Strike Action Quotes
Ford was then 74 years old and had become a very different man than in his youth when he was the hero of labor. He was very paranoid at this time. He even thought that financiers were actually backing the labor unions because their purpose was to go to war against Hitler who Ford greatly admired and supported. See {642379}. He claimed that the way they would do it is to fund the labor unions so most workers would join unions. This he thought would eliminate competition and lower workers’ wages. When workers’ wages were pushed low enough, the workers would demand American entry into the war to create government spending on armaments and a labor shortage to drive wages up again. There was not a single financier who was actually paying or lending any money to labor unions, and most industrialists other than Ford complained that labor unions would always demand higher wages. Ford’s son Edsel was the chief operating officer of Ford Motor Company, and did his best to work around his father to keep the company healthy and deal with a terrible labor relations problem his father caused.
The then Vice President was accosted on the train by southerners who believed that he was on his way to his home state of Tennessee to persuade the legislature not to secede from the union. Amid cries to hang him and after he was punched by one of the mob, ex-Senator Wigfall—the man who had received the surrender sword at Sumter, who was also on the train, persuaded the crowd to hear Johnson out. Johnson thus began his speech which was potentially for his life, but never wavered from his view that secession was a mistake. Most of the crowd calmed down and as the train pulled out, they let him go though there were still a few shouts for “hanging.” There was no secret service protection for the President or vice President at the outbreak of the Civil War. Pinkerton had organized some informal protection for the President and thwarted some plots, but it was the Vice President who was attacked first. And there was not sufficient protection to prevent Lincoln’s assassination.
This was a description of the famous Lawrence, MA, textile mill strike.
In 1892 President Harrison and the Republicans were trying to win a second term and were embarrassed by a bloody strike and riot at the Homestead steel works. Frick, the Homestead General Manager, was visited by a Republican emissary suggesting that Frick recognize the union and reduce the public embarrassment.. The Republicans lost to Grover Cleveland and the Democrats.
This quotation was reprinted and widely distributed by the CIO in its 1936 organizing drive of the Ford Motor Company
According to Palmer, all labor strikes were a part of the international communist movement to take over America. This quotation is an excellent example of the conflation and the strange logic of the extreme anti-communists of the red scare. It started with a railroad strike. Because some of the strike leaders were socialists and some communists, the strike was communist. And if it was communist, the strike is but one step in capturing the political and economic power of the nation, and the purpose of that was to overthrow the government and substitute the governmental structure of Russia. With such thinking no labor action could be seen as American and patriotic if there were any socialists or communists participating in the strike. Later in the McCarthy era, a strike would be a menace if any participant even had been a communist or was related to one or had friends who were communists or even if not but the Communists morally supported the strikers, then the strike was dangerous. The same thing for civil rights. The Communists loudly opposed racial segregation. Therefore any effort to end segregation was a danger to America and furthers the communist conspiracy. This “logic” can be seen well into the 1960’s by the Southern segregationist leaders.
