There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday October 28, 1916
From the Everett Labor Journal: Criminal Strikebreakers
EX-CONVICTS PREFERRED AS STRIKEBREAKERS
—–
“God save my dollars.”
The following relating to strike-breaking methods in New York will show to what lengths open shop advocates will go to accomplish their ends:
Dante Barton, of the Industrial Relations Committee, in a statement just issued, points out the record of the strike-breaking firm of Bergoff Bros. & Waddell, which is supplying the traction trust with strike-breakers. The statement follows:
Bergoff Bros. & Waddell, who have supplied the thousands of strikebreakers now being housed in car houses and shop buildings by the Interboro, is today the largest and most notorious strike-breaking agency in the United States. It is an amalgamation of Bergoff Bros. and the old firm of Waddell-Mahone.
Almost exactly a year ago this firm was investigated by the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, in connection with an investigation of the strike at the Bayonne refinery of the Standard Oil Company. The investigation was conducted by George P. West and C. L. Chenery, agents of the commission.
In a statement issued recently by the now unofficial Committee on Industrial Relations, Mr. West said:
Waddell, the most experienced member of this firm, admitted to Mr. Chenery and me that he had no prejudice against ex-convicts, but on the contrary, finds many of them particularly valuable for the work in hand.
The firm’s attorney, while attempting to secure the release of thirty strike breakers, who had been jailed by Sheriff Kinkead, protested to the authorities of Hudson County that it was unreasonable to ask the firm to put up bail for these men. In my presence he said to the under-sheriff and prosecuting attorney:
“These men are a lot of irresponsible thugs. My clients could not be responsible for their movements. In 24 hours they would have disappeared, and we would have to forfeit the bail.”
Waddell told us that he could raise an army of 10,000 armed men in 24 hours. He said many of them were ex-soldiers who loved adventure and were willing to quit their jobs in the hope of finding it as strikebreakers. As a matter of fact, most of them are recruited from the scum and dregs of the cities.
Ex-convicts are preferred because they can be trusted to do dirty work without “squealing.” The agency employing them shares their secret, and is able to use this knowledge to control them like slaves. The agency usually “has something on them,” and can “turn them up” if they do not perform satisfactorily.
This is the type of men to whom Messrs. Shonts and Hedley propose to turn over the highly responsible task of operating the elevated and subway trains of New York City. This is the best evidence of their tender regard for the welfare of the metropolis.
It was Bergoff Bros. & Waddell who had the contract to supply strike-breakers when a strike was threatened on the surface and elevated lines of Chicago a year ago last June. They actually shipped thousands of men before the controversy was amicably settled by the yielding of the company, it will be remembered that one trainload of thugs en route from New York to Chicago broke out of the cars at a small station in Pennsylvania and looted the station lunchroom, terrorizing the town and defying the authorities.
Liquor is usually the cause of the abject downfall that alone could make a man willing to follow the infamous occupation of strike-breaking, and experience in every strike where these thugs are used has proved that their courage and usefulness involves the free use of whisky. Yet rather than relinquish their arbitrary, tyrannical control over the American citizens who man the cars, Shonts and Hedley are perfectly willing to commit the safety of their fellow citizens of New York into the hands of such men.
There is little room for doubt that the strike-breaking element in this vicinity are of a kind with Bergoff Bros. & Waddell. The Industrial Relations Committee is showing up that kind of animals in their true light.
—–
[Photograph added.]
SOURCE
The Labor Journal
(Everett, Washington)
-Oct 27, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/83617085/
IMAGES
Rockefeller, God save my dollars, Minor, ISR Sept 1915
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA140
Report on the Colorado Strike by George P West, 1915
https://archive.org/stream/reportoncolorado00unit#page/n5/mode/2up
Hundreds of company gunthugs, such as these,
were made Deputy Sheriffs in the Kingdom of Farr, Colorado 1914
https://archive.org/stream/ludlowmassacrere00finkrich#page/28/mode/1up
See also:
For more on Shonts and Hedley:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=akQ_AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA486
Commission on Industrial Relations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Industrial_Relations
For more on the formation of the Committee on Industrial Relations,
see The New York Times of Nov 9, 1915:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9500E2D91239E333A2575AC0A9679D946496D6CF&legacy=true
WALSH HEADS BODY TO ADVANCE LABOR; Hopes to Have Business Controlled Entirely by the Working People. SEVEN ARE UNION MEMBERS New Committee on Industrial Relations Includes Amos Pinchot, F. C. Howe, and Bishop Williams.
To continue the work of the extinct United States Commission on Industrial Relations, there was organized at the Hotel Brevoort yesterday, under the leadership of former Chairman Frank P. Walsh, a new Committee on Industrial Relations, which the founders hope will in time so revolutionize industry that business will be controlled in time entirely by the working people.
