Showing posts with label labor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label labor. Show all posts

Friday, March 11, 2011

Herbert Hoover and the Labor Movement

Since the racist reactionary neo-conservative right wing, the so called Tea Party, has taken over the Republican party during the "worst recession since the Great Depression" and is behind the recent attacks on union rights and the public sector in Wisconsin and around the U.S.

Let's go back to the Republican President during that time; Herbert Hoover, and see what his relationship was to the Labor Movement of his day and his political economic solution to America's post war problems.

The whole of Hoovers chapter on Labour from his Memoirs is posted below.


My views on labor relations in general rested on two propositions which I ceaselessly stated in one form or another:

First, I held that there are great areas of mutual interest between employee and employer which must be discovered and cultivated, and that it is hopeless to attempt progress if management and labor are to be set up as separate "classes" fighting each other. They are both producers, they are not classes.

And, second, I supported continuously the organization of labor and collective bargaining by representatives of labor's own choosing. I insisted that labor was not a "commodity."

On September 5, 1925, I stated:
It is my opinion that our nation is very fortunate in having the American Federation of Labor. It has exercised a powerful influence in stabilizing industry, and in maintaining an American standard of citizenship.


He was on good terms with Samuel Gompers, the founder of the AFL and even asked for his help when Democrats were smearing him during an election. Gompers died in 1924, so this must have occurred during an election campaign earlier than the 1928 election.

"The Democratic underworld made a finished job at these low levels with several favorite libels Another attack was laid on with a defter touch. Some years before, I had taken an interest in a group of young men to enable them to buy a ranch near Bakersfield, California. From over devotion, they had named it the "Hoover Ranch" and had painted the name on the gatepost. Agents of the Democratic County Committee painted a sign "No White Help Wanted" and, hanging it on the gate below the name, had it photographed and distributed the prints all over the country. The reference was to the employment of Asiatics. The ranch never had employed any such help. Through my friend Samuel Gompers, I at once secured an investigation by the Kern County labor union leaders. Their report was an indignant denial, but we were never able to catch up with the lie. This smear was used for years afterwards."
The Presidential Campaign of 1928
Hoover was proud of his relationship to the American Labour Movement, and despite having to intervene in the Great Rail Strike he placed the blame squarely on finance capital, the bankers on Wall Street.

In a statement from his memoirs his critique of finance capital is as pertinent today as it was then.
He blames the continued conflict not on the owners or workers, Hoover was of the progressive school that saw government as a partnership of the productive classes; workers and owners. Instead he blames continued conflict in the rail industry on the Stock Brokers and Investment Bankers of the day.

It is a safe generalization for the period to say that where industrial leaders were undominated by New York promoter-bankers, they were progressive and constructive in outlook. Some of the so-called bankers in New York were not bankers at all. They were stock promoters. They manipulated the voting control of many of the railway, industrial, and distributing corporations, and appointed such officials as would insure to themselves the banking and finance. They were not simply providing credit to business in order to lubricate production. Their social instinct belonged to an early Egyptian period.
Hoover thus exemplified the early 20th Century American Producer ideal, that all Americans were producers, either farmers or workers, even the capitalist. Producerism resulted in political economic ideologies of wealth redistribution popular at the end of WWI; both Social Credit and the ideal of Cooperative Socialism.

Hoover offers a liberal / utilitarian compromise between these two. Hoovers ideas came from his engineering background, which was the new management ideal that developed immediately after WWI.

It is reflected in Hoovers ideal of a scientific solution to American economic problems.
typical is the picture of the engineer presented by J.E. Hobson, Director of
Stanford's Research Institute in the 1950:" the engineer is not playing with
scientific matters for the pleasure he derives from his studies he has a very
specific purpose an objective in mind: that of applying his technical knowledge
to an economic problem".

This concept of scientific social engineering is an American phenomena reflected in Scientific Management that resulted in Fordism , and the idea of Technocracy based on Thorstien Veblen's (a Wisconsinite)
"The Engineer and the Price System

Hoover was no Tea Party Republican, nor was he an Ayn Rand individualist nor did he embrace the economics of the Austrian School, he embraced scientific management of the political economy while having a similar distrust of finance capital as Veblen.


His American Individualism was not that of the American Libertarian Right nor the current Republican leadership.We would call him a Progressive Conservative in the Canadian context or a Liberal Democrat in the UK. Something Left Wing Historian William Appleman Williams goes to great pains to document.

The Postwar Need of the United States for Reconstruction

It was apparent that from war, inflation, over-expanded agriculture, great national debt, delayed housing and postponed modernization of industry, demoralization of our foreign trade, high taxes and swollen bureaucracy, we were, as I have said, faced with need for reconstruction at home. Moreover, not only were there these difficulties arising from the war but there was the letdown from the nation's high idealism to the realistic problems that must be confronted. Deeper still was a vague unrest in great masses of the people.
Our marginal faults badly needed correction. We were neglecting the primary obligations of health and education of our children over large backward areas. Most of our employers were concertedly fighting the legitimate development of trade unions, and thereby stimulating the emergence of radical leaders and, at the same time, class cleavage. The twelve-hour day and eighty-four-hour week were still extant in many industries.
During my whole European experience I had been trying to formulate some orderly definition of the American System. After my return I began a series of articles and addresses to sum up its excellent points and its marginal weaknesses.
Constantly I insisted that spiritual and intellectual freedom could not continue to exist without economic freedom. If one died, all would die. I wove this philosophy, sometimes with European contrasts, into the background of my addresses and magazine articles on problems of the day. Along with these ideas, I elaborated a basis of economic recovery and progress. I did not claim that it was original.2
It involved increasing national efficiency through certain fundamental principles. They were (a) that reconstruction and economic progress and therefore most social progress required, as a first step, lowering the costs of production and distribution by scientific research and transformation of its discoveries into labor-saving devices and new articles of use; (b) that we must constantly eliminate industrial waste; (c) that we must increase the skill of our workers and managers; (d) that we must assure that these reductions in cost were passed on to consumers in lower prices; (e) that to do this we must maintain a competitive system; (f) that with lower prices the people could buy more goods, and thereby create more jobs at higher real wages, more new enterprises, and constantly higher standards of living. I insisted that we must push machines and not men and provide every safeguard of health and proper leisure.
I listed the great wastes: failure to conserve properly our national resources; strikes and lockouts; failure to keep machines up to date; the undue intermittent employment in seasonal trades; the trade-union limitation on effort by workers under the illusion that it would provide more jobs; waste in transportation; waste in unnecessary variety of articles used in manufacture; lack of standard[s] in commodities; lack of cooperation between employers and labor; failure to develop our water resources; and a dozen other factors. I insisted that these improvements could be effected without governmental control, but that the government should cooperate by research, intellectual leadership, and prohibitions upon the abuse of power.
I contended that within these concepts we could overcome the losses of the war.
Aside from the better living to all that might come from such an invigorated national economy, I emphasized the need to thaw out frozen and inactive capital and the inherited control of the tools of production by increased inheritance taxes. We had long since recognized this danger, by the laws against primogeniture. On the other hand, I proposed that to increase initiative we should lower the income taxes, and make the tax on earned income much lower than that on incomes from interest, dividends, and rent.
I declared that we should have governmental regulation of the public markets to eliminate vicious speculation, and that we must more rigidly control blue sky stock promotion.
At that time these ideas were denounced by some elements as "radical."

2 Twenty years later an economic institution in Washington, with loud trumpet-blasts of publicity, announced this as a new economic discovery.


I came across the Hoover memoirs thanks to this interesting article;

John L. Lewis as Herbert Hoover's Secretary of Labor


In *The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency
1920-1933,* pp. 221-2, Hoover wrote as follows concerning his choice of a
Cabinet after his election in 1928:

"When I formed the Cabinet, I came under strong pressure to appoint John L.
Lewis Secretary of Labor. He was the ablest man in the labor world. In view,
however, of a disgraceful incident at Herndon, Illinois, which had been
greatly used against him, it seemed impossible. He, however, maintained a
friendly attitude. As he stated publicly in later years, 'I at times
disagreed with the President but he always told me what he would or would not
do.' Lewis is a complex character. He is a man of superior intelligence with
the equivalent of a higher education, which he had won by reading of the
widest range. He could repeat, literally, long passages from Shakespeare,
Milton, and the Bible. His word was always good. He was blunt and even brutal
in his methods of negotiation, and he assumed and asserted that employers
were cut from the same cloth. His loyalty to his men was beyond question. He
was not a socialist. He believed in 'free enterprise.' One of his favorite
monologues had for its burden: 'I don't want government ownership of the
mines or business; no labor leader can deal with bureaucracy and the
government, and lick them. I want these economic royalists on the job; they
are the only people who have learned the know-how; they work eighteen hours a
day, seven days a week; my only quarrel with them is over our share in the
productive pie.'

