Insurgency - USA, 1930s

lhp bulletin Breathing spaces No. 83 December 2021 1 / LHP BULLETIN DECEMBER 2021 LHP Bulletin 83, December 2021 ISSN 1175-3064 The Labour History Project Inc. PO Box 27-425 Wellington Aotearoa New Zealand For more information on LHP membership, activities, publications and news, check out our website: www.lhp.org.nz Design: Connie Davies Editor: Paul Maunder REVIEWS Insurgency: USA, 1930s Extract from a Book in Progress Russell Campbell In the early 1930s, American workers were reeling under the impact of the Great Depression with its mass unemployment and downward pressure on wages and conditions. But with the coming of the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal in 1933, hopes of better times exploded in a series of great strikes. Two hotbeds of militancy were on opposite sides of the continent, on the West Coast and in the Southeast. In Dubious Battle depicts a strike by California apple pickers in 1933. Based on the 1936 novel by John Steinbeck, it follows the action from the point of view of two radical (presumably Communist) organizers, the experienced Mac McLeod ( James Franco) and the novice Jim Nolan (Nat Wolff ). The two outsiders join the discontented workers (who have been offered a dollar rather than the three dollars a day promised) and incite them to walk off the job. Setting up camp on land owned by a sympathetic small farmer, the strikers hold out for more than a month, contending with strikebreakers, infiltrators, and murderous vigilantes. At the end of the film, Mac is killed, but the workers pledge to fight on. End titles inform us that, ‘Across the nation, countless workers engaged in battles like these in the ongoing fight for fair treatment. In 1934 alone, over 1.5 million workers took part in over 2,000 labor strikes.’ Steinbeck’s fictional apple strike is an amalgam of two actual struggles, a peach strike on the Tagus Ranch in Tulare County in August 1933, and the cotton strike which took place in the San Joaquin Valley two months later, in October. Both were successful. The peach picking hourly wage went up from 15 to 25 cents, while the rate for picking a hundred pounds of cotton was raised from 60 to 75 cents. In both strikes the workers were organized by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU), which had been set up by the Communist Party and began its efforts in the field in late 1932. Whereas the AFL had ignored the sector, and earlier farm strikes in the state had been quickly snuffed out by the employers in conjunction with law enforcement authorities, union organization during 1933 led to more victories than defeats. The novel’s Mac and Jim were possibly modelled on the key CAWIU organizers in the field, Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker. 1 The film, which by and large follows Steinbeck’s narrative, is successful in conveying the financial muscle of the growers and the power at their command to fight off challenges: they enjoy the support of sheriff and deputies and have the ability to deploy vigilantes who can murder with impunity. It also accurately reflects the manner in which the Communist Party was able to underpin industrial action with the organization of orderly and hygienic tent colonies and, despite its constrained resources, the supply of food and medicine. But in other respects, In Dubious Battle offers a severely distorted representation of the actual farm workers’ struggles. For a start, although the film portrays the workers as comprising more of an ethnic mix than the all-white contingent of the novel, they are not identified as migrants; in reality, three-quarters of the pickers in both the peach and cotton strikes were Mexican.2 The workers’ vulnerability to exploitation as non-English-speaking aliens is thus not touched upon. Then again, there is no mention of the union which was so effective that year in organizing the agricultural labor force and leading numerous strikes such as the one shown on screen. The apple pickers are depicted as an inert mass who won’t do a thing about the injustice of their situation until stirred into action by outside agitators. In point of fact the great strike wave on the California ranches in 1933, involving as many as 80,000 workers, comprised spontaneous action by a highly militant rank and file, not dependent on any inducement by radicals. Even more misleading is the portrayal of the workers as a violent mob, viciously attacking the foreman, in one incident, when an elderly picker falls from a defective ladder. Strikers are also shown setting fire to a grower’s homestead, with a man inside being burnt, probably, to death. In reality, though there were some confrontations with scabs, the landowners and vigilantes were chiefly responsible for the bloodshed – including the unprovoked shooting deaths of three strikers – and the workers generally remained peaceful: the sheriff of Fresno County actually complained that they ‘don’t commit any overt act, don’t give us a chance to help ourselves by legally getting out and getting them by the neck’. 