When I took Texas history in public school, we weren't
taught one single thing about the labor movement in this state -- but we did
learn the name of the horse that Sam Houston rode at the Battle of San
Jacinto, which happened to be Saracen.
So you may not have heard of the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, the
largest and most important clash between management and organized labor in
19th-century Texas history.
In Bruceville, 16 miles south of Waco, is a monument to Martin Irons, who
led the Great Strike. Even allowing for the florid sentimentality of
19th-century orators, Irons seems to have been an uncommonly good man,
gentle and warm, and a natural leader.
He was born in Scotland in 1827 and immigrated to the United States at the
age of 14. He worked as a machinist for the railroads all over the
Southwest; he was a member of the machinists union and the Knights of
Pythias. He was also interested in the Grange, the populist farmers
movement.
According to Ruth Allen's The Great Southwest Strike (Austin: University
of Texas, 1942), his politics consisted of anger "at the encroaching
domination of corporate business as monopolist and employer, with agrarian
insistence upon ownership of the land as the basis of liberty."
The following account is taken mostly from Allen's 163-page monograph on
the strike:
Irons, a master workman, joined the Knights of Labor in 1884 and helped
form District Assembly 101, composed of workers for Jay Gould's Southwestern
railroads. He was later elected chairman of the executive committee of the
union assembly. For those of you whose late 19th-century history has faded,
Jay Gould was, to put it gently, a seriously disgusting specimen of Robber
Baron who controlled all the Southwestern railroads through interlocking
companies.
In 1885, the year before the Great Strike, Gould fired the Knights of Labor
shop men of the Wabash line, causing a walkout. The Knights working for
other railroads refused to operate any train with Wabash cars and so brought
Gould to the bargaining table. It was a great victory for the workers, and
the Knights gained members, but Gould was determined to destroy the union.
In March 1886, Irons called a strike against Gould's Texas & Pacific
Railway over the firing of a foreman in Marshall, and all hell broke loose.
The T&P strike soon spread to other railroad lines, as in the '85 strike.
The workers uncoupled cars and seized switch junctures. Gould in turn hired
scabs and Pinkertons. The Pinkerton "detective agency" was actually a mobile
strike-breaking force in those days, and it specialized in busting heads.
Gould also asked for military assistance from the governors of states
affected by the strike. Texas Gov. John Ireland sent the state militia and
the Texas Rangers to Buttermilk Switch in Fort Worth. This early example of
using the Rangers for union-busting is of particular interest to those who
remember the Rangers' strike-breaking activities in the Valley during
efforts to organize the farmworkers in the 1960s.
The ensuing violence turned public opinion against the strikers. Gould
refused to negotiate, and the strike failed.
"Failure of the Great Southwest Strike represented the first major defeat
sustained by the Knights of Labor and proved to be a fatal blow to their
vision of an industrial union that would unite all railroad workers in the
Southwest into 'one big union.' Once again, an emerging labor organization
was crushed when competing with powerful, determined and well-organized
industrialists in command of nationally based corporations," Allen
concludes.
Martin Irons was blacklisted and could not hold a regular job. He moved to
St. Louis, Little Rock, Ark., and Fort Worth for brief periods, sometimes
using an assumed name.
In 1894, his health was failing; G.B. Harris of Bruceville, a democratic
socialist, offered him a home. Allen reports that he continued to work for
social reform until his death in 1900.
A lot of busted heads and broken lives went into making the eight-hour
workday a reality. Think how mad Irons and all those other fighters would be
at us for letting the corporations get away with mandatory overtime and
60-hour workweeks, month after month.
The thing about corporations is that they never give anything away out of
the goodness of their non-existent hearts. As economist Milton Friedman put
it, the only social obligation of a corporation is to make money. Workers
still have to fight for a decent life.
Solidarity forever!
Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out
more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers
and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
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