When Workers Shot Back

When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921, by Robert Ovetz (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).

In 1967, civil rights activist H. Rap Brown declared that “violence is as American as cherry pie,” and produced shock waves. People who had a positive opinion of their culture took offense, despite the reality that violence is deeply imbedded in the nation’s past. In When Workers Shot Back, Robert Ovetz studies this phenomenon in relation to the era of strife between labor and management from the 1870s through the 1930s. He views it from the perspective of what he calls the strategy of workers to position class struggle within the American class system. In other words, rather than regard it as an alien device to destroy the system, he interprets it as a weapon within its framework used by workers for their own advantage.

Ovetz begins with the railroad strikes of 1877 and 1894, and then asks why workers engaged in violence at those times. Answering his question ideologically, he calls their action predictable, as it followed a “trajectory of political violence” along a discernible course. They first encountered, and then had to overcome, walls of resistance. There was opposition to peaceful dispute resolution through such means as arbitration, collective bargaining, and union organizing. Workers responded, Ovetz argues, consistent with the system that had produced it. Essentially a strategy for self-defense, it was therefore not mainly random or reactive, but whether it was successful is debatable. The forces of capital remained undeterred, and effectively blamed workers for industrial violence.

Citing various theorists, such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt, Ovetz argues that there was more predictability than spontaneity to explain what occurred. Referring to H. Rap Brown, who also contended that violence was a necessity to end oppression, the author concludes, “the violence of capitalism was met by the violence of the class struggle.”
With Brown in mind, Ovetz considers civil rights violence during the 1960s. Without elaborating, or even citing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he dismisses “peaceful progress” as a “myth” and cites the deployment of “tactical violence” on the part of a group in North Carolina led by Robert Williams. In addition, he notes that civil rights “insurgents paired and switched between non-violent” and violent tactics “before the Black Panthers even formed in 1966.” Yet in summing up the conclusions of a “virtual cottage industry of academic research and think tank reports into the political violence of the 1960s and 1970s,” he notes that “the consensus explanation was that violence was anything but a tactic of class struggle.”

Violent class conflict indeed occurred in the half century to 1921, but what is unclear is what exactly precipitated it. In 1877 railway workers destroyed Pittsburgh’s railway depot, and in the same year anthracite coal miners known as the Molly Maguires, also in Pennsylvania, were executed for murder of management sympathizers. Surprisingly, Ovetz does not discuss the bitter, failed strike of unionized workers organized as the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association two years earlier. He also makes only slight reference to the Mollies. In 1897, peaceful, marching miners were slaughtered in the so-called “Lattimer [Pennsylvania] Massacre.” In 1914, Colorado national guardsmen destroyed a tent colony of striking workers in the “Ludlow Massacre.” President Wilson deployed federal troops to restore order.

What remains intriguing here is the question of whether a formula can comprehend or predict worker violence. In more than 500 pages, Ovetz makes a case for one, but also whets one’s appetite for additional evidence. For example, where are the locked- out Carnegie Steel workers who “shot back” at the 300 Pinkerton agents along the Monongahela River in 1892?
On the other hand, Ovetz offers a welcome chapter on violence during the World War I years, between 1917 and 1919. This period is easy to misconstrue as quiet because it included suppression of dissent, government control of the economy, and collaboration between the White House and the American Federation of Labor to combat labor radicalism. Between major strikes of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1912 and 1913 and the Steel and Seattle General Strikes of 1919 there was a “war on capital.” Wildcat strikes were numerous, and resistance to strikers could be outrageous, as evidenced by the 1917 deportation of 1,800 copper mine workers from Arizona to New Mexico. The creation of a War Industries Board and National War Labor Board, and increasing union membership, seemed to suggest stability, but in 1919 a “Red Scare” prompted by fear of Bolshevism and labor unrest revealed dangerous unrest.

In his book Robert Ovetz serves much food for thought. Why some workers became violent is not always obvious, but the idea of a pattern to explain it is nevertheless intriguing. He takes familiar ground and provides creative insight, which makes his work eminently worthwhile.

Reviewed by Robert D. Parmet, Professor of History, York College of The City University of New York