The first U.S. academic to struggle to make systematic sense of the enormity of the upheaval and violence of 1919 was likely the rather unlikely Colonel Robert T. Kerlin, professor and head of the English Department at the Virginia Military Institute since 1910. Kerlin had completed a doctoral dissertation titled “Theocritus in English Literature” at Yale in 1906 after a wide-ranging education and teaching career. He had also already, in his own words, spent “three years in the ministry of the Southern Methodist Church” and in 1898 “held a commission in the Spanish American War as Chaplain of the Third Missouri Volunteers.”Footnote 1 After the catastrophe of the race rioting in nearby Washington, DC, from July 19 to 23, 1919, which began with soldiers among the vigilantes and ended with the mobilization of troops under orders, he immediately began collecting news coverage on black America dating from July 1 for a period of four months through November 1. Kerlin looked exclusively to African American publications to try to understand what was happening and did so with a national scope, though one tilted toward the South. In the introduction of the quick to follow book, The Voice of the Negro: 1919, published at the beginning of 1920 and collecting excerpts from eighty different papers, “though I studied twice as many,” he advised his readers, who he presumed, like himself, to be well-off whites:
To know the Negro do not quiz the cook in your kitchen, or the odd-job, all-service menial about your premises, or the local school-teacher or preacher. In general they will tell you what they know you wish to hear, or, on difficult matters, remain non-committal. To know the Negro do not fall foul of two or three publications of Chicago or New York: there are some pretty radical and rather bolshevistically inclined white papers, according to the Post Office Department, in those quarters. We do not regard them as representing White America. To know the Negro read his papers extensively…
Kerlin devotes only about twenty-five pages in the middle of almost 190 to six riots, in turn. His chapter on another compelling horror, lynching coverage from the period, was similarly brief. The rest of the chapters were thematic rather than event driven. The book was much more a sympathetic attempt to understand the causes of the injustices that African Americans suffered and how the voice of the black press demanded remedy as the violence unfolded than it was an attempt to chronicle the violence itself. Though a local event had spurred the project, he demonstrated a commitment to understanding a national problem.Footnote 2
These months of intensive collection and study moved him to write an open letter, published in The Nation in June 1921, addressed to Governor Thomas C. McRae of Arkansas in protest of the impending executions of black men scapegoated in the wake of another local event, the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas, perhaps the worst incident of both violent and judicial repression of African Americans in a year with much gruesome competition. The men were eventually freed following a Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Dempsey in early 1923, though for some it took two more years of legal struggle. Kerlin was following the black press closely in order to compile his book as the violence and immediate miscarriage of justice in Arkansas happened in late September and through October in 1919. His lengthy, outraged letter, written with the encouragement of Walter F. White, who had investigated Elaine for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was shot through with biblical references used to condemn this injustice.Footnote 3 It was the last straw for the Virginia Military Institute. Of the fourteen stages listed in his employment record leading to his firing and departure to teach in Pennsylvania, the first was his study attempting to make sense of 1919: “The tendency of this book was to create race prejudice as well as race animosity.”Footnote 4
The period that Kerlin studied as it unfolded, according to historian David F. Krugler, contains eight of the ten large-scale race riots of the era that also featured the highest levels of organized black resistance.Footnote 5 Because the largest concentration of these key clashes, four of the ten, occurred in July, this phenomenon (including also an impossible to comprehensively catalog number of smaller-scale incidents of black repression and resistance) has long been referred to as Red Summer, a common acknowledgment not just of its bloodiness, but of the importance of it coinciding with the Red Scare even if the connections are sometimes unclear.Footnote 6 In the first, and perhaps still the best, scholarly study focused on just one of the major riots, historian William M. Tuttle, Jr. noted in his 1970 book on the Chicago violence that “It is not coincidental that the summer of 1919 also marked the beginning of the xenophobic and hysterically antiradical ‘Red Scare.’ Both phenomena were the ugly offspring of some of the same unrest, anxieties, and dislocations that plagued the United States and, indeed, most of the world in the immediate postwar years.” Tuttle briefly reminds us of a long list of territorial disputes between nationalities, struggles against colonialism, attempts at revolution, economic crises, and incidents of racial violence around the globe.Footnote 7 Nearly a half century after Tuttle's book, we still have a long way to go toward understanding how these two complex and global strands of the immediate postwar era intertwine.Footnote 8
There is also no agreement on the number or definition of major Red Summer incidents at all. Scholar Arthur I. Waskow had settled in 1966 on a more restrictive classification than Krugler of seven major riots from May to September with an additional sixteen smaller-scale incidents from the NAACP “Mob Violence, 1919” file, which stretched over almost the entire year, from February to November.Footnote 9 Journalist Cameron McWhirter more expansively combined “at least 25 major riots and mob actions” from April through November in his 2011 book on the subject.Footnote 10 Jan Voogd, a librarian, had already focused on twenty-six locales over the same period as McWhirter in a 2008 book, but in contrast to the journalist's chronicle form, Voogd constructed an original taxonomy to catalog the 1919 race riots in separate chapters: “hysterical reaction to racial caste rupture,” “arising out of labor conflicts,” “involving the military as agents or targets,” and “arising out of local politics.” Voogd acknowledged that the riots should not be isolated within single labels, which were mainly tools “to understand what happened, and why.” However, the complexity of all of this inevitably leads to so much overlap and imperfect fit that the problems inherent in the pursuit of conceptual categorization toward synthesis can counterproductively overshadow Voogd's valuable local research on individual events.Footnote 11
