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Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America
This is the first systematic study of strikebreaking, intimidation, and anti-unionism in the United States, subjects essential to a full understanding of labor's fortunes in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, the country that pioneered the expansion of civil liberties allowed corporations to assemble private armies to disrupt union organizing, spy on workers, and break strikes. Using a social-historical approach, Stephen Norwood focuses on the mercenaries the corporations enlisted in their anti-union efforts--particularly college students, African American men, the unemployed, and men associated with organized crime. Norwood also considers the paramilitary methods unions developed to counter mercenary violence. The book covers a wide range of industries across much of the country.
Norwood explores how the early twentieth-century crisis of masculinity shaped strikebreaking's appeal to elite youth and the media's romanticization of the strikebreaker as a new soldier of fortune. He examines how mining communities' perception of mercenaries as agents of a ribald, sexually unrestrained, new urban culture intensified labor conflict. The book traces the ways in which economic restructuring, as well as shifting attitudes toward masculinity and anger, transformed corporate anti-unionism from World War II to the present.
Norwood explores how the early twentieth-century crisis of masculinity shaped strikebreaking's appeal to elite youth and the media's romanticization of the strikebreaker as a new soldier of fortune. He examines how mining communities' perception of mercenaries as agents of a ribald, sexually unrestrained, new urban culture intensified labor conflict. The book traces the ways in which economic restructuring, as well as shifting attitudes toward masculinity and anger, transformed corporate anti-unionism from World War II to the present.
344 pages, Hardcover
First published May 27, 2002
About the author
Stephen H. Norwood
9 books3 followersStephen H. Norwood, who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award in American Social History and winner of the Macmillan/SABR Award in Baseball History. His articles have appeared in anthologies and numerous journals, including American Jewish History, Modern Judaism, and the Journal of Social History.
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June 27, 2017
Norwood argued that the inherent violence of first half 20th century strike breaking, involving beatings, murder, mercenary armies, spy networks, and blacklists, was not simply a matter of class, but also one of proving masculinity in both strikebreakers and unionists. Indeed, strikebreaking became one of highly aggressive masculine proving-grounds. First, companies employed hugely expensive strikebreaker mercenary forces to both guard replacement workers, do replacement work, spy on union activists, intimidate union activists, and in some cases murder union activists. They would often sexually intimidate women strikers or daughters/wives of strikers. While strikebreaking companies, most famously the Pinkertons, would employ black and immigrants or desperately unemployed strike breakers, they were unreliable as they would often developed sympathies with strikers since they were of common economic backgrounds. For the first twenty years of the 20th century, upper to middle class college students and other youth organizations would attack or do replacement work as a adventurism to prove their own masculinity, reveling in combat against what they perceived as a threat to the nation, though that changed with the Great Depression and increasing working class students attending college campuses.
Chapter one focuses on middle class masculinity directly confronting strikers, as university boards often were composed of corporate bosses and therefore had direct interest in destroying unions. Students, which at the time colleges were only for the elite, were far removed from working conditions and sought to prove their masculine heroics. Chapter two looks to the streetcar wars of urban America, as streetcar companies were hated by working class people, and strikebreakers brought in thought of themselves as gunslingers looking to defeat uncivilized subhuman working class people in a similar vane of cowboys killing Indians. Chapter three moves to look at African-American strikebreakers, whom were proving their own masculinity against unions, especially of the AFL, that had excluded them. Corporate bosses thought of black workers as a “scab race”, which changed rapidly in the 1930s as the CIO actively included black workers in its organizing efforts, as well as Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters challenged white bosses in an all-black union to make African-Americans amongst the most pro-union of populations.
Chapter four moves to the Mine Wars of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, when mercenary armies battled with miners in guerilla wars, full of massacres, shootouts, destruction of camps and large mobilization of private armies. Chapter five looks to the Ford company’s terror machine, as Henry Ford moved away from benefits packages to rule through fear by extensive spy networks and goon squads, of which labor had to respond with their own goons. Chapter six looks to the paramilitary combat in the UAW drive to organize the auto industry, with the KKK and fascist modeled Black Legion carrying out terror campaigns against UAW organizers and supporters, which were answered by protection by other unions. It concludes by noting why violence subsided, as suburbanization lessened rowdy street corner culture and all-male spaces like pool halls, as well as the lessening militancy of unions in the 1950s as they held onto seniority. He notes that the rise of “union avoidance” firms which held in prestigious universities to use propaganda of strikes (even as unions have largely moved away from striking), hiring preferences, and benefits to hurt unions.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-Labor violence was a more regular occurrence in industrial USA in the first half 1880s-1920s than in Europe because of the rise of private corporate armies, whereas in Europe national police and troops were deployed occasionally against strikes, not directly controlled by companies.
