I have no particular love for the idealized "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on. - George Orwell [1]
The Greensboro massacre of 1979 represented a racist attack against people of color, but it also marked an attack on the rights of working people. The "Death to the Klan" rally was organized as part of an effort to end the harassment of poultry workers as they fought to form a union, and most of those killed were union organizers [2]. Such pairings of racist oppression and class exploitation have been the historical norm; slavery, for example, was a system of production as well as a system of race control.
Though there are divergences between race and class, the means for control in each area have always been very closely linked. This connection is perhaps never clearer than when racist means are used to suppress the resistance workers mount against capitalism - as in Greensboro, or, to take an earlier example, as in 1885, when Mayor Joseph Guillote of New Orleans responded to a levee workers' strike by ordering the police to arrest any Black man who "did not want to work [3]."
Control of the lower classes has been a function of policing at every point since the institution's birth, and has served as one of the major determinants of its development. In the South, the police first approached their modern form after a long process of experimentation and development in the official means of controlling the slave population. This mandate was over-determined, required both by the demands of White supremacy and by the economic needs of the plantation system. The mechanisms developed to control slaves eventually expanded in each direction, as slave patrols were charged additionally with regulating the behavior of free Black people and that of poor White people, especially indentured servants. As modern capitalism took shape, the new industrial working class posed new challenges to the social order, and the police institution evolved to meet them. like the slaves, these "dangerous classes" were marked as permanent objects for police control, and their lives became increasingly regulated by specially designed laws, selective enforcement, and heightened scrutiny.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread. - Anatole France [4]
In 1876, the Report of the General Superintendent of Police in Chicago warned: "There is in every large city, a dangerous class of idle, vicious persons, eager to band themselves together, for purposes subversive to the public peace and good government... [5]" The police, in Chicago and elsewhere, took as their main task the control of this dangerous class, especially when the poor "banded themselves together," but also (and more routinely) in the course of daily life. The police concentrated their enforcement activities in poor neighborhoods, armed with the tools of physical violence and a variety of laws prohibiting public order offenses, vice crimes, and a great deal of other activities associated with the working class [6].
It was a short step from selective enforcement to the criminalization of poverty itself and of poor people as a group. While the wealthy were treated leniently by the courts, the poor were sometimes convicted where no crime was even alleged. (In 1839, Sarah Hays and Thomas Firth were jailed for the non-offense of kissing in public. The mayor admitted that there was no law prohibiting such behavior, but based on the reputation of the neighborhood where they were arrested, he ordered them jailed just the same [7].) In short, the laws themselves targeted the poor, the courts issued harsher judgments against poor defendants, and tlle police treated poor people with intense suspicion. The instructions to the Philadelphia police explained: "As a general thing, any idle, able-bodied poor man has no right to complain if the eye of the police follows him wherever he roams or rests. His very idleness is an offense against all social laws [8]."
This tradition of class control continues today, in many forms, including urban "quality-of-life" and "zero-tolerance" policies, the war on drugs, and "gang suppression" efforts that seem aimed at disrupting the normal course of neighborhood life [9]. One of the clearest examples of class bias in law enforcement, in the nineteenth century and today, is the persecution of the homeless. Beginning in the 1870s, cities around the country began vigorously enforcing laws against "vagrancy," and mounted special efforts to limit the mobility of migrant workers (in the parlance of the day, "tramps''). For nothing other than the crime of being poor, vagrants and tramps were forced out of town, subjected to violence, and oftentimes imprisoned for as long as six months [10]. While contemporary laws are careful to proscribe certain behavior (rather than poverty per se), statutes prohibiting trespassing under bridges, sleeping on sidewalks, and panhandling clearly have the same effect as the vagrancy laws of the earlier period.
The practices surrounding the enforcement of these laws are often simply cruel, involving intimidation, violence, seizing (and never returning) identification, and the destruction of personal possessions. In the fall of 1993, I was witness to an incident in which numerous police officers, all wearing latex gloves, moved methodically through Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., seizing the belongings of the people who lived in the park-sleeping bags, backpacks, pieces of tarpaulin. With the White House in the background, the police carried the items to a nearby garbage truck, where they were unceremoniously crushed. Similar incidents have been reported in Miami, where a court ruled the practice illegal [11], and in Detroit, where social service providers blamed the crackdown on pressure from area businesses [12].
