‘Class War in Detroit’ by Felix Morrow from New Masses. Vol. 7 No. 11. May, 1932.

This is the story the Detroit workers told me, as they told it to me:

“Just before we got to Miller Road, Al Goetz called a halt to say something about proletarian discipline, and how, whatever happened, we were to get through without violence.

“Big as life and uglier than sin, the cops were standing along the Dearborn line waiting for us to get within reach, and as soon as we did, they let go at us with those tear bombs.

“If we’d meant to hurt them bastards we could’ve killed a dozen yellow coppers, as you’ll agree if you just stop to figure that there were five thousand of us with bricks galore to our hand. Only half a dozen got binged at all, we were just shooing them out of the way.

“Most of that mile from the Dearborn line to Gate 3 and the bridge, after they’d used up their tear gas, the cops were running and we were running after them, but it wasn’t really no running fight, lots of them were right in the middle of the crowd and we didn’t touch them. One copper was running beside me with his gun in his hand, and all I kept saying for most of that mile was ‘Don’t you dare shoot, you son-of-a-bitch.’

“Joe York and me and two other comrades were some way ahead of the main body, we’d just slowed down to a walk. I think I even saw the Ford guard do it, he stood up on the bridge aiming for as much as two minutes before he let go and Joe spun around in a half-twist and dropped hard.

“Can you imagine them murderers talking about self-defense! After York and a couple of others had got shot, Goetz got up on the back of a parked car and told us there wasn’t no chance of presenting our demands so we’d turn back, practically all of us were standing listening to him. We were four-five hundred feet away from Gate 3 and the bridge where the Ford firemen were shooting water toward us. Now tell me this, if we were attacking Gate 3, how come, so few of us got wet?

“By the time that fellow who was leading us got up and started to talk, everything looked to be over. The last of the Dearborn cops had reached Gate 3 and gotten behind the fence with the Ford guards. Then Bennett come driving out somewhere near Gate 2 and drove past the edge of the crowd shooting tear-gas. I let him have half a brick as he stuck his face out. He kept going till near Gate 3, stumbled out of the car and emptied his gat, I think he plugged two or three, including that Italian fellow who cashed in. And a minute later the whole lot of them let go from behind the fence.

“They started firing when the men turned to go, you can tell that because most of them were shot in the back. That’s where I got mine.

“I been through the war and they can’t tell me there was no machine guns, the way lines of men were dropping at equal distances and the way those bullets hit the cars in the parking space like rolling drums.

“I’d gotten two in the back and one in the leg, so I just lay there watching the boys running back down Miller Road with those brave coppers after them emptying their guns into our backs.

“Wonder what happened to Joe Bussel? After the shooting was all over he was standing against an automobile, and he said, no, he didn’t want any help, he’d be all right, so I beat it, and that night they reported him dead. They must have done him in after we left.

“Comrades took us to the Receiving Hospital in Detroit. We were put on those stretcher wagons and before the doctors even bandaged us the police handcuffed us to the stretchers.

“About twelve o’clock at night the sheriff’s deputies came into the hospital’s prison ward where we were trying to sleep; maybe the other boys could, but it hurt too much, I just was trying to keep still, and in came the deputies, and what do you think for? Why, to put leg chains on us so we couldn’t get out!

“Just as soon as we could creep off our beds, the Detroit police took us to headquarters and called up the Dearborn police. They piled us into the Dearborn patrol wagon and took us to the Dearborn jail.

“They don’t even give you beds in that Dearborn jail, it’s just a flat steel section you have to lie on, and me with my back shot wide open.

“You know what the papers say about me? ‘He was found wandering about the Detroit streets with a bullet hole in his head.’ Sure I had the bullet hole, but it was all cleaned and bandaged, I was one of the lucky ones who got treated by a private doctor. And I wasn’t wandering on no streets. I was having a cup of coffee in a lunchroom the next morning, and this patrolman, Elmer Gross, comes up to me and says in a friendly way, ‘What’s that bandage on for?’ Feeling proud, I tell him I got that in the Ford march. And then he goes and takes me out and calls the Dearborn patrol wagon for me. Now they say Detroit police didn’t have anything to do with it.