"If Lewis's great abilities could have been turned onto the side of the
government, they would have produced a great public servant."


(There is no "Herndon, Illinois"; this is obviously a misprint for "Herrin,
Illinois." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrin_massacre and
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7847/massacre.htm for the details of the
1922 "Herrin massacre.")

Anyway, Hoover decided to re-appoint the Harding-Coolidge Secretary of Labor,
James J. Davis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Davis But in November
1930, a second opportunity arose to appoint Lewis. Davis was elected to the
US Senate from Pennsylvania and Hoover had to choose a succesor.

According to Irving Bernstein, *The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker,
1920-1933*, p. 354

"The American Federation of Labor had traditionally regarded the Department
of Labor as its own and the Secretary of Labor as its voice in the Cabinet.
Gompers had played the decisive role in the creation of the Department on
March 4, 1913. No one from outside the AFL had ever been Secretary of
Labor...Shortly after the Davis announcement, [William] Green [Gompers'
successor as head of the AFL] called at the White House to ask the President
to name a man from the Federation. He suggested five prominent leaders:
William L. Hutcheson of the Carpenters, John L. Lewis of the Miners, Matthew
Woll of the Photo-Engravers, John P. Frey of the Metal Trades, and John R.
Alpine of the Plumbers. Green urged Hoover to 'maintain the precedent set by
your predecessors.'

"The President, however, chose to break with tradition. He appointed William
N. Doak of the independent Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen as Secretary of
Labor. In Hoover's judgment the AFL could be ignored even on an issue of
moment."

The idea of Lewis as Hoover's Secretary of Labor intrigues me in part because
the two men were philosophically compatible in many ways. I don't just mean
Lewis' opposition to socialism and communism--that was commonplace among
American trade unionists. What was more unusual is that Lewis shared the
engineer Hoover's enthusiasm for technological advance and modernization.
Notoriously, many labor leaders opposed the introduction of new technology
for fear it would put people out of work. Lewis, however, wanted the coal
industry to become more modern even if that meant employing fewer coal
miners. Mechanization would help put out of business the smaller, less
efficient mines that were driving down coal prices and wages. As Lewis put
it, "We decided it is better to have a half million men working in the
industry at good wages...than it is to have a million working in the industry
in poverty." (Bernstein, p. 225) Moreover, Lewis endorsed Hoover for the
presidency not only in 1928 but for re-election in 1932 as well (despite
Hoover's having turned him down for Secretary of Labor twice). Lewis'
politics later in the 1930's could hardly have pleased Hoover, but in 1940
they were allies again--Lewis even trying to get the Republicans to nominate
Hoover for president on a stay-out-of-the-war platform.


The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency

1920-1933,


CHAPTER 15
___________________________________________________________
LABOR RELATIONS
From a technical point of view labor problems were in the hands of the Secretary of Labor, James J. Davis. He was a most amiable man who through his natural abilities had climbed from the ranks on the ladder of labor union politics. He was skillful in handling industrial disturbances—"keeping labor quiet," as Mr. Coolidge remarked. He proved to be good at repair of cracks. He had a genuine genius for friendship and associational activities. If all the members of all the organizations to which he belonged had voted for him, he could have been elected to anything, any time, anywhere.
When I accepted membership in the Harding Cabinet I had stipulated that I must have a voice on major policies involving labor, since I had no belief that commerce and industry could make progress unless labor advanced with them. Secretary Davis was very cooperative. I have already related my part in the Economic Conference of 1921, which bears upon these activities.
My views on labor relations in general rested on two propositions which I ceaselessly stated in one form or another:
First, I held that there are great areas of mutual interest between employee and employer which must be discovered and cultivated, and that it is hopeless to attempt progress if management and labor are to be set up as separate "classes" fighting each other. They are both producers, they are not classes.
And, second, I supported continuously the organization of labor and collective bargaining by representatives of labor's own choosing. I insisted that labor was not a "commodity." I opposed the closed shop and "feather bedding" as denials of fundamental human freedom.

I held that the government could be an influence in bringing better relations about, not by compulsory laws nor by fanning class hate, but by leadership.
The labor unions in that period were wholly anti-Socialist and anti-Communist. On September 5, 1925, I stated:
It is my opinion that our nation is very fortunate in having the American Federation of Labor. It has exercised a powerful influence in stabilizing industry, and in maintaining an American standard of citizenship. Those forces of the old world that would destroy our institutions and our civilization have been met in the front-line trenches by the Federation of Labor and routed at every turn.1

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
One result of the Industrial Conference of 1919 was an attempt on my part to convince the private insurance companies that it was to their advantage as well as that of the people at large to work out a method of unemployment insurance. I spoke on the subject at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company managers' conference on January 27, 1923, stating my belief that in some industries, such as the railways and the utilities, the fluctuations in employment were not widespread, and that there was in them actuarial experience which would give a foundation and a start to such an insurance. However, the companies did not wish even to experiment with it.

CHILD LABOR
The Federal statutory prohibition of child labor had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. I had joined during 1920 in several efforts to secure a new Constitutional prohibition. Soon after I entered the Cabinet Senator Lenroot consulted me about the text of a new Constitutional amendment which he proposed to introduce into the Congress. I objected to his draft, as he had placed the age limit— eighteen—so high as to generate great public opposition. I agreed that this standard was ultimately desirable, but I feared that the lunatic fringe was demanding two years more than was attainable.

Senator, however, refused to change it and passed the amendment through the Congress. I was proved right as to the strength of the opposition. I spoke several times in support of the amendment, for instance, in April and December, 1921, and June, 1922.
When I became President I urged the adoption of the amendment by the states, but some of them, particularly the Democratic-controlled ones, would not ratify it. Roosevelt during his four years as governor of New York did not give more than lip service to its passage.
In the meantime, the agitation, particularly of the American Child Health Association, drove many of the Republican states to pass better laws prohibiting child labor. By the end of my administration in 1932 this evil was largely confined to the backward states.

ABOLISHING THE TWELVE-HOUR DAY
For the practical improvement of working conditions I undertook a campaign to reduce the work hours in certain industries. This black spot on American industry had long been the subject of public concern and agitation. Early in 1922 I instituted an investigation by the Department of Commerce into the twelve-hour day and the eighty-four hour week. It was barbaric, and we were able to demonstrate that it was uneconomic. With my facts in hand I opened the battle by inducing President Harding to call a dinner conference of steel manu-facturers at the White House on May 18, 1922.
All the principal "steel men" attended. I presented the case as I saw it. A number of the manufacturers, such as Charles M. Schwab and Judge Elbert H. Gary, resented my statement, asserting that it was "unsocial and uneconomic." We had some bitter discussion. I was supported by Alexander Legge and Charles R. Hook, whose concerns had already installed the eight-hour day and six-day week. However, we were verbally overwhelmed. The President, to bring the acrid debate to an end, finally persuaded the group to set up a committee to "investigate," under the chairmanship of Judge Gary.
I left the dinner much disheartened, in less than a good humor, resolved to lay the matter before the public. The press representatives were waiting on the portico of the White House to find out what this meeting of "reactionaries" was about. I startled them with the
information that the President was trying to persuade the steel industry to adopt the eight-hour shift and the forty-eight-hour week, in place of the twelve-hour day and eighty-four-hour week. At once a great public discussion ensued. I stirred up my friends in the engineering societies, and on November 1, 1922, they issued a report which endorsed the eight-hour day. I wrote an introduction to this report, eulogizing its conclusions, and got the President to sign it. We kept the pot boiling in the press.
Judge Gary's committee delayed making a report for a year—until June, 1923—although it was frequently promised. They said that the industry, "was going to do something." When their report came out, it was full of humane sentiments, but amounted merely to a stall for more time. I drafted a letter from Mr. Harding to Judge Gary, expressing great disappointment, and gave it to the press. The public reaction was so severe against the industry that Judge Gary called another meeting of the committee and backed down entirely.
On July 3 he telegraphed to the President, saying that they would accede. I was then with Mr. Harding at Tacoma en route to Alaska. He had requested me to give him some paragraphs for his Fourth of July speech. I did so, and made the announcement of the abolition of the twelve-hour day in the steel industry a most important part of the address. He did not have time to look over my part of his manuscript before he took the platform. When he had finished with the American Eagle and arrived at my paragraphs, he stumbled badly over my en-tirely different vocabulary and diction. During a period of applause which followed my segment, he turned to me and said: "Why don't you learn to write the same English that I do?" That would have required a special vocabulary for embellishment purposes. Anyway, owing to public opinion and some pushing on our part, the twelve-hour day was on the way out in American industry—and also the ten-hour day and the seven-day week.
When I became Secretary of Commerce, the working hours of 27 per cent of American industry were sixty or more per week, and those of nearly 75 per cent were fifty-four or more per week. When I left the White House only 4.6 per cent were working sixty hours or more,
while only 13.5 per cent worked fifty-four hours or more. This progress was accomplished by the influence of public opinion and the efforts of the workers in a free democracy, without the aid of a single law —except in the railways.