Work long after the 1919 efforts of Colonel Kerlin still struggles with the reality that the incidents we have collected as the “Red Scare” and “Red Summer” and made national, manifested often as disparate local events that responded to immediate conditions. In addition, many of the problems of the era we often view through a national lens, we know are global issues in the World War I era and its aftermath as well: militarism in political culture; expansive investigative and repressive state capacity; and violent, legal, and bureaucratic defense of race, gender, and class hierarchies against increasingly assertive social movements. It is not my intention to dismiss study of the Red Scare/Red Summer as a national phenomenon. On the contrary, the national perspective can be very helpful when we are examining shifts in the prerogatives and capacities of the state (including how its components intersect with other key actors, such as economic elites, social movements, and the press) and how this in turn shifts federalism, including local and regional contests over power amidst crisis and rapid change. I argue in this methodological article that responding to the local events of the Red Scare/Red Summer to better understand regional history, the potential importance of outliers, or secondary themes is not an inadequate response that distracts us from a more worthy attempt to synthesize primary national currents. Avoiding the compulsion to connect the largest disparate events between differing and internally complex states and regions and at different moments in an era toward an overall understanding could help us to reach multiple important goals.
First, it will remove pressure to treat both smaller-scale strikes, like the actors’ walkout in New York, and incidents of racial violence, like the Mulberry, Florida, shooting, as less important potential windows into the past. Because there are so many noteworthy events to make sense of, the rational tendency can be to eliminate much out of necessity in order to be able to substantively connect what is left. Krugler noted that, in addition to the ten major riots he examined, the Red Summer period had “dozens of minor, racially charged clashes, and almost 100 lynchings.”Footnote 12 According to data compiled by Florence Peterson for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1937, the number of striking workers in 1919 dwarfed anything seen in the 1880 to 1936 period that she examined (historian David Montgomery has estimated it to be nearly a quarter of all manual and service non-household workers), even though the actual number of strikes was about the same as in 1918 and 1920 and lower than in 1917.Footnote 13 This reinforces the same “big event” Red Summer tendency for the Red Scare because there was an unprecedented number of large strikes, not total strikes, and thus conflicts that did not paralyze an entire critical industry or large city seem less worthy of inquiry and connective, era-defining study. The same could be said of small-scale investigative and policing operations in response to radical organizing or labor militancy in localities that did not produce bomb scares, large and persistent anticapitalist demonstrations, or dramatic levels of civil unrest and vigilantism.
Second, a regional history approach can help us to see shifts in national state power from the bottom up, as they impact everyday life—and to better understand distinctive variants within a rapidly evolving postwar national political culture. We must look at the critical importance of local government in a vast republic with a coast-to-coast rail connection barely half a century old and a government in DC that was only able to carry out its first truly national war mobilization and production effort in 1917–18 by appending the capacities of private and public sector allies in every region.Footnote 14 The years 1919–20 took shape as they did far beyond the ambitions of Washington power players like A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, William B. Wilson, and Lee Slater Overman. Yet, the tempting dynamic of a back and forth between explosive local dramas, sensational national press coverage, and then shifts of power and agenda in DC can often determine what events we select as seminal. Because the looming Seattle general strike in early 1919 had a role in reviving and transforming the U.S. Senate's Overman Committee on the opposite side of the country from an out-of-date investigation into German propaganda into one rooting out Bolsheviks, it can be tempting to continue threading this loop throughout the year.Footnote 15 The Seattle general strike also set our expectations for local political leadership during the Red Scare/Red Summer, with the alarmist, bombastic, reactionary, armed-force wielding Ole Hanson catapulted to fame as the era's most heroic anti-red mayor.Footnote 16 Yet local political environments that take uncommon form or defy reactionary politics, such as Galveston, Texas (which did both), also have much to tell us because they stand outside the national, even their own regional, narrative.
Third, exploration of the local and regional history of the Red Scare/Red Summer can help us to better understand the global ferment of the period. In December 1919, the Buford, dubbed the “Soviet Ark” by the press, left New York carrying 249 radicals bound eventually for the Soviet Union. Many of them were members of the Union of Russian Workers and had been rounded up in the first of the Palmer Raids the previous month.Footnote 17 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, two of the most prominent revolutionaries in the nation, were with them, helping to cement the image of the departing Buford as perhaps the key reflection of a widely accepted central fact of the Red Scare: that it was the domestic manifestation of the bilateral conflict with the new Soviet Union.Footnote 18 The later development of this hostility into a bipolar world following World War II, lasting almost half a century, too often obscures the dramatic impact of other revolutions upon the radicals of the Red Scare/Red Summer era. This article will conclude with a look at the impact of the Irish Revolution on anticolonial, pan-African militancy in Harlem. In the wake of World War I, the escalating global challenge to colonialism was interwoven with that to capitalism and the work of historians here provides a key thread to help us further bind together the Red Summer and Red Scare.
