# Unions and employers both campaigned. One side also hired spies and wrote workers' telegrams.

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  Unions and employers both campaigned. One side also hired spies and wrote workers' telegrams.
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- Unions and employers both campaigned. One side also hired spies and wrote workers' telegrams.
  At a glance

From the Los Angeles Times bombing to the Little Steel strike, unions and employers argued for the public's support. A Senate committee found

When1910ActorUnions and strike committees…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  Content note: this page quotes strike-era insults aimed at soldiers, police, employers and union members, and it describes shootings, a deadly fire and a bombing.

## What it said

Start with the strikers. In 1912 the textile workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, put their case in print, and the federal Bureau of Labor later reprinted their proclamations in its report:

We, textile workers of Lawrence, are on strike. We are striking against unbearable conditions.

Lawrence strike committee proclamation, 1912, reprinted in U.S. Bureau of Labor, Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass. in 1912, Appendix B.

The same committee gave a figure a reader could test (cut our pay to an average of 50 cents a week, which to us means 10 loaves of bread), and also called the militia an army of hirelings and butchers and the owners a parasite class. Two years later, at a rally for the unemployed in Union Square, New York, a man wore a card in his hat that read BREAD OR REVOLUTION.

Now the employers. In the 1920s they promoted the open shop as the "American plan." In 1936 a steel industry advertisement ran in 382 papers. The American Iron and Steel Institute put its position this way: The Steel Industry believes in the principles of collective bargaining, while it would oppose any attempt to compel its employees to join a union. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a citizens' committee campaigned under Law and Order and The Right to Work is Sacred.

The cartoonists joined in. A 1914 cartoon by John Scott Clubb turned the initials I.W.W. into "I Won't Workers." In May 1918, when the Sedition Act passed, W. A. Rogers drew Uncle Sam in the New York Herald hauling off a bundle labeled "Spy," "Traitor," "I.W.W.," "Germ[an] money" and "Sinn Fein."

## Who made it and why

On the labor side: the Industrial Workers of the World, the Lawrence strike committee, which the IWW's Joseph Ettor chaired at first, and later the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee. On the employer side: Remington Rand, the "Little Steel" companies, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Iron and Steel Institute, open-shop associations, detective agencies and company-backed citizens' committees. Police and National Guard units acted in several of the strikes.

Both sides wanted the same audience: the workers, the town, the troops on strike duty, and the national newspaper reader. Much of what they produced was ordinary signed persuasion. Lawrence meetings had speakers in English, Italian, Polish and French. The IWW sold a song book; a 1913 labor paper advertised Forty-three songs... Songs of Revolution. Pickets at Canton were told to act by persuasion only. Steel executives signed advertisements and testified under oath. That is the First Amendment in use, on both sides.

## What it got right or wrong

Violence came from more than one direction, and the page has to say so.

- Los Angeles, 1910. The Los Angeles Times building was dynamited on 1 October 1910. On 1 December 1911 James B. and John J. McNamara, identified in the press with the structural iron workers' union, pleaded guilty. A report of the time gave twenty dead and noted the paper had been opposed to the labor unions; FRAME's summary counts 21. A Puck cartoon of 27 December 1911 drew a cannon marked "Violence" blowing back on the McNamaras and on Samuel Gompers.

- Lawrence, 1912. About 23,000 workers struck after a state law cut the work week from 56 to 54 hours and pay dropped with it. The Bureau of Labor recorded two deaths in clashes with the authorities. Twenty-eight sticks of dynamite were found and blamed on the strikers; a local businessman who had no connection with the strikers was later convicted of planting them. Strikers sent their children to families in other cities, and on 24 February police stopped a departure, with some 30 arrests.

- Ludlow, Colorado, 20 April 1914. Guardsmen fired on a strikers' tent colony. In the Library of Congress's words, eleven children and two women died in a fire set by the National Guard.

- Chicago, Memorial Day 1937. Chicago police fired on a crowd of marchers. The Senate committee found ten marchers fatally shot, Seven received the fatal wound in the back, and judged the force far in excess of that which the occasion required. Thirty-five police had minor injuries. The committee rejected the union leaders' claim that the march was unplanned. The police account, as the committee summarized it, called the casualties a regrettable but necessary incident.

The bombing was murder, and the McNamaras pleaded guilty. The Lawrence strikers were framed with dynamite they did not plant. The Ludlow fire and the Memorial Day shooting were deaths at the hands of the state's own armed men. All four are wrong. They are not the same kind of wrong, and the record does not let anyone blur them.

On words, both sides called names. "Hessians" and "butchers" and "a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine" from the strike committee; "agitators," "I Won't Workers" and, from a Chicago patrolman describing a man who had been shot, the lousy Communist. The Lawrence claim that troops were ordered to shoot to kill is not shown in the sources the archive used, so this page does not repeat it as fact.