INDUSTRIAL CONFLICTS
During the years of my service in the Department we had comparatively little labor disturbance. Because of general prosperity and increasing efficiency, wages were increasing steadily in unorganized as well as organized industries—in the former to some degree because employers stood off organization by paying wages at least as high as those in the organized industries. But, in the main, employers willingly shared their larger profits with employees. We had only two bad conflicts.
In 1922, the railway shopmen and the organized bituminous coal miners went on strike at the same time. President Harding assigned the coal strike to Secretary Davis and requested me to negotiate a settlement of the railway strike. I was to learn some bitter lessons. I had arranged that the railway employees' leaders see the President and disclose confidentially to him their minimum demands, which were as usual considerably below the demands which they announced publicly. Through President Daniel Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the chairman of the Railway Managers' Committee, I secured a confidential statement of their maximum concessions. I found that the two antagonists were not far apart and suggested some modifications which seemed to me to be fair. The Employees' Committee believed they could carry the settlement. Mr. Willard's committee agreed to support the settlement on this basis. The railway presidents called a meeting in New York to consider the proposal. Mr. Willard asked me to attend the meeting and give him support. I secured a message from President Harding to open my statement. I was kept waiting outside the meeting for some time and was finally ushered in and introduced by the chairman with an attitude which seemed to convey, "Well, what have you got to say here?" Most of the two hundred men present were very antagonistic. I learned afterwards they had already repudiated Willard and his
committee. Anyway, I certainly had a freezing reception. Paradoxically, my temperature rose somewhat and my preachment upon social relations raised their temperatures and made my exit more welcome.
The railway executives now refused every concession. The men continued the strike until the roads represented by Willard's committee fell away from the rest and gave the men even better terms than the original formula. Then they all gave way.
While thenceforth I was not devotedly loved by certain railway magnates, their lack of affection was more than offset by friendship of others. Especially among these friends was Daniel Willard, who remained unwavering during the quarter-century before his death. He was respected by the whole American people and beloved by every B. & 0. man. There were many fine citizens among the railway presidents. At that time and in later years I had many devoted friends among them, such as Sargent, German, Budd, Crawford, Shoup, Gray, Storey, Downs, Scandrett, and Gurley, mostly western railway presidents. It was a suggestive thing that the railway presidents who led the opposition had their offices in New York City. They have mostly gone to their rest in graves unknown to all the public except the sexton, or they still dodder around their clubs, quavering that "labor must be disciplined."
A by-product of this incident gave me deep pain. An editor of the New York Tribune came to see me after the meeting in New York. He was a man with a fine conception of public right; he was greatly outraged at the whole action of the majority of railway presidents. The following morning the Tribune's leading editorial gave them a deserved blistering. The next day the editor informed me that Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Sr., who dominated the paper, had ordered his instant dismissal after many years of service. The dear old lady was a righteous and generous woman, but a partial misfit with the changing times. In the science of social relations she was the true daughter of a great western pioneer, Darius 0. Mills. When the editor came to see me in Washington, while he had no regrets, it was easy to see that he was wholly unstrung by his tragedy and distracted by anxieties over growing family obligations and lack of resources. At once we gave him an economic mission in Europe, during which he somewhat recovered his spirits and was able to keep his family going. But he never really regained his grip.
It is a safe generalization for the period to say that where industrial leaders were undominated by New York promoter-bankers, they were progressive and constructive in outlook. Some of the so-called bankers in New York were not bankers at all. They were stock promoters. They manipulated the voting control of many of the railway, industrial, and distributing corporations, and appointed such officials as would insure to themselves the banking and finance. They were not simply providing credit to business in order to lubricate production. Their social instinct belonged to an early Egyptian period. Wherever industrial, transportation, and distribution concerns were free from such banker domination, we had little trouble in getting cooperation.
Others of the Department's services to labor sprang from its broad economic programs. However, our emphasis on the needs and rights of organized labor and our constant insistence on cooperation of employers and employees as the means of reducing the areas of friction brought no little change in public attitudes.

THE RAILWAY LABOR BOARD
It was obvious that we must find some other solution to railway labor conflict than strikes, with their terrible penalties upon the innocent public. Therefore, early in 1926, I began separate conferences with the major railway brotherhoods on one hand, and the more constructive railway presidents, under Daniel Willard, on the other. I discarded compulsory measures but developed the idea of a Railway Labor Mediation Board, which would investigate, mediate, and, if necessary, publish its conclusions as to a fair settlement, with stays in strike action pending these processes. Having found support in both groups, I called a private dinner at my home of some ten leaders, half from each side—and I omitted extremists of both ends from the meeting. We agreed upon support of this idea and appointed a committee to draft a law. We presented it to the Congress, and with some secondary modifications it was passed on May 20, 1926. This machinery, with some later improvements, preserved peace in the railways during the entire period of my service in Washington.

Commenting upon the progress of labor relations I was able to say in an address on May 12, 1926:
There is a marked change . . . in the attitude of employers and employees. . . . It is not so many years ago that the employer considered it was in his interest to use the opportunities of unemployment and immigration to lower wages irrespective of other considerations. The lowest wages and longest hours were then conceived as the means to attain lowest production costs and largest profits. Nor is it many years ago that our labor unions considered that the maximum of jobs and the greatest security in a job were to be attained by restricting individual effort.
But we are a long way on the road to new conceptions. The very essence of great production is high wages and low prices, because it depends upon a widening range of consumption only to be obtained from the purchasing power of high real wages and increasing standards of living. . . .
Parallel with this conception there has been an equal revolution in the views of labor.
No one will doubt that labor has always accepted the dictum of the high wage, but labor has only gradually come to the view that unrestricted individual effort, driving of machinery to its utmost, and elimination of every waste in production, are the only secure foundations upon which a high real wage can be builded, because the greater die production the greater will be the quantity to divide.
The acceptance of these ideas is obviously not universal. Not all employers . . . nor has every union abandoned the fallacy of restricted effort. . . . But . . . for both employer and employee to think in terms of the mutual interest of increased production has gained greatly in strength. It is a long cry from the conceptions of the old economics.
1 The C.I.O., with its socialist and Communist control in its early stages, was not organized until several years later.
2 Indeed, it preserved peace until the presidents failed to give moral support to the Board's recommendations and its potency was largely destroyed.
3 A list of my more important statements upon labor as Secretary of Commerce appears in the Appendix, under the heading Chapter 15.

CHAPTER 15
1921: April 1, article in Industrial Management; Nov. 4, address at New York; statement in Labor on strikes.
1922: Feb. 18, statement on Coal Strike; Aug. 7, on Railroad Strike.
1923: Jan. 27, May 8, addresses at New York.
1925: April 11, address at New York; May 19, on the Seven-Day Work Week; Sept. 5, at American Federation of Labor; Dec. 28, on Labor Arbitration.
1926: May 12, address at Washington.
1927: Aug. Foreword to Year Book on Commercial Arbitration in the United States, 1927 (American Arbitration Association).
1928: Feb. 25, Report to President from Secretaries of State, Commerce, Labor, on immigration.
___________________________________________________________

Monday, February 21, 2011

Lucy Parsons Redux


I originally posted here about Lucy Parsons for Black History Month. Here are some updates from the web about Lucy. And as you read about her you realize that she could be celebrated during Womens History Month, Labour History Month, as Mexican American an Indigenous woman, an American proletarian revolutionary.

