A daily, pocket-sized history of America's working people, brought to you by The Rick Smith Show team.
Episodes
Monday Oct 14, 2024
Monday Oct 14, 2024
Bury me with my boys in Mt. Olive, and let no traitor draw breath over my grave.” Such was the last wish of labor leader Mother Jones. She wanted her final resting to place to be alongside the coal miners who gave their lives in the struggle to bring fair wages and a safe working environment to Virden, Illinois.
Friday Oct 11, 2024
Friday Oct 11, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1965.
That was the day acclaimed photojournalist Dorothea Lange died.
She is celebrated for her work documenting the Great Depression for the Farm Security Bureau.
Lange’s photos captured images of migrant workers, sharecroppers and the rural poor.
Her iconic photo, Migrant Mother, is probably her most well known image.
It depicts a despondent, Dust Bowl mother surrounded by her hungry children.
Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895.
She suffered the effects of polio as a child, which left her with a permanent limp.
She studied photography at Columbia University in New York, and eventually settled in the Bay Area.
When the Great Depression hit, she began photographing labor strikes, breadlines and soup kitchens, the homeless and unemployed.
The Resettlement Administration hired her soon after.
Nowadays, we can access images from around the world at a moment’s notice that broaden our understanding of current events.
But until the 1930s, few Americans could access media that adequately depicted the desperate social conditions engulfing the nation.
Federal programs that funded projects like Lange’s brought Depression-era images into the public eye.
Americans soon realized their suffering wasn’t caused by personal failure; that millions across the country were experiencing destitution brought on by broader economic forces.
During World War II, Lange worked for the War Relocation Authority, where she documented forced evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans.
Her images, especially of Manzanar, were withheld from the public until after the war and were accessible to the public through the National Archives.
After the war, she taught at San Francisco’s Art Institute and cofounded the magazine Aperture.
She has been heralded as an innovator and has influenced generations of documentary photography.
Friday Oct 11, 2024
Friday Oct 11, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1965.
That was the day acclaimed photojournalist Dorothea Lange died.
She is celebrated for her work documenting the Great Depression for the Farm Security Bureau.
Lange’s photos captured images of migrant workers, sharecroppers and the rural poor.
Her iconic photo, Migrant Mother, is probably her most well known image.
It depicts a despondent, Dust Bowl mother surrounded by her hungry children.
Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895.
She suffered the effects of polio as a child, which left her with a permanent limp.
She studied photography at Columbia University in New York, and eventually settled in the Bay Area.
When the Great Depression hit, she began photographing labor strikes, breadlines and soup kitchens, the homeless and unemployed.
The Resettlement Administration hired her soon after.
Nowadays, we can access images from around the world at a moment’s notice that broaden our understanding of current events.
But until the 1930s, few Americans could access media that adequately depicted the desperate social conditions engulfing the nation.
Federal programs that funded projects like Lange’s brought Depression-era images into the public eye.
Americans soon realized their suffering wasn’t caused by personal failure; that millions across the country were experiencing destitution brought on by broader economic forces.
During World War II, Lange worked for the War Relocation Authority, where she documented forced evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans.
Her images, especially of Manzanar, were withheld from the public until after the war and were accessible to the public through the National Archives.
After the war, she taught at San Francisco’s Art Institute and cofounded the magazine Aperture.
She has been heralded as an innovator and has influenced generations of documentary photography.
Thursday Oct 10, 2024
Thursday Oct 10, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1912.
That was the day mill workers began to walk off the job at the Phoenix and Gilbert Knitting Mills in Little Falls, New York.
The strike was sandwiched between the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts and the 1913 Paterson textile strike.
American, Hungarian, Polish and Italian workers, over 70% of them women, struck against wage reductions.
Their hours had just been cut from 60 hours a week to 54, and their wages adjusted accordingly.
A recent factory inspection commission investigation revealed deplorable working and living conditions, among the worst in the state.
As a result, state legislators passed protective legislation restricting women’s work hours.