In these cases the police put their energies toward attacking, rather than protecting, some of society's most vulnerable members. This use of resources only makes sense when viewed in the context of vast disparities in wealth. The continual harassment of the destitute reinforces their low social standing, stigmatizes poverty, keeps the poor under the supervision and control of the criminal justice system, and - in all these ways - serves to preserve existing inequalities. Given this perspective, routine attacks against the poor seem ruthlessly rational, and the suppression of organized labor becomes altogether too predictable.
The role of the police as union-busters and strikebreakers was an outgrowth of their position in the class structure and their function regulating the behavior of workers for the convenience of the new capitalist economy. After about 1880, whenever strikes were anticipated, the police made special preparations to control, and thereby defeat, the workers' efforts. Police were sometimes housed on company property for the duration of the conflict In addition to attacking picketlines and rallies, they increased patrols in working-class neighborhoods, stepped up enforcement of public order laws, and took pains to close the meeting halls and bars where strikers gathered [13]. Arbitrary arrests were common, and strikers were sometimes held on minor charges (or without charges) until the strike was over. The police also intercepted union organizers and radicals traveling to areas affected by strikes; the unionists and "reds" were usually interrogated, sometimes with third-degree methods, and released at the town line with a stern warning to stay away [14].
Writing in 1920, Raymond Fosdick described something of the range of police tactics, and the uses to which they were put:
The police are often used on behalf of employers as against employees in circumstances which do not justify their interference at all. This has been especially true in the handling of strikes. Lawful picketing has been broken up, the peaceful meetings of strikers have been brutally dispersed, their publicity has been suppressed, and infractions of ordinances which would have gone unnoticed had the violators been engaged in another cause, have been ruthlessly punished. Sometimes, too, arrests have been made on charges whose baselessness the police confidentially admit. "We lock them up for disorderly conduct," a chief of police told me when I asked him about his policy in regard to strikes and strikers. "Obstructing the streets" is another elastic charge often used on such occasions. Sometimes the arbitrary conduct of the police passes belief.
Newspapers favoring the strikers' cause have been confiscated and printing establishments closed on the supposition that they would "incite to riot." Meetings of workingmen have been prohibited or broken up on the theory that the men were planning a strike, and specific individuals have been denied the right to speak for the reason that they were "labor organizers." "I have this strike broken and I mean to keep it broken," a director of public safety told me, as if breaking strikes were one of the regular functions of the police [15].
Such coercive activity is now generally considered the exclusive domain of governments. but the use of violence to break strikes was at first the right and responsibility of private employers. In the period immediately following the Civil War, company guards were sometimes relied on to perform this function, while in other cases the company reimbursed the city government for expenses incurred during strikes [16]. Either way, capitalists facing unruly workers were caught between the desire to directly control strikebreaking activity, and the expense and difficulty of maintaining security forces at the necessary level. It was under these conditions that the Pinkerton Detective Agency grew to national prominence, achieving special notoriety for its use of an agent provocateur against the radical miner's organization, the Molly Maguires [17]. By the mid-1880s, the Pinkertons had become part of the standard response to labor trouble, and their dual roles as spies and leg-breakers were often sanctified by deputization into local police departments [18].
In the coal fields of Pennsylvania, recurring unrest led the coal companies to dispense with the Pinkerton middle-men and maintain an industry police of their own, the "Coal and Iron Police." For a fee of $1 per officer, the state conferred police powers upon these company-controlled guards [19]. In 1915, the Commission on Industrial Relations noted with disapproval that
one of the greatest functions of the State, that of policing, [was] virtually turned over to the employers or arrogantly assumed by them ... [and by] criminals employed by detective agencies clothed, by the process of deputization, with arbitrary power and relieved of criminal liability for their acts [20].
During the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era, such civic-minded concerns, matched with the employers' unwillingness to bear the full cost of strikebreaking, shifted responsibility for these duties to the public police.
The creation of the state police illustrates this process clearly. After the 1902 Great Anthracite Strike, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a body to investigate the conflict and make recommendations concerning the unresolved disputes. The Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, as it was called, took this task a step further, recommending thoroughgoing changes in the policing of strikes. After quite a few damning words about the strikers [21], the commission concluded: "Peace and order ... should be maintained at any cost, but should be maintained by regularly appointed and responsible officers ... at the expense of the public [22]." In May 1905, Pennsylvania governor Samuel Pennypacker signed into law an act creating a state police force [23].
The Pennsylvania State Constabulary proved an effective force against strikes, since it recruited from across the state, thus minimizing the influence of any particular officer's ties to the local community [24]. The Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor called for the organization's elimination and published a volume of evidence against the state police. Titled The American Cossack, the book collects witness statements, newspaper accounts, legislative debate, and other materiaL A typical story comes from S. P. Bridge of New Alexandria, Pennsylvania, dated February 21, 1911:
Gentlemen:
State Police came to New Alexandria July 31, 1910, Sunday. The State Constabulary are of no use in this country to farmers or workingmen. They make all efforts to oppress labor.