“Culehan, the assistant prosecutor, says to me, ‘Ever work for Ford?’ ‘Four years on the line.’ ‘Want your job back?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Are you going to help us?’ ‘What d’you mean help you?’ I asked, and Culehan tells his stenographer, ‘Don’t take that down.’ ‘Well, I’ll have to keep you here’ he tells me, ‘Is that because I won’t help you?’ I want to know. And he smiles: ‘Oh no. But you are not telling all you know.’ So though I’d heard him promise the judge at the habeas corpus hearing that we’d be out by supper-time, back to jail I went for two more days.”

* * *

I tried to get at the truth of what had happened to Joe Bussell and Joe York. Seventeen year old Bussell was a member of the Young Communist League and was soon to have gone to study in the Soviet Union. I have already quoted the man who last saw the boy alive, apparently only slightly wounded; ugly stories were circulating, even in respectable circles, that after the field was left to the Dearborn police and Ford thugs, they had clubbed him to death. These brutes knew and hated Joe Bussell for, unintimidated by threats, he had regularly sold the Daily Worker in front of the Ford plant. I learned only this — that after the coroner, who had not as yet seen the body, had granted permission for an outside physician to be present at the autopsy, it was revoked by Prosecutor Harry S. Toy, who had seen the body.

I wondered, too, about nineteen year old Joe York, Y.C.L. organizer, who had been the first to fall, with bullet wounds in the abdomen. It was said the youth had been permitted to bleed to death. A Ford engineer, who had watched the whole affair from a window in the plant, told me that two of the wounded had lain unattended for more than half an hour after shooting. Joe York died later in Delray Hospital. I had an interview with Miles N. Culehan, the assistant prosecutor in charge of the investigation. I asked him if he had talked to Joe York. He did not answer the question directly, but a minute later, after another question, and as if aimlessly, he said: “You know, the law is that we’ve got to question any man with gunshot wounds as soon as he is brought into a hospital. We’ve got to find out what happened. It may sound hard, but that is the law. Our business is to prosecute, and if we didn’t find out what happened, the man might die while the doctor was treating him.”

So someone had slowly bled to death under questioning, if not Joe York, then Coleman Leny or Joe de Blasio.

The half-dozen officers who were injured had sustained nothing more than minor bruises; their victims numbered four shot and killed and thirty others wounded, many of them seriously. The contrast was too glaring, something had to be done about it. Harry Bennett, ex-prizefighter, ex-mobster, now chief of the Ford guards and secret service, the highest paid industrial thug in America, had been struck in the head with a stone; he was chosen as the symbol of the wrongs suffered by the righteous. Immediately after the shooting, the Ford officials announced that Bennett had received a concussion of the brain from a brick. Probably unaware of the Ford statement, the prosecutor’s office announced that Bennett had been shot and seriously wounded by a Red.

What had been Bennett’s share in the shooting? First tear gas as he drove by, and then bullets, said the workers. The first edition of the Detroit Free Press immediately after the shooting carried this report by a Detroit detective: ‘Detective Quinn said that the dead man found near the gate was the victim of Bennett’s marksmanship,” that this man had attempted to attack Bennett, “and that before Quinn could get his own gun out, Bennett killed the man.” The Detroit Times reported an officer telling an investigator: “ When Bennett emptied his gun he turned to me and demanded mine.” When I asked Assistant Prosecutor Culehan about this, he answered: “Naw, all Bennett had was a tear-gas gun.”

The papers dug up the most touching stories relating to Bennett. It was told of him (The Mirror, 3/9) that once, when an imposing array of gangsters in six automobiles drove up to the Ford plant to make a holdup, “Bennett stepped to the curb, raised a hand, and the gangsters stopped.

“You don’t want to do this boys’, he pleaded — and he was unarmed in the face of these desperate characters— ‘you know it’ll only cause bloodshed. You know it’ll only mean jail for you.’ He singled out the leader of the gang.