Many social reformers pushed for laws like these in the hopes of improving women’s quality of life by minimizing their exploitation on the job.
But the reduction in hours spelled disaster for these mill women, who then faced a loss of income that ranged from 75 cents to $2 a week.
Socialists in nearby Schenectady, including the socialist mayor George Lunn, arrived in town and were promptly arrested for giving open-air speeches in support of the strikers.
IWW organizers soon followed to help organize picketing, daily strike parades and strike committees at each of the factories.
They quickly established IWW Local 801, National Industrial Union of Textile Workers.
By the end of the month, mounted police closed in on the women strikers and began clubbing them, many into unconsciousness.
The police raided strike headquarters and arrested IWW strike committee leaders.
But the women strikers stood strong and were celebrating victory by the beginning of the year.
They won full reinstatement and 60 hours pay for 54 hours work.
Wednesday Oct 09, 2024
Wednesday Oct 09, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1823.
That was the day abolitionist and women’s suffragist, Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born.
Her parents were free blacks of color in the slave state of Delaware.
They were involved with many prominent abolitionists and active in the Underground Railroad.
The family moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary and her siblings were educated in Quaker schools.
As a young woman, Mary became a teacher and returned to Wilmington, Delaware where she opened a school for black children.
Once the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, Mary and many other free blacks fled to Canada to safely continue their abolitionist work.
She opened a school for fugitive slaves in Windsor, Ontario just across the river from Detroit.
Mary soon came under fire in the local press for insisting the school be racially integrated.
She responded by starting her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman.
She and her husband, Thomas often traveled to the United States to continue their anti-slavery work.
They were present at John Brown’s 1858 Constitutional Convention.
Mary worked with Osborne Perry Anderson to publish his 1861 memoir, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.
Anderson had participated in Brown’s raid and was the lone African-American survivor.
After her husband’s death, Mary returned to the United States with her children to help recruit black soldiers to the Union Army.
Once the Civil War was over, Mary moved to Washington D.C to teach.
She enrolled in Howard University where she earned a law degree.
There she joined the National Woman Suffrage Association and worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
She continued to advocate for civil rights and women’s equality until her death in 1893.
Tuesday Oct 08, 2024
Tuesday Oct 08, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1933.
That was the day garment factory owners locked out dressmakers in several shops throughout Los Angeles.
The women garment workers, overwhelmingly Mexican, had been organizing with the ILGWU for over a month.
They began conducting strikes at selected shops the previous month to press their demands.
The women wanted union recognition, a thirty-five hour workweek, an end to homework, shop floor committees, a guaranteed wage and more.
Historian Douglas Monroy observes that their demands reflected the harsh working conditions they faced.
It was a volatile, competitive, seasonal industry.
Businesses worked tirelessly to undercut each other and job out the work.
Women workers were routinely unemployed or underemployed, subject to widespread wage theft and discrimination.
They were frustrated by promises of the new National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised the right to organize but held no provisions for enforcement.
Employers flaunted the new legislation and continued to discharge workers for union activity.
When the employers forced a lockout, Local 96 looked to the AFL’s Central Labor Council to sanction a general dressmakers strike, which started four days later on October 12.
As many as 3,000 Latina strikers maintained solid picket lines, despite dozens of arrests.
ILGWU organizer Rose Pesotta arrived from New York to help with food distribution and packing the picket lines.
The rank and file leadership produced a bilingual strike bulletin and made daily radio announcements.
The strike ended in arbitration that conceded few gains to the garment workers.
But the women of Local 96 continued to organize throughout the Los Angeles area.
They led a series of strikes that finally won the closed shop in 1936.
Monday Oct 07, 2024
Monday Oct 07, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1933.
That was the day Detroit anarchist labor leader, Joseph Labadie died.
Born in Paw Paw in 1850, Jo was born to descendants of French immigrants and grew up among Native Potawatomi peoples in southwest Michigan.
He became a printer, joined the local Typographical Union No.18 and worked for the Detroit Post and Tribune.