Six of them were stationed at this town for a period of two months for the benefit of the coal company. Their duty was in and around the works.
At the time they were here there was trouble between them and the miners. There was a camp located within two hundred feet of my house. There were three State Constabulary and two deputy sheriffs went into camp. They rode their horses over men, women, and children. They used their riot clubs freely on the miners without cause or provocation.
One of the men had to be sent to the hospital, one received a broken arm, one woman was clubbed until she was laid up for two weeks.... They used their clubs on everyone that protested against their conduct and I was an eye-witness to the affair.
There were no lives lost and no one hurt before their arrival.
The majority of citizens are not in favor of the Constabulary.
I cannot see that anyone but the coal company is benefited by the Constabulary.
Yours truly,
S. P. Bridge [25].
Another statement is unusual only for its source. Hugh Kelley, the chief of police in South Bethlehem, wrote:
When the constabulary arrived here, February 26, 1910, neither the burgess nor myself, as chief of police, were informed of their arrival. They were in charge of the sheriff.... They beat people standing peaceably on the street; men were arrested and taken to the plant of the Steel Company and there confined.
They started out on our streets, beat down our people without any reason, whatever, and they shot down an innocent man, Joseph Zambo, who was not on the street, but was in the Majestic Hotel. One of the troopers rode up on the pavement at the hotel door and fired two shots into the room, shooting one man in the mouth and another (Zambo) through the head.... There was no disturbance of any kind at this hotel, the Majestic was the headquarters of the leaders who were conducting the strike.... Troopers went into the houses of people without warrant and searched the inmates, drove people from their own doorsteps. They beat an old man, at least, sixty years of age. Struck him with a riot stick and left him in a very bad condition.
This is only one of a dozen similar cases [26].
The law creating the Pennsylvania State Constabulary intended the new body "as far as possible, to take the place of the police now appointed at the request of various companies [27]." It is hard to think of a more literal description of their role. Whereas strikers had previously had their heads cracked by guards in private employ (or police leased to the company, which comes to the same thing), they increasingly had the honor of having their heads cracked by impartial public servants, authorized by the government and funded by the tax. By investing this responsibility in the state itself, the ruling class made provision for the more regular and predictable service of its needs, with the costs shared - in a sense, socialized - and, for that matter, at least some portion of the costs borne by the workers themselves [28].
Though Pennsylvania did not boast the first state police force, it did pioneer the current type. Earlier state forces were either military organizations, vice squads, or short-lived civil rights agencies [29]. But following the success of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, the idea of a state police force took hold across the country. By 1919, of the six existing state police departments, all but one were modeled after Pennsylvania's. Ten years later, there were twenty-five such departments. And by 1940, every state had one [30].
However, with or without a state police force, the independence of the police in relation to the larger companies was somewhat illusory. And in the 1920s, following the federally directed Red Scare, distinctions between union-busting and law enforcement practically dissolved. In Philadelphia, the police issued a proclamation on March 21, 1921, that they would not interfere with union meetings "so long as the meeting is orderly and not of radical character, but all meetings of radical character will be prohibited or broken up [31]." The policy offered the police license to attack any union meeting, since it was assumed all labor organizing was Communist in nature.
At times, anti-union campaigns drew on a practice familiar from the efforts to control African Anlelicans; police formed alliances with, actively cooperated with, and provided official cover for the activities of right-wing vigilante groups. In Los Angeles, for example, the police joined in a partnership with the American Legion, deputizing members of its "law and order committee." The American Legion then commenced a series of raids against meetings of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or the "Wobblies"). In the first such raid, four Wobblies were hospitalized and five were arrested for "inciting a riot." A few months later, in April 1921, the IWWs offices and meeting halls were again raided, its supporters arrested, and men, women, and children beaten with ax handles. Those identified as leaders were driven to the desert, beaten unconscious, and abandoned. Though many of the victims could identify their attackers, no charges were ever filed. The pattern continued for years. In June 1924, a vigilante mob, organized in part by the police, attacked the IWW hall with clubs and guns. They destroyed the furniture in the building, beat many of the men and women present, tarred and feathered the leaders, and deliberately scalded several children with hot coffee [32]. While the police ignored these offenses, and sometimes actively protected the perpetrators, they simultaneously engaged in aggressive enforcement practices against the unionists. Between 1919 and 1925 the LAPD arrested 504 union organizers; 124 were convicted for "criminal syndicalism," a charge designed to stifle union activity and specifically targeting the IWW [33]. So while actual union-busting activity remained a joint venture between public and private forces, during the Progressive Era the authority to use or license violence slowly moved out of private hands, solidifying the state's theoretical monopoly on it. Despite the continual re-configuration of the public/private split in terms of funding and control, the police mission during strikes remained basically the same: to defend the company's interests, to preserve the status quo.
