"It ain't your color, it's your scabbing": literary depictions of African American strikebreakers.

I wonder why
They are so shortsighted
As not to realize
That every time
They keep any worker,
man or woman,
White, yellow, or black,
OUT of a UNION,
They are forcing a worker
To be a SCAB,
To be used AGAINST THEM?
--from "The Negro Worker"

These lines of verse, published in The Messenger in July 1919, make a point about strikes that is frequently disregarded in the hundreds of pages of fiction by social realists who addressed the major labor struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: "[A]ny worker / man or woman, / White, yellow, or black" could be a strikebreaker. In the West, for example, railroad and mining company managers used workers from countries such as China, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Mexico to break strikes, fully aware that these immigrants would have no allegiance to the ethnic groups who had thrown down their tools in protest. Surprisingly, strikebreaking even crossed class lines as upper and middle class male college students also took on the role of strikebreaker to express their antagonism toward workers. (1) The variety of sources of strikebreakers is not fully reflected in the fictional response to the strike. In some of the most significant radical fiction of the early twentieth century, black workers--more than any other group--are curiously cast in the villainous role of "scab." In the span of a few decades, these literary depictions ranged from collective racist stereotypes to sympathetic psychological portraits of the pressures faced by the African American laborer.

Ample evidence of friction between whites and blacks can be found in some of the U.S. labor movement's key strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (2) The use of black troops offers the earliest examples. Black soldiers were used against striking miners in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1892 and 1899, because African Americans "were believed much less likely than white troops to fraternize with the strikers" (Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 85). In addition, black troops guarded trains and railroad property during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Regarding African American civilians, the Knights of Labor and the newly developing American Federation of Labor (AFL) successfully attracted African American workers, and examples of interracial unity both in the workplace and during strikes can be found. But as the lines from "The Negro Worker" also imply, some unions excluded black members. If blacks were welcomed as members, they faced discriminatory policies under a second-class status. Blacks were denied work on union projects despite membership, or they were denied better jobs despite seniority. Unions failed to protect blacks from racial hostility, and blacks charged union leaders with ignoring their complaints of discrimination. The development of segregated locals was another sign of trouble. Before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass wrote in favor of labor unity between African American and white workers; however, when he realized that labor was doing little to lessen racial animosity, he came out in favor of blacks taking the jobs of strikers: "Colored men can feel under no obligation to hold out in a 'strike' with the whites, as the latter have never recognized them" (qtd. in Foner, Organized Labor, 7). As America's industrial revolution picked up steam, this issue came into greater prominence in most mass production industries in cities in the North. Racism fueled an African American labor force ready and willing to break strikes.

One of the earliest and most significant fictional treatments of African American strikebreakers is found in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). The labor struggle in the canonical novel is based on the unsuccessful stockyard strike by thousands of packinghouse workers and mechanical tradesmen of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in Chicago in 1904. African Americans had been used as strikebreakers in the meat packing industry at least as early as 1894, in response to a sympathy strike by packing and slaughterhouse workers who supported Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike. Sinclair, who covered the 1904 strike as a journalist for the Socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, was among an increasing number of pro-labor social realists exposed to the problems of the working class through journalism. But he apparently had little sympathy for the struggles of African Americans, as his racist depiction of the strikebreakers makes clear.

As the strike develops in The Jungle, Sinclair accurately reflects the historical record by demonstrating that strikebreakers were racially and ethnically mixed. (3) The novel's protagonist, Lithuanian Jurgis Rudkus, is among the workers who decide to cross the picket lines as well as "the lowest foreigners--Greeks, Roumanians, Sicilians, and Slovaks" (260). In fact, Rudkus is placed in charge of the strikebreakers--a group described by Sinclair as "a throng of stupid black Negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a word that was said to them" (260). Sinclair portrays the strikebreakers--particularly the African Americans--as lazy, incompetent, and threatening--especially when they get access to knives in the packinghouse. The Jungle details the pathetic attempt by Rudkus to "teach" the strikebreakers in order to increase production on the killing floor:

   He had the most tractable pupils, however.
   "See hyar, boss," a big black
   "buck" would begin, "ef you doan'
   like de way Ah does dis job, you kin
   get somebody else to do it." Then a
   crowd would gather and listen, muttering
   threats. After the first meal nearly
   all the steel knives had been missing,
   and now every Negro had one,
   ground to a fine point, hidden in his
   boot (261).