He was an early leader of the Socialist Labor Party.
By 1878, Jo organized the first Knights of Labor Assembly in Detroit.
He served as the first president of the Detroit Trades Council and founded the Michigan Federation of Labor.
He wrote tirelessly for a number of labor and socialist newspapers across the country.
He embraced anarchism and soon produced a popular column titled, “Cranky Notions.”
Labadie enjoyed the company and correspondence with radical labor leaders like Emma Goldman, Albert and Lucy Parsons, Eugene V. Debs, Benjamin Tucker, Terrance Powderly and others of the Progressive Era.
He was often referred to as ‘The Gentle Anarchist’ for his insistence on non-violence and distancing from those Anarchists who advocated the use of violence as an acceptable tactic.
Labadie was also known to never throw out any printed material relevant to labor or radical causes.
His biographer, Carlotta Anderson notes that, “the story of his life, deeds and thoughts is abundantly revealed through the treasure trove of letters, periodicals, clippings, manuscripts, booklets, photos and circulars once stored in his attic and now housed in the Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan. His stockpile of documents of social protest has proved a boon to scholars, enabling them to study the early labor movement in detail.”
When he died at the age of 83, he considered this to be his legacy.
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1917.
That was the day Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi.
She was the youngest of 20 children.
Her parents were sharecroppers and she began working the fields at the age of six.
At the age of 12, Fannie had to drop out of school to sharecrop to meet the needs of her family.
Marrying in 1944, she and her husband continued to work as sharecroppers on a plantation near Ruleville.
After decades of abject poverty and Southern political repression, Fannie Lou Hamer joined up with voter registration activists in 1962.
When she and seventeen others traveled to Indianola to register, Fannie was fired from her job and driven from the plantation she had worked at for decades.
She began working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and played a central role in organizing Freedom Summer.
In a short time, Fannie was repeatedly arrested, beaten and shot at for her activism.
She suffered kidney damage after police beat her nearly to death in a Winona, Mississippi jail as she traveled home from a literacy workshop.
By 1964, she helped to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white delegation to the Democratic Convention.
President Lyndon Johnson was so threatened by live testimony she was giving before the Convention’s Credentials Committee, that he orchestrated an emergency press conference to preempt the broadcast.
When the Committee attempted a backroom deal to seat just two MFDP delegates with no voting rights at the convention, Hamer and other delegates left in disgust.
Hamer continued her activism but her life was tragically cut short in 1977 from hypertension and breast cancer.
She was just 59.
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
On this day in labor history, the year was 1886.
That was the day Henry George accepted the nomination to run for mayor of New York on the United Labor Party ticket.
In cities across the country, trade unionists met to found state labor parties and to hammer out political platforms for local and state elections.
In New York City, ULP advocates issued the Clarendon Hall platform and nominated Henry George as the ULP candidate for the mayoral race.
George had gained prominence with the 1879 publishing of his book, Progress & Poverty.
In it, he addressed private land ownership as the basis for inequality and advocated for a single tax system.
At New York’s Cooper Union that evening, where thousands of supporters gathered, George addressed the crowd.
He presented the ULP platform: higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, government ownership of railroads and communications and an end to police repression.
Burrows and Wallace describe the scene that night in their book, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
During his speech, George declared that, “this government of New York City—our whole political system is rotten to the core.”
He argued that “politicians had made a trade out of assembling votes and selling them to powerful interests; what business got in return was police protection, lax enforcement of housing and health codes, friendly judges and fat franchises. To purify the political order, working class voters had to sever ties to all the established parties and choose from their own ranks.”
For a party that had just been founded weeks before, George came in second.
But like its sister organization in Chicago, the New York ULP would split over the issue of socialism within a year.
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
On this day in Labor History the year was 1945. That was the day President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9639. It ordered the US Navy to seize control of more than four dozen oil refineries across the country. As World War II was drawing to a close, workers in many industries were growing increasingly restless. They had seen company owners rake in record profits, and the workers felt they had not received their fair share.