[Emphasis added.]
Hellraisers Journal (July 28, 1915): 30 Company Guards Arrested by Sheriff in Bayonne; Two Martyred Strikers Buried
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/7/28/1403808/-Hellraisers-Journal-30-Company-Guards-Arrested-by-Sheriff-in-Bayonne-Two-Martyred-Strikers-Buried
Hellraisers Journal (September 4, 1915): A Report on the Battle of Bayonne from the International Socialist Review
Note: contains a portion of The West-Chenery Report.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/9/4/1418085/-Hellraisers-Journal-A-Report-on-the-Battle-of-Bayonne-from-the-International-Socialist-Review
Report on the Colorado Strike
-by George P. West
Barnard & Miller print, 1915
https://books.google.com/books?id=0eoCAAAAMAAJ
Chapter III
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=0eoCAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA101
Note: The following is a small part of Chapter III which describes the hiring, arming, and deputizing of gunmen in order to break the UMWA’s Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-14:
CHAPTER III.
Violence and Policing.
The first act of violence in connection with the strike was the killing of Gerald Lippiatt, an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, by George Belcher, a Baldwin- Felts detective in the employ of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. Lippiatt was shot down on a public street in Trinidad before the strike began. There were the usual charges of an altercation, and Belcher asserts that he fired in self defense.
But the question as to who committed the first act of violence is of minor importance. Conditions in the coal mining district were such that violence was inevitable. The testimony of Sheriff Jefferson Farr and former Under-sheriff John McQuarrie proves that men accustomed to the ready use of a revolver or rifle had been imported into the district in large numbers from Texas, New Mexico, West Virginia, and other sections by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and its associates. These mercenary adventurers had been employed and armed by the coal companies prior to the strike, and had been given deputy sheriffs’ commissions by the sheriffs of Las Animas and Huerfano counties, who were political partners and agents of the coal companies.
When the miners left their homes on company property and established tent colonies on land leased by the United Mine Workers, they knew that they could expect no protection from officers of the law. A sheriff who at the company’s behest would deputize hundreds of men whom he had never seen, and who, for all he knew, “might be red handed murderers fresh from the scenes of their crimes,” could not be counted upon to safeguard the rights of striking employees of a company that was his partner in the liquor business and his political master…
[Photograph added.]
Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony, Volume 1
(Also known as the Manly Report)
United States. Commission on Industrial Relations
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1916
https://books.google.com/books?id=WdseAQAAMAAJ
Note: See Page 56 on deputized company gunthugs:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=WdseAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA56
CAUSES OF INDUSTRIAL UNREST [page 29]…
3. DENIAL OF JUSTICE [page 38 & 39]…
An enormous mass of evidence bearing upon these charges has been presented to the commission by witnesses or collected by its staff. This material is presented in some detail in another part of the report, but the summary which follows may be regarded as reasonably full and exact….
[page 56] Tenth, it is asserted by the workers that in many localities during strikes not only is one of the greatest functions of the State, that of policing, virtually turned over to employers or arrogantly assumed by them, but criminals employed by detective agencies and strike breaking agencies are clothed, by the process of deputization, with arbitrary power and relieved of criminal liability for their acts.
Only three such cases are cited here, though the commission has in its records evidence regarding a considerable number. At Roosevelt, N. J., it was found by the commission’s investigators and later confirmed in court that the office of sheriff was virtually turned over to one Jerry O’Brien, the proprietor of a so-called detective agency; that he imported a number of men of bad reputation and clothed them with the authority of deputies; and that on January 19, 1915, these criminals, without provocation, wantonly shot and killed 2 men and wounded 17 others who were on strike against the American Agricultural Chemical Co., which paid and armed the deputies.
Similarly, during the Calumet, Mich., strike, about 230 men were imported from detective agencies in eastern cities, 52 under pay from the county board of supervisors, which was made up almost entirely of copper company officials. The actions of these men were so wantonly brutal that they were censured by the local judge, but they went unchecked in their career of arrogant brutality, which culminated in their shooting, without provocation, into a house in which women and children were, killing two persons and wounding two others.
The recent strike in Bayonne, N. J. [1915 strike], threw more light on these armed guards. During this strike one of the New York detective agencies furnished for the protection of the Tidewater Oil Co.’s plant men who were so vicious and unreliable that the officials of the company themselves say that their presence was sufficient to incite a riot. These men shot without provocation at anyone or everyone who came within sight, and the killing of at least three strikers in Bayonne and the wounding of many more is directly chargeable to these guards.
[Photograph added.]
Which Side Are You On – Rebel Diaz