Where conflicts arise between workers and bosses, between the rights of one class and the interests of the other, the machinery of the law is typically used as a weapon against the poor. And where the law is contrary to the demands of powerful corporations, the police act not from principle or legal obligation, but according to the needs of the ruling class. This tendency shouldn't surprise us, if we remember the lengths to which the cops have gone in the defense of White supremacy, even as laws and policies have changed.34 With class, as with race, it is the status quo that the police act to preserve and the interests of the powerful that they seek to defend, not the rule of law or public safety. The law, in fact, has been a rather weak guide for those who are meant to enforce it.
For example, the Interchurch World Movement's Commission of Inquiry reported that:
During the [1919 Steel Strike] violations of personal rights and personal liberty were wholesale; men were arrested without warrants, imprisoned without charges, their homes invaded without legal process, magistrates' verdicts were rendered frankly on the basis of whether the striker would go back to work or not [35].
Thus, in a time of crisis, the pretense of law enforcement was given up in favor of naked repression and class warfare. The police, the jails, and the courts acted to serve, not the law, but the interests of business.
This tendency was occasionally tempered by the attitudes of other elites, or by those of the officers themselves. James Richardson notes that countervailing forces within the community, or especially within the city government, did sometimes neutralize the police:
In grappling with the dilemmas posed by community polarization , the police tended to follow the lines of power and influence.... If the authorities favored the workers or were at least neutral, the police remained neutral. If on the other hand, political leaders and newspapers viewed the strikers as un-American radicals or a threat to the town's prosperity by making industry reluctant to locate there, then the police acted as agents of employers in their strikebreaking activities [36].
Richardson's point is well taken, but it must be remembered that such neutrality must, in a class-based society, remain suspect. Bruce Smith, an early scholar of policing, makes the point clearly:
The substitution of non-union labor for union labor is perfectly legal, and the police are bound to give protection against any and all interference with the right to work. The effective performance of this duty ... frequently "breaks the strike," and the police, whether local or state, are charged with conducting a strike-breaking operation. At such times, evenhanded justice almost necessarily operates to the ultimate advantage of vested property rights [37].
Even where police do not deliberately side with the employers, class bias is nevertheless built into their role. An exhaustive recounting of labor battles, police attacks on picket lines, and unlawful arrests cannot be supplied here, but two case studies may offer some sense of the usual police role.
In 1912, Massachusetts law reduced the workweek for women and children, from fifty-six hours to fifty-four. The American Woolen Company complied with the letter of the law, if not the spirit; it reduced the workweek, but also made corresponding cuts in pay. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, where 60,000 people depended on the earnings of 25,000 textile workers, and where the average the wage was $8.76 per week, 25 cents more or less made an enormous difference in the workers' ability to feed their families [38]. Thus, on January workers received their paychecks and discovered the reduction, they walked out - first at the Everett cotton mill, and the following day at the Washington mill. The Washington workers marched to the Wood mill, shut off the power, and called out the workers there. By that evening, 10,000 were on strike [39]. By the end of the month, the strike had spread to other industries, and 50,000 people (in a town of 86,000) were striking [40]. One picket sign expressed the workers' position clearly, capturing both the desperation of the moment and the hope for a better future: "We want bread and roses too [41]."
The repression of the strike was immediate and intense. Arbitrary arrests and summary judgments became the order of the day, and many strikers were sentenced to one-year prison terms without ever having the opportunity to put forth a defense [42]. Leaders were marked for more serious charges, and extreme measures were taken to discredit the union. When dynamite was discovered in a cobbler's shop, police and press alike were quick to blame the strikers, though there was no evidence to support such a conclusion. The tactic backfired. First, a school board member. John C. Rrppn , was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined $500 for planting the dynamite [43]. Then, Ernest W Pitman, president of Pitman Construction Company, implicated himself and several other business leaders in a confession to the district attorney. Pitman revealed that the incident had been planned by one of the textile companies, leading to conspiracy charges against Fred E. Atteaux, the president of the Atteaux Supply Company, and William M. Wood, the president of the American Woolen Company [44].
