Repressing worker dissent: lethal violence against strikers in the early American labor movement

ABSTRACT

Despite U.S. labor-management history having long been recognized as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation, unanimity has failed to materialize regarding its impact on concomitant labor protests, organizations, and politics. We examine the impact of striker fatalities on the strength and trajectory of the early American labor movement against the null hypothesis that such bloodshed is largely random and/or inconsequential by building recently constructed measures of fatal strike violence into time-series regression models of strike frequency, union membership, and membership within the Socialist Party of America. The results suggest that killing strikers, labor organizers, and strike sympathizers had deleterious consequences for labor: dampening strike activity through the long-term cumulative history of picket-line deaths – particularly strikes for union recognition; and hampering union and Socialist Party organizational growth. Thus, repressive elite violence appears to have contributed, in part, to propelling the American labor movement along what has traditionally been characterized as an ‘exceptional’ path of weakening labor’s potential power during its formative decades.

KEYWORDS:

• American exceptionalism
• labor history
• repression
• socialism
• strikes
• unions
• violence

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association. For research support, Larry Isaac thanks the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Endowment, College of Arts and Sciences, Vanderbilt University.

Data availability statement

The strike fatality data that support the findings of this study are available from the authors upon reasonable request. All other data employed in our analyses are readily available in public sources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Resistance to organized labor persisted in the industrial heartland even during its postwar apex or heyday period (Dixon, 2021).

2. The same configuration of fatality effects appear when we estimate frequency of strikes (a count without labor force standardization) using a negative binomial or Poisson estimator.

3. We note that the same short-term and long-term results for striker deaths were observed when we used change in union density as the dependent variable.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported, in part, by the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Endowment, College of Arts and Sciences, Vanderbilt University.

Notes on contributors

Paul F. Lipold

Paul F. Lipold earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Florida State University in 2003. His primary research interests include the history and dynamics of labor-management conflict and workplace violence.

Larry W. Isaac is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Sociology and Political Economy at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on U.S. labor movements, the anti-racist civil rights movement, and mixed historical methods for analyzing social change.