Finding Jobs: The Working Class

Finding Jobs: The Working Class

In Chicago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, laborers organized against big business while at the same time warring internally amongst themselves. Skilled workers fought the unskilled. Protestants fought Roman Catholics. The native-born fought the foreign-born. And the Irish fought everyone, including their Lithuanian, Germans, and Polish neighbors. Capitalists took advantage of the internal divisions by pitting one group against another. They did most effectively in 1904 when progressive union leaders persuaded workers in the Chicago stockyards to overcome divisions in ethnicity and skill. In response, the owners of the packing houses imported black workers from the South to replace the white strikers who had banded together in defense of a living wage. Many unionists expressed contempt for the blacks who crossed picket lines. They were considered scabs, more interested in personal welfare than the general well-being of the working class. For their part, black workers saw no reason to honor the efforts of labor leaders. Blacks most often were excluded from labor unions.

Consequently, Chicago formed a color line long before rocks were thrown on July 28, 1919. Among union leaders in 1904, a few liberals attempted to overcome the racial divide. They pleaded for blacks and whites to unite and fight. Their efforts failed. Antagonisms between black and white workers increased. The tensions became apparent in late July of 1919 when various labor actions placed the jobs of 250,000 white workers in jeopardy. After the race riot, one labor leader prophesied that

Some day the white worker is going to coax the black man to line up with him; all that he needs is a crusader’s heart and a genuine desire to make the black man and himself free, and when he succeeds there won’t be, in the economic field at least, the differences which now exist, due to this pitting of one race against the other and both being walloped by the action.

Of course, Chicagoans learned from the tragic events of 1919 that day was unlikely to appear for a very long time.