As I researched this post I came across a number of references to Lucy being a member or supporter of the Communist Party of the USA.

This is a historiographical case of mistaken identity confusing her with her wobbly sister Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Rebel Girl, who was national Chairman of the CPUSA.


Lucy was a Revolutionary Socialist and Anarchist till the end of her life.



A Fury For Justice: Lucy Parsons And The Revolutionary Anarchist Movement in Chicago
For six and a half decades Lucy Parsons played a pivotal role in some
of the most influential social movements of her time. A fiery speaker,
bold social critic, and tireless organizer, Parsons was a prominent figure
in radical American political movements from the late 1870s until
her death at the age of 89 on March 7th, 1942. Despite playing an
important part in such iconic struggles as the movement for the 8-
hour day, the defense of the Haymarket martyrs, and the founding
of the IWW, Lucy Parsons has been largely ignored by historians of
all stripes. Parsons sole biographer, writing in 1976, explained her
invisibility thusly: “Lucy Parsons was black, a woman, and working
class — three reasons people are often excluded from history.”1
While this helps explain in part Parsons’ absence from mainstream
historiography, it is not entirely satisfying. While other working
class black women found their way into academic writing and political
iconography with the rise of Black Nationalist movements in
the 1960s and 70s and the concurrent proliferation of Black Studies
programs at American universities, Lucy Parsons was mostly left behind.
Unfortunately, when she has been included in academic writing
she has usually not been allowed to speak for herself. Most of the
academics that have mentioned Lucy Parsons (generally very briefly)
have recast her as they would have preferred her to be, usually as
either a reflection of their own politics or as an example of the failures
of past movements. The only biography of Parsons, Carolyn
Ashbaugh’s Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary, combines misrepresentation
with inaccuracy. Ashbaugh nonsensically claims that
Parsons was not an anarchist, a fact beyond the point of argument
for anyone that has read Lucy Parsons’s work, and she groundlessly
claims that Parsons joined the Communist Party towards the end of
her life. Sadly, this has allowed every writer after Ashabugh to make
the same erroneous claim

FOUNDING CONVENTION

Industrial Workers of the World

THIRD DAY

Thursday, June 29, 1905

AFTERNOON SESSION

SPEECH OF LUCY E. PARSONS

DEL. LUCY E. PARSONS: I can assure you that after the intellectual feast that I have enjoyed immensely this afternoon, I feel fortunate to appear before you now in response to your call. I do not wish you to think that I am here to play upon words when I tell you that I stand before you and feel much like a pigmy before intellectual giants, but that is only the fact. I wish to state to you that I have taken the floor because no other woman has responded, and I feel that it would not be out of place for me to say in my poor way a few words about this movement.

We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it, and the only way that we can be represented is to take a man to represent us. You men have made such a mess of it in representing us that we have not much confidence in asking you; and I for one feel very backward in asking the men to represent me. We have no ballot, but we have our labor. I think it is August Bebel, in his “Woman in the Past, Present and Future”—a book that should be read by every woman that works for wages—I think it is Bebel that says that men have been slaves through-out all the ages, but that woman’s condition has been worse, for she has been the slave of a slave. I think there was never a greater truth uttered. We are the slaves of the slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Wherever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them, and if there is anything that you men should do in the future it is to organize the women.

And I tell you that if the women had inaugurated a boycott of the State street stores since the teamsters’ strike they would have surrendered long ago. (Applause). I do not strike before you to brag. I had no man connected with that strike to make it of interest to me to boycott the stores, but I have not bought one penny’s worth there since that strike was inaugurated. I intended to boycott all of them as one individual at least, so it is important to educate the women. Now I wish to show my sisters here that we fasten the chains of slavery upon our sisters, sometimes unwittingly, when we go down to the department store and look around for cheap bargains and go home and exhibit what we have got so cheap. When we come to reflect it simply means the robbery of our sisters, for we know that the things cannot be made for such prices and give the women who made them fair wages.

I wish to say that I have attended many conventions in the twenty-seven years since I came here to Chicago’ a young girl, so full of life and animation and hope. It is to youth that hope comes; it is to age that reflection comes. I have attended conventions from that day to this of one kind and another and taken part in them. I have taken part in some in which our Comrade Debs had a part. I was at the organization that he organized in this city some eight or ten years ago. Now, the point I want to make is that these conventions are full of enthusiasm. And that is right; we should sometimes mix sentiment with soberness; it is a part of life. But, as I know from experience, there are sober moments ahead of us, and when you go out of this hall, when you have laid aside your enthusiasm, then comes solid work. Are you going out with the reflection that you appreciate and grasp the situation that you are to tackle? Are you going out of here with your minds made up that the class in which we call ourselves, revolutionary Socialists so-called—that that class is organized to meet organized capital with the millions at its command? It has many weapons to fight .us. First it has money. Then it has legislative tools. Then it has its judiciary; it has its army and its navy; it has its guns; it has armories; and last, it has the gallows. We call ourselves revolutionists. Do you know what the capitalists mean to do to you revolutionists? I simply throw these hints out that you young people may become reflective and know what you have to face at the first’ and then it will give you strength. I am not here to cause any discouragement, but simply to encourage you to go on in your grand work.

Now, that is the solid foundation that I hope this organization will be built on; that it may be built not like a house upon the sand, that when the waves of adversity come it may go over into the ocean of oblivion; but that it shall be built upon a strong, granite, hard foundation; a foundation made up of the hearts, and aspirations of the men and women of this twentieth century who have set their minds, their bands, their hearts and their heads against the past with all its miserable poverty, with its wage slavery, with its children ground into dividends, with its miners away down under the earth and with never the light of sunshine, and with its women selling the holy name of womanhood for a day’s board. I hope we understand that this organization has set its face against that iniquity, and that it has set its eyes to the rising star of liberty, that means fraternity, solidarity, the universal brotherhood of man. I hope that while politics have been mentioned here I am not one of those who, because a man or woman disagrees with me, cannot act with them—I am glad and proud to say I am too broad-minded to say they are a fakir or fool or a fraud because they disagree with me. My view may be narrow and theirs may be broad; but I do say to those who have intimated politics here as being necessary or a part of this organization, that I do not impute to them dishonesty or impure motives. But as I understand the call for this convention, politics had no place here; it was simply to be an economic organization, and I hope for the good of this organization that when we go away from this hall, and our comrades go some to the west, some to the east, some to the north and some to the south, while some remain in Chicago, and all spread this light over this broad land and carry the message of what this convention has done, that there will be no room for politics at all. There may be room for politics; I have nothing to say about that; but it is a bread and butter question, an economic issue, upon which the fight must be made.

Now, what do we mean when we say revolutionary Socialist? We mean that the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers. (Applause.) Now, let us analyze that for just a moment, before you applaud me. First, the land belongs to the landless. Is there a single land owner in this country who owns his land by the constitutional rights given by the constitution of the United States who will allow you to vote it away from him? I am not such a fool as to believe it. We say, “The tools belong to the toiler.” They are owned by the capitalist class. Do you believe they will allow you to go into the halls of the legislature and simply say, “Be it enacted that on and after a certain day the capitalist shall no longer own the tools and the factories and the places of industry, the ships that plow the ocean and our lakes?” Do you believe that they will submit? I do not. We say, “The products belong to the producers.” It belongs to the capitalist class as their legal property. Do you think that they will allow you to vote them away from them by passing a law and saying, “Be it enacted that on and after a certain day Mr. Capitalist shall be dispossessed?” You may, but I do not believe it. Hence, when you roll under your tongue the expression that you are revolutionists, remember what that word means. It means a revolution that shall turn all these things over where they belong to the wealth producers. Now, how shall the wealth producers come into possession of them? I believe that if every man and every woman who works, or who toils in the mines, the mills, the workshops, the fields, the factories and the farms in our broad America should decide in their minds that they shall have that which of right belongs to them, and that no idler shall live upon their toil, and when your new organization, your economic organization, shall declare as man to man and women to woman, as brothers and sisters, that you are determined that you will possess these things, then there is no army that is large enough to overcome you, for you yourselves constitute the army. (Applause). Now, when you have decided that you will take possession of these things, there will not need to be one gun fired or one scaffold erected. You will simply come into your own, by your own independence and your own manhood, and by asserting your own individuality, and not sending any man to any legislature in any State of the American Union to enact a law that you shall have what is your own; yours by nature and by your manhood and by your very presence upon this earth.