3 The organizers, in contradiction to historical fact, are portrayed as both inciting the strikers to violence and themselves being responsible for the brutal torture of a young vigilante. ‘It’s gonna get ugly,’ Mac says, ‘But that’s good for us. The worse it gets, the bigger the story, the more sympathy for the cause.’ 6 The fictional pair of radicals are callously manipulative in their efforts to arouse the fighting instincts of the ‘bunch of stiffs’: Mac, for example, admits that he fixed the ladder so that the picker would fall and severely injure himself, enabling blame to be pinned on the foreman. Although the ending of the film is inconclusive, everything points to the strikers going down to defeat. There is a heavy 27 / LHP BULLETIN DECEMBER 2021 In Dubious Battle: Strikers on the march pessimism quite at odds with the victorious campaigns in fact waged, surprisingly, in that year of the Great Depression. The mood perhaps reflects subsequent developments: in July 1934, eighteen leaders of the CAWIU, including Chambers and Decker, were arrested and charged with criminal syndicalism, and the pair with six others spent two years in jail before their conviction was overturned. The union was destroyed, and Californian farm labourers remained unorganized for many years to come. But for events in 1933, Franco’s In Dubious Battle is an unreliable guide. Its effect is to tar all militant unionists, especially if they are motivated by radical politics and come from outside, with the brush of coldblooded calculation. It is unsurprising that Chambers and Decker took a dim view of the novel, and the film based on it, depicting underhand agitators stirring up a workers’ mob to violence, does little more than recycle slanderous movie clichés of a century before. 4 A more authentic account of labour insurgency in the period is to be found in The Uprising of ’34, a documentary by Judith Helfand and George Stoney about strike action by cotton mill workers in the Southeastern states. Arising out of a collective research project initiated by Vera Rony, the film features scores of interviews with veterans of a momentous struggle which had largely been wiped from popular memory. The textile magnates in the region in which the cotton mills were concentrated – North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia – ran their operations like feudal fiefdoms and were virulently hostile toward any workforce organizing. Some gains were made with the high demand for textiles and shortage of labour during WWI, but by 1921 all unions in the sector had been crushed. In the years that followed, organizing efforts were repeatedly thwarted through the deployment of labour spies and stool pigeons; mill hands signing up to a union were fired and In Dubious Battle: Mac ( James Franco) and Jim (Nat Wolff ) blacklisted. Refusing to be intimidated, the workers fought back. Towards the end of the decade strikes escalated, although the AFL-affiliated United Textile Workers (UTW), rooted in the woollen, silk and hosiery factories of the North, for the most part remained aloof. 5 The chief grievance of the striking workers was the ‘stretch-out’ – a change to production technique requiring a faster pace of work from fewer employees. The squeeze became more acute as the Great Depression hit the mills’ profitability. But workers’ hopes were raised with the coming of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933. Section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act guaranteed the right to organize and bargain collectively, while the Cotton Textile Code of Fair Competition set minimum wage rates and mandated the 40-hour week. In response, thousands flocked to join the UTW. The employers, however, brazenly violated the Code, and the flood of complaints sent to Washington were ignored. Attempts by workers to use National Recovery Administration (NRA) machinery were frustrated, and in July 1934 employees at the Dwight mills in Gadsden, Alabama, went out on strike. This led 28 / LHP BULLETIN DECEMBER 2021 REVIEWS to a chain of walkouts across the region. The union could not ignore the strength of feeling of its new southern membership, and at its New York convention in August called a general strike in the textile industry. Key demands were enforcement of the wage provisions in the Code and an end to the stretch-out. Uprising of 34: Deputies It was a year of nationwide labour revolt. In major disputes, West Coast longshoremen walked off the job, as did auto workers in Toledo, Ohio and teamsters in Minneapolis. It was no different in textiles. Support for the strike, which commenced at the start of September, was massive. By the end of the second week, over 170,000 textile workers had walked off the job, making it one of the biggest industrial actions in US history. Employers refused to negotiate. In Honea Path, South Carolina, seven strikers were killed by scabs deputized by the mill owner. In Georgia, martial law was declared and scores of strikers were transported to a concentration camp. President Roosevelt appointed a Commission to propose terms on which the dispute could be settled. Its report recommended changes to the NRA mechanisms which the union had called for, further discussion of the stretch-out issue, and a return to work without discrimination. The UTW executive council accepted the report and called off the strike after three weeks. The employers had agreed to nothing. Thumbing their nose at the President’s wish that there be no discrimination, many manufacturers refused to rehire employees who had taken strike action: it is estimated that 72,000 strikers were locked out of their jobs, with those in company housing evicted from their homes. 