Regardless of the scandal, union leaders were generally blamed for any violence - not only the violence of the strikers, but that used against them as well. On January 29, when striking workers attempted to block the mill gates, the police and the militia attacked, and a riot ensued. An Italian striker, Anna Lo Pizzo, was shot and killed. Witnesses identified the culprit as officer Oscar Bemoit, but two IWW leaders were arrested instead. Neither of the two men - Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti - had been present when the shooting occurred, but the complaint alleged that "before said murder was committed, as aforesaid, Joseph J. Ettor and Antonio [sic] Giovannitti did incite, procure, and counsel or command the said person whose name is not known, as aforesaid, to commit the said murder.... [45]" The police later named Joseph Caruso as an accomplice and "Salvatore Scuito" as the gunman, though no one of that name was ever located [46].
Martial law was declared on January 30, the day after the shooting. Colonel E. LeRoy Sweetser was given charge of twelve companies of infantry, two cavalry troops, fifty cops from the Metropolitan Park Force, and twenty-two companies of militia. Citizens were forbidden to meet or talk in the streets, and Lo Pizzo's funeral was broken up by a cavalry charge. Mass arrests became common, and strikers were rousted from their homes and taken to jail. A Syrian striker, John Ramy, was stabbed with a bayonet and subsequently died. But the strike grew. The textile companies kept the looms running, but only as a kind of propaganda; they had no workers to operate them, and thus no product. Joseph Ettor commented from jail: "Bayonets cannot weave cloth [48]."
On February 5, the Italian Socialist Federation proposed evacuating the strikers' children. Supplies could thus be saved and the children decently cared for by sympathetic families. In the three days following, they received 400 offers to take in the children. The Socialist Women's Committee and a committee of the IWW took applications and inspected the homes. On February 10, 119 children were sent to New York under the supervision of four women, two of them nurses. A week later, 103 more were sent to New York, and thirty-five others to Barre, Vermont. This exodus was embarrassing for both the government and the mill owners, and on February 17, Colonel Sweetser announced that no more children would be allowed to leave [49]. But if the socialist foster-care system was embarrassing, the attempt to disrupt it was absolutely scandalous. On February 24, when forty children tried to leave for Philadelphia, they found the train station full of police. A member of the Women's Committee of Philadelphia later testified before a House committee about what happened next:
When the time approached to depart, the children arranged in a long line, two by two, in orderly procession, with their parents near to hand, were about to make their way to the train when the police closed in on us with their clubs, beating right and left, with no thought of children, who were in the most desperate danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck, and even then clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the panic stricken women and children [50].
No further effort was made to interfere with the children, and on March 12, the American Woolen Company agreed to a new pay rate [51]. The workers voted to end the strike, but the struggle was not over. New slogans appeared: "Open the jail doors or we will close the mill gates [52]." As the September 30 trial date for Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso approached, textile workers in Lawrence, Haverhill, Lowell, Lynn, and elsewhere threatened to strike if they were convicted. As a demonstration of their seriousness, 15,000 staged a one-day strike a few days before the trial was set to start. The police attacked the strikers, arresting fourteen, and almost 2,000 were fired and blacklisted. But the strikers had already seen worse, and knew something of their own strength. Amid threats of further strikes, the mill owners were forced to back down, and after fifty-eight days of trial all three defendants were acquitted [53].
In 1934, the West Coast witnessed an extended, and at times bloody, conflict between dockworkers represented by the International Longshore Association (IIA) and the business interests represented by the Waterfront Employers Union and the Industrial Association. Principally, the conflict concerned the control of the longshore hiring hall and related issues of scheduling, seniority, and, of course, wages. The bosses preferred to arbitrate the dispute, and the union leadership was willing to compromise, but the workers had other ideas. A strike began on May 9 among longshore workers in San Francisco, and quickly spread to maritime and related industries, reaching up and down the coast [54]. It stalled the economy of the entire country, but the center of conflict remained in San Francisco, where it escalated through a series of bloody battles to become a general strike [55].
Violence was a major feature of the San Francisco strike, a tool used by both sides. Strikers commonly beat up scabs, and sent "sanitary" or "clean-up" crews to patrol the waterfront with bats [56]. The bosses, however, mostly relied on the violence of the state, especially the police. This was a convenient relationship, as it legitimized anti-strike violence and shifted the target of public outrage away from the employers and onto the police. David Selvin emphasizes the point:
[T]he police even more than the strikebreakers became the strikers' chief antagonist. The role of the strikebreaker was soon stabilized and contained, while police came to serve, day by day, as the employers' virtual private assault force. When the clashes came, as they did, the police - not the strikebreakers - were pitted against the strikers [57].
