A People's History of the United States

The Pinkerton Detective Agency was established in the 1850s as a private police force for hire. It remained relatively unknown until Civil War general George McClellan hired the agency to spy for his army. Despite the agency’s and McClellan’s abysmal wartime career, the agency entered the second half of the 19th century more famous than before. In the post-Civil War period, the agency reinvented itself as strikebreakers. The Pinkertons were similar to a modern anti-riot force. However, their private character allowed them to deploy to strike locations more rapidly and respond with more violence than any modern police force. The Pinkerton Agency, often just called Pinkertons, could be hired by anyone in need of a security force. When called to confront a strike, the Pinkertons first attempted to regain control of the factory floor and its related buildings. They then pushed out to challenge strikers along the picket line and around town. The Pinkertons had a reputation for considerable and unfocused violence. They made little distinction between strikers and bystanders, men and women, or healthy and sick. When organizations like the IWW began to react more aggressively to strikebreakers, the Pinkertons turned towards extreme violence. In 1886, several early union organizations attempted to hold rallies and demonstrations across Chicago. One of these demonstrations was scheduled to be held at Haymarket Square. But when the unionists arrived, they found themselves surrounded by aggressive uniformed police. The situation was tense. The police were unwilling to let the demonstration continue, while the unionists were unwilling to give the police a symbolic victory. Then a bomb detonated in the crowd, killing several and turning the demonstration into a panic. Police used the bomb as an excuse to press into the square, while the demonstrators pushed in every direction trying to escape a possible second attack. The Haymarket demonstration turned into a rolling street battle as protestors tried to push past police and escape, while police tried to hem the protestors in. Dozens were killed, and hundreds were injured. In the aftermath, the Chicago police were forced to admit that they had hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate the demonstrations and that the agency may have been responsible for the bombing.

The Pinkertons, and other organizations like them, are the book’s villains. During the height of labor activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pinkertons worked aggressively to push back against strikers and organizers. The Pinkertons broke many strikes thanks to their aggressive tactics, and when combined with the heavy weaponry of state militias, the Pinkertons became the catalysts for bloodshed. The Pinkertons sit in a stream of anti-worker organizations that arose during the 19th century to combat various forms of activism. The Ku Klux Klan formed after the Civil War to violently oppose Black activism. It was destroyed but resurrected itself in the 1920s. At nearly the same time, volunteer organizations and local police forces worked together to destroy labor unions and socialist organizations. After World War II, the federal government picked up the torch and organized movements designed to defeat popular activism. The Ku Klux Klan reformed again in the South and worked in cooperation with local anti-activists to challenge, attack, and murder Black Americans. Police also cooperated in violence against protestors both during the civil rights movement and the later anti-war movement. Where local organizations were ineffective, national organizations like the House Un-American Activities Committee worked to discredit left-wing Americans and portray them as Communists and saboteurs.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, were formed in 1905 in Chicago by several leading members of local unions. Inspired by the work of European socialists and labor activists, the IWW worked to unite and organize American workers around the country. Its goal was to establish itself as a union of unions. It argued that the working class itself was not divided, that every member shared the same interest and deserved the protection of the same union. By organizing into a single union, workers gained considerable power, and one of the IWW’s slogans was that “an attack on one is an attack on all.” Led by Bill Hayward, the IWW refused to play by the rules and norms established by other unions such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Unlike the AFL, the IWW allowed women, Black people, and immigrants to join the union freely. Just as unusual was the IWW’s radical stance regarding violence and striking.

Unlike most unions in the wake of the Haymarket affair, the IWW did not draw a line at violent strikes. Instead, the organization felt that if owners were willing to resort to violent strikebreaking, workers needed to be prepared to fight back. Second, the IWW was an early proponent of the so-called “wild cat” strike, in which workers, whether they were unionized or not, whether they had taken a vote or not, agreed to lay down their tools. Wildcat strikes (they get their name from the symbol of a puffed-up cat that the IWW would draw on the walls to signal to workers it was time to lay down their tools), were terrifying for bosses. It meant that a factory could shut down rapidly without warning or opportunity to respond.

The IWW grew rapidly in the decade before World War I as Americans responded positively to its tough stance against owners. But World War I undid the tremendous success the union had enjoyed. The passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts made it a crime for Americans to disrupt the war effort or oppose the draft. Much of the IWW leadership was opposed to the war. They recognized that the mobilization of public opinion thwarted labor activism. The IWW was also not accustomed to following the rules. But this time they were not up against Pinkertons but the federal government. After Bill Hayward and IWW leadership encouraged members not to comply with the draft, they were arrested.

Hayward was tried in 1918, during the final year of the war. The trial was one of the longest ever held until that time. Hayward refused to defend himself but instead used his time to condemn the system which imprisoned him. Hayward was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Given that he died in 1928, this surely would have been a life sentence for him. Instead of submitting to what he felt was unjust imprisonment, Hayward fled to the newly created Soviet Union where he served as a regional governor and labor advisor for the newly established government. With Hayward’s flight, the imprisonment of other IWW leaders, and targeted harassment from local governments, the IWW collapsed into irrelevancy. The initial success of the IWW had been in its attempts to unify the working class. But by 1930, the union’s membership had cratered and with it its reason to exist. While the IWW continues to exist to this day as an artifact of a more radical labor movement, it cannot speak with the same unified voice that gave it strength in the early 20th century. 

The Anti-Vietnam War movement was formed in the wake of American escalation in Vietnam in 1965. The movement began by applying the tactics of the civil rights movement, especially protests and civil disobedience. Some of the early protests against the Vietnam War included campus sit-ins, demonstrations outside the Pentagon, and marches in cities around the country. But these tactics were ineffective in changing policy. By 1968, the anti-war movement’s tactics had changed. Radicals across the country worked to undermine the American war effort. Many flew the flag of the Vietcong; actress Jane Fonda even made a goodwill trip to Hanoi in 1972 during which she was photographed posing in a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. The peak of the anti-war movement was in 1968. Activists demanded the Democratic Party nominate an anti-war candidate who would promise to immediately end the war in Vietnam. The party did not. As Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated in the convention hall in Chicago, on the street demonstrators were beaten and arrested by Chicago police. The election of Richard Nixon in that year broke some of the enthusiasm for the movement; for others, it was justification for a new and even more violent phase of the struggle. For groups like the Weather Underground, 1968 and the 1969 “Days of Rage” were signs that it was time to bring the war in Vietnam home to Americans.

These groups aside, the collapse of the anti-war movement in the 1970s opened the door to newer types of activism. By this point, many American activists were well versed in how to spread their message. When Betty Friedan helped form NOW, she brought with her nearly two decades of experience in organizing movements. These movements achieved important if limited victories in their fields of advocacy, but Zinn suggests this division of effort ultimately sapped the unity of the working class.