During the first inter-imperialist world war, Dobbs says, the capitalists "raked in ever-larger profits, while workers' wages lagged farther and farther behind rapidly climbing prices. The 'patriotic' sacrifices in support of the war effort that the government demanded from 'everyone' were imposed in a one-sided way. As the workers' buying power shrank, and their economic hardships became more severe, the urge to organize for a fight to improve their situation grew stronger."

Dobbs recounts struggles, such as those among meat packers, that pointed in the direction of organizing industrial unions, breaking from the narrow craft structures that crippled the power of the labor movement and left the masses of workers without union organization. By the time the war ended in November 1918, he writes, "the workers' grievances ran so deep that they began to revolt on a massive scale." Demands included pay hikes to catch up with rising living costs, an eight-hour day to replace the 10-to-12-hour days common in industry, and improved job conditions. When the employers rejected these demands, a strike wave spread across the country on a scale never seen before in the United States.

Some 365,000 steelworkers walked off the job in September 1919. In February 1919 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and copper miners in Butte, Montana, went on strike, and a general strike gripped Seattle. In November 1919 a half million bituminous coal miners, many of whom toiled in "captive mines" owned by the steel trusts, went out, demanding increased pay, a six-hour day to offset unemployment, and measures to address their dangerous working conditions. This action reinforced the steelworkers' strike, entering its second year.

Dobbs explains that the impact of the 1917 Russian Revolution on workers in the United States "was among the factors giving rise to the militancy displayed from Lawrence to Seattle. The proletarian victory sweeping across the former Russian Empire enabled U.S. workers to perceive more clearly their inherent power as a class, and they wanted to use that power in their expanding fight to wrest concessions from the bosses."

The labor fakers who sat on top of the craft unions feared the militancy of the workers, their rising social struggles, and the fundamental transformation of the unions posed by the fight by millions of workers for industrial organization. In face of government threats, and direct intervention by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, coal miners' president John L. Lewis ordered the miners back on the job shortly after the strike began. An employer-government offensive broke the steel strike, which was officially called off in January 1920. Building on their victory over the steelworkers, the rulers deepened their assault, launching the infamous "Palmer raids" that targeted the labor movement.

The excerpt reprinted below is from the chapter, "New Capitalist Repressions," in Revolutionary Continuity: Birth of the Communist Movement by Farrell Dobbs. Copyright © 1983 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
 

An expanding network of informers was used to spy on union activities and finger individual militants for victimization as "agitators." Repressive actions became more and more widespread as the corporations heated up their open-shop drive. Many of the workers' organizations were thrust back toward the semilegal conditions of existence under which the labor movement had arisen in the nineteenth century.

As an integral part of the assault on the working class, steps were taken to intensify discrimination against Afro-Americans and sharpen divisions within the working class along race lines.

In 1910 three-fourths of U.S. Blacks were rural, mainly farm laborers, tenant farmers, or sharecroppers; and 90 percent lived in the South. During the war, however, labor shortages resulting from the combined effects of expanded industrial production and the military draft had enabled Blacks to find industrial employment on an unprecedented scale. In general, though, they were confined to the dirtiest, hardest, most dangerous, lowest-paying jobs.

Conditions of life for Afro-Americans within the urban communities--like the conditions of rural poverty they were escaping from--were also horrible. They were segregated in ghettos, charged exorbitant rent for slum housing, subjected to price gouging by merchants, and preyed upon by loan sharks. When the war ended and industrial production declined, Blacks were usually the first to be laid off. With mounting unemployment thus putting an even greater blight upon their lives, they began to press more strongly than ever for economic, political, and social equality.

Using a double twist, the capitalists responded by making the victim the criminal. As the postwar labor upsurge developed, Blacks were sometimes hired--as in the case of steel--to break strikes by trade unionists who were in their great majority white.

This was facilitated by the bosses' propaganda branding union members as "criminals" because of their efforts to halt production. In those circumstances race prejudice against Blacks, which was already widely extant among workers who were white, became further intensified. This by-product of the strikebreaking attacks on the trade unions could in turn be used by the boss class to keep Black "criminal" upstarts in a subordinate place, deepening the divisions in the working class that were necessary for capitalist rule.

With tacit capitalist encouragement, violent attacks on Blacks escalated during 1919 in both the industrial North and agrarian South. Lynchings occurred with increasing frequency. Race riots, initiated by white bigots, broke out in several northern cities as well as in the South. Blacks fought back, defending themselves as best they could in a situation where the forces of "law and order" collaborated with the white mobs. Blacks refused, moreover, to back off from their demands for equal rights. They continued to press public discussion of ways and means to advance their cause.  
 
