Another fine piece from Frank Bohn. The case of the McNamara brothers shook the Socialist and labor movements. Labor activists, John J. and James B. McNamara were accused of the bombing of the anti-union Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910 resulting in at least 20 deaths. At first they pleaded innocent, with luminaries such as Samuel Gompers, Clarence Darrow, and L.A. Socialist Job Herriman defending them. With just days to go until an election in which Job Herriman was running for Los Angeles mayor, the McNamaras changed their plea. Admitting their guilt campaign of bombings, many ‘respectable’ Socialists and labor leaders abandoned the brothers immediately. Frank Bohn was among those that did not. John was sentenced to fifteen years; James to life. He died in prison on March 8, 1941.

‘One Tenth War: The McNamaras and the American Labor Movement’ by Frank Bohn from Revolt (San Francisco). Vol. 2 No. 27. December 30, 1911.

“Hang ’em!” “Hang ’em!” “Give ’em the limit!” “Kill ’em!” were the murderous cries of the mob of all classes when on December 2d black headlines declared that the McNamaras had confessed their guilt. The popular thirst for their blood was shared by most labor union leaders and by some Socialists.

To the average American citizen, to whom the old barbarian custom of “An eye for an eye” is still good law, this uncontrolled rage was the natural result of their sense of “justice.” The McNamaras have killed others, why not kill them? Scores of labor unions are said to have sent in urgent demands that they be punished “to the extreme extent of the law.” The rumor that admonitions, were received urging the killing of all their relatives, including their old mother, has not been substantiated.

What about the theory of our inquiring into the causes of human conduct before taking action? The blood cry raised against the McNamaras was simply a result of the old-fashioned and ignorant method of looking no further than the individual for causes and effects which are entirely social in their nature.

What does the McNamara case signify? Why did these men do as they did? If any may be held accountable, who are they? And, by far the most important of all, What do these facts signify in the development of the American labor movement?

The history of the American labor movement for the past twenty years is a record of the murder of innocents. The newly developed plutocracy, flushed by revolutionary confidence and courage and an assured victory has moved rapidly and steadily forward in its work of reorganizing the industrial and political life of America. As Wall street swung its sharp axe on the lean hands with which the middle class clung desperately to its little all, that middle class whined and whimpered about “law and order,” “Justice” and “The Golden Rule.” The trusts were “crimes against society.” As the middle class let go of its wealth, political power, by that very act, slipped away from it. On December 5th, Attorney-General Wickersham stated that “John H. Patterson and his associates by wrongful and illegal acts have destroyed more than 150 cash register companies and now control more than 95 per cent. of the trade.”

“By wrongful and illegal acts,” says the Attorney-General of the United States, a great trust has destroyed more than one hundred and fifty competing companies. This statement means that hundreds of middle-class families have been, by a single trust, crushed down into the wage-earning class or thrown ruthlessly upon the wayside to perish. And all these “wrongful and illegal acts” were simply according to that old and ever-valid higher law–“Might Makes Right.”

The Trusts and the Labor Unions.

The one trust we shall describe in this connection bears directly upon the subject now under discussion. Many of the trusts during the period when they were killing and eating the middle class compromised with the old-fashioned craft unions. In fact, these antiquated craft organizations could thrive only where they did compromise with the trust. Sam Parks was a structural iron worker. He was a “brother” of the McNamaras. Sam Parks was a power of the Structural Iron Workers’ Union during that period when the great contractors and allied interests were crushing out their smaller rivals. Sam Parks was paid by the big interests to call strikes on the jobs of the little interests and put them out of business. When the group of great construction companies which used Sam Parks did not need his dirty work in their business any longer they sent Sam to jail. And thus ended the first chapter. By 1903, the year Sam Parks was sent to prison, the Steel Trust was well on its way toward the control of the structural iron work of the nation. And the Steel Trust never needed men like Sam Parks. The professional labor faker belongs to the period of transition merely and is discarded when the trust is completed. But labor “leaders” like Sam Parks got salaries from the big interests such as would never be paid to labor fakers who represent men who work in shops. The reason for this lies in the fact that in building construction both the middle-class capitalist and the organized craft unionist can live longer than any manufacturing industry. If men go on strike in Pittsburg, the. Steel Trust can close down the Pittsburg shops and have the work done in Pueblo, Colorado, or Windsor, Canada. But a building which is to be put up at 100 Tenth street, New York, cannot be constructed in St. Louis or San Francisco and then imported. It must be built right there on the spot. Under these conditions the middle class has a much better chance to secure contracts, to profit by local political influence and otherwise to compete with the trust. Also, for this reason, the building trades of their own strength and volition can maintain a stronger hold on the situation than the workers in any other modernized industry.

