O.B.U. editorial on the meaning of 1919’s Red Summer.

‘Riots and Race Wars, Lynchings and Massacres, Military Law, Terrorism and Giant Strikes’ from One Big Union Monthly. Vol. 1 No. 9.

In the above long heading the social conditions at present in the United States are briefly summed up.

There was the insurrection in Drumright, Okla., where several thousand oil workers suddenly took possession of the city government and threatened to hang the mayor. In Omaha there was both an insurrection and a race war. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., there were riots and race wars. In Elaine, Kans., where over a dozen negroes were killed, there was the beginning of an insurrection of tenants against the landlords, although the affair gets the appearance of a race war as the tenants happen to be colored. The lynchings have increased enormously in the South. Hardly a day passes without the most hair-raising stories from those parts. In other parts of the country, great numbers of workers are being arrested, in addition to those already in jail. At the time of writing we hear of sixteen I.W.W. men incarcerated in Los Angeles and Sacramento, Cal., and of fifteen I.W.W. men being imprisoned in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, and 12 in St. Louis, Missouri. Great numbers of the striking steel workers are in prison in Gary, and a riot was on the verge of being started. Hundreds are being arrested throughout the strike zone, and great numbers have been clubbed and maltreated and shot, and some have been killed by the tools of the steel trust. “Patriots” are doing longshorework in Seattle and regular soldiers are unloading ships in New York. In New York one hundred “REDS” were recently wounded when the police made an attack on a parade, and so it goes throughout the country for every day that passes.

Constitutional rights are formally suspended in many parts of the country, while in every part of the country these rights are being ruthlessly trampled upon. The right of free speech, free press and free assemblage have been circumscribed and limited and in some parts entirely suppressed.

Federal troops are in control in three steel cities in Indiana and martial law is declared. In other states armed troops of cossacks are terrorizing the steel cities, oppressing, clubbing and murdering. One great strike follows upon the other and the people suffer and writhe in pain.

Such are conditions in the promised land of democracy anno 1919.

To this must be added, that so-called “patriotic” societies and organizations of duped soldiers thruout the country are exercising private terrorism, oppressing, blackmailing, threatening and maltreating private citizens who are suspected of rebellious thoughts against these terrorists.

From where does this terrorism come?

Its fountain head is undoubtedly in Wall Street and its ramifications are found among the social layers whose economic interests are identical with Wall Street’s. It has been nursed with a tidal wave of lies in the prostituted press, and it is being kept alive by a strong and steady stream of agitation against the imaginary danger of so-called Bolshevism. The low passions of national hatreds are being appealed to, and the American flag is in the name of “patriotism” being draped about the most vicious and most dangerous acts against the liberty of the people, and all this tremendous agitation is being financed by the rich and is directed against the poor.

Only such efforts are tolerated by the terrorists as have for their aim to protect private ownership in the form that it is approved by Morgan, Rockefeller, Dupont and Gary. Every effort to solve the social question by striking out for a new society on a communist basis is branded as criminal and treasonable, and everyone who publicly voices such thoughts takes the risk of losing life, liberty or the means of livelihood.

Liberty is practically dead in this country. Courageous and daring truth speakers are either made harmless or are silenced, and the field of publicity is reserved solely for the criminal philosophy of profiteerdom. Rapacious “business men” and gamblers are spreading themselves insolently with their platitudes and their criminal principles in the columns of the newspapers, and what they say is made to weigh as much as the word of God. These terrorists have bit the head off shame and turned morals upside down. Right is what agrees with the interests of these robbers; wrong is what is contrary thereto. The so-called “intelligenzia,” consisting of professors, lawyers, journalists, physicians, priests, and others with a university education, have long ago been made so dependent that they no longer dare to speak the truth, and if they should do so, there is no publicity given to it, for swindledom controls the whole big press. The majority of the American intelligenzia has not stopped here, but has gone still further and placed their ability on the market, selling their soul for bread, speaking and writing lies for pay.

Capitalism has now come to the point where it can no longer stand the light of day. The shameful crimes are becoming so numerous and so terrible that the knowledge of them has to be suppressed with violence and oppression. Production is to a great extent being carried on at the point of the bayonet, under the police club, or even under the mouth of the machine gun and cannon, and the mass is held in silent awe and given the choice between submissive slavery or prison and death.

When a social system can maintain itself only at such a price, it is evident to thinking people that its days are numbered. Capitalism cannot very long hold on to the rudder of the social ship. It is on the verge of collapsing. Certain learned men and social observers are predicting a tremendous crisis, and we for our part hold that it can’t be very far distant.

But among the working masses there seems to be very little uneasiness. There is no general realization of the impending danger. Like a soulless herd of buffaloes it wanders in the known furrows and in the beaten paths against unknown dangers. They dress and they feast, they dance and go to the theatres as if everything were calm and peaceful, and masses of them are blind enough to place themselves under the banner of the profiteers and help with the oppression.

What shall we do under these circumstances? We who can see the coming storm, the precursors of which are now whistling past our corners.

There is only one thing we can do and that is, in spite of all obstacles, to spread information about the only road to salvation for mankind; that is industrial organization. If we survey the whole field of human endeavor there is nothing else that is adequate to cope with the conditions resulting from the collapse of capitalism. It alone can save the freedom of the people and safeguard the uninterrupted flow of the necessities of life.

One Big Union Monthly was a magazine published in Chicago by the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World from 1919 until 1938, with a break from February, 1921 until September, 1926 when Industrial Pioneer was produced. OBU was a large format, magazine publication with heavy use of images, cartoons and photos. OBU carried news, analysis, poetry, and art as well as I.W.W. local and national reports.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/one-big-union-monthly/v01n09-nov-1919_One%20Big%20Union.pdf