Capitalist rulers smear Black movement
In an effort to squelch such discussions, the capitalist government resorted to a smear campaign against the Black movement. National publications encouraging vigorous efforts to win Afro-Americans' demands were singled out for condemnation, with the main fire centered on The Messenger and The Crisis. What they said was twisted and distorted in order to accuse them of fomenting "sedition." But the needs of this oppressed nationality were so compelling that its best fighters would not be silenced.

Branding the Black struggle "seditious" was at the same time part of the drive against all workers, regardless of color. A propaganda barrage identifying trade union militancy with communism was widely promulgated by the capitalist media and used to drum up broad support for a general assault on workers' organizations. Union busting and decimation of the communist movement were painted up as "patriotic" endeavors.

Gompers quickly put the AFL on record in support of the capitalist witch-hunt, making his own contribution to perpetuating the hysteria against radicals generated during the war. He remained totally silent in the face of the intensified attacks against Blacks. These stances were intended both to strengthen Gompers's bureaucratic hold over the organization and to curry favor with the bosses by demonstrating that the craft unions were part of capitalism's line of defense against "Bolshevism," "criminality," and all things "foreign."

The AFL bureaucracy's treacherous action coincided with the opening of another extralegal assault upon the working class, one spearheaded by the American Legion. Formed in 1919 on ruling-class initiative, the legion's chief objective was to incite war veterans against the labor movement.

It was structured to perpetuate in a civilian organization of demobilized troops the same domination over the rank and file by the officer caste that had prevailed in military service. Behind dire warnings of the specter of a "red menace," the legion organized ex-soldiers in vigilante actions to terrorize critics of the capitalist status quo. Witch-hunting of individuals, attacks on union picket lines, and disruption of meetings held by workers' political parties all became common.  
 
State antisedition laws
Encouragement for such outrages was provided by all branches of government. Many state legislatures put new, stiffer criminal syndicalism and antisedition laws on the books. "Antisubversive" bills were introduced in the U.S. Congress. Worker militants were brought to trial in one or another type of frame-up, and the courts refused to accord them their constitutional rights.

The shock brigade of the government's vicious witch-hunting was the U.S. Department of Justice, headed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Acting for the Wilson administration, Palmer launched an anti-red crusade with special emphasis on "alien anarchy."

For many years the ruling class had been planting spies and provocateurs in the Socialist Party to inform on its members and disrupt it. When the SP split occurred in 1919, the Justice Department's dirty work was extended into the two new Communist parties. These infiltrators were now used as bird dogs in a dragnet operation intended to tear apart the workers' vanguard organizations. The operation was carried out under the immediate supervision of J. Edgar Hoover, who was later to become director of the antilabor, anti-Black Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In November 1919, during the steel strike, the political police had swooped down and arrested several hundred members of the two Communist parties, mainly in New York. This particular raid was intended, among other things, to buttress a phony charge that the steel strike was part of a "Bolshevik plot." The charges leveled against the Communists implied that they were masterminding the trade union struggles taking place, when in reality their sectarianism had isolated them from the labor upsurge.

Then, at the beginning of 1920, Palmer opened an all-out anticommunist offensive, extending from coast to coast. Federal agents invaded Communist meetings, party headquarters, and the workplaces and homes of individuals. They seized literature, party records, and private correspondence. Firings were encouraged, families were terrorized, and wholesale arrests were made. By the end of January thousands of political militants were in jail on framed-up charges.

Foreign-born workers bore the brunt of the attack. As the January raids began, the political cops were given packets of deportation warrants. These so-called John Doe warrants, issued without naming actual persons, were then used against noncitizens picked up by chance in the federal dragnet. Almost 3,000 alleged communists were arrested in that way. They languished in jails throughout the country, except for those able to get out on bond; and several hundred of them were hustled to Ellis Island, where they were incarcerated pending final orders for their expulsion. In the end, some 750 immigrants were deported as a result of the 1919 and 1920 raids.

The vast scope of the government drive against the foreign born suspected of harboring communist ideas, together with the brutal manner in which it was carried out, sowed fear among immigrant workers generally. This wider consequence of the Palmer raids was, of course, exactly what the capitalist rulers sought to achieve. Basically, their antilabor-anticommunist campaign was intended to curb militancy throughout the entire labor force and keep the workers divided and docile to the boss class.
 
 
Related article:
Sedition charges used against union fighters  
 
 
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