The International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers has been the last craft union, to look the Steel Trust in the face.

Even before the trust was organized the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had been broken and driven. Its real power was lost in the great Homestead strike of 1892. At that time Carnegie and his hirelings shot and starved its members into submission. Open shop conditions at Homestead and vicinity meant that closed shop conditions elsewhere helped drive the little capitalist who compromised with’ the union to the wall. When the Steel Trust came upon the scene what was left of the Amalgamated Association was quickly snuffed out. The next great union for the Steel Trust to crush completely was that of the Lake Seamen. Iron ore is first and foremost of the products shipped on the lakes. The Steel Trust owned its own fleet of ore vessels. It forced every other shipper on the lakes to join it in blacklisting the Lake Seamen’s Union. All that is now left of that union are a few old starved workers who for 50 cents a day carry signs about the lake cities stating that the strike is still on.

In its war upon organized labor the Steel Trust committed murders without number. Innocent men whom it imprisoned are still languishing in jails and penitentiaries. It reduced the standard of living and drove to disease and premature death scores of thousands of working-men and their families.

The roadway of the triumph of progress of the Steel Trust is smeared with blood and lined with the graves of its victims. All industrial and social life in Pittsburg, in Homestead, in McKees Rocks, in Gary, is simply organized pillage, organized starvation and organized murder.

In the blackness of the night which pressed upon this broken and disheartened army of wage slaves, one single craft union for a time has been able to maintain a semblance of organization. It is the last to leave the field of battle. Its end has now most surely come. Against the steel armor and the high-power steel rifles of the greatest of trusts it remained to test the bow and arrow and the war club of craft unionism. These poor weapons have now fallen from its nerveless hands.

The McNamara brothers saw union after union collapse. They saw their class spit upon and then starved and murdered. They saw all the powers of a mighty government over which their class had not the slightest degree of control turned ruthlessly against the working class.

Other labor “leaders” became liars, traitors to their class and grafters upon the enemy. The McNamaras in their blundering and ignorant way resolved to be true to their class. The Steel Trust used every force within reach to crush the working class. They would repel force by force. For men who had been receiving five dollars a day for eight hours to be forced down to two dollars a day for ten or twelve hours meant death to the working class. The McNamaras chose to die fighting.

With every convention of morality known to their minds despised and every law made for their protection broken by the enemy, how could anyone, they argued, expect them to obey the law or accuse them of wrong-doing when they ignored the constraints of customary morality? Had the McNamaras been wiser in their day, they would have said to the workers in every branch of the iron and steel industry, “Organize one union. Join the Socialist party.” Organize that union of workers as the trust has organized its union of capitalists. Protect that union from the police powers of the State and from the injunction as the capitalists now protect their property from you–by gaining control of the political government. Do not organize to make peace. Organize to fight. The fight must go on until we completely possess and control the trusts. That we can do only through one union and one party and by means wholly different from those used in the old craft-organized pure and simple union. Throw away your old weapons and take for yourself weapons out of the armory of modern science and scientific methods. Let us organize as a class against a class. Let us use every weapon we need for victory, discarding none. For the old-fashioned union to fight the trust is suicide. To attempt at present to use force against force would be worse than suicide. Let us peacefully educate ourselves and organize “ourselves unto that day when we have developed the power necessary for an assured victory.” But in the labor union world of the McNamaras there was no such message. With Gompers they were good Democrats in 1908. In ignorance and despair they turned to the only means which seemed available to them.

In blowing up the Times building the McNamaras killed nineteen non-union men. This is suggestive of the methods of the antiquated unions. Their war had been one-tenth a war against the enemy and nine-tenths against unorganized workers. An average craft union makes scabs through high initiation fees, high dues, closed books and discrimination. Then when those whom its methods cannot or will not organize get the jobs it is at their peril. Most of the craft unions have among their membership a large proportion who got in by taking the jobs of strikers and later, when they kept the jobs, being organized by the union. In view of these facts the outcry against the scab is, nine times out of ten, a hollow mockery.