“In a minute, the gangsters stepped into their cars again and drove off the Ford grounds, as Bennett watched. The payroll was Safe.”

The story is not unbelievable if one knows what are Bennett’s connections with the underworld. The first visitor to see him in the hospital after Henry and Edsel Ford, was Joe Tocco, downriver beer baron. One of his chief assistants is former Inspector McPherson of Detroit, who was kicked out of the police department after being indicted for having underworld connections. One of the ways Bennett pays his gangsters is to turn over to the chief mobsters the valuable food concessions at the Ford plant. This was the way the notorious gangster Chester La Mare was paid; Bennett persuaded Judge Simons to parole La Mare after he had been convicted as a bootlegger, and La Mare proceeded to show how widespread his underworld influence was by returning to a Boston Ford agent his child who had been kidnapped. When a bomb destroyed the home of William H. Gallagher, the nationally- known attorney who had beaten Ford in the Sapiro case, and who at the time of the bombing was fighting Ford for fraudulent practices in the Leland case, and also at the same time was obtaining a divorce for Bennett’s wife, suspicion was immediately directed at Bennett’s underworld lieutenant, La Mare. Soon after, La Mare was bumped off, and a few days later his food concession was turned over to a rival gangster. Twice in recent years Bennett himself has been unsuccessfully put on the spot by rival mobsters. It was this fact which was coupled to the massacre to make one of the headlines of a human interest story: “Thrice Has Bennett Been Under Fire.”

‘Bennett has taken over the whole Italian gangsterdom in Detroit, including the Black Hand,” Mayor Murphy himself told me. “At the time of the Sapiro case, Bennett convinced Ford that his life was in danger from a Jewish assassin, and ever since then Ford has given Bennett carte blanche to hire as many gangsters as he pleases.”

Four workers had been shot and killed and thirty others shot and wounded, but the press and the authorities assumed after the massacre that it had all been a red plot, and they talked accordingly.

It was later to be decided that the official Dearborn police were to take the rap, absolving both Ford guards and Detroit police of any responsibility, but those first two days no one thought of that possibility. So the newspapers published photographs with these titles: “Dearborn and Ford Police Meeting Attack With Tear Bombs.” “Detroit Police, Dearborn Police and Ford Officers Who Quelled Riot.” It was taken as a matter of course that four Detroit detectives, including Detective Quinn, should have been among the forces of authority. A call had been sent in for Detroit policemen and 150 of them, under Inspector Black had been dispatched, it was afterward claimed that they arrived after the shooting was over. But Tuesday morning’s Free Press quoted inspector Black of Detroit as saying:

“Some of the men in the crowd began stoning my car and I ordered my men to draw their clubs. Inspector Stevens and I both warned the crowd to disperse or move on, and when they refused our officers charged with their night sticks.”

This certainly meant that Detroit police were present during the actual hostilities. A regular terror began right after the Ford massacre.

With this, too, the Detroit police were later to claim they had nothing to do, but those first twenty-four hours the massacre was still a red plot and nothing was concealed. The authorities who carried out the raids and arrested suspects were described as “Prosecutor’s investigators, sheriff’s deputies, and Detroit and suburban police.” There was a list published of those “Held by Police at Detroit.”

There were raids in Detroit on the Unemployed Council and the Auto Workers Union, on the International Labor Defense and the Trade Union Unity League. At least one case was reported of a private search.

“Charles Ellis was arrested when he visited Thomas Jones, his roommate, at receiving Hospital. Police searched his room and found Communist literature.” All this in liberal Detroit, and all without search warrants. For it was thought by the authorities that the murdering, shooting, clubbing, gassing of workmen could be used as the first step in wiping out the working class movement in Detroit.

The high point of the reactionary surge came Tuesday, when the Wayne County Council of the American Legion, composed of 54 posts with a total membership of 8300 (on paper), met in secret session to express its sympathy to Ford and to offer him its services on future occasions.