IN SOLIDARITY?
The 1919 strike wave, which did so much to escalate the Red Scare, was often beset with problems internal to the labor movement, which compounded the weight of external repression often carefully aimed at these weaknesses.Footnote 19 The cost of the sometimes byzantine and generational ethnic and racial divisions among striking workers, which were closely linked to hiring, training, and job and union rank, were already starkly clear in a book-length analysis of the most epic industrial clash of the Red Scare era, the fall 1919 national steel strike, published just months later in 1920. William Z. Foster, the author, who had been a key organizer and leader of the walkout (and would soon become part of the Communist Party leadership), included an entire chapter devoted to “National and Racial Elements” in The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons.Footnote 20 Historian David Brody's definitive 1965 book on the event, Labor in Crisis, keeps these exploitable estrangements central (as have subsequent scholars) and expresses a persistent understanding: “The disaster of 1919 had proved to be only a postponement, and not a final denial, of the benefits of unionism for America's steel workers.” After all, “by the mid-1940's, the steel industry was thoroughly organized.”Footnote 21
Historian Lizabeth Cohen's 1990 book, Making a New Deal, was an analytical breakthrough examining the critical role of an emergent mass culture toward uniting industrial workers across ethnic and racial boundaries in new mass unions in Chicago during the Great Depression. Combined with local studies by Gary Gerstle and others on that same era exploring the importance of working-class culture and evolving identity, this new approach greatly enriched the focus on shifting political and institutional conditions that previous scholars had used to explain why the trade union movement triumphed in the 1930s so soon after the 1916–22 strike wave, with its extraordinary peak in 1919, that coincided with the buildup and then decimation of labor's ranks.Footnote 22 That Cohen's model rooted in Chicago has limited applicability in some other regions, such as the South, or localities that were significantly less urban or demographically diverse does not discount its value. An attempt at a broadly workable national synthesis would have deemphasized the important dynamics that she, and contemporaries like Gerstle, reconstruct and their approaches have indeed succeeded in getting us to think about an important problem in new ways.
The nature of solidarities leading into and during the Red Scare/Red Summer similarly require new thinking emerging from local insight. Historian Stephen H. Norwood has counterintuitively concluded that “Most biracial union alliances before 1919 were forged in the South,” and although they “usually rested on fragile foundations,” historians have turned up a surprising number of such cases and not all, particularly on the waterfront in New Orleans, were short lived. Examples of interracial working-class solidarity in the South were exceptional in the Red Scare/Red Summer era and became rarer still in its aftermath, but that should not marginalize their importance.Footnote 23 Examination of unexpected solidarities might usefully yield more interlocking components than we anticipated, from the transcendence of unusual internal barriers to union cohesion to comradeship with insurgents abroad to local partnerships with cross-class political coalitions, government and law enforcement, and a broad public that may have been more sympathetic to the strikers of 1919–20 than we sometimes assume.
THE REVOLT OF THE ACTORS AND PUBLIC SOLIDARITY IN NEW YORK
The successful New York stage actors’ walkout of August 1919 was one of the most public strikes of the Red Scare era. Though extensively chronicled in a weighty and very useful (if overly enthusiastic) tome by Alfred Harding in 1929, it has received too little subsequent attention from scholars of the Red Scare.Footnote 24 The Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), which had just affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), arguably faced more of an uphill battle than many other unions that struck in 1919. Joining the AFL had left deep internal division in the AEA according to scholar Sean P. Holmes, who has traced the development of labor organization among actors in the 1910s and ‘20s. The AEA had now “alienated that section of the theatrical workforce that wore its class prejudices on its collective sleeve and clung to the view that art and labor were irreconcilable.”Footnote 25 In addition, the seemingly unappeasable Producing Managers’ Association (PMA) published a statement in the New York Times portraying the union leadership as feckless contract breakers betraying their own members: “It has ceased to be a struggle between the actor and the manager. The manager must fight now to deliver the actor from the grip of unscrupulous agitators and restore him to a position of some personal liberty.”Footnote 26 Nevertheless, this union, though new to the labor movement, unschooled in strike organization and tactics, divided over even being a trade union, beset by hierarchical divisions and individualist ambition, and split among many and often seasonal workplaces, prevailed in 1919. It also built up its membership in the 1920s as many other unions saw steep declines; and in the darkness of 1924, after the five-year contract it won in 1919 expired, the AEA achieved a union shop for the first time in U.S. theater.Footnote 27
Though internal divisions and external repression typically have primacy, analysis of the Red Scare strike wave often gives a nod to the understood notion of public hostility to, or at least wary exhaustion with, the disruption and threat associated with the dramatic escalation of labor militancy. Its most implacable opponents, like Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson or Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge are the era's supposed popular heroes.Footnote 28 Surely New York actors, the very picture of glamor, now withdrawing entertainment to protest their own conditions, would be pilloried. After all, the strike found little sympathy from the popular press, which seemed unable to even take actors seriously as workers.Footnote 29
Yet, win they did—and through solidarity forged with the public as much as with each other. According to Holmes, “By feeding the voracious public appetite for information on the private lives of stage celebrities, [theatrical employers] were able to define stage acting … almost entirely in terms of the rewards that accrued to it and that obscured the reality of the theatrical workplace. In the context of the strike of 1919, however, this worked against them. The men and women of the legitimate stage were able to exploit their commodity status by taking the dispute out into the public arena and transforming it into a performance.”Footnote 30 The union immediately ran afoul of city picketing rules and received helpful advice about how to take their protest to the public effectively from what would seem an unlikely source: the police.