So the miserable end of the McNamaras is a natural result of the decay of craft unionism among a working class which has, until now, lacked the insight and courage to build up a union which the times demand.

But responsibility does not end with this conclusion. When the McNamaras went to an average Socialist political meeting what did they usually hear? Something like this: “The labor unions are dead. They have served their purpose. You have failed by striking. Now you must vote. Don’t waste time fighting on the job. Wait until election day. Vote for what you want and you will get it.” From such lop-sided piffle as this the McNamaras turned away in disgust and filled their suit cases with dynamite. Socialists who are too cowardly to teach the class war on the industrial field cannot now escape the censure of all right-thinking workers. And in 1911 ignorance of the situation on the part of Socialist speakers and writers is as inexcusable as cowardice.

Yet the McNamara case cannot hurt the Socialist party in any way. They were Democrats and members of the Knights of Columbus. Had they been Socialists we would have been kept busy for years to come protesting that we do not favor their methods. As it is we shall refrain from placing the responsibility upon Woodrow Wilson and W.J. Bryan or upon Cardinal Gibbons and the Roman Pontiff.

Furthermore, the confession cannot in reality hurt our cause in California. The non-Socialist labor union vote in Los Angeles we had far better do without. When the workers of Los Angeles are ready to vote for Socialism, we shall carry the city with or without the consent of the union officials.

Gompers and Mitchell or the average craft union leaders in the place of the McNamaras would have played the part of weaklings and grafters or slunk out of the fight altogether. Thousands of such have quit in despair or gone over to the enemy when the trusts proceeded to smash the unions. The McNamaras, strong but ignorant, woefully misguided but true to their class, threw themselves like fanatics into a hopeless and losing fight. Why could they not, in the hour when each in his inmost self was put to the crucial test, act like men and die as they had lived? From such a going out the revolutionary workers might have drawn that measure of comfort which comes from the reflection that members of the working class may be depended upon to suffer death for their cause. But their vision was too limited to inspire calm courage. Their confession is a dying groan from the lips of an expiring craft unionism.

The McNamaras were just as misguided but no more so than was John Brown. With twenty-one untrained fanatics John Brown started a war. upon the South and upon the Government of the United States. Could Brown have been successful in freely the slaves, he would have been “right.” Failure made him wrong. Were the McNamaras’ old-fashioned union methods successful in bringing freedom to the working class they would be “right.” But such methods cannot win. Hence for that reason, and for that reason alone, they are to be condemned. The hearts of the McNamaras were right. It was their heads which were in error. A pity that they might not have gone to their doom like their elder brother, who, when he marched down between the ranks of soldiers with loaded muskets, bowed his head and bent his back but once, and then to kiss the black child of a slave. A few days later, at the grave of old John Brown, Wendell Phillips, rising in the face of the bitter opposition of every cowardly, slavery-defending wage-worker, of every cringing, sniveling parson, of every dough-faced politician and every swindling, prostituted lawyer and shopkeeper who hastened to assure the South that they were “law-abiding” and that they gloried in the death of John Brown, said to the whole dirty rabble what revolutionists may well repeat today:

“John Brown had more right to hang the Governor of Virginia than the Governor of Virginia had to hang John Brown. Virginia stands at the bar of the civilized world on trial.”

Revolt ‘The Voice Of The Militant Worker’ was a short-lived revolutionary weekly newspaper published by Left Wingers in the Socialist Party in 1911 and 1912 and closely associated with Tom Mooney. The legendary activists and political prisoner Thomas J. Mooney had recently left the I.W.W. and settled in the Bay. He would join with the SP Left in the Bay Area, like Austin Lewis, William McDevitt, Nathan Greist, and Cloudseley Johns to produce The Revolt. The paper ran around 1500 copies weekly, but financial problems ended its run after one year. Mooney was also embroiled in constant legal battles for his role in the Pacific Gas and Electric Strike of the time. The paper epitomizes the revolutionary Left of the SP before World War One with its mix of Marxist orthodoxy, industrial unionism, and counter-cultural attitude. To that it adds some of the best writers in the movement; it deserved a much longer run.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/revolt/v2n27-w36-dec-30-1911-Revolt.pdf