The Red Scare: From the Guilded Age to the Modern Times - Part 1

While others are focusing on the elections, we will focus on something far more important: The Labor Movement

While the election results came in the USA, we thought we should look at something far more important than elections: The labor movement. The labor movement doesn’t take a break and it has given us concrete results such as the weekend, overtime pay, minimum wage laws, and worker protection. When the government is hostile to the interests of the working class, the only way to advance the interests of the working class is through a strong labor movement. With this, we present our series:

Although, most historians usually use term “The First Red Scare,” referring to the events in following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution where strikes, stoppages and even bombings were blamed on an internal “fifth-column” of Bolsheviks   However, the history of anticommunism in the United States goes back further than that. All the way back to when communism was first defined by Marx in the Communist Manifesto.  

Anti-Communism is more than just a sentiment, it is a series of tactics used by by people in the eternal class conflict.  There are those who want to improve the lives of the workers and those who want to keep the status quo.  Anti-communist tactics are used by those who want to keep status quo. These tactics have been used ever since the first revolts of the oppressed: enslaved people and they have been molded and perfected until today.

In order to do this, they deploy tactics that include intimidation, manipulation, deception, outright lies, and even murder. In order to take on the powerful, the powerless must be united in a strong, indivisible front.  One of the most useful tactics they used is the divide and conquer tactic since the days of the slavery.

The slave owning colonists figured out that they needed to pit the enslaved, poor whites, and the indigenous people against one another so those groups wouldn’t turn on them. They offered concessions to the poor whites and put them in positions of “middle management” like being the overseer of enslaved people in a field or offering awards for them to act as a police force that would be used to hunt down escaped slaves which were considered property for the slave owner of course. This was the base and still very much the mindset of our current police force.  They created whiteness, a merging of pan-european identities, in order to break any solidarity between poor european immigrants and enslaved Africans.  

“Othering” a group or an ethnicity was a common tactic used throughout the labor movement. Throughout the 1800s large groups of immigrants, mainly from Europe, immigrated to the USA.  1848 was a hard year for the people of both Ireland and Germany. Ireland had the ongoing English engineered famine and cultural and religious oppression under the English. In Germany, a revolution of an alliance of liberals, socialist, and the nationalists lost against the conservative rule. Many of the German immigrants that made their way to the US brought with them Marx’s new ideas on socialism.

The media played a big part as well. Newspapers were written through the eyes of the state and capitalists. Socialists were often portrayed negatively in the media, depicted as un-American and a threat to the capitalist system. This portrayal fueled public distrust and hostility toward socialist ideas.

Two years later, in August 1850, during the 1850 Garment Workers Strike in that left two German tailors dead in August of that year, the papers took great umbrage of the “violent Germans” destroying property and wrote of how the police saved the day with the use of their clubs while breaking up the 300 tailors protesting not being paid fairly. Little was said about the two men who died at the end of those clubs.

In this strike alone, we start to see some of the anticommunist tendencies. The media made sure everyone knew these were “German tailors”  and that the Germans were “prone to violence”.   Therefore, the first tactic that is often used is to play upon national and ethnic identities to “other” people involved in strikes as a way of encouraging workers who have much more in common with the strikers to turn away from them.

The Pinkertons

The Pinkerton Detective Agency

The Pinkertons

At the same time during the Garment Workers strike, in August of 1850, Allan Pinkerton opened up what he called a “detective agency” in Chicago.  The Pinkerton Detective Agency originally started by providing security and investigation from beyond what the “official” sheriff services at that time were willing to do for mainly banks and railroads.   However, after the civil war, they expanded their services to become labor spies and private police for companies who were involved in labor strife against their workers. At the height of their power, between  1870 to the 1890s, they were the world’s largest private police. 

In 1873, Alan Pinkerton took on his role as a spy for capital against labor strife. In 1873, Alan Pinkerton received an urgent communique from Franklin Gowan, who, against the anti-monopolistic practices of the day, owned both the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Reading Railway company and the Reading Coal and Iron company. Franklin Gowan’s task to Pinkerton was to allegedly get rid of the “noxious weeds” infesting the coal region.  

However, the coal region was now being populated by mostly irish workers who had come after they had lost their properties during the 1848 potato famine. Unfortunately, for the Irish laborers, life in Pennsylvania did not turn out much better.  They complained, “In Ireland, there were landlords and agents, in Pennsylvania there were mine owners and mine bosses”  

In order to fight for better conditions, the Irish turned to a secret society known as the Ancient Order of the Hibernians.  In 1863, the Irish laborers went on strike to oppose the new federal draft laws.  They also started to protest for better working conditions, and soon this turned into a riot.  

Many people in Pennsylvania laid blame to a group known as “Molly Macguires.” The Pinkerton Detective Agency’s job was to make a case against these 20 Irish coal miners who had been the source of labor dispute.  For this, he hired an Irishman who had lost his liquor store in the Great Chicago Fire.  His name was James McParland.  

The original Molly McGuires were a group of agrarian workers in Ireland that probably started sometime around 1835. They would protest high rents, low wages, and the English enclosing off the lands for the conacre system. The conacre differed from regular sharecropping because there was no formal lease between the farmer and the landlord. This system, which forced the tenants to grow just one crop, is thought to be one of the biggest reasons for the Potato Famine in Ireland. 

The tactics the Mollies used mostly consisted of damaging the fences that enclosed the land, releasing livestock, threatening, and, yes, beatings and even some assassinations. So labeling a group of laborers “Molly McGuires” was a fear tactic to pin them as violent and made them neat scapegoats for the person or persons who were actually committing the assassinations. 

From 1864 through 1868, 17 coal mine bosses in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania were murdered. These and other murders in the area went unsolved until the mid-1870’s when a Pinkerton labor spy infiltrated and made a case against a group of Irish men many who were past and present labor leaders in the area.  

There is little to no proof that the 20 men executed for the murders that happened in the area at the time actually committed the murders or that they even were associated with the Molly McGuires.

It also should be noted the man who hired the Pinkertons, owner of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad, Franklin B. Gowan, was the person who benefitted the most from the murders as he was buying up the coal companies after the assassinations happened. This was done illegally because as president of the Reading Railroad, he was not allowed to own coal mines but Pennsylvania said that was unenforceable. Gowan, who had studied law and served as the District Attorney Schuylkill County in 1862, also served as prosecution on some of the trials of the “Mollies”. 

Be sure to check out part two which will be coming shortly.