Historical Notes for
HARVEST
THE LABOR MOVEMENT IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION . . .
Langston Hughes' play is based on the real life
events of a strike of migrant farm workers in California's San Joaquin Valley
in 1933. To fully appreciate the issues voiced in HARVEST it is important to understand the
extraordinary events that were occurring in America and in the
American Labor Movement at that time.
THE CRASH.
The Great Depression began with the Stock Market
Crash of 1929, but the situation only got worse in the early 1930s.
Thousands died from starvation or poverty-related illnesses, hundreds of
thousands lost their homes, and millions lost their jobs. In 1933, over
15 million Americans -- one-quarter of the nation's workforce -- were
unemployed.
For those who were lucky enough to still have a job,
the situation was not much better. Employers took the opportunity to
push wages lower and lower while simultaneously increasing the number of hours
required on the job. Thinking their workers were simply too desperate to
resist, bosses degraded working conditions to an almost slave-labor status
where corruption ran rampant and workers were often openly required to bribe
their immediate supervisors just to get each day's work.
In company-dominated towns like Honea Path, South
Carolina, Human Rights and the Rule of Law were simply thrown aside in favor of
company-issued regulations. Workers were required to work well beyond
the maximum hours allowed by State and Federal statutes, were denied any legal recourse, paid entirely
in company script instead of U.S. currency, and even required to attend the
company-approved church every Sunday!
THE LABOR MOVEMENT BEFORE THE NEW DEAL.
The Labor Movement of the 1920s and early 1930s
was dominated by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Under the
leadership of the notoriously conservative "Labor Statesman"
Samuel Gompers, AFL Unions were run much like old fashioned guilds -- small,
secretive organizations kept tightly under the thumb of an old-boy network
which restricted membership to "skilled" workers only (such as tailors,
cabinet-makers, cigar-makers, shoe-makers, and other supposedly "specialized"
vocations). The complacent hierarchy of the AFL was adamantly opposed to
organizing "unskilled" workers -- in practice this meant
excluding Blacks, immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and many other such
marginalized groups while simultaneously ignoring the growing majority of
factory workers.
Socialists, Communists, and other openly political
Union activists were banned from the AFL and "red-baiting"
was a common tactic used by the Old Guard of the AFL to silence and ostracize members of
the rank-and-file who dared to speak out for a more militant approach.
The AFL was also stubbornly committed to the policy of "craft"
unionism -- that is to say, they organized workers of separate crafts into
separate Unions. As a result, workers in the same industry would often be
divided up into dozens of different Unions making it very difficult to stand
united on any issue. Bosses frequently exploited these divisions playing
one Union off against another.
Of course, these "craft" divisions
made it nearly impossible to organize large-scale strikes. But this wasn't a
concern for the AFL Leadership since they were usually the first to urge
workers NOT to strike. For the most part, AFL Officials saw themselves
not as fighting activists but as gentrified "Labor Statesmen"
whose job was to politely negotiate agreements with management. And many
were often secretly -- and sometimes even not-so-secretly -- in the pockets of their employers
anyway.
THE NEW DEAL.
All this began to change with the passage of the
National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933. One of the first acts
of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" legislation, the NIRA contained
a small clause -- Section 7(a) -- which recognized the rights of Labor Unions
for the first time in U.S. History. Up till then, merely belonging to a
Union could theoretically get you arrested for sedition!
Roosevelt originally envisioned Section 7(a) as a
benign piece of legislation designed simply to help involve workers in
restoring productivity. But Union organizers quickly seized upon the
opportunity to bolster Union drives with slogans like 'Your President Wants
You to Unionize!'
Terrified by the poverty of the Great Depression
and emboldened by the seeming approval of the White House, working people
swarmed into the Union Movement at an astonishing rate. From 1933 to
1934, Unions enjoyed the biggest overall growth in a one-year period that
America has ever seen -- before or since.
In a statement that beautifully sums up the spirit of
the times, a Union organizer in Kentucky sent back a report to her leadership
in the summer of 1933 stating that: "The people have been so beat up
and exhausted that they are streaming back into the Unions. I organized
nine locals on Tuesday."
THE STRIKEWAVE OF 1934.
Millions of these newly enlisted Union men and
women were eager to take decisive action to win a better life. But
millions of employers, politicians, police, National Guardsmen, and soldiers
were out to stop them. 1934 saw some of the most harrowing and bloody
Labor struggles in U.S. History. Here are just a few important examples.
In May, the National Guard in Toledo, Ohio opened fire on striking truck
drivers killing two and wounding fifteen.
In July, what began as a Longshoreman's strike in San
Francisco grew into one of the Nation's first city-wide general strikes as
twenty-one Unions banned together in solidarity.
In August, a nationwide textile workers strike sent
much of the Eastern United States into turmoil. Over 65,000 workers came
out on strike in Macon, Georgia, and Charlotte & Gastonia, North
Carolina. Soldiers opened fire on striking textile workers in Honea
Path, South Carolina, leaving seven dead and twenty wounded. Only days
later, National Guardsmen fired on striking textile workers in the little town
of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, killing four.
THE TEAMSTER REBELLION.
But perhaps the most important strike of 1934 was one
started by truck drivers in Minneapolis, Minnesota organized by the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters -- a strike that came to be called the "Teamster
Rebellion."