Nature has been lavish to her children. She has placed in this earth all the material of wealth that is necessary to make men and women happy. She has given us brains to go into her store house and bring from its recesses all that is necessary. She has given us these two hands and these brains to manufacture them suited to the wants of men and women. Our civilization stands on a parallel with all other civilizations. There is just one thing we lack, and we have only ourselves to blame if we do not become free. We simply lack the intelligence to take possession of that which we have produced. (Applause). And I believe and I hope and I feel that the men and women who constitute a convention like this can come together and organize that intelligence. I must say that I do not know whether I am saying anything that interests you or not, but I feel so delighted that I am talking to your heads and not to your hands and feet this afternoon. I feel that you will at least listen to me, and maybe you will disagree with me, but I care not; I simply want to shed the light as I see it. I wish to say that my conception of the future method of taking possession of this is that of the general strike: that is my conception of it. The trouble with all the strikes in the past has been this: the workingmen like the teamsters in our cities, these hard-working teamsters, strike and go out and starve. Their children starve. Their wives get discouraged. Some feel that they have to go out and beg for relief, and to get a little coal to keep the children warm, or a little bread to keep the wife from starving, or a little something to keep the spark of life in them so that they can remain wage slaves. That is the way with the strikes in the past. My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production. If any one is to starve—I do not say it is necessary—let it be the capitalist class. They have starved us long enough, while they have had wealth and luxury and all that is necessary. You men and women should be imbued with the spirit that is now displayed in far-off Russia and far-off Siberia where we thought the spark of manhood and womanhood had been crushed out of them. Let us take example from them. We see the capitalist class fortifying themselves to-day behind their Citizens’ Associations and Employers’ Associations in order that they may crush the American labor movement. Let us cast our eyes over to far-off Russia and take heart and courage from those who are fighting the battle there, and from the further fact shown in the dispatches that appear this morning in the news that carries the greatest terror to the capitalist class throughout all the world—the emblem that has been the terror of all tyrants through all the ages, and there you will see that the red flag has been raised. (Applause). According to the Tribune, the greatest terror is evinced in Odessa and all through Russia because the red flag has been raised. They know that where the red flag has been raised whoever enroll themselves beneath that flag recognize the universal brotherhood of man; they recognize that the red current that flows through the veins of all humanity is identical, that the ideas of all humanity are identical; that those who raise the red flag, it matters not where, whether on the sunny plains of China, or on the sun-beaten hills of Africa, or on the far-off snow-capped shores of the north, or in Russia or in America—that they all belong to the human family and have an identity of interest. (Applause). That is what they know.

So when we come to decide, let us sink such differences as nationality, religion, politics, and set our eyes eternally and forever towards the rising star of the industrial republic of labor; remembering that we have left the old behind and have set our faces toward the future. There is no power on earth that can stop men and women who are determined to be free at all hazards. There is no power on earth so great as the power of intellect. It moves the world and it moves the earth.

Now, in conclusion, I wish to say to you—and you will excuse me because of what I am going to say and only attribute it to my interest in humanity. I wish to say that nineteen years ago on the fourth of May of this year, I was one of those at a meeting at the Haymarket in this city to protest against eleven workingmen being shot to pieces at a factory in the southeastern part of this city because they had dared to strike for the eight-hour movement that was to be inaugurated in America in 1886. The Haymarket meeting was called primarily and entirely to protest against the murder of comrades at the McCormick factory. When that meeting was nearing its close some one threw a bomb. No one knows to this day who threw it except the man who threw it. Possibly he has rendered his account with nature and has passed away. But no human being alive knows who threw it. And yet in the soil of Illinois, the soil that gave a Lincoln to America, the soil in which the great, magnificent Lincoln was buried in the State that was supposed to be the most liberal in the union, five men sleep the last sleep in Waldheim under a monument that, has been raised there because they dared to raise their voices for humanity. I say to any of you who are here and who can do so, it is well worth your time to go out there and draw some inspiration around the graves of the first martyrs who fell in the great industrial struggle for liberty on American soil. (Applause). I say to you that even within the sound of my voice, only two short blocks from where we meet to-day, the scaffold was erected on which those five men paid the penalty for daring to raise their voices against the iniquities of the age in which we live. We arc assembled here for the same purpose. And do any of you older men remember the telegrams that were sent out from Chicago while our comrades were not yet even cut down from the cruel gallows? “Anarchy is dead, and these miscreants have been put out of the way.” Oh, friends, I am sorry that I even had to use that word, “anarchy” just now in your presence, which was not in my mind at the outset. So if any of you wish to go out there and look at this monument that has been raised by those who believed in their comrades’ innocence and sincerity, I will ask you, when you have gone out and looked at the monument, that you will go to the reverse side of the monument and there read on the reverse side the words of a man, himself the purest and the noblest man who ever sat in the gubernatorial chair of the State of Illinois, John P. Altgeld. (Applause). On that monument you will read the clause of his message in which he pardoned the men who were lingering then in Joliet. I have nothing more to say. I ask you to read the words of Altgeld, who was at that time the governor, and had been a lawyer and a judge, and knew whereof he spoke, and then take out your copy books and copy the words of Altgeld when he released those who had not been slaughtered at the capitalists’ behest, and then take them home and change your minds about what those men were put to death for.

Now, I have taken up your time in this because I simply feel that I have a right as a mother and as a wife of one of those sacrificed men to say whatever I can to bring the light to bear upon this conspiracy and to show you the way it was. Now, I thank you for the time that I have taken up of yours. I hope that we will meet again some time, you and I, in some hall where we can meet and organize the wage workers of America, the men and women, so that the children may not go into the factories, nor the women into the factories, unless they go under proper conditions. I hope even now to live to see the day when the first dawn of the new era of labor will have arisen, when capitalism will be a thing of the past, and the new industrial republic, the commonwealth of labor, shall be in operation. I thank you. (Applause.)

Carr, Mary M. "Jay Fox: Anarchist of Home." Columbia Magazine. 4.1 (Spring 1990): 3-10.

The utopian colony of Home was founded in 1896 on Von Geldern Cove, across the Tacoma Narrows on the Key Peninsula. Established by three families who were refugees from another failed utopian community, it became in time a successful anarchist colony whose most famed inhabitant was the sometimes elusive Jay Fox, anarchist and labor radical.

In 1904 Fox worked closely with Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons, in an attempt to launch an anarchist, English-language newspaper. In the spring of that year Parsons, Fox and others discussed the possibility of starting a paper to replace The Free Society which had folded in the wake of the persecution of radicals following the McKinley assassination. Throughout the summer the group held socials and picnics to raise money for the cause.

However, by late summer a rift had developed between Fox and Parsons. A group headed by Fox felt that The Demonstrator of Home Colony should be adopted and backed. The other faction, headed by Parsons, felt strongly that such a paper should emanate from the radical and industrial center of Chicago rather than from the backwater colony of Home. Before the controversy was settled, Fox sent the money to Home. Parsons, undaunted, started a Chicago-based paper, The Liberator. It should be noted that Fox had good reason for his position. He had been invited to assume the editorship of The Demonstrator, planning to move to Home in the fall of 1905. He was delayed that fall and again in the spring.


by Robert Black

Not for its intrinsic interest - no part of this book has much of that - but as a case study in Salerno's shortcomings, let me review in much more detail than it deserves his chapter on "Anarchists at the Founding Convention." Here is his most of his case for significantly raising prevailing estimates of anarchist influence on the IWW. He first cites the expressions of solidarity with the Haymarket anarchists martyred two decades before which issued from the podium; there was even a pilgrimage to their graves. Indeed , one of the opening speakers was Lucy Parsons, widow of executed Haymarket defendant Albert Parsons.(112) Mrs. Parsons, however, was so far from speaking as an anarchist that she actually apologized for using the word "anarchy." As Joseph Conlin described the scene, "while almost all the delegates claimed to be socialists, there was also present a small group of anarchists, the remnants of the Chicago group. Lucy Parsons was honored by a prominent seat and spoke several times. But she functioned primarily as platform decoration and had little influence on the proceedings. Her ignominious role characterized the dilemma of the less eminent anarchists: tolerated in attendance, they went all but unheard. Mrs. Parsons sheepishly apologized for employing the term 'anarchy' in a speech, and the few avowedly anarchist proposals that reached the floor were summarily rejected."(113)

None of this is evidence of anarchist influence at the founding convention. The Haymarket labor martyrs had been anarchists - although even that has been called into question(114) -- but they were commemorated in Chicago, not as anarchists, but as labor martyrs. By then, their anarchism long since interred with them, they were remembered as heroic leaders of the eight-hour movement, a lowest common denominator cause any unionist could rally around at a convention bent on forging unity. (115) That they assembled in Chicago made it only that much more obligatory as a matter of common courtesy to pay homage to the local heroes. The presence of Lucy Parsons on the platform had exactly, and only, the honorific significance of the presence of, say, Coretta King on the platform of a Democratic Party convention. Coretta King has no influence on the Democrats and Lucy Parsons had none on the Wobblies.