The violence started early, and escalated throughout the strike. On the first day, the police dispersed 500 picketers with relative ease. By the end of the month, however, the pickets were fighting back, hurling bricks at the police. The cops then used clubs, gas, and eventually shotguns to break up groups of strikers [58].
The most serious violence accompanied efforts to operate the docks, especially attempts to move goods to or from the ports [59]. On July 3, 1934, the police created a corridor along King Street to Pier 38, guarded by a police line on one side and a row of box cars on the other. As trucks approached, the police sought to break up the crowd of strike supporters. They attacked with clubs, tear gas, and gunfire, injuring many in the crowd as well as numerous bystanders. (A stray bullet wounded a teller in the nearby American Trust Company.) Soikers retaliated by throwing rocks, bricks, and tear gas containers back at the police. At least two strikers were shot, one killed, and eleven hospitalized; and nine cops were injured [60]. The ILA issued a statement on the encounter: "Striking pickets were clubbed down and rode over by the police who a short time ago were supposed to be the friends of these same workers. The strike cannot and will not be settled by force [61]."
But force seemed to be the authorities' preferred means of convincing the workers to return to their jobs. On July 5, the entire San Francisco Police Department was put on strike duty [62]. The fighting was concentrated in the area surrounding Pier 38 and Rincon Hill. But the police also moved in on a crowd at Steuart and Mission, near the ILA hall. Suddenly a car carrying two police inspectors appeared in the intersection. The inspectors stepped out of the car, fired their pistols into the crowd, and then fled as the crowd hurled rocks and bricks at them [63]. Two men died in the attack - Howard S. Sperry, a longshoreman, and Nick Counderakis (aka, Nick Bordoise), a Communist. A third man, Charles Olsen, was also shot, but survived [64]. When the injured were taken to the ILA's clinic, the police fired into the building and filled it with tear gas. As the unionists barricaded themselves in the hall, the telephone rang: "Are you willing to arbitrate now [65]?"
That evening 1,700 National Guard troops were deployed, armored cars patrolled the streets, and the Embarcadero, the street nearest the waterfront, was enclosed in barbed wire and guarded with machine guns. But the military fortifications fell short of their objective: the work remained undone. Two hundred fifty ships sat idle along the coast Even when a military guard made it possible for scabs to unload and move cargo, it just sat in the warehouses, where Teamster truckers refused to touch it [66]. As in Lawrence, the state was reminded of the practical limits of its reliance on force.
By the end of the day, in addition to Sperry and Bordoise, one other worker had been killed, and at least 115 hospitalized [67]. Thus July 5 came to be termed "Bloody Thursday." Strike leader Harry Bridges called it a "reign of terror." He said: "It was an attack by armed men against unarmed peaceful pickets. It was a massacre of workers by the shipowners through the police [68]." The next day, the corner of Steuart and Mission was covered with flowers. Chalked on the street were the words: "Two men killed here, murdered by police [69]."
One week later, 4,000 truck drivers walked out, marking the move toward a general strike. They were quickly joined by butchers, machinists, welders, laundry workers, culinary workers, cleaners and dyers, and boilermakers: thirteen unions, representing 32,000 workers, joined the strike [70]. The Teamsters picketed the city's southern limits, guarding the only vehicular route to the city. There they turned back - and sometimes turned over - non-union trucks. A strike committee issued permits for hospital supplies, food, and other necessary services, but the city could not function as usual [71]. Signs began appearing in shop windows: "Closed, Out of Supplies," "No Gas, Due to the Strike," "Closed for the duration," and "Closed till the boys win [72]."
The next day the authorities declared an emergency. The police began stockpiling weapons, swore in 500 special officers, and created an "anti-radical and crime prevention bureau [73]." Eighteen hundred cops and 4,500 National Guard troops were now on strike duty, reinforced with machine guns, tanks, and artillery [74]. Meanwhile, across the bay, 15,000 building-trades workers laid down their tools and walked off their jobs. They were joined by 27,000 workers affiliated with the Central Labor Council [75].
On July 17, the second day of the general strike, the police launched a coordinated attack. That morning a group of uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives raided the Maritime Workers Industrial Union office, breaking down the door, destroying office equipment and furniture, smashing windows, seizing records, and arresting everyone present, often delivering a beating in the process. This was the first of a daylong series of similar raids, not only in San Francisco, but throughout the state. Police, National Guard troops, and vigilantes attacked radical hangouts, strike kitchens, newspapers offices, and even a school. About 300 people were arrested [76].