So often a critical part of the repression of labor in this period, Holmes reminds us that “the summer of 1919 was unusual in that police officers around the country … were engaged in a struggle of their own over the right to organize.”Footnote 31 Historian Joseph Slater has noted that by this point in 1919, the AFL had received sixty-five requests for police locals and had chartered thirty-seven. Like the actors, policemen were newcomers to the AFL in 1919, having previously rejected applications on the basis that, as the organization informed officers from Cleveland in 1897: “It is not within the province of the trade union movement to specially organize policemen, no more than to organize militiamen, as both … are too often controlled by forces inimical to the labor movement.”Footnote 32 Indeed, police were taking on a yet larger role in combating the labor movement during the Red Scare even as some sought to join it. Historian Gerda W. Ray has charted the use of the new state police in New York as an effective strikebreaking force and has argued that the strike wave of the Red Scare and early 1920s saw a transition there and in other states from National Guard troops to state policemen in strike suppression.Footnote 33 Of course, strikers also clashed with local police forces all over the nation. Still, there was a rapidly growing and novel push from urban police to connect to the labor movement, and sympathy for strikers may have been considerably more widespread than even the boom in applications to charter police locals indicates. Much more study at the local level is needed here and we should see the Boston police strike of September 1919 as exceptional only in its level of escalation, not in the basis for the conflict or the officers’ orientation toward organized labor.
New York police officers advised the striking actors to use corner street speakers for less than five minutes and to do so out of the way of traffic, thus there would be no legal violation and no permits needed. Unburdened by any sort of tradition of strike tactics, the AEA evolved roving street corner protests into theatrical events and Holmes recounts that actors “entertained the crowds with familiar comic stories cleverly reconfigured into attacks upon the producing managers.” Actor Eddie Cantor later recalled that the tactic was so successful that he and other comedians could prevent audiences from entering theaters that stayed open just by offering a more exciting, spontaneous, and intimate performance for them outside in the street. “The policemen were in sympathy,” Cantor wrote, “so was the public, and we invariably captured the day for Equity.”Footnote 34 Holmes has observed that “Strikes in the United States have always had an important performative dimension, with picketing serving not only to bring production to a halt but also to dramatize shop-floor struggles for consumption in the public arena.” We cannot ignore, however, the extent to which the actors exploited chorus girls, after forcing them into an auxiliary organization, to win sympathy, and even funds, from affluent men. Holmes recounts how the AEA sent chorus girls into Wall Street banks as a sexualized display to publicize their demands to wealthy and influential male theatergoers, and in Chicago the union threw a large and lavish “benefit ball at which ticket purchasers were given the opportunity to dance with the objects of their desire.” The newspapers made sure, of course, that the public could consume salacious details.Footnote 35 The press, largely hostile to the actors, could also be manipulated toward mutual gain. We clearly need further examination of the complex ways in which the public interacted with, and policemen policed, conflict and protest that used public space, or created spectacle for consumption, during the Red Scare.
