Red Chicago: American Communism

[Questionable]

I've been looking to learn more about the history of communism in America, and this title caught my eye:

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Chicago-American-Communism-Grassroots/dp/0252076389

It sounds very interesting, but $23 is a lot, and there's only two reviews on Amazon. Can anyone here vouch for its quality?

Also, are there any other titles I should look into? It doesn't have to be just about communism, I'm interested in the history of any radical tendency in America.

[#FF0000]

"Dynamite" by Louis Adamic is a pretty good lil book about class struggle and working class militancy in America.

[TaylorS]

Apparently Minneapolis was a big center of Trotskyist activity. My Grandpa, who was a Fargo area Farmer-Laborite union guy, knew a few of them.

[Red Commissar]

I haven't read that particular book, but I never did look much into the militancy in Chicago beyond the Haymarket Affair. It would seem logical that this was a hub of worker agitation, seeing as it was an industrial heart for a good period of time.

I remember reading in A People's History of the United States about the events of the 1877 Railway Strike which occurred in different parts of the country. From my understanding of it, the strike in St. Louis reached such an extent that they had some concrete demands beyond immediate work relief such as an 8 hour work day and an end of child labor- in a sense similar to the Paris Commune's own democratic demands.


http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnother10.html

The one city where the Workingmen's party clearly led the rebellion was St. Louis, a city of flour mills, foundries, packing houses, machine shops, breweries, and railroads. Here, as elsewhere, there were wage cuts on the railroads. And here there were perhaps a thousand members of the Workingmen's party, many of them bakers, coopers, cabinetmakers, cigarmakers, brewery workers. The party was organized in four sections, by nationality: German, English, French, Bohemian.

All four sections took a ferry across the Mississippi to join a mass meeting of railroad men in East St. Louis. One of their speakers told the meeting: "All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have the numbers, is to unite on one idea-that the workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes, belongs to him, and the workingmen made this country." Railroaders in East St. Louis declared themselves on strike. The mayor of East St. Louis was a European immigrant, himself an active revolutionist as a youth, and railroad men's votes dominated the city.

In St. Louis, itself, the Workingmen's party called an open-air mass meeting to which five thousand people came. The party was clearly in the leadership of the strike. Speakers, excited by the crowd, became more militant: ". . . capital has changed liberty into serfdom, and we must fight or die." They called for nationalization of the railroads, mines, and all industry.

At another huge meeting of the Workingmen's party a black man spoke for those who worked on the steamboats and levees. He asked: "Will you stand to us regardless of color?" The crowd shouted back: "We will!" An executive committee was set up, and it called for a general strike of all branches of industry in St. Louis.

Handbills for the general strike were soon all over the city. There was a march of four hundred Negro steamboat men and roustabouts along the river, six hundred factory workers carrying a banner: "No Monopoly- Workingmen's Rights." A great procession moved through the city, ending with a rally of ten thousand people listening to Communist speakers: "The people are rising up in their might and declaring they will no longer submit to being oppressed by unproductive capital."

David Burbank, in his book on the St. Louis events, Reign of the Rabble, writes:

Only around St. Louis did the original strike on the railroads expand into such a systematically organized and complete shut-down of all industry that the term general strike is fully justified. And only there did the socialists assume undisputed leadership.... no American city has come so close to being ruled by a workers' soviet, as we would now call it, as St. Louis, Missouri, in the year 1877.

The railroad strikes were making news in Europe. Marx wrote Engels: "What do you think of the workers of the United States? This first explosion against the associated oligarchy of capital which has occurred since the Civil War will naturally again be suppressed, but can very well form the point of origin of an earnest workers' party. . . ."

In New York, several thousand gathered at Tompkins Square. The tone of the meeting was moderate, speaking of "a political revolution through the ballot box." And: "If you will unite, we may have here within five years a socialistic republic. . . . Then will a lovely morning break over this darkened land." It was a peaceful meeting. It adjourned. The last words heard from the platform were: "Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us." Then the police charged, using their clubs.

In St. Louis, as elsewhere, the momentum of the crowds, the meetings, the enthusiasm, could not be sustained. As they diminished, the police, militia, and federal troops moved in and the authorities took over. The police raided the headquarters of the Workingmen's party and arrested seventy people; the executive committee that had been for a while virtually in charge of the city was now in prison. The strikers surrendered; the wage cuts remained; 131 strike leaders were fired by the Burlington Railroad.

When the great railroad strikes of 1877 were over, a hundred people were dead, a thousand people had gone to jail, 100,000 workers had gone on strike, and the strikes had roused into action countless unemployed in the cities. More than half the freight on the nation's 75,000 miles of track had stopped running at the height of the strikes.

You *might* live near a library that carries the book. It wouldn't hurt to check.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/red-chicago-american-communism-at-its-grassroots-1928-35/oclc/123539615