THE GRASSROOTS REVOLT ★^831organizers spread the message that the
“political liberty for which our forefa-
thers fought” had been “made mean-
ingless by economic inequality” and
“industrial despotism.” “We are free
Americans,” declared the Steel Workers
Organizing Committee. “We shall exer-
cise our inalienable rights to organize
into a great industrial union.”
Labor’s great upheaval exploded in
1934, a year that witnessed no fewer
than 2,000 strikes. Many produced vio-
lent confrontations between workers
and the local police. In Toledo, Ohio,
10,000 striking auto workers sur-
rounded the Electric Auto-Lite factory,
where managers had brought strikebreakers to take their jobs, leading to a
seven-hour fight with police and the National Guard. In Minneapolis, where
an organization of businessmen known as the Citizens Alliance controlled the
city government, a four-month strike by truck drivers led to pitched battles in
the streets and the governor declaring martial law. San Francisco experienced
the country’s first general strike since 1919. It began with a walkout of dock-
workers led by the fiery communist Harry Bridges. Workers demanded rec-
ognition of the International Longshoremen’s Association and an end to the
hated “shape up” system in which they had to gather en masse each day to wait
for work assignments. The year 1934 also witnessed a strike of 400,000 textile
workers in states from New England to the Deep South, demanding recogni-
tion of the United Textile Workers. Many of these walkouts, including those
in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, won at least some of the workers’
demands. But the textile strike failed.
The Rise of the CIO
The labor upheaval posed a challenge to the American Federation of Labor’s
traditional policy of organizing workers by craft—welders or machine repair-
ers, for example—rather than seeking to mobilize all the workers in a given
industry, such as steel manufacturing. In 1934, thirty AFL leaders called for the
creation of unions of industrial workers. When the AFL convention of 1935
refused, the head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, led a walkout
that produced a new labor organization, the Congress of Industrial Organi-
zations (CIO). It set out to create unions in the main bastions of the American
Signs carried by striking cotton mill workers in
Lumberton, North Carolina, in 1937 illustrate
how the labor movement revived the nineteenth-
century language of “wage slavery” to demand
union recognition.Who were the main proponents of economic justice in the 1930s, and
what measures did they advocate?