## Deception and force cross the line

A worker may join a union or refuse to. An owner may argue for the open shop, in print, under his own name. A libertarian has no quarrel with the "American plan" as a signed argument, and FRAME's notes record its San Francisco advocate making it openly. The line is crossed by deception and by force.

The Senate's La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, in reports from 1936 to 1941, documented deception on the employer side in detail:

- A borrowed voice. In 1937 a telegram from Monroe, Michigan, signed by four employees, asked the union leader, Is it because you want to set up a dictatorship in America? The committee found the signers were in no way consulted on its contents. Hill & Knowlton issued it as a news release.

- Bought fronts. In Johnstown the citizens' committee raised more than $60,000, and passed over $36,000 of Bethlehem Steel money to the mayor. In Youngstown, the committee called a civic group the front for "Harmony Ads" written, in their author's words, to organize a community against labor agitators before they get in their work.

- Spies and a manufactured scare. A Burns detective agency letter offered to find "communists and agitators"; its Portland manager wrote back that employers cared about the labor agitators, not the Communist. The committee concluded that Raising the 'red' scare is a common practice with detective agencies. Asked how many Communists his office had found, the superintendent of Pinkerton's Atlanta office answered, I don't believe we found any.

- A playbook. After Remington Rand broke a 1936 strike at Ilion, New York, James H. Rand, Jr. said the method would go down into history as the Mohawk Valley formula. On 13 March 1937 the National Labor Relations Board ruled against the company and set out the method in nine steps, the first being Label the union leaders 'agitators'. The Board found the Ilion citizens' committee had been created because Mr. Rand threatened the community with the loss of Remington Rand's plants.

Writing a message in a citizen's name without asking him is fraud on the public, whoever does it. Paying a mayor through a committee that calls itself civic is laundering. Hiring spies to report on lawful meetings chills the right to assemble. These findings are not a matter of interpretation.

Two cautions keep the page honest. The La Follette committee was created to look at employer interference with organizing. It did not investigate union methods, so "no example in these sources" for unions is not proof that none existed. A later Senate inquiry, the McClellan Committee of 1957 to 1959, found corruption in some Teamsters locals; FRAME has not reviewed it against the same tests, so it is mentioned and no more. And the NAM said it had no knowledge of the "nine steps" and had not publicized them. The record here does not show that it did.

## Its legacy

The 1918 cartoon is the warning for this site's wider subject. When the Sedition Act passed, a union was drawn into the same sack as spies and traitors. Lumping a lawful association with enemy agents is how a speech law becomes a weapon against ordinary dissent. See the Espionage and Sedition Acts for what those statutes did in court.

The Monroe telegram has a modern cousin: in 2016 a foreign company's accounts posed as American activists to promote a "Miners for Trump" rally. The device is the same, a borrowed identity. The speaker was different: a domestic employer and its publicists in 1937, a foreign operation in 2016. The test works in every era. Ask who actually wrote the "citizens'" or "employees'" statement, and who paid for it.

## Sources

- U.S. Bureau of Labor, Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass. in 1912 (strike committee proclamations in Appendix B). Library of Congress.

- U.S. Senate, La Follette Civil Liberties Committee: Industrial Espionage (1937); preliminary report and The Chicago Memorial Day Incident (S. Rep. 46, pts. 1-2, 1937); The "Little Steel" Strike and Citizens' Committees (S. Rep. 77-151, 1941), quoting the NLRB's Remington Rand decision, 2 N.L.R.B. 626.

- Library of Congress research guide, "Ludlow Massacre: Topics in Chronicling America."

- Evening Times-Republican (Marshalltown, Iowa), 2 December 1911, on the McNamara pleas; Los Angeles Almanac, "The 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing."

- The Voice of the People (New Orleans), 11 September 1913, p. 3; Great Falls Tribune, 16 January 1922, p. 10; St. Charles Herald, 29 July 1922, p. 4 (H. B. Allen, "The American Plan as Established and Enforced in San Francisco").

- "I.W.W. Hat Card," Bain News Service, 11 April 1914; John Scott Clubb, "The unemployed," 10 March 1914; W. A. Rogers, "Now for a round-up," New York Herald, 9 May 1918; "The flareback," Puck, 27 December 1911. Library of Congress.

- Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal; Ahmed A. White, "Industrial Terrorism and the Unmaking of New Deal Labor Law," Nevada Law Journal.

- EBSCO Research Starters, "McClellan Committee."

- FRAME case study "Labor organizing and anti-union campaigns in the United States, 1910-1941," for the chronology, the Bureau and Senate quotations and the notes on what is not shown.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/labor-organizing-and-anti-union-campaigns/