Women that Wobbled but Didn’t Fall Down

Lucy Parsons, an adamant socialist and ‘Wobbly’ (a term for IWW members), stands out as a great example of a woman in the IWW. While little is known about her earliest background, we do know that she was born in 1853. Her ethnicity was the convergence of African, Mexican and Native roots, and, because of this, she was keenly aware of injustices in society in respect to those groups to which she belonged (Bird, Georgakas and Schaffer). Furthermore, it is supposed that she was born into slavery, which, again, gives her an interesting perspective in regards to the injustices perpetrated by the rich on the destitute.

Lucy Parsons

Lucy Parsons
(1853 - 1942)

Lucy Parsons was born in Texas in 1853 (most likely as a slave) to parents of Native, African and Mexican American ancestry. She was an anarchist labor activist and powerful orator who fought against poverty, capitalism, social injustice and racism her whole life.

She married Albert Parsons, a former confederate soldier, in 1871. During that time, the South was instituting repressive Jim Crow laws and Lucy and Albert fled north to Chicago . The Chicago Police Department described her as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” in the 1920s. Lucy and Albert were highly effective anarchist organizers involved in the labor movement in the late 19 th Century. They also participated in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless and women. Albert was fired from his job at the Times because of his involvement in organizing workers and blacklisted in the Chicago printing trade. Lucy opened a dress shop to support her family and hosted meetings for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). She began to write for the radical papers The Socialist and The Alarm , weekly publications of the International Working People's Association (IWPA) which she and Albert were among the founders of in 1883.

By 1886, tension among workers across America was high due to horrid working conditions and the squelching of union activities by authorities. A peaceful strike at McCormick Harvest Works in Chicago became violent when police fired into the crowd of unarmed strikers. Many were wounded and four were killed. Radicals called a meeting in Haymarket Square and once again, this peaceful gathering turned violent when someone threw a bomb that killed a police officer. Although Albert was not present at Haymarket, he was arrested and executed on charges that he had conspired in the Riot.

In the years following the execution, Lucy lived in poverty but remained committed to the cause. In 1892, she began editing Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly and was frequently arrested for public speaking and distributing anarchist literature. Then, in 1905, she helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and began editing The Liberator , a paper published by the IWW and based in Chicago . Here she was able to voice her opinions on women's issues, supporting a woman's right to divorce, remarry and have access to birth control. She organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in 1915, which pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party and Jane Addam's Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration on February 12.

In 1925, she began working with the National Committee of the International Labor Defense, a Communist Party group that aided with the Scottsboro Eight and Angelo Hearndon cases. These were cases where the establishment charged African-American organizers with crimes they did not commit.

With eyesight failing, she spoke at the International Harvester in February, 1941. She fought against oppression until her death in 1942 at the age of 89 when she died in an accidental house fire. Her boyfriend died the next day from injuries he sustained while trying to save her. Adding to this tragedy, the FBI stole her library of 1,500 books and all of her personal papers. The state still viewed Lucy Parsons as a threat, even in her death.



WILLIAMS, Casey. "Whose Lucy Parsons ? The mythologizing and re-appropriation of a radical hero".

Anarcho-Syndicalist Review number 47, Summer, 2007
As a radical anarchist, Lucy Parsons dedicated over sixty years of her life to fighting for America’s working class and poor. [1] and A skillful orator and passionate writer, Parsons played an important role in the history of American radicalism, especially in the labor movement of the 1880s, and remained an active force until her death in 1942. The one question from which she never swayed was "how to lift humanity from poverty and despair ?" [2] With this question propelling her life’s work, Parsons was active in a multitude of radical organizations including the Socialistic Labor Party, the International Working People’s Association, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Coupled with her long involvement in America’s labor movement was Parsons’ unbending anarchist vision of society, a philosophy which underlay her critique of America’s oppressive economic and political institutions.

Peter Linebaugh: Joe Hill and the IWW

Rosemont has a crucial chapter on the indigenous people. Lucy Parsons, "whose high cheek bones of her Indian ancestors" as her biographer says, provided the physiognomy of a countenance of utter inspiration when she spoke at the founding convention of the IWW August Spies lived with the Ojibways; Big Bill Haywood attended pow-wows. Abner Woodruff, a Wob, had a chapter on Indian agriculture in his Evolution of American Agriculture (1915-6). The Wobblies were "the spiritual successors to the Red Indians as number one public enemy and conscience botherers." Frank Little, the most effective Wobbly organizer, was lynched in Butte, Montana, by the same hard rock copper "bosses" which caused Joe Hill to be shot. Little was a Cherokee Indian.

The Wheatland Riot, The Bisbee Deportation, IWW Ties with Mexico, Workers of the World


Read more: Industrial Workers of the World - The Wheatland Riot, The Bisbee Deportation, IWW Ties with Mexico, Workers of the World http://www.jrank.org/cultures/pages/4003/Industrial-Workers-World.html#ixzz1EaFOqcfE

The IWW arose in response to the abysmal working conditions of many poor and unskilled workers in the United States and to what it considered the lack of concern on the part of the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), who sought to organize skilled, U.S.–born workers. The AFL excluded many of the groups that the IWW actively recruited: immigrants, women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and unskilled laborers. The AFL was determinedly anti-immigrant, and even Mexican Americans were viewed as “foreigners.” In order to recruit Mexican Americans to its ranks, the IWW hired Mexican American organizers and translated IWW literature into Spanish.

Mexican Americans have been a part of IWW's history since the beginning. Lucy Gonzales Parsons was a founding member of the IWW and a longtime radical whose work from the 1870s until her death in 1942 gained her the reputation of being “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Born in Texas, Gonzales Parsons moved to Chicago in the 1870s with her husband, Albert Parsons, one of the “Haymarket Square martyrs.” Although many scholars argue that she was African American, Gonzales Parsons claimed Mexican and Indian parentage and her death certificate listed Spanish-surnamed parents.


Roots of Resistance

An interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The IWW spanned a decade and a half of an extremely repressive period—Jim Crow segregation of Blacks and Mexicans was firmly entrenched, Native Americans had to have passes to leave their reservations and were not allowed to join trade unions, women didn't have the vote. Yet, the IWW was able to organize and inspire inter-racial struggles. It was also the period of the prolonged Mexican Revolution and cooperation between the IWW and the Mexican revolutionary workers was constant. In Oklahoma, black, white, and Indian tenant farmers, inspired by the Wobblies, rose up together in 1917 to oppose the draft for World War I and oppose the war as a "rich man's war." It was called the "Green Corn Rebellion." And, of course, women were prominent in the IWW founding and leadership: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and many local leaders.

The legacy of the IWW.

Thus Lucy Parsons, already renowned for her defense of her husband after the Haymarket incident in 1886 and as an African-American revolutionary in Chicago, famously spoke for the most lowly, women driven to prostitution. But she also spoke of workers' capacity, arguing: "My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production." In this way, the extraordinary veteran of nineteenth-century class, race, and gender struggles predicted the sit-down strike of the future, which took place first in factories, then at sit-ins to integrate public facilities, and still later in college classrooms and presidents' offices to protest the brutal war on Vietnam.