The AEA held a series of benefit performances to aid the strike and they were a roaring success. Harding describes the first of them in The Revolt of the Actors:
While the evicted audiences were filing out into rainswept Times Square and its neighboring streets, the great Equity Benefit at the Lexington Avenue Opera House was swinging into being. In spite of the rain and the strike on the subway and elevated lines, every seat in the house had been sold hours before curtain time. By seven-thirty, when standing room sales had to be discontinued, more than five hundred standees had been crowded into the old structure, filling it as it had not been filled since the days of [opera star Amelita] Galli-Curci…
The shows closed with an actor delivering “a parody of Marc Anthony's oration over Caesar” and Harding includes this section of the script in his book. Its militancy is remarkable. A photo from the first performance shows actor Brandon Tynan in regular clothes and perched on a huge scenery crate on a bare stage packed with “the greatest all-star mob ever seen on Broadway” surrounding him. At the end, Harding recounted, “The crowded house sprang to its feet, and as the mob on the stage threw back its head, stretched out its arms and thrilled to the cry of its faith, the audience joined in, tossing up its arms, mingling its shouts with the players, united with them for Equity.”Footnote 36 There were certainly other critical components to the New York actors’ eventual victory, such as the spread of unrest to some other cities in varying degrees, an emergent—though fragile—solidarity among types of performers and with the organized theater trades, and a failed PMA legal strategy.Footnote 37 But it is the bond with the public, forged with police support and in the face of a scornful press, that demands further study of public space as a site of solidarity, not just confrontation, during the Red Scare.Footnote 38
THE LOCAL POLITICS OF INTERRACIAL SOLIDARITY IN MULBERRY AND GALVESTON
A world away from the glitz of Broadway, the residents of Mulberry, Florida, and other nearby phosphate mining towns fought a grinding strike against fourteen companies to obtain the reduced workday and wage increase that the War Labor Board had recommended. They eventually achieved (at best) a partial victory on those terms after bitter and lengthy resistance, but certainly failed to establish collective bargaining. The phosphate miners’ strike in Florida was the longest strand running through the state's considerable labor unrest in 1919, lasting from April through December, and it was marked by both sabotage and violence. It was also marked by an unusual degree of interracial solidarity that defied attempts to break it.Footnote 39 Unfortunately, it still awaits a study, even of article length, devoted to it. Jan Voogd has argued that the violence in “Mulberry, Florida and Bogalusa, Louisiana, developed as an hysterical overreaction to the racial coalition building among workers.”Footnote 40 For Mulberry, at least, this seems like speculation and deemphasizes the most instructive aspect of the incident: the interracial unity in the town in reaction to the violence, which was perpetrated by company guards, including the solidarity of the mayor and sheriff with residents. Here we see that the critical relationship between local government, public opinion, and worker protest in the Red Scare was not always predictable. Historian Wayne Flynt's assertion that “Had strikers not alienated public opinion by violence, the outcome might have been different” both assumes that the Florida phosphate industry was susceptible to public pressure on collective bargaining and that the orientation and tone of the city newspapers he consulted did actually reflect public opinion during the strike and the state elections of 1920, in which pro-labor candidates fared poorly. However, in a more localized observation better grounded in his evidence, Flynt also concluded that “When trouble did occur white residents in the phosphate mining areas sympathized with the strikers, whatever their color.”Footnote 41
It must be emphasized that there was every reason to believe that this interracial strike would not hold. Under darkness in early August, Flynt recounts, “forty-six automobiles, each containing two men armed with rifles and shotguns,” drove a hundred African American strikebreakers from Georgia to the mines in Haines City. Just outside of Mulberry, “the convoy was ambushed,” a strikebreaker was killed, a deputy sheriff “was critically wounded,” and a “guard was shot in the arm.”Footnote 42 Racial division was easy to find in the state's 1919 labor conflicts. White insistence on the common practice of segregated unions had helped to cripple the shipbuilding strike in the Oscar Daniels Yard in Tampa during April, the same month the phosphate walkout began, with only sixteen of six hundred black workers joining.Footnote 43 Even tolerance of separate unions was in doubt as the postwar campaign to beat back black job gains in industrial employment intensified across the South. Historian Eric Arnesen has found that white railroad workers in the region spent much of their clout with employers and the federal government during this era on expelling blacks from positions they coveted rather than make common cause to better weather the antiunion drive.Footnote 44
Given this context, that the solidarity of the phosphate strike not only lasted, but escalated to interracial cooperation toward armed resistance, is extraordinary. After forty black and white strikers with guns gathered in response to a story that strikebreakers had hit some of their comrades with cars, a reporter wrote that “measures are likely to be taken at once as the arming of negroes is the last straw and trouble may result at any time.” This incident occurred two days before the ambush near Mulberry.Footnote 45 The event fully illuminating the most historically important and unusual component of the broad solidarity these strikers had forged, however, was yet to come. Less than two weeks later, mining company guards fired their guns indiscriminately into Mulberry from the direction of the Prairie Pebble mine just outside of town. There were twenty-five shots from “high-powered rifles and shotguns loaded with buckshot,” according to the Kissimmee Valley Gazette. The casualties were African American: a dead child and two badly wounded adults. Incredibly, the sheriff arrested four guards in the mine's power house, which was the origin of the first shots according to residents, even though the guards claimed that “they had returned the fire of a negro who had opened fire on the power house,” an utter failure to forge solidarity with the town's whites and place law enforcement in a racial bind. The guards denied shooting at or entering the town, an outlandish claim that seems to have convinced no one. The mayor demanded that the sheriff disarm the guards, and he complied. The sheriff was still trying to calm the populace later that night, “many of whom were in favor attacking the power house.”Footnote 46 The strike did cause bitter divisions that lasted a long time. Voogd noted that “as of 1970 there were still families not on speaking terms … because of being on opposite sides.”Footnote 47 We could see the persistence of this animosity as a legacy of the extraordinary popular unity on display that manifested in a commitment to interracial working-class self-defense in Mulberry, which does not seem to have been limited to the union, using both arms and sympathetic local official power. Workers’ use of local government as a tool against repression through forging solidarity across predictable voter splits and in the face of fearmongering during the Red Scare is a topic ripe for further exploration.
