The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922

Abstract

David Bates's The Ordeal of the Jungle is a very fine book, a history of labor and race that speaks to our own moment. In it Bates focuses on the efforts of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) to cultivate a meaningful, powerful interracial union movement in Chicago's meatpacking and steel industries between 1916 and 1922. It is a valuable contribution to the history of Chicago and labor history generally, and offers important cautionary lessons on taking a class-reductionist approach to the struggle of working people of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds.Bates begins The Ordeal of the Jungle with an examination of a series of strikes across a range of Chicago's workplaces, which sowed “the seeds of racial discord that poisoned” subsequent CFL campaigns (10). In 1903, Black and white restaurant workers walked off the job after one of the city's restaurant groups fired its Black unionized employees and replaced them with white waitresses. The strike ended when white workers abandoned interracial solidarity and endorsed an arbitrated agreement that benefited them at the expense of their Black comrades. In 1904, meatpackers brought in nonunion workers to replace strikers in the city's stockyards. The vast majority of strikebreakers were white, but the presence of Black strikebreakers in an industry that had previously been closed to them raised the ire of white workers. They caricatured Black people as a “scab race” and singled them out for violent reprisals—whether they were strikebreakers, ordinary laborers, or simply Black community members. Finally, in 1905, the “avowedly interracial” Teamsters union struck against retailers in Chicago's downtown, a labor conflict that quickly “transmogrified into a race war” (29). White workers noted that a small minority of strikebreakers were Black, and launched racist and violent attacks against the entirety of Black Chicago. By late in the year, the strike had fizzled, “the power of labor in the city” was “seriously diminished,” and “the venomous tensions that had come to define relations between white and black workers” had “ossified” (35). Taken together, these episodes signaled the inability of white workers to abandon racism and led many Black workers to view unionism with heightened and understandable skepticism.The stage was set for the CFL's stockyards campaign of the late 1910s. The CFL had floundered as a marginal influence since 1905, but with the increased migration of African Americans into the city, federation leaders saw an opportunity to resurrect a muscular, interracial labor movement. In this effort, the CFL adopted a federated organizing strategy to leverage its full resources behind the campaign, and simultaneously organize the entire stockyards worker base, skilled or unskilled, Black or native-born or immigrant, male or female, and regardless of craft. They formed the Stockyards Labor Council (SLC) and sought to seize control of local electoral politics via a new Labor Party.The campaign had stunning early success, making significant inroads in the yards and eventually drawing in federal authorities as arbitrators between the union and the packers. In turn, the President's Mediation Committee, led by federal judge Samuel Alschuler, handed the SLC a stunning victory, ruling that the packers must pay men and women equally, increase wages for all workers, and standardize hours and workweeks, among other things. It was, Bates writes, a “total victory” (65).It was also, ultimately, an illusory one, because, for the most part, white union leaders and workers failed to take racism seriously. While federated unionism offered Black workers some advantages, Black locals, to which most Black union members belonged, were marginalized within the federated structure. Even more importantly, while the CFL preached interracialism as important to class struggle, it was decidedly not antiracist. White workers and union leaders alike constantly suggested that class exploitation was the only issue that really mattered. The end result was enmity, not solidarity. White union members castigated Black Chicagoans as inimical to the cause; Black workers, organizations, and community leaders rebuffed support for a unionism that was deeply racist; and white people in turn doubled down on their racist resentment of Black workers as the latter drifted from the movement.The result was catastrophic in more ways than one. On the one hand, the local labor movement foundered on the shoals of race, both in the stockyards and again a few years later when the CFL tried to organize in the steel industry. The federation was not defeated solely by employers, Bates shows, but also by its own racial blind spots and tolerance of naked racism. On the other hand, Bates argues, the enmity cultivated in these labor conflicts—when mutual class struggle devolved into race war—manifested in the bloody Red Summer race riot of 1919. The CFL tried with some success to keep its white members from engaging in that summer's horrific violence that saw thirty-eight Chicagoans killed, but that success was never total. The riot was part of a longer continuum of interracial rancor and violence that stretched back through the stockyards organizing campaign to the earlier hostilities of 1903 to 1905.While The Ordeal of the Jungle is an important and impressive piece of work, readers may leave it with a few questions in mind. One is where the story of interracial organizing outside the formal union context might enter into the story, particularly the work of communists in early 1930s Chicago. In the book's conclusion, Bates contrasts the failure of the CFL to successfully cultivate an interracial unionism with the Congress of Industrial Organization's successes in doing so in the late 1930s. Given the scope and sweep of organizing done in Chicago by communists and fellow travelers in the early 1930s, bridging racial lines in the fight against Depression-era austerity, one wonders if they deserve a place in the story of how interracial unionism was more workable in subsequent years than it was in preceding ones.The more foundational question readers may have is one of sources. Archivally, Bates leans entirely on a handful of collections from the Chicago History Museum and one from the National Archives; the rest of the primary source base comprises newspapers and other periodicals. To take just one example of how this may be limiting, we might think of the discussions of the Chicago Urban League (CUL) and its willingness to encourage strikebreaking by Black workers as preferential to standing in class solidarity with racist white workers. The CUL's official records from these early years are, sadly, gone, lost to a fire long ago. But the personal papers of members of its leadership still exist, including those of branch head T. Arnold Hill (at Bennett College) and first board president Robert Park (at the University of Chicago). One wonders whether the discussion of the CUL's motives and internal debates as they related to these questions of jobs, unionism, and racism would be nuanced or clarified by consulting those papers.That said, The Ordeal of the Jungle is a wonderful contribution to our understanding of the history of Chicago and to the ever-intersecting relationship of race and labor in the United States. It is also an important reminder, in an era fraught with scoffing dismissals of “identity politics,” that any working-class struggle that does not hold antiracism at its center will fail us all.