6 Changes in the NRA machinery resulted in no improvements in enforcement of the Code, while the NRA itself was declared unconstitutional in June 1935. Southern membership in the UTW plummeted and the organization fell apart. Uprising of 34: Mill hands The Uprising of ’34 seeks to tell this story through the testimony of people who were there at the time and their immediate descendants – workers, predominantly, but also the organizers, the mill owners, a National Guardsman, an NRA official. Without recourse to narration or to professional historians, it offers a lucid and accurate narrative which is all the more vivid through its eyewitness perspective. Amongst the myriad of interviewees, there are two who stand out. Lucille Thornburgh was a former stenographer who became a mill hand and volunteer organizer at the Cherokee Spinning Co. in Knoxville, Tennessee. Described in a newspaper headline as the ‘Girl With Flashing Eyes’, she became, at the age of 24, a leader of the strike. Subsequently fired and blacklisted, she went on to a lifetime’s work for the labour movement. In the film, her vivacity, piercing intelligence and dedication to the cause shine through. Joe Jacobs, a UTW lawyer, is crucial to the documentary since he offers a broad, overarching perspective on the struggle. It is Jacobs who argues that out of the strike and the textile barons’ doublecrossing of Roosevelt came the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) to guarantee the right of collective bargaining. Uprising of 34: Strike march 29 / LHP BULLETIN DECEMBER 2021 Endnotes: Uprising of 34: Girl with flashing eyes With its incorporation of graphic library footage and in its wide choice of interview subjects, The Uprising of ’34 is particularly strong in describing the condition of black workers (denied employment within the mills and relegated to low-paid servant and labouring jobs), recounting the feats of the ‘flying squadrons’ in spreading the strike, and recording the brutal repression orchestrated by the mill owners (one woman describes a striker being stabbed to death, another records that her father was shot five times, twice in the back, three in the front). 1 Benson and Loftis 1980, 198-206, 218, 219. According to Carey McWilliams, there were 37 recorded farm strikes in California in 1933, 24 of which were led by the CAWIU. Wage gains were made in 29 of the strikes. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (University of California Press, 1999), 229. Footage of the cotton strike, including shots of Chambers and Decker, was filmed by members of the San Francisco Film & Photo League and incorporated in their documentary A Century of Progress (1934). See Carla Leshne, ‘The Film & Photo League of San Francisco’, Film History vol 18 (2006), 362-364. 2 Benson and Loftis 1980, 210. 3 Jon Falsarella Dawson, ‘Solidarity Forever: The Historical Background of John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle’, The Steinbeck Review, 12:2 (2015), 136. 4 Chambers called the novel ‘a bunch of trash’ and Decker wrote a very negative review, apparently never published. Benson and Loftis (1980), 221. 5 In 1929 there were 130 textile strikes; the UTW participated in nine, and authorized one. Irons 1988, 115n. 6 Irons 1988, 481. 7 On the production and distribution of the film as a community project, see Whiteman 2002; Judith Helfand, ‘Using “The Uprising of ‘34” to Link the Classroom to the Community’, OAH Magazine of History 11:3 (Spring 1997), 40-42; Barbara Abrash and David Whiteman, ‘The Uprising of ’34: Filmmaking as Community Engagement’, Wide Angle 21:2 (March 1999), 87-99; and Jane M. Gaines, ‘Radical Attractions: The Uprising of ‘34’, Wide Angle 21:2 (March 1999), 100-119. The great textile strike of 1934 had been all but forgotten, its memory repressed. The Uprising of ’34, produced and distributed in intimate collaboration with communities in the South, 7 ensures that it will be indelibly written into American labour history. Bibliography Benson, Jackson J., and Anne Loftis (1980). ‘John Steinbeck and Farm Labor Unionization: The Background of In Dubious Battle’, American Literature 52:2 (May), 194-223. Irons, Janet (1988). Testing the New Deal: The general textile strike of 1934 (PhD dissertation, History, Duke University), published as Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (University of Illinois Press, 2000). Whiteman, David (2002). ‘Impact of The Uprising of ’34: a coalition model of production and distribution’, Jump Cut 45 (Fall). 30 / LHP BULLETIN DECEMBER 2021