And where, during this terrorization of the working class of Detroit, was Frank Murphy, Mayor of Detroit, the outstanding liberal, the recall mayor who had been elected to replace an obviously pro-Ford mayor; who had been supported by all the liberals and the “radicals” and the Detroit Federation of Labor; the champion of the people whose advent to office had been hailed by Norman Thomas and other leading socialists; the self-consecrated defender of free speech who, as he himself put it, “except for one unfortunate occasion” — November 31, 1931, when his police attacked an anti-war demonstration, and clubbed and beat hundreds of participants — had been assuring everyone who would listen that even Communists could meet and march without molestation; Murphy, the white hope of a “left” Democratic or Third Party presidential campaign; where was he while his police were involved in the Ford massacre, and were raiding working class organizations and throwing workmen into jail or turning them over to the tender mercies of the Dearborn police? The silence of the tomb surrounded Mayor Murphy. While his police, under a police commissioner holding office at Murphy’s pleasure, did these things, Murphy was at least passively acquiescent.

It was, as a matter of fact, more than passive acquiescence. “Ford is a terrible man,” he said to me “and Sorenson and Bennett, who control him, are inhuman brutes. Don’t I know,” he cried, beating his breast, “that those workers were guiltless of any crime? When they were gassed, they threw a few stones, and those brutes used it as an excuse to kill! Mayor Clyde M. Ford of Dearborn called me up and told me that his police took all the responsibility of the shooting. Well, even if it were true, which it isn’t, what is the difference between the official Dearborn police and Ford’s guards? A legalistic one!”

But Murphy, needless to say, did not talk like this in public. When the Dearborn authorities brazenly declared that if any explanation for the killing was due, it should be made by the Detroit authorities because they had not smashed the hunger march before it left Detroit; when telegrams of protest from working class organizations throughout the country began to pour in on him; when the response William Siegel of the working class of Detroit had already scared the newspapers into a change of policy and even the Ford-controlled prosecutor’s office was protesting that it only wanted to see justice done; when the Young Communist League bitterly protested the murder of two of its leaders; Murphy’s only answer was that “In Detroit the marchers had police permission and police protection and were orderly…The present deplorable tragedy grew out of a march in the City of Dearborn for which it appears no permit was issued…The entire conflict was between the Dearborn police, the Ford Police and the demonstrators. An appeal was made to the Superintendent of Police in Detroit for help in quelling the riot and he directed a number of men to the scene who arrived after it was over.” Privately, he said, “Don’t you see, I can’t openly criticize the regularly constituted authorities of Dearborn?” Since he himself insisted the distinction between Dearborn and Ford was merely a legalistic one, that meant that he could not, or rather would not, openly criticize Ford.

But what about the participation of Murphy’s own police? As to the raids and the arrests, Murphy said maybe they were carried out on warrants — which they were not. And then, too, one had to be realistic. Did I know that some of the police officials were holdovers from Ford regimes? One couldn’t get rid of them easily. Maybe they had carried out the raids and the arrests. Yes, the police commissioner was responsible to him, he was in fact an old friend, “and a Rhodes scholar,” but such things happen. As to the actual massacre, “Barring the presence of Detective Quinn and the others, the position of the Detroit police is all right.” But hadn’t a hundred and fifty policemen been dispatched as soon as the riot began? “They needed help to quell the riot. But,” said Murphy, “they didn’t get there until the shooting was over.” Yes, but what if they had gotten there while it was going on? “Oh well,” was Murphy’s answer, “when trouble occurs, we have to send help.”

So every time the irresponsible devils of Dearborn start shooting at workmen, they can call for further help on Murphy’s police. What price, then, Murphy’s subjective and ever so private feelings? He is simply the liberal front to an adjunct of Ford’s secret service.

In the same breath that he recognized as a duty that his police force is at the call of Ford’s murderous henchmen of Dearborn, Murphy assured me that he did for Detroit just what Norman Thomas did for New York. And for once, he was right.

Through its elaborate espionage system, the Detroit Employers Association — Big Business itself — sufficiently grasped the seriousness of the situation to call a secret meeting Tuesday night. There was a tumultuous three-hour session and the die-hards were in evidence, but more flexible minds prevailed. They concluded that the shooting of unemployed marchers was impossible to defend outright, and that the safest policy was to drop the red herring and consider the march as one of honest American workingmen who had been the victims of precipitate action. The newspapers were called in and informed of the change of policy, and next day all four papers carried editorials deploring the shooting of innocent workmen.