The Socialist Party, as a third-party political alternative at the local level, went into terminal decline during World War I.Footnote 48 However, that did not signal the collapse of local labor politics and the varied forms and impact of this level of government during the Red Scare deserves wider attention. The island port of Galveston, Texas, provides a fascinating case that defies expectations. The machinations of two factions of rival elite families in Galveston had for years dominated local politics, though by agreement they eschewed the Democrats popular with white union locals and the Republicans supported by African American voters (who were effectively barred from Democratic primaries in Texas in 1903). The two factions supported their own invented, shifting political parties as they competed with each other. Beyond token gestures, the growing and increasingly political and militant black and white locals of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) were left out in the cold.Footnote 49 Even though the races were segregated into separate locals, there had been fragile attempts to cooperate toward sharing the work and raising wages together.Footnote 50
In late March 1919, amidst an escalating national Red Scare and looming Red Summer, a new political club took form in Galveston and its chair nominated three white and three black members to a party-naming committee and “waterfront workers had a majority influence,” according to historian Gregg Andrews. The new City Party immediately set out to recruit both black and white organizers from every ward in Galveston. It was not an unreasonable goal because, as Andrews notes, “Although there were clear patterns of residential segregation in Galveston, the racial lines were not completely rigid in neighborhoods, particularly in working-class areas where black and white families sometimes lived on the same block.” The effort to revive working-class neighborhood politics, which had long been muted by the institution of a commission system of government in 1901, was a core component of the new City Party movement.Footnote 51 Their moderate platform was geared toward inspiring support from both laborers and the middles classes through reform of elite political and economic control of the city, including getting initiative, referendum, and recall mechanisms into the city charter that would, as one leader at a May election rally argued, “prevent the enactment of obnoxious ordinances, and would give you the privilege of recalling from office any who may prove unfit for the public trust.” A push for clean and fair government intentionally cast a broad net, but it was carefully paired with an appeal to workers: “We ask the laboring man, those who toil for their living, to stand shoulder to shoulder in the election of our ticket—a ticket which presents to you honest, clean men.”Footnote 52 It was a success. As Andrews has observed, “The City Party's strategy to mobilize working-class voters at the ward level through the ILA locals worked. The reform coalition's entire slate of candidates won the election by a very large margin on a platform condemning the special interests that controlled Galveston's waterfront and enjoyed preferential tax treatment.”Footnote 53
The ILA strike in Galveston, which began in New York in March 1920 and quickly spread to other ports on the Atlantic and in the Gulf of Mexico, has received much more attention from historians than the interracial working-class reform politics of the City Party. It was a complex conflict, very worthy of study, and has likely received more analysis over a longer period than any other walkout in the state's history.Footnote 54 The nearly year-long dispute certainly fits the Red Scare narrative of crushed militancy ground by the combined might of employer and state power. Amidst an escalation of tension between strikers and strikebreakers, and pleading from Galveston port business interests, Governor William P. Hobby saw his opportunity to declare martial law on the island and sent in National Guard troops in June.Footnote 55 “Convinced that city officials were too indebted to the black and white longshoremen who put them in office,” Andrews has written, “Governor Hobby suspended the police force, mayor, commissioners, attorney, and recorder” in July “and ordered General Wolters to assume full control.” An agent of the Bureau of Investigation reported on the police force in seeming continued justification of its suspension in August that “the greater part of its members are active in other labor unions and could not be depended upon to take an active part in a suppression of any nature where Union labor is concerned.”Footnote 56 The Texas Rangers, in an echo of Gerda W. Ray's research on state police in New York, replaced the Guard in October and stayed through the rest of the strike. Despite some short-term concessions to the strikers, open shop forces in Galveston and the state capital triumphed over the ILA in early 1921, ending both the walkout and union clout on the island's docks, while gaining a new state law designed to illegalize disruptions to port trade in Texas.Footnote 57
This blow did not, however, immediately end the City Party that had been victorious in 1919 or the biracial working-class unity that built it. The political coalition won again in 1921, though “once the ILA local unions collapsed in 1922, Galveston's City Party lost its strongest base of support” and, “Without the unions the progressive political coalition broke down and yielded to the takeover of the party by more conservative influences in 1925.”Footnote 58 The persistence of interracial political unity among laborers after such a lengthy, unsuccessful, and potentially divisive strike in the Jim Crow South is perhaps even less stunning than the continuation of the broad-based, cross-class coalition built upon that unity and in support of a moderate, union-driven platform that successfully dominated Galveston politics throughout almost the entirety of the Red Scare/Red Summer era and outlasted it.Footnote 59
ANTICOLONIAL RADICALISM IN HARLEM IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE IRISH REVOLUTION
