Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
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strongest corporation in the world, was unable to defeat<br />
the new industrial unions, then a new day had come. Practical<br />
advances by workers in auto, steel, rubber, electronics,<br />
maritime, meat-packing, trucking and so on, proved<br />
that this was so.<br />
The new union upsurge, which had begun in 1933,<br />
continued into the World War I1 period and the immediate<br />
post-war years. The number of strikes in the U.S. jumped<br />
from 840 in 1932 to 1700 in 1933,2200 in 1936, and 4740 in<br />
1937. By 1944 over 50% of auto workers took part in one<br />
or more strikes during the year. As many settler workers<br />
were taking part in strikes in 1944 as in 1937, at the height<br />
of the Sit-Downs. (12)<br />
The defiant mood in the strongest union centers<br />
was very tangible. On March 14, 1944, some 5,000 Ford<br />
workers at River Rouge staged an "unauthorized" wildcat<br />
strike in which they blockaded the roads around the plant<br />
and broke into offices, "liberating" files on union<br />
militants. (13) It was common in "negotiations" for<br />
crowds of auto workers to surround the company officials<br />
or beat up company guards.<br />
The substantial increases in wages and improvements<br />
in hours and working conditions were, for<br />
many, secondary to this new-found power in industrial<br />
life. In the great 1937 Jones & Laughlin steel strike in Aliquippa,<br />
Pa. - a company town ruled over by a nearfascistic<br />
company dictatorship - one striker commented<br />
on his union dues after the victory: "It's worth $12 a year<br />
to be able to walk down the main street of Aliquippa, talk<br />
to anyone you want about anything you like, and feel that<br />
you are a citizen. " (14)<br />
White Amerika reorganized then into the form we<br />
now know. The great '30s labor revolt was far more than<br />
just a series of factory disputes over wages. It was a<br />
historic social movement for democratic rights for the settler<br />
proletariat. Typically, these workers ended industrial<br />
serfdom. They won the right to maintain class organizations,<br />
to expect steady improvements in life, to express<br />
their work grievances, to accumulate some small property<br />
and to have a small voice in the local politics of their Empire.<br />
In the industrial North the CIO movement reformed<br />
local school boards, sought to monitor draft exemptions<br />
for the privileged classes, ended company spy<br />
systems, replaced anti-union police officials, and in myriad<br />
ways worked to reorganize the U.S. Empire so that the<br />
Euro-Amerikan proletariat would have the life they expected<br />
as settlers. That is, a freer and more prosperous life<br />
than any proletariat in history has ever had.<br />
3. New Deal & Class Struggle<br />
The major class contradictions which had been<br />
developing since industrialization were finally resolved.<br />
The European immigrant proletariat wanted to fully<br />
become settlers, but at the same time was determined to<br />
unleash class struggle against the employers. Settler<br />
workers as a whole, with the Depression as a final push,<br />
were determined to overturn the past. This growing<br />
militancy made a major force of the settler workers. While<br />
they were increasingly united - "native-born" Euro-<br />
Amerikan and immigrant alike - the capitalists were increasingly<br />
disunited. Most were trying to block the way to<br />
needed reform of the U.S. Empire.<br />
The New Deal administration of President<br />
Franklin Roosevelt reunited all settlers old and new. It<br />
gave the European "ethnic" national minorities real integration<br />
as Amerikans by sharply raising their privileges.<br />
New Deal officials and legislation promoted economic<br />
struggle and class organization by the industrial proletariat<br />
- but only in the settler way, in government-regulated<br />
unions loyal to U. S. Imperialism. President Roosevelt<br />
himself became the political leader of the settler proletariat,<br />
and used the directed power of their aroused<br />
millions to force through his reforms of the Empire.<br />
Most fundamentally, it was only with this shakeup,<br />
these modernizing reforms, and the homogenized unity<br />
of the settler masses that U.S. Imperialism could gamble<br />
everything on solving its problems through world domination.<br />
This was the desperate preparation for World War.<br />
The global economic crisis after 1929 was to be resolved in<br />
another imperialist war, and the U.S. Empire intended to<br />
be the victor.<br />
This social reunification could be seen in President<br />
Roosevelt's unprecedented third-term victory in the 1940<br />
elections. Pollster Samuel Lube11 analyzed the landslide<br />
election results for the Saturday Evening Post:<br />
"Roosevelt won by the vote of Labor, unorganized<br />
as well as organized, plus that of the foreign born and<br />
their first and second generation descendants. And the<br />
Negro.<br />
"It was a class-conscious vote for the first time in<br />
American history, and the implications are portentous.<br />
The New Deal appears to have accomplished what the<br />
Socialists, the I.W.W. and the Communists never could<br />
approach ..." (15)<br />
Lubell's investigation showed how, in a typical<br />
situation, the New Deal Democrats won 4 to 1 in Boston's<br />
"Charlestown" neighborhood; that was a working class<br />
and small petit-bourgeois "ethnic" Irish community. Of<br />
the 30,000 in the ward, almost every family had directly<br />
and personally benefited from their New Deal. Perhaps<br />
most importantly, the Democrats had very publicly<br />
"become the champion of the Irish climb up the American<br />
ladder." While Irish had been kept off the Boston U.S.<br />
Federal bench, Roosevelt promptly appointed two Irish<br />
lawyers as Federal judges. Other Irish from that<br />
79 neighborhood got patronage as postmasters, U.S. mar-