What began as a relatively minor dispute between
drivers and coal-distributors escalated quickly as police routinely harassed
and beat up workers on the picket line. Pushed too far, strikers made
plans to fight back. On May 21st, when police attacked yet again,
strikers mounted a counter attack -- many fighting with just their bare hands
-- that sent twenty cops to the hospital!
A news photographer snapped a picture of one striker
as he brought his baseball bat down on a policeman's head. This picture
was printed and re-printed in almost every newspaper in America. For
many workers across the Country this picture symbolized a radical new way of
looking at the world -- instead of taking the blows, strikers could start
delivering them.
On May 22nd, police took to the streets of
Minneapolis eager to exact revenge for the previous day's beatings. To
their surprise, they were sorely outnumbered. The vast majority of the
working people of Minneapolis had turned out to stand with the striking truck
drivers. This impromptu workers' army was armed with shovels, crowbars,
sledge hammers, pick axes, tire-irons -- the tools that workers had once used
to make their bosses richer were now being used in their own defense.
The "Teamster Rebellion" would
ultimately grow into a City-wide General Strike involving dozens of area
Unions. After many painful months, this strike won out and became a
rallying cry for workers nationwide.
THE BIRTH OF THE CIO.
America was rapidly polarizing into two heavily armed
camps -- workers on one side, employers, politicians, newspapers, police, and
soldiers on the other. As the spirit of militancy continued to grow
amidst the rank-and-file of working class America, the AFL was increasingly
under pressure -- both from within and without -- to organize workers into
industry-wide Unions and abandon their elitist distinctions between "skilled"
and "unskilled" workers.
A leading advocate of industrial Unions was the President of the United
Mine Workers of America, John L. Lewis. Even though his Union was part
of the AFL, Lewis was growing more and more outraged by the refusal of the
AFL's hierarchy to change with the times.
The situation came to a head at the AFL's annual
conference in Atlantic City in October of 1935. When Carpenters' Union
President William Hutcheson insulted an "unskilled" rubber
worker who was trying to give an organizing report, Lewis had had
enough. He walked over to Hutcheson and punched him square in the
nose! Shortly thereafter, Lewis announced that he was forming a "Committee
for Industrial Organizations" (CIO).
The CIO began as a faction within the AFL -- it would
later break away and form an entirely separate Union federation in 1938 as the
"Congress of Industrial Organizations" and eventually
re-merge with the AFL in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO that we know today.
But that is beyond the scope of the period in question.
In 1935, the creation of the CIO shook up the world
of Organized Labor. For the first time, workers in the same industry
could all belong to the same Union. Defying the AFL's reluctance to
organize "unskilled" workers, the CIO reached out to workers
in the emergent mass production industries of the day -- auto workers, rubber
workers, electrical workers, steel workers, garment workers, etc. -- who had
been ignored or outright rejected by the "Craft Unions" of
the AFL.
Lewis boldly proclaimed that the CIO would organize
America "from top to bottom." And -- in a move that
perhaps outraged mainstream Labor leaders the most -- Lewis declared that
Communists were welcome to work as CIO organizers.
REVOLUTIONARY GROUPS OF THE 1930s.
Throughout the late 1800s, it was radicals --
primarily socialists and anarchists -- who fought to build Unions in America
only to be pushed aside by more moderate leaders as soon as their services
were no longer needed. By 1935, radicals were fighting their way back
into the center of the Labor Movement and the desperate economic conditions of
the times made many American workers willing to hear them out. 
Drawing its inspiration from the Russian Revolution
of 1917, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was
formed in 1921. By the mid-1930s -- even though many Unions banned
Communists from holding Union posts -- Communists had become heavily involved
with the rank-and-file of Unions throughout America often giving voice to
precisely the sort of rank-and-file concerns that mainstream Labor leaders
doggedly refused to acknowledge.
While mainstream Labor leaders called on their
members to accept concessions and pay-cuts, Communists cried out for
strikes. While mainstream Labor leaders pleaded with their members to
obey the law and wait for improved legislation, Communists rallied workers to
take to the streets and fight for their rights. While mainstream Labor
leaders refused to organize "unskilled" workers, Communists
urged workers to look beyond their racial, religious, and economic divisions
and stand together. While mainstream Labor leaders were notoriously
unwilling to dirty their hands with the day-to-day work of organizing and
strike activity, Communists were often the first to put their lives on the
line in Labor struggles.
As the Great Depression wore on, the Communist Party established bookstores
and soup kitchens in practically every major city. Their soap-box
speakers shouted speeches in public squares and parks. Their paper, The
Daily Worker, was circulated widely. They played a leading role in
the Councils of the Unemployed which fought against evictions and for the
rights of the jobless. In some cases, Communist Party leaders were even
elected to public office -- most notably the City Council of New York City.
But the Communist Party was not the only
revolutionary group agitating amongst the rank-and-file. The Communist
League of America -- which later formed into the American Socialist Workers
Party -- became America's first Trotskyist organization in 1928. Also
heavily involved in Unions -- touting their paper, The Militant -- they
often advocated an even more radical program than the Communist Party.
In fact, there was a long list of other such groups -- like A.J. Muste's
Workers' Party, Norman Thomas' Socialist Party of America, or various remnants
of the Socialist Labor Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, to name
only a few -- that also had a significant impact on the Labor Movement of the
time.
The work of these radical groups exposed American
working people to revolutionary ideas on a scale that had never before been
possible.
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