Due to the chaos and tension in the plant, management is unable to meet the demands of the meat market and is forced into a doomed attempt at arbitration. The packers then attempt to replace the striking workers permanently with "gangs of Negroes in the country districts of the far South" (262).

A tactic used by capital against labor is to emphasize the criminal element among strikers, ignoring the fact that most were law-abiding citizens. Sinclair utilizes this technique against capitalism by tagging strikebreakers with vice, immorality, and criminality; however, he explicitly associates these characteristics with African Americans as a group. He discredits blacks through what Eugene Leach labels "mob stigma" and "hostile generalizations," using "well-established metaphoric conventions that characterized mobs as natural forces--volcanoes, storms, wild animal herds--which degraded human beings" (190). Sinclair writes in The Jungle that "the vast majority [of strikebreakers] were 'green' Negroes from the cotton districts of the far South, and they were herded into the packing-plants like sheep" (264). More viciously, he writes:

   [A]nd any night, in the big open space
   in front of Brown's one might see
   brawny Negroes stripped to the waist
   and pounding each other for money,
   while a howling throng of three or four
   thousand surged about, men and
   women, young white girls from the
   country rubbing elbows with big buck
   Negroes with daggers in their boots,
   while rows of woolly heads peered
   down from every window of the surrounding
   factories. The ancestors of
   these black people had been savages in
   Africa; and since then they had been
   chattel slaves, or had been held down
   by a community ruled by the traditions
   of slavery. Now for the first time
   they were free,--free to gratify every
   passion, free to wreck themselves.
   They were wanted to break a strike,
   and when it was broken they would be
   shipped away, and their present masters
   would never see them again; and
   so whiskey and women were brought
   in by the car-load and sold to them,
   and hell was loose in the yards. (264-265). (4)

Sinclair's repeated references to African American men as "bucks" are significant. In a study of the stereotypes of African Americans in film, Donald Bogle notes that the character of the black buck or black brute appears in D. W. Griffith's controversial The Birth of a Nation. Bogle describes the figure as "subhuman ... nameless characters setting out on a rampage of black rage. Bucks are always big, baaadd [sic] niggers, over sexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh" (13-14). Sinclair offers a similar stereotype, dramatizing the accusation by union officials in Chicago that African American strikebreakers brought immoral conditions to the plants because they were more libidinous than white workers. The lack of objection to racist passages provides additional proof that American socialists were influenced by a doctrine of white supremacy during this time, a doctrine which argued "that the Negro belonged to an inferior race and warned their comrades against violating the Caucasian purity of their association (Moore 5). (5) The image of African Americans as a "scab race" was evident in other circles as well: "Racist politicians and union leaders helped mold this perception, as witnessed by ... AFL official John Roach, who described the black scabs as 'huge strapping fellows, ignorant and vicious, whose predominating trait was animalism'" (Halpern 39).

While it has been noted that strikebreakers were racially and ethnically mixed during the stockyard strikes, the historical record indicates that acts of hatred and violence were particularly harsh when directed against African Americans:

   Effigies with the words 'Nigger Scab'
   scrawled upon them hung from lamp-posts
   around the stockyards.... An
   angry mob mauled a black laborer and
   his ten-year-old son; another black lost
   both eyes when caught by a crowd of
   enraged whites. At least one black
   worker was stabbed to death; and others
   were reported to have been
   drowned in the fetid waters of "Bubbly
   Creek" north of the yards. At times,
   the violence assumed a generalized
   character, as whites attacked any black
   unlucky enough to be found in the
   vicinity of the plants. (Halpern 31-37).