The most astounding and abject volte-face was made by Hearst’s Times, the only paper which had previously commented editorially, and that had been concerning “Harry Bennett’s Courage.” This paper, which but the day before had slobbered over the (doubtful) fact that Harry Bennett had not used a machine gun or tear gas projector, now said:

“Someone, it is now admitted, blundered in the handling of the throng of hunger marchers that sought to present petitions at the Ford plant in River Rouge.

“When the Dearborn police, the representatives of the established order, precipitate violence, they inflict terrible damage on the entire community. The killing of obscure workingmen, innocent of any crime, is a blow directed at the very heart of American institutions. Martyrdom gives life and spirit to any cause.”

Now the prosecutor, too, began dancing to the tune, awkwardly enough, considering what was hanging to his skirts. Twenty- four hours before, Toy had been instituting a nation-wide man-hunt for Foster, Goetz and Schmies, asserting that the evidence showed intent to riot, and designating the grand jury probe as one to curb Communist activities and convict the leaders of the march of at least criminal syndicalism, if not of murder. Now he declared “The investigation may involve all Communist activities in Detroit, but it will be primarily concerned in fixing the responsibility for the shooting.” When I suggested a contradiction between the two days’ statements to Toy’s assistant, Culehan, he said: “Oh, the first day’s were not official statements of the prosecutor, it was just his conversations with the reporters.”

Mr. Culehan, however, in the midst of protesting the impartiality of the prosecutor’s office, was so injudicious as to lose his temper and to shout at me: “I’ll tell you how I feel, and I don’t care who knows it. The only thing I’m sorry for is that the officers didn’t kill a few more before it was over.”

So from now on, all respectable Detroit was either, like the prosecutor, in a state of judicial suspense, or, like the newspapers, deplored the unfortunate shooting of innocent workmen. With two minor exceptions.

One was the Detroit Saturday Night, a fantastically reactionary weekly which represents the few elect who can show two generations untouched by trade: this sheet flayed the newspapers for backing down and the authorities for “coddling the Reds,” warned that “the Communist Party has armed large groups of Negroes,” and published a cartoon depicting Foster phoning the news of the massacre to a bewhiskered Bolshevik who chortles; “Goot Vork.”

The other exception was the speaker at the Sunday night Peoples Forum. Mr. Joseph W. Sharts, five-time Socialist candidate for governor of Ohio, and a member of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, said:

“When I am put down into my grave I will be thankful that no one will say, there is the damnable scoundrel who influenced me into this attempt to riot against law and order.”

Mr. Sharts also announced that he would “much prefer to engage in a nationalist war than in a class war against my fellow countrymen.”

“Whatever you may thing of Murphy,” someone close to him told me, “he has an extraordinary instinct for knowing how people out there are feeling.” “My goodness,” cried Murphy, “these business people of Detroit don’t know it, but there’s a revolution brewing in this country. All we can do is try to make it come gradually. If you want to see what we’re up against, just go to that mass meeting tonight.” He proved a good prophet.

To the largest hall to be found in Detroit, came the auto workers and the working women and youth of Detroit. They filled the sixty-five hundred seats and packed the open area in the rear, then they pushed the seats together to make room for more comers, then they pressed into the aisles and the balcony and onto the platform, and when there was no more room they stood outside where they could not hear but only knew that their fellow-workers were meeting inside. When Ben Bussell called on them to avenge his brother’s death by building the Auto Workers Union, I learned that the roar of the crowd is more than a figure of speech. As the workers roared their assent, and fists went up in the Communist salute, it was moving to see the many who had never before attended a demonstration, turn and watch their more seasoned neighbors saluting; and, in the salutes that followed, unfamiliarly raise their arms, each time more confidently till by the evening’s end, every fist in the vast mass was raised aloft. They shouted with triumph when Al Goetz appeared, for whom, presumably, the police were still scouring the nation; but they smoldered when a red flame of a girl stood stiff and tense and told how she had seen Joe York go down.

