lead Factory and at multiple fertilizer plants. He was possibly buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, which is where Charles Rutherberg from the Cleveland May Day parade is buried. Also, Big Bill Hayward, who was one of the founders of the IWW (well, half his ashes, the other half is in Chicago). I’d love to see the arguments that they get up to. I mean, Ruthenberg didn’t like another guy buried there, John Reed, who has been dancing along the edge of getting into the script, but I cannot add everyone. He testified in front of the Overman committee. It’s just interesting how many people with radically different political views who all knew each other ended up in a wall in Russia.

On a different note, I found the pamphlet I wanted! The one about the Soviet Union vs Nazi Germany. I just had to search the name. He makes some really good arguments, like talking about the soviet union isn't actually communist, it's socialist, and how the nazis weren’t socialist, they were “the most reactionary expression of the dying capitalist world order.” Of course, with hindsight, we can recognize that the capitalist world order definitely wasn't dying, and the war gave the current dying capitalist empire (cough, cough, the US) the ability to become such a strong presence, but I'm not faulting him for not being able to see the future in 1941. Of course, I'm not saying that the Soviet Union didn't kill a lot of people, but this is fascinating. He argues that the reason is because the capitalist system confuses them purposefully because the masses hate fascism (oh boy, I wish). Also, because they want to convince people that fascism isn’t an outgrowth of capitalism, but its own thing. As you get further, he does start making some arguments about the Soviet Union that are completely unsubstantiated, like claiming that there couldn’t be “red imperialism.” The soviet union was a product of Russian chauvinism that took over other countries and did imperialism to them. Most of the rest of the pamphlet is laying out how the Nazi government was horrible in shockingly accurate detail for someone without much of the knowledge that we have today, and misreading the Soviet Union. He does say explicitly that the capitalist class of the US would be exactly like the Nazi leaders if they overcame the popular resistance.

An incredibly interesting man who lived a very interesting life. He was in love with the Soviet Union, but he was a communist; I really don’t know what else I expected from him. He lived a life, especially in his early years, that I would not want. I wouldn't want the petty factionalist arguments, but consistently advocating for change and then getting run off by the bosses does not sound like a fun life. Truly someone who proves that your principles can change over time.

I will say I feel bad for the guy based on his politics alone. Not that I think they’re bad or anything, I’m just imagining being a radical labor organizer in the 1910’s getting through the first red scare, then saying “No, I'm a communist now. I’m going to become an important figure in the communist party,” and then you live to see the second red scare? Like, I think the government just hates you specifically at that point.If he had a nickel for every time the US government was doing a red scare against the group that he’s specifically a part of, he would not be adequately compensated for all the shit he had to go through.

And we‘ve come to the end. Next time, we will finally get into the Palmer Raids, the Red Summer, and my favorite journalist, Ida B. Wells.