Shortly thereafter, on July 20, the strike committee voted to end the General Strike, though the longshore and maritime workers continued striking on their own [77]. The announcement was met with another wave of police raids and vigilante attacks [78]. Eleven days later, the last strikers returned to work. The strike had lasted eighty-two days and involved 30,000 dock workers. Seven were killed, hundreds were hospitalized, and thousands were treated at the ILA clinic. There were 938 arrests in San Francisco alone [79].
In arbitration, the workers won a raise and a thirty-hour week, but were only granted partial control of the hiring hall - falling short of their most important demand [80]. The strike delivered real gains, but not the decisive victory the workers wanted. In this case, they proved unwilling to accept even a partial defeat, and the class war shifted from a campaign of massive, often deadly, battles to one of quick, bloodless, guerrilla actions. Both the longshore and the ship workers immediately instigated a series of on-the-job actions against unfair and dangerous conditions [81]. And, perhaps as importantly, they changed the face of their unions and the labor movement overall. Looking back on the strike a few years later, Thomas G. Plant told a conference of longshore employers:
Most of us heaved a big sigh of relief, and felt that the old peace and order would soon be restored. But the old order had changed. The old union had said to us, "We believe our interests are common with yours; we will cooperate with you in every way...." The new union was to say to us, "We believe in the class struggle, that there is nothing in common between our interests and yours, therefore, we will hamper you at every turn, and we will do everything we can to destroy your interests, believing that by doing so we can advance our own [82]."
The role of the police in suppressing organized labor during the period before World War II is well documented and relatively un controversial. What is often overlooked, however, is their continuation in this role since that time. The police have undergone a great many changes in the half-century since World War II, but their position in the class structure and their role in the class war have remained very much the same.
For example, sixty-five years after the San Francisco General Strike, on the opposite side of the country, dockworkers were again facing a threat to their union - a recalcitrant company backed by the armed might of the state. In October 1999, Nordana line, a Danish shipping company, announced that it would end its contract with the ILA and started using non-union workers to unload its ships. Union members began picketing the port in Charleston, South Carolina, sometimes damaging equipment, blocking access to machinery, and intimidating non-union workers [83]. On January 20, 2000, the police intervened with a massive display of force. Six hundred officers from the State Law Enforcement Division, the State Highway Patrol, the Charleston County Sheriffs Office, and the police departments of Charleston, North Charleston, and Mount Pleasant assembled in riot gear at the port's gates, a helicopter buzzing overhead [84]. Just after midnight, about 200 workers marched from the union hall to the docks, chanting "ILA, ILA, ILA" As the workers tried to break through the police lines, the cops pushed them back with their shields. The fight escalated from there, with workers throwing rocks and bottles, and the police using clubs, tear gas, and rubber bullets to drive the crowd back toward the union hall. At least ten workers - and probably many more - were injured, most of them African Americans [85].
Nine workers were arrested, charged with misdemeanor trespassing. Those charges were dismissed when the accused agreed to perform community service, but South Carolina attorney general (and gubernatorial candidate) Charlie Condon filed felony riot charges against five of the workers - Kenneth Jefferson, Elijah Ford, Jr., Peter Edgerton, Ricky Simmons, and Peter Washington, Jr. Condon explained the importance of prosecution: "In South Carolina, a citizen's right not to join a union is absolute and will be fully protected." At the same time he announced "a comprehensive plan for dealing with union violence and attacks on police which involves jail, jail, and more jail [86]."
The state of South Carolina placed the Charleston Five under house arrest for more than a year while they awaited trial; if found guilty, the men faced five years in prison. But after a massive, international solidarity campaign - ranging from "Free the Charleston Five" posters in windows around town, to rallies at the statehouse, to threats to close ports around the world on the first day of the trial - Condon removed himself from the case [87]. The new prosecutor downgraded the charges to misdemeanors in exchange for "no contest" pleas; each of the five was sentenced to thirty days, or a fine (ranging from $100 to $309). Nordana, in the meantime, returned to its agreement with the ILA [88].