And afterward they went to Ferry Hall — the typical, dearly familiar shabby dance and meeting-hall building which is almost everywhere in America the center of the revolutionary movement — and drew up in long lines to file past the four bodies lying in state. For blocks along Ferry Avenue and down the side streets the lines stretched; late into the night the lines were still filing by for a last look at the murdered men. “Police remained at a distance.”

And by eight o’clock the next morning the lines were again extended along the streets. The funeral began at two o’clock, but long before twelve those who were to march had made impassable the surrounding territory. The police who had been assigned to Ferry Hall — “only for traffic purposes,” Murphy swore: “I’ve ordered them to hide their clubs” — were unable to get within blocks of the place, but stood at the edge of the crowd like rats nibbling at an enormous cheese. They certainly were not needed. “Proletarian discipline requires no traffic cops” said Rudolph Baker, district organizer of the Communist Party; and when the signal was given, and the Funeral March of 1905 rang out, that seemingly amorphous mass was seen to be an orderly procession, sixteen abreast.

They marched for two hours down the principal thoroughfare of Detroit. More joined them from the dense throngs on the sidewalks, at the urging of marching friends; more awaited them at Grand Circus Park where the march itself ended. Here, the marchers opened up to permit a round thousand automobiles — four of us counted them from a nearby point of vantage — to drive through the centre of the marchers, and with extraordinary speed and efficiency the cars were filled and followed the four hearses to the cemetery. Many of those who could not find places in the cars went on by street lines. The remaining ten thousand marched into the park.

Going out to the cemetery, we drove by Dearborn. The place was an armed camp. No one was permitted to get within half a mile of the Ford plant. The boundaries of this district were flooded with state troopers, Sheriff’s deputies, prosecutor’s armed investigators, Dearborn police, Ford guards, and hundreds of thugs dressed in overalls to look like workmen, and very ill at ease they looked in such unaccustomed clothing. Such is the mentality of Ford and his henchmen, that they were expecting the plant to be stormed; but the auto workers of Detroit were burying their dead.

We came late to the cemetery, to find the gates locked, and thousands of people trying to get in. Nearest the gate, trembling with fury, shaking her fist through the bars, was a motherly-looking Polish woman, crying in her native tongue: “You swine, you won’t even let us bury them!” Those in the front of the crowd took hold of the iron gates as if they would lift them out of the ground. Cemetery officials yelled that the next gate was open; we went to look for it; it proved to be a mile off, and also closed, so back we went. That mile was crowded with bitter men and women trying to find a way in; many men climbed the high picket fence. At the first gate, I produced a press card, presented it to one of the officials, and wanted to know why he was sending the enormous crowd back and forth between the gates. “My god,” he cried desperately, “I can’t let any more in. There are forty thousand people in there. If we let any more in, it’ll take all night for them just to walk out.” My press card got me through; but those other thousands walked futilely along the miles of picket fences trying to find a way in.

It was nightfall before I got within actual sight of the grave. The speakers had long finished, the four coffins had been lowered to their common resting place to the singing of the Internationale, thousands and thousands of mourners had filed by and filled the grave with red flowers, the gravediggers began to throw back into the wide chasm the displaced earth, and still the line of those who Jacob Burch wished a last look at the coffins before they were finally covered, continued to march by. In the line were many men and women holding young children in their arms. I asked a weary, stolid-looking laborer why he had been standing for hours with his five year old boy pressed against his breast. He looked at me sternly. “I want him to see what is class struggle.”

There the four lie in their common grave, a step from the Dearborn line, facing the beautiful silhouette of the Ford factories; just inside the cemetery fence. Just outside that fence, within twenty feet of their bodies, pass by the street cars on which the Ford workmen go to work in the morning and return home at night. Soon, as they ride by, there will face them the towering figure of a workman, arm raised, fist clenched: to remind them that here lie together four of their fellows, murdered by Henry Ford; who still, for a time, holds the living in subjection.

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