The revolutionary world view of Cyril V. Briggs, African Black Brotherhood (ABB) leader and editor of its monthly Crusader magazine, suggests another, and in this instance more global and radical, form of interracial politics during the Red Scare/Red Summer era. Briggs was a key part of the bubbling cauldron of activism and ideas emanating from the periodicals of the Afro-Caribbean community in Harlem in this era, which reached across the nation and outward through the African diaspora. In December 1920, the Crusader reported that its circulation was 33,000.Footnote 60 As historian Margaret Stevens has recently noted, these publications were also imbedded in a complex cross-border intellectual exchange: “the Caribbean was not simply where many of these Harlem New Negro radicals were from, but, more importantly, it was a critical regional epicenter that prompted the spread of black radical ideas.”Footnote 61 Unfortunately, as historian Minkah Makalani observed in her 2011 book on radical black internationalism in the interwar period, also our most important study of the ABB: “Briggs remains one of the more storied if poorly studied black radical intellectuals of the New Negro movement.”Footnote 62
The Crusader first appeared in August 1918 in Harlem at the same time as the Negro World, the periodical of Marcus Garvey's meteoric United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which would soon draw both a global following and swift federal repression in the United States.Footnote 63 The Crusader promoted the UNIA along with its own ABB, but eventually cooperation between the two groups eroded and they became openly opposed in 1921.Footnote 64 A strong advocate for anticolonialism from the first issue of the Crusader, Briggs began openly praising and identifying with the Bolsheviks in its pages by late 1919. Historian Robert A. Hill has argued that “If the Red Scare helped to channel his radicalism into communist militancy, it was the violent racial clashes … of 1919 that pushed Briggs into organizing black self-defense.” Hill also observed that “The Red Scare had now merged with a parallel black scare: in fact, the October 1919 Crusader that first advertised organization of the ABB was also the issue in which Briggs announced his willing acceptance of the Bolshevik label.”Footnote 65 The first two communist parties in the United States had just formed in Chicago the previous month, aligning the ABB with the very beginning of this new movement.Footnote 66
Beyond Russia, Briggs had his eye on insurrectionary movements around the globe. He was excited by the ongoing revolutionary struggle in Ireland and saw its successful escalation into the war of independence of 1919–21 against British colonial domination as a critical example not just for African Americans, but oppressed peoples globally.Footnote 67 He frequently cited the British Empire as the most oppressive force in the world and urged the African diaspora to both join with and emulate the resistance movements of its conquered peoples. In the August 1919 Crusader, just predating the establishment of the communist parties in the United States and Briggs's open affiliation with Bolshevism, he authored an editorial asserting that “By strikes, rebellions and other forceful means the Irish people have forced the world to take cognizance of British misrule and oppression.” He concluded with, “And the maxims remain true: ‘When you fight, FIGHT!’ and ‘he who would be free himself must strike the blow.’ There is no middle course when dealing with the oppressor.”Footnote 68 The confluence of revolutionary influences was not lost on those monitoring Briggs during the Red Scare. Hill cites a report from the Post Office, that same month, charging that the Crusader was “entirely sympathetic with Bolshevism, Sinn Fein, Jewish agitation, in fact any movements which the magazine could compare with the struggle of the negro.”Footnote 69
Briggs pushed not just emulation of Irish militancy broadly, but also the specific forms and methods of resistance they were employing with success, including “organizing secretly a great Pan-African army in the same way as the Sinn Fein built up the Irish Republican Army under the very nose of England.”Footnote 70 And that force should, similarly, not be restricted to conventional weaponry in this uneven fight: “No one could condemn the Irish should that oppressed people … resort to the use of dum-dum bullets, poison and any other means at their disposal.”Footnote 71 In late 1921 after the two groups had irrevocably split, Briggs denounced the UNIA goal of African Americans returning to Africa, stressing that the ABB wanted “to Strengthen the Position of the American Negro in order to Use it in the Struggle for a Free Africa in much the same Manner as the Irish Strength in America was used in the Struggle for a Free Ireland.”Footnote 72 Briggs had earlier that year exhorted African Americans to join the economic boycott of the Irish against British goods to help their brethren in Africa: “The Irish people and the Negro people have much in common. … But how differently do Irish and Negroes meet the common foe!” He argued that, “The difference is not so marked in Africa and Ireland, where both races are engaged in deadly war against the Anglo-Saxon. … But how different in America!,” which lacked a black boycott movement.Footnote 73 This is a very broad comparative structure, a frequent feature of the pages of the Crusader. We should approach this aspect of Briggs's work with caution. Makalani has argued that Briggs “put forward a diasporic identity that presented fundamental problems. On the one hand, he implied that pan-African unity required ignoring real social differences among African-descended populations and the complex of racial identities that arose from those differences. On the other, by insisting that local struggles would contribute to pan-African liberation, he sought to balance local and global concerns.”Footnote 74