While Sinclair does not ignore the violence against strikebreakers in his fictional treatment of the subject, on this point he reduces the degree of historical specificity. In one scene, for example, when Jurgis and three other workers go outside the stockyard in search of alcohol and are chased by strikers as "scabs," a scuffle ensues. The incident is blown out of proportion in the newspapers, as Sinclair attempts to impress upon the reader the press's tendency to exaggerate strike-related violence (259). Later in the chapter, Sinclair again minimizes the violence against African American strikebreakers by simply noting that the "scab" who made the mistake of wandering into Packingtown "fared badly" (263). The Jungle also disregards the historical record and never indicates that many blacks were faithful to union causes and orated not to cross picket lines. Black unionists' fidelity would be addressed, however, in a major radical novel that appeared in 1915--Ernest Poole's The Harbor.

Like Sinclair, Poole covered the 1904 Stockyard Strike as a journalist and witnessed the emotional impact of strikebreaking firsthand. (6) A Chicago native who later moved to New York to join the Greenwich Village "intelligentsia," Poole also witnessed two other major labor struggles of the period, the Lawrence Woolen Strike of 1912 and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. These labor disputes are notable for successfully addressing problems of ethnic and racial diversity among workers. The insight into strike activity Poole gained served him well a few years later when he sat down to pen his most significant novel in a large body of work. (7)

The Harbor, a first-person narrative, is the story of Billy, who is raised in a home in Brooklyn that overlooks New York's harbor and his father's warehouse on the docks. Because of his proximity to the harbor and its workers, Billy reevaluates his middle-class background, and converts to the idea that the working class must be freed from exploitation. Billy's conversion arises from a major strike by stokers and dockers. Strikebreakers play a significant role in the labor dispute and, as Sinclair does, Poole's strikebreakers are African Americans. Unlike Sinclair, though, Poole stresses the importance of black/white labor coalition. As the strike opens, an African American docker pleads with his fellow workers at a union meeting:

   "Yes, brothers,"
   he boomed, "let
   us stop our
   fights. Let us
   desist--let us
   refrain. We are
   men from all
   countries, black
   and white. The
   last speaker
   came from
   Norway--he
   came from way
   up there in the
   North. My father came from Africa--.
   ... "Brothers," cried the black man, "I
   come here from the colored race. At
   my dock I got over sixty negroes to
   walk out. Is there no place for us in
   this strike? If my father was a slave, is
   my color so against me?" (280)

The initial display of racial and ethnic unity at the strike meetings infuses the narrator with what he labels as the "strike feeling ... the deep buried resources of the common herd of mankind, their resources and their power of vision when they are joined fused in a mass" (279). In The Harbor, the strike is not just "a strategy of Socialist agitation"; it is also "a ritual of strength" (Hart 92). But unity crumbles upon the arrival of strikebreakers, and although the narrator gradually develops a deep compassion for the working class, even he finds the strikebreakers repugnant: "Up the empty harbor, under a dark and cloudy sky, came four barges, black with negro laborers. ... One of the barges docked where I stood and the negroes quickly slunk inside. I drew back from them as they passed, for to me too they were 'scabs' that night" (293-294). The struggle hinges on racial (dis)unity. The fictional union leader, based on the historical "Big Bill" Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), states to strikers: "We have no use for scabs, black or white. But we have use for strikers, both black and white--our negro brothers are with us still, and we'll show them we know that they are our brothers" (297). But, predictably, the plea for unity fails before hopelessness and threats of violence that probably shocked Poole's 1915 readers: "Threats against 'scabs' were shouted out, the word 'scab' arose on every side. Bitter things were said against 'coons,' not only 'scabs' but 'all of 'em, God damn 'em!'" (296). A negative "race feeling" (296) supplants the positive "strike feeling" (279) to such an extent that blacks are forced to abandon the labor struggle. Racial