[On September 10th,
1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked
by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend
post on contemporary hate crimes.]
On one pessimistic
and one optimistic takeaway from the anti-labor massacre.
I’m gonna turn
this first paragraph over to Erik
Loomis, who as I highlighted in that tribute post is one of our most
prolific and important labor historians. His post
on the Lattimer Massacre is, as usual, a must-read. So check that out and I’ll
see you back here after!
Welcome back! As
Erik likewise traces at length in this
piece for Bill Moyers’ website, Lattimer was only one of many such episodes
of brutal violence directed at American workers by police, corporate hired
guns, and other such authoritarian mobs. (For two powerful cultural
representations of such violence, both focused on the 1920 West Virginia coal wars, check
out John Sayles’ film Matewan [1987] and Diane Gillam
Fisher’s poetry
collection Kettle Bottom [2004].)
Indeed, while the Haymarket
Square bombing might be the most famous single act of violence connected to
the American labor movement, the telling irony is that the vast majority of
such violence was directed at laborers, not emanating from them (if, as I wrote
in that May series, the bombing even emanated from them at all). You can’t
tell the story of labor in America without remembering such acts of violence,
not only because they happened and happened so often, but also and especially because
they reflect the lengths to which corporations and their allies would go to
oppose strikes and protests and other labor activisms. That’s not a happy
lesson, but it’s a vital one, and Lattimer helps us better remember it.
Lattimer also
helps us challenge another set of dark histories too often tied to the labor
movement: narratives of ethnic and racial division and opposition. It’s true
that corporate interests often tried to divide groups of workers along such lines
(as Matewan portrays quite well), and
of course also true that the labor
movement was in no ways immune to the prejudices
and bigotry that have been part of every community and moment in American history.
At Lattimer, mining boss A.S. Van Wickle tried to capitalize on these histories
by bringing in Slavic workers (who had historically
been kept out of the United Mine Workers union) to break the strike; but
the workers joined the strike instead, helping add their voices to a truly
multi-ethnic community of striking laborers. Over the next few years, UMW
membership surged dramatically, making the union far more powerful and
successful in its activisms and negotiations, and there’s quite simply no way
to understand that shift without considering the role of multi-ethnic workers
and communities. As with so many of our darkest histories, Lattimer also
featured moments and threads of hope, representations of the best of American communities
that make it that much more important to better remember this historic
massacre.
Next massacre
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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