-Masculinity was invoked on both sides, with unionists arguing they were family men and strikebreakers were dregs, while on the other side strikebreakers were proving themselves by violently defeating the unionists.
-By the 1930s, state militias and professionalized police forces replaced private armies against strikers and the Wagner Act legalized union activity.
-Permanent replacement of strikers was legalized in a 1938 decision and never really challenged, to labor’s detriment.
Chapter one focuses on middle class masculinity directly confronting strikers, as university boards often were composed of corporate bosses and therefore had direct interest in destroying unions. Students, which at the time colleges were only for the elite, were far removed from working conditions and sought to prove their masculine heroics. Chapter two looks to the streetcar wars of urban America, as streetcar companies were hated by working class people, and strikebreakers brought in thought of themselves as gunslingers looking to defeat uncivilized subhuman working class people in a similar vane of cowboys killing Indians. Chapter three moves to look at African-American strikebreakers, whom were proving their own masculinity against unions, especially of the AFL, that had excluded them. Corporate bosses thought of black workers as a “scab race”, which changed rapidly in the 1930s as the CIO actively included black workers in its organizing efforts, as well as Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters challenged white bosses in an all-black union to make African-Americans amongst the most pro-union of populations.
Chapter four moves to the Mine Wars of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, when mercenary armies battled with miners in guerilla wars, full of massacres, shootouts, destruction of camps and large mobilization of private armies. Chapter five looks to the Ford company’s terror machine, as Henry Ford moved away from benefits packages to rule through fear by extensive spy networks and goon squads, of which labor had to respond with their own goons. Chapter six looks to the paramilitary combat in the UAW drive to organize the auto industry, with the KKK and fascist modeled Black Legion carrying out terror campaigns against UAW organizers and supporters, which were answered by protection by other unions. It concludes by noting why violence subsided, as suburbanization lessened rowdy street corner culture and all-male spaces like pool halls, as well as the lessening militancy of unions in the 1950s as they held onto seniority. He notes that the rise of “union avoidance” firms which held in prestigious universities to use propaganda of strikes (even as unions have largely moved away from striking), hiring preferences, and benefits to hurt unions.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-Labor violence was a more regular occurrence in industrial USA in the first half 1880s-1920s than in Europe because of the rise of private corporate armies, whereas in Europe national police and troops were deployed occasionally against strikes, not directly controlled by companies.
-Masculinity was invoked on both sides, with unionists arguing they were family men and strikebreakers were dregs, while on the other side strikebreakers were proving themselves by violently defeating the unionists.
-By the 1930s, state militias and professionalized police forces replaced private armies against strikers and the Wagner Act legalized union activity.
-Permanent replacement of strikers was legalized in a 1938 decision and never really challenged, to labor’s detriment.
October 19, 2011
For me this was one of the the most interesting types of history book -- a book about something I had barely known about before reading. I had known that companies have resisted their workers forming unions, that companies have used different methods to end strikes, and that sometimes violence was involved. But I had no idea of the lengths businesses have gone to and how extremely violent things got.
This is a book about strikebreaking in the United States only, between the beginning of the 1900s and the 1940s. The main industries described are streetcars, steel, mining, and auto.
If you read this book you can learn about:
* how detective agencies got their start -- the Pinkerton Detective Agency was not employed mainly in solving crimes or finding missing people, but in spying on workers, guarding strikebreakers, and physically intimidating would-be union members
* why it was fashionable for male college students to participate in strikebreaking until the 1920s
* the "streetcar wars" in which the men who worked as drivers and conductors of streetcars in U.S. cities went on strike for better wages and working conditions, and the streetcar companies brought in tough guys to run the cars, and (because you can't picket a moving vehicle) the strikers hung things off the electric wire to prevent the cars from moving, and protested in mobs, and the strikebreakers shot them
* the factors that led many African American leaders to oppose organized labor during the early twentieth century
* the battles between striking miners and private police in the isolated company-owned mining towns in West Virginia and Colorado, in which police burned down the tents of evicted strikers' families
* how Harry Bennett ran the Ford Service Department, the Ford Motor Company's very own version of the Pinkerton Agency (a story that involves organized crime, boxing, and Henry Ford's unhappy relationship with his son)
* the connection between the KKK (and especially a KKK-like organization, the Black Legion) and anti-unionism
* and many more episodes that aren't in most histories
I found much of this book completely riveting. This is incredibly dramatic, complicated, and relevant history, and yet I think most people have absolutely no idea that it ever happened. I can imagine that many of the people actually involved in it would want to forget and not tell their children, because all of this is brutal and depressing and rarely led to lasting triumph for the workers. But it's time to remember.