Adding yet another layer of complexity, Briggs seemed to endorse not just the importance of the Irish struggle in itself or as an example, but the necessity for a common struggle with them. In February 1921, the lead article in the Crusader, “Heroic Ireland,” seemed to place the ongoing Irish struggle above the Russian Revolution of 1917 in importance: “The Irish fight for liberty is the greatest Epic of Modern History.” Briggs went on to write that “The Negro in particular should be interested in the Irish struggle, for while it is patent that Ireland can never escape from the menace of ‘the overshadowing empire’ so long as England is able to maintain her grip on the riches and man power of India and Africa, it is also clear that those suffering together under the heel of British imperialism must learn to CO-ORDINATE THEIR EFFORTS before they can HOPE TO BE FREE.” He closed with the idea that “It should be easily possible for Negroes to sympathize with the Irish fight against tyranny and oppression, and vice-versa, since both are in the same boat and both the victims of the same Anglo-Saxon race.”Footnote 75 In fact, black dockworkers in New York had already supported the extraordinary “Irish Patriotic Strike” against British shipping to the city in August and September 1920, despite a bitter history of racial animosity and competition for work that the strike certainly did not end. Historian Bruce Nelson has written that “Few if any developments in the entire history of the New York waterfront could equal, or explain, this extraordinary event and the convergence of class, nationalist, and racial slogans it generated. Partly it was a reflection of the moment—1919 had been an apocalyptic year in much of the world, and the currents of proletarian upheaval and insurgent nationalism that were its hallmarks continued to crest in many places for some time thereafter.”Footnote 76 There was at least one example of formal organizational collaboration in New York some months later, the establishment of an interracial Harlem chapter of The American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, reported in the April 1921 issue of the Crusader, with the stated intention of meeting weekly and becoming “a coordinating factor in the cause of oppressed humanity.”Footnote 77
Hill, who edited and indexed the entire existing run of the Crusader for compiled publication, has asserted that the influence of the Irish Revolution goes beyond the pages of the magazine to the formation of the very shape and mission of the ABB. We should treat this influence as partial, of course, and it is important to note that this lineage does not appear in Makalani's important subsequent book with substantive coverage of the group. Hill has argued that “The model of political organization from which the ABB derived its principal inspiration was the Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB], the legendary clandestine Fenian organization.”Footnote 78 It is a fascinating claim. Hill has argued that “At an operational level, the ABB emulated the clandestine methods of the IRB,” and that the language it used for recruitment and its structure to some extent specifically mirrored the IRB (including leadership by a “Supreme Council”) and “carried the clear implication that the ABB was some kind of military force.”Footnote 79 Certainly, at least an ambition toward such an organization was prominent in the Crusader. Next to the masthead and contents in the February 1921 issue leading with “Heroic Ireland,” the magazine featured a boxed column beginning:
Negro Heroes!
You, who on the Bloody Fields of Flanders faced and CONQUERED the very Flower of the White Race, the Whitest of the Whites, surely you will not Stand Affrighted at the Challenge of Degenerated, Draft-Dodging Crackerdom?
Then Organize for Self-Defense
YOU know the value of organization. You know that Right without Might is Pure Moonshine, so enlist for self-defense with the
African Blood Brotherhood
the only Negro Secret Organization of its kind in the world, and the only body capable of opposing the lawlessness of the Ku-Klux Klan.Footnote 80
It is unclear how large the group actually became, but it is clear that its prominence was growing in 1921 as the Irish were achieving victory over the British in their independence struggle. The Crusader reproduced a New York Times story from early June following racial violence in Tulsa, highlighting that the ABB “is believed by the authorities … to have fomented the race riot in that city.” It cites Briggs “claiming 150 branches throughout the country with a membership of 50,000 Negroes.” That same issue reported that “Over 20 posts are now in operation in the West Indian Islands” and three “in West Africa.”Footnote 81 That is quite a leap from just a year earlier, when the Crusader had announced that “The organization now numbers over 1,000 men and women of African blood.” The ABB had outlasted the Red Scare of 1919–20 and its appeal had grown along with the persistence of racial violence after the Red Summer of 1919 and anticolonial struggles abroad.Footnote 82
The growth of the ABB during and just after the Red Scare era and its solidarity with the Irish anticolonial struggle is but one revelatory facet toward understanding the complex interplay between local and international in this revolutionary age during which insurrections beyond Russia moved radicals in the United States to absorb their influences and then push these outward in new ways while working within distinctive and supportive locales, such as Harlem. Further work tracing such connections to enrich our understanding of the Red Scare/Red Summer could stretch outward to postwar turmoil in far-flung locales across the globe, or could remain as close to the United States as Briggs's anticolonial Caribbean or the ongoing upheaval of the Mexican Revolution and the border war against Pancho Villa.Footnote 83 When added to the need for continued study of myriad local solidarities (many of them much more moderate) that suggest new connections to explore more widely toward uncovering their national implications, we have an era much in need of continued reevaluation and one that promises to elucidate a host of important historical issues in return.