Class Struggles and Geography:
Revisiting the 1886 Haymarket Square Police Riot

Regardless of how one interprets Haymarket, their memory would have
vanished altogether by the next generation without recent efforts and those of Lucy
Parsons, along with other anarchists and labour activists, to recount and publish
Haymarket accounts. In this manner, Haymarket became an integral part of labour
movements’ lore, especially in Latin America and southern and eastern Europe.
Between 1887 and today, with uneven speed and through differing circumstances
and motivations, Haymarket was turned into the basis of a holiday with the
establishment of the first of May as labour-day in most of the world. Even if that
history was appropriated by state socialist dictatorships for their own
propagandistic and geopolitical ends during the middle and late twentieth centuries,
it remained a symbol of workers’ struggle for rights and dignity in the workplace, if
not a struggle for socialism. In the US, however, the holiday, along with its radical
referent, was banned by 1955. The observance was not revived until the 1970s with
the endeavours of veteran union activists and the renewed spread and
popularisation of anarchist perspectives (Avrich, 1984, 428-436; Green, 2006, 301-
320; Zinn, 1995, 267).

LUCY PARSONS

Lucy also wrote about the press, and how even in her own time, newspapers suppressed and manipulated information with their disinformation and misinformation in reporting incidents which occurred. Lucy wrote essays, “The Importance of a Press” and “Challenging the Lying Monopolistic Press” that alerted people that the fourth estate could be just as destructive to citizen’s interests as much as any robber baron, or government institution.

Her writings on sex and patriarchy, as well as her thoughts on race and racism, require closer reading, and certainly deserve greater attention.

In February, 1941, in one of her last major appearances, Lucy spoke at the International Harvestor, where she continued to inspire crowds. On March 7, 1942 at the age of 90, Lucy died from a fire that engulfed her home.

Her lover George Markstall died the next day from wounds he received while trying to save her. To add to this tragedy, when Lucy Parsons died, the police seized and destroyed her letters, writings and library. She almost disappeared from history, but, many of her writings did survive.

Lucy’s library of 1,500 books on sex, socialism and anarchy were mysteriously stolen, along with all of her personal papers. Neither the FBI nor the Chicago police told Irving Abrams, who had come to rescue the library, that the FBI had already confiscated all of her books. The struggle for fundamental freedom of speech, in which Lucy had engaged throughout her life, continued through her death as authorities still tried to silence this radical woman by robbing her of the work of her lifetime.

She is buried near her husband, near the Haymarket Monument.

Lucy Parsons and the call for class war -notmytribe.com

Lucy lived well up into this century,
well into this century, died in 1940.
One time, she was speaking at a big May Day rally
back in the Haymarket in the middle 1930s, she was incredibly old.
She was led carefully up to the rostrum, a multitude of people there.
She had her hair tied back in a tight white bun, her face
a mass of deeply incised lines, deep-set beady black eyes.
She was the image of everybody’s great-grandmother.
She hunched over that podium, hawk-like,
and fixed that multitude with those beady black eyes,
and said: “What I want
is for every greasy grimy tramp
to arm himself with a knife or a gun
and stationing himself at the doorways of the rich
shoot or stab them as they come out.”

Looking for Lucy (in all the wrong places)

Considering Lucy Parsons’s life as a muckraker, incendiary wordsmith, and all-around thorn in the side of the established order, the Chicago Park District should have expected the flurry of controversy it got when it decided to name a park for her. Like most controversies, this one has made some fairly preposterous bedfellows. The two groups most vociferously opposed to naming a city park after Parsons have been the Fraternal Order of Police, and local anarchists who insist that any government-sanctioned recognition dishonors Parsons’s anarchist legacy.

In tracking this little gush of new blood from an old wound, I’ve gained an even deeper understanding of just how tortured Chicago’s relationship with its radical history is. Lucy Parsons — the anarchist formerly known to the American labor movement as one of its founding mothers, and to the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” — is barely known to most Chicagoans today, including the city officials who supported the park-naming. In what is surely one of the greatest ironies in the history of Chicago’s civic life, the cops were the only ones who went on record openly acknowledging Parsons’s anarchism, while her supporters both in and out of local government labored to recast her merely as a champion of rights for women and minorities (which she was, but only by extension of her lifelong fight for workers’ revolution).


Lucy Parsons :: Revolutionary Feminist

Class, Race and Gender
Parsons’ commitments towards freedom of the young Black Communist Angelo Herndon in Georgia, Tom Mooney in California, and for the Scottsoboro Nine in Alabama were unflinching. Parsons recognized the class system in America as the prime factor in perpetuating racism. She was the foremost American feminist to declare that race, gender and sexuality are not oppressed identities by themselves. It is the economic class that determines the level of oppression people of minorities have to confront. Notwithstanding her social location of being a black and a woman, Parsons declared that a black person in America is exploited not because she/he is black. “It is because he is poor. It is because he is dependent. Because he is poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North.”

Lucy Parsons was a relentless defender of working class rights. To contain her popularity, the media portrayed her more as the wife of Albert Parsons – a Haymarket martyr, who was murdered by the state of Illinois, while demanding for eight-hour working day on November 11, 1887. While identifying her with Albert’s causes, history textbooks – both liberal and conservative – seldom mention Parsons as the radical torchbearer of American communist movement.

Parsons was among the first women to join the founding convention of IWW. She thundered: “We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it. But we have our labor. Wherever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class uses women to reduce them.”

In The Agitator, dated November 1, 1912 she referred to Haymarket martyrs thus: “Our comrades were not murdered by the state because they had any connection with the bombthrowing, but because they were active in organizing the wage-slaves. The capitalist class didn’t want to find the bombthrower; this class foolishly believed that by putting to death the active spirits of the labor movement of the time, it could frighten the working class back to slavery.”

She had no illusions about capitalistic world order. Parsons called for armed overthrow of the American ruling class. She refused to buy into an argument that the origin of racist violence was in racism. Instead, Parsons viewed racism as a necessary byproduct of capitalism. In 1886, she called for armed resistance to the working class: “You are not absolutely defenseless. For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known with impunity, cannot be wrested from you!”

For Parsons, her personal losses meant nothing; her oppression as a woman meant less. She was dedicated to usher in changes for the entire humanity – changes that would alter the world order in favor of the working poor class.

Even as a founding member of IWW, she was not willing to let the world’s largest labor union function in a romanticized manner. She radicalized the IWW by demanding that women, Mexican migrant workers and even the unemployed become full and equal members.

With her clarity of vision, lifelong devotion towards communist causes, her strict adherence to radical demands for a societal replacement of class structure, Lucy Parsons remains the most shining example of an American woman who turned her disadvantaged social locations of race and gender, to one of formidable strength – raising herself to bring about emancipated working class consciousness.


Baron, Fanya nee Anisimovna aka Fanny Baron 188?-1921 | libcom.org

Idealistic young anarchist who suffered the brutality of both the US cops and the Russian Cheka.

Born in Russia, Fanya Anisimovna moved to the United States where she established a relationship with Aron Baron (aka Kantarovitch), who worked as a baker. She was active in the anarchist movement in Chicago, and with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She was involved in the hunger demonstrations of 1915 there, alongside Lucy Parsons and Aron. On January 17th 1915 she led the Russian Revolutionary Chorus at a meeting addressed by Lucy Parsons and others at Hull House, established by Jane Addams to help the poor. On the demonstration outside the police viciously attacked. Plain clothes detectives used brass knuckles on the crowd, while uniformed cops struck out with billy clubs. Fanya was knocked unconscious by one of the club wielding cops. She and five other Russian women and fifteen men were arrested. Jane Addams arranged bail for Fanya, Lucy and others who were pictured in the Chicago press.


LUCY PARSONS

FREEDOM, EQUALITY & SOLIDARITY

Writings & Speeches 1878-1937

Edited & Introduced by Gale Ahrens

With an Afterword by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"The most prominent black woman radical of the late nineteenth century, Lucy Parsons [was also] one of the brightest lights in the history of revolutionary socialism."-Robin D. G. Kelley, in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

"Lucy Parsons's writings are among the best and strongest in the history of U.S. anarchism. Although written long ago, these texts tackle the major problems of our time. Her long and often traumatic experience of the capitalist injustice system-from KKK terror in her youth, through Haymarket and the judicial murder of her husband, to the U.S. government's war on the Wobblies -made her not "just another victim" but an extraordinarily articulate witness to, and vehement crusader against, all injustice. That kind of direct experience gave her a credibility and an actuality that those who lack such experience just don't have. Lucy Parsons's life and writings reflect her true-to-the-bone heroism. Her language sparkles with the love of freedom and the passion of revolt."
- Gale Ahrens
, Introduction

"More dangerous than 1000 rioters!" That's what the Chicago police called Lucy Parsons- America's most defiant and persistent anarchist agitator, whose cross-country speaking tours inspired hundreds of thousands of working people. Her friends and admirers included William Morris, Peter Kropot-kin, "Big Bill" Haywood, Ben Reitman, Sam Dolgoff-and the groups in which she was active were just as varied: the Knights of Labor, IWW, Dil Pickle Club, International Labor Defense, & others. Here for the first time is a hefty selection of her powerful writings & speeches-on anarchism, women, race matters, class war, the IWW, and the U.S. injustice system.

