David Bates - The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922

In the summer of 1919, Chicago exploded into a weeklong paroxysm of racial violence that left thirty-eight people dead, more than five hundred injured, and more than a thousand homeless.

But the Chicago race riot was also the climax of another, longer story: the efforts of the citys labor leaders to organize an interracial union. By the time of the riot, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) had been working for more than two years to organize the citys stockyards without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, or skill level. Initially at least, these efforts were enormously successful. At various points, it was estimated that in many departments, white and black participation in the Stock Yards Labor Council (SLC), as the organizing body was called, exceeded 90 percent. But by the time of the riot, the SLCs position in the black community had become tenuous at best; the violence of the riot and the recriminations of its aftermath would make their presence positively toxic. Within months, the SLC would be disbanded entirely. By early 1922, after abortive last-ditch strikes in steel and meatpacking, the CFL would recede into obscurity for more than a decade. Reflecting on these failures, a black trucker later explained that he had got along fine during a stint as a union butcher. But that stint had been brief, and left him suspicious toward unionism. Strikes are too hard on the man that aint in the union, The anonymous workers wariness was born of hard experience. By the early 1920s, African Americans felt forcibly estranged from Chicagos labor movement.

This book traces the long and complex history of that estrangement, and of the complex interplay of forcesorganizational missteps, shop-floor confrontations, and employer predationthat produced it. Labor unions had built a long and infamous history of racial exclusion by the time of the CFL campaign. Most unions were craft oriented and thus shunned unskilled workers, immigrants, and African Americans. Though the CFLs leaders earnestly sought to transcend such bigotry, their view of racial inclusion was limited and the structure of their campaign produced a de facto segregated union that proved repellent to black workers. White union members took this intransigence as substantiation of longstanding suspicions that African Americans were a scab race. Employers targeted the union mercilessly, using strategic hiring and firing practices to enflame racial tensions, divide their workforce, and defeat the campaign. As a result, both black and white workers entered the 1920s as easy prey for the whims of bosses.

Previous historians have examined this phenomenon in a variety of ways. Practitioners of the so-called old labor history, distinguished by its focus on the structure of union institutions and campaigns, analyzed the chasm between the stated commitment of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to colorblind organizing and the frequently (and often openly) racist nature of its unions. These historians largely concluded that racial conflicts within the working class were produced by racist union structures and the divide-and-conquer tactics of employers. Philip Foner raged against the AFLs accommodation of whitewashed trade unions, while Sterling Spero and Abram Harris argued that unions largely viewed African Americans as member[s] of a race which must not be permitted to rise to the white mans level.

The so-called new labor history inverted this approach; rather than examining large-scale structures of union organization, new labor historians focused their energies on local studies of workers attitudes and culture. As a result, many scholars have focused their attention more on moments of contact and even cooperation between white and black workers.