This sort of intersection between race politics and class conflict is not unique to the South. On June 15, 1990, the Los Angeles police trapped and beat striking janitors as they marched through the Century City business district. The janitors, who were mostly Latino, were organized as part of the Service Employees national Union's "Justice for Janitors" campaign; they were demanding that International Service Systems (ISS) recognize their union. As the march entered Century City, the 300 demonstrators found themselves surrounded by nearly 100 police. The cops blocked the exits and proceeded to arrest and beat them. Ninety people were injured, nineteen of them seriously. Workers reported broken bones, a concussion, and a miscarriage as a result Ironically, the violence brought more attention to the workers' cause than the march itself ever would have, and nine days later ISS recognized the union [89].
Perhaps the clearest recent case of police-managed strikebreaking is that of the Detroit Newspaper Strike (and later, lockout). In July 1995, when 2,600 employees of the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press went on strike, the newspapers (together, the Detroit News Agency) responded by hiring 2,000 private security guards supplied by Vance International, and by giving money to police in the suburb of Sterling Heights, where the papers' production plants are located. Police initially confiscated clubs and other weapons from Vance guards, but after the Detroit News Agency's first donation - a sum of $115,921 - the cops' attitudes changed [90]. Police ignored harassment and violence on the part of the guards - even when several Vance agents beat a striker so severely they split his skull [91]. But strike sympathizers were arrested for even minor infractions, such as blowing the horns of their cars to show support for the strike [92].
The cops also perpetrated their own violence against the workers. Most notoriously, on August 19, 1995, a picketer named Frank Brabenec was beaten by the Sterling Heights police. A widely published photograph showed a uniformed officer dragging Brabenec along the ground while a plainclothes cop - later identified as Lieutenant Jack Severance - kicked him [93]. A couple weeks later, on Saturday, September 2, the police attacked picketlines with pepper spray. The unions happened to be holding a rally nearby, and 4,000 supporters rushed to the site of the conflict. The cops called for reinforcements from twenty-two police agencies, and a sixteen-hour stand-off ensued, during which time trucks could not enter or leave the plant. Two days later, on Labor Day, a smaller crowd fought with the security guards [94]. Those first few weeks set the tone for the next five-and-a-half years, until December 2001, when the unions finally gave in. Only a third of the striking workers were rehired - at lower wages, of course [95].
It is hard to know how much of the blame for this defeat really falls to the police, especially given the poor planning of the unions, media hostility, and court orders limiting the number of strikers on picketlines [96]. But it is easy to see what the cooperation of the police was worth to the Detroit News Agency. During the course of the strike, the company donated nearly a million dollars to the Sterling Heights police. Police violence escalated accordingly, and crowds took to chanting "Bought and paid for!" when the cops arrived [97]. Mayor Dennis Archer explained that riot police helped to preserve "a good business climate [98]."
These recent events indicate how little has changed over the course of a century. Naturally, strikes and other labor actions still focus on many of the same issues, since there is a permanent conflict of interest between workers and their employers when it comes to matters of pay, hours, and control. And in the clashes between workers and capital, the police continue to line up on the side of capital. But the differences between these later disputes and those of the early twentieth century are also clear enough. Violence persists, but at lower levels. Battles between police and workers, while sometimes bloody, are rarely deadly [99].
These reduced levels of violence are the result of a shift in the form of class conflict unionization, collective bargaining, and even strikes have been formalized, institutionalized, and subject to legal regulation. Increasingly, this development has taken the struggles of workers out of the factories and the streets and placed them instead in courthouses and government offices [100]. Companies, then, have come to rely less on police or Pinkerton thuggery to keep the workers in line. At the same time, the militancy of the labor movement overall has suffered a sustained decline, and the power within unions has shifted away from the rank and file and toward the official leadership, the paid staff, and their legal advisors [101].
This process was already taking hold at the time of the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. In fact, the strike may be seen as the workers' direct resistance to the institutionalization of class conflict on two fronts: first, in their refusal to submit substantive issues to arbitration; and second, in following the leadership of rank-and-file members like Harry Bridges, rather than obeying the orders of union officials [102]. The depth of this resistance - the degree to which workers refused to play by the prescribed rules, and rejected the given definitions of victory and defeat - is evident in the continuation of the struggle even after they had returned to work. The strike ended, but the workers did not surrender. They, in effect, moved the conflict to an arena where the influence of the union officials, the courts, and the police could be minimized, and where the strength of the workers was greatest - on the shop floor.
The institutionalization of class conflict has changed unions and strikes, certainly; it has also changed the means of controlling the working class, and the role of the police in particular. Police tactics, strategies, an d organization have all changed as the forms of conflict have changed. All the while, the basic aims of policing - control of the powerless, defense of the powerful - have remained essentially the same. The relationship between these changes and continuities will be examined in the chapters that follow.