"Lucy Parsons's personae and historical role provide material for the makings of a truly exemplary figure ... Think of it: a lifelong anarchist, labor organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and dynamic speaker, a woman of color of mixed black, Mexican, and Native American heritage, founder of the 1880s Chicago Working Woman's Union that organized garment workers, called for equal pay for equal work, and even invited housewives to join with the demand of wages for housework; and later (1905) co-founder the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which made the organizing of women and people of color a priority. . .For a better understanding of the concept of direct action and its implications, no other historical figure can match the lessons provided by Lucy Parsons."
- Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
, Afterword

Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other ...

Alibris has Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other Agitators ... but - thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW - much more ...
www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=10370395&matches... - Cached

Scandalous Women: Lucy Parsons - An American Revolutionary

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Business Unionism Offers No Solution To Capitalist Crisis

You know that the labour movement is no threat to Canadian Capitalism when it can agree with the bosses on a band aid to the current economic crisis.;

'Job killing' EI premiums hurt workers, employers as manufacturing sector lags

Critics say the current EI program fails jobless workers, many of who don't qualify for EI benefits because they have not worked the required number of hours, as well as employers, who worry about having to pay what Liberal MP John McCallum, an economist, calls 'job killing' EI premiums.
On the employee side of the debate, the push is for more generous benefits.


Not surprisingly, one of the few things employer and employee representatives agree is the need to refrain from increasing the 2009 EI premiums for employees or employers. The chief actuary of the EI commission has already recommended a freeze for 2009, and the commission is expected to take the advice when it announces the 2009 rates this week.
Corinne Pohlmann, vice-president of national affairs for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said the commission should go further and cut employer premiums. Continuing surpluses in the EI fund, estimated at $600 million for the last year, should be used to reduce the rate from the current of $2.42 per $100 of insurable earnings, she said in an interview.
The federation also wants the formula rewritten so employers and employees share the cost of the EI plan 50/50, or so that the government picks up a share of the cost. Employer premiums are currently 1.4 times higher than the $1.73 paid by employees.
The business federation and the CLC have both advocated - unsuccessfully so far - to give employers a 'premium holiday' for a period of time if they use the money to train employees.
The Conservative government's plan to move to a new system for setting EI premiums, starting in 2010, is causing jitters in some circles too. A newly-created EI financing board will set the premium rate each year "to generate just enough premium revenue during that year to cover expected payments" and to ensure a $2-billion reserve is maintained, according to government documents. Legislation establishing the new system became law last June.
Diane Finley, named last week to her former post as human resources minister, declined requests to discuss the EI system on grounds she is still getting briefed on the portfolio.
But Georgetti and McCallum said the system means that if the country's jobless rate worsens, as is expected, the board will either have to raise premiums the following year or cut benefits to meet its mandate.
"It has to be one or the other," said Georgetti. "That's the only way I have ever learned to balance the books. And neither one, in this environment, is the way to go."




Once upon a time the labour movement opposed child labour now they decry unemployment of the youth sector of the economy. These are kids working at Wal-Mart, MacDonalds etc., all of course in the non unionized sector.

Canadian Labour Congress: Public Works!
Now That the Election is Over, it's Time to Invest in Jobs That Last

Young workers, many of whom work in accommodation and food services, took a big hit in October. In total, 34,400 workers aged 15 to 24 lost their jobs. At the same time 27,000 people who earned their livelihoods in the accommodation and food services sector were out of a job last month.



And in their recently released paper on the global meltdown they sound more like economic apologists for capitalism than the voice of the working class. There is no discussion of using public and workers pension funds to finance the creation of worker controlled take overs of manufacturing in Canada. Showing that Canada's labour movement has lost the vision of building a new world within the shell of the old. Instead true to its nature as business unions the CLC calls for the state to bail out its bosses.



The Meltdown, Seen from Below
What union leaders, labour experts and anti-poverty activists say needs to be done.

The CLC has just issued a paper on its response to the current crisis titled "Global Capitalism: On the edge of the abyss." The paper says the global economy is now "almost certainly headed for a deep and prolonged recession," and notes that global markets have already fallen as far as they did in the Great Crash of 1929.
The labour group blames deregulated global finance for the crisis, pointing to what it calls "the unregulated shadow banking system of investment banks, hedge funds and private equity funds," and decrying the creation of "fiendishly complex and sometimes outright fraudulent products." The face value of these highly abstract and uncertain financial instruments, the paper notes, was recently estimated at over $50 trillion.
The CLC paper quotes Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business at the Stern School of Business at New York University: "The crisis was caused by the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in the history of humanity.... a housing bubble, a mortgage bubble, an equity bubble, a bond bubble, a credit bubble, a commodity bubble, a private equity bubble, a hedge funds bubble are all now bursting at once in he biggest real sector and financial sector deleveraging since the Great Depression."
The CLC paper calls on Canada to play a role in creating a co-ordinated international response to the crisis that features re-regulation of both local and cross-border transactions and the imposition of a small transaction tax on all securities trading, including commodity futures. This Tobin Tax, named for the Nobel Prize winner who first suggested it, is designed to discourage short term speculation and to raise the government revenues that will be necessary to fund appropriate investments in social services and infrastructure repair.
Bail out tied to regulation
While many critics of the official response so far are asking why so much money is going into the banks and finance houses that created the crisis, the CLC endorses some bail-out activity as necessary to avert a systemic collapse. The bail out money must come, it cautions, tied to effective regulatory rules.
The CLC wants Canada Mortgage and Housing to re-finance distressed Canadian home mortgages at lower rates, dismissing the view that Canada is not experiencing a housing bubble as a myth. The $10 billion a year in new infrastructure investment the CLC calls for, says the paper, would create 200,000 new Canadian jobs rebuilding roads and bridges, mass transit projects, water works and the like as well as replenishing the country's diminished stock of social housing. A
public letter recently signed by 80 prominent Canadian economists has echoed this call for an active and interventionist response by government to the economic crisis.
Further corporate tax cuts should be cancelled, the paper argues, in favor of direct government support for new investments in machinery and equipment, research, development and training.
Even if all these reforms are put into place, says the CLC paper, Canada may well experience serious increases in unemployment, which will expose weaknesses of the Employment Insurance program. Far fewer workers are eligible for EI as it now exists than was true in years past, and maximum rates and time allowed for coverage are both inadequate, according to the paper, which calls for broadened eligibility, higher maximum payouts and longer terms of coverage for the unemployed. The EI system currently has a surplus of over $50 billion.
Call for new pension protection
The CLC paper predicts the current financial crisis will create a severe pensions crisis, and a follow-up paper issued on Oct. 29 calls for the creation of a new pension benefit insurance scheme (financed by the proposed tax on financial transactions) to insure annual pension and RRSP benefits for individual Canadians up to $60,000 a year.
Pensions are a concern for Bill Saunders, too. Saunders, the president of the Vancouver and District Labour Council, says that Canadian workers and their pensions are more exposed to risk during market trouble because of the successful campaign over the past decades to move from defined benefit pensions, which guarantee a certain monthly amount when you retire, to defined contribution plans, promoted by market enthusiasts.
Contribution plans shovel a defined amount every month into mutual funds and other stocks, creating pension payouts that can vary widely depending upon the health of the market, as many Canadians are discovering this year as their RRSP holdings have shrunk dramatically.
"Twenty years ago," said Saunders, "60 per cent of Canadian private pension plans were defined benefit. Now that share has been cut in half. Defined contribution plans just don't deliver the goods for workers the way defined benefit plans do, and the current crisis illustrates that."



The final irony is that despite calls by the CLC to meet with Harper government it appears that labours agenda was accepted by the Premiers and the PM at their first ministers te'te' today.

Harper, premiers agree on infrastructure, pensions

Once again proving Herr Doctor Professor Marx correct:



Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit, Addressed to Working Men, The First International Working Men's Association, 1865.



SEE:

Concessions Don't Work

And Then There Was One

October Surprise Was The Market Crash

No Austrians In Foxholes

Pension Rip Off



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