The one real quibble I have is with Norwood's approach to writing. As you can see by the subtitle (Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America), he's analyzing how strikers and strikebreakers thought about and acted out masculine roles in these events. This is an interesting subject, but because most of the information in the book is so new to me (and, I think, to most potential readers who aren't already labor historians), I would have preferred to take in the narrative of the events, and then consider the gender performance aspect. Instead, Norwood tends to write both at once, sometimes subordinating information about what happened and who did it to information about how strikebreakers or strikers described it. (E.g., when writing about sexual harassment of miners' daughters by private police, he often structures his paragraphs in a way that primarily emphasizes how the striking miners used these occurrences to portray themselves as family men and the strikebreakers as uncivilized threats to women's virtue. This isn't wrong, but it's a bit confusing to someone who's only just learning what kinds of tactics the police used against strikers and their families.)
I think this book would have benefited more generally from Norwood being clearer about what exactly he was writing about and what methodology he was using. I would have liked him to indicate more clearly where he was talking about what really seems to have happened, and what were the strikers' or corporations' interpretation of events. This is particularly important because most of his sources are primary -- contemporary newspapers, union and corporate records, and interviews. So the synthesis and analysis of most of this information is Norwood's, and I would have liked to have been able to follow better how he did it.
This is a book about strikebreaking in the United States only, between the beginning of the 1900s and the 1940s. The main industries described are streetcars, steel, mining, and auto.
If you read this book you can learn about:
* how detective agencies got their start -- the Pinkerton Detective Agency was not employed mainly in solving crimes or finding missing people, but in spying on workers, guarding strikebreakers, and physically intimidating would-be union members
* why it was fashionable for male college students to participate in strikebreaking until the 1920s
* the "streetcar wars" in which the men who worked as drivers and conductors of streetcars in U.S. cities went on strike for better wages and working conditions, and the streetcar companies brought in tough guys to run the cars, and (because you can't picket a moving vehicle) the strikers hung things off the electric wire to prevent the cars from moving, and protested in mobs, and the strikebreakers shot them
* the factors that led many African American leaders to oppose organized labor during the early twentieth century
* the battles between striking miners and private police in the isolated company-owned mining towns in West Virginia and Colorado, in which police burned down the tents of evicted strikers' families
* how Harry Bennett ran the Ford Service Department, the Ford Motor Company's very own version of the Pinkerton Agency (a story that involves organized crime, boxing, and Henry Ford's unhappy relationship with his son)
* the connection between the KKK (and especially a KKK-like organization, the Black Legion) and anti-unionism
* and many more episodes that aren't in most histories
I found much of this book completely riveting. This is incredibly dramatic, complicated, and relevant history, and yet I think most people have absolutely no idea that it ever happened. I can imagine that many of the people actually involved in it would want to forget and not tell their children, because all of this is brutal and depressing and rarely led to lasting triumph for the workers. But it's time to remember.
The one real quibble I have is with Norwood's approach to writing. As you can see by the subtitle (Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America), he's analyzing how strikers and strikebreakers thought about and acted out masculine roles in these events. This is an interesting subject, but because most of the information in the book is so new to me (and, I think, to most potential readers who aren't already labor historians), I would have preferred to take in the narrative of the events, and then consider the gender performance aspect. Instead, Norwood tends to write both at once, sometimes subordinating information about what happened and who did it to information about how strikebreakers or strikers described it. (E.g., when writing about sexual harassment of miners' daughters by private police, he often structures his paragraphs in a way that primarily emphasizes how the striking miners used these occurrences to portray themselves as family men and the strikebreakers as uncivilized threats to women's virtue. This isn't wrong, but it's a bit confusing to someone who's only just learning what kinds of tactics the police used against strikers and their families.)
I think this book would have benefited more generally from Norwood being clearer about what exactly he was writing about and what methodology he was using. I would have liked him to indicate more clearly where he was talking about what really seems to have happened, and what were the strikers' or corporations' interpretation of events. This is particularly important because most of his sources are primary -- contemporary newspapers, union and corporate records, and interviews. So the synthesis and analysis of most of this information is Norwood's, and I would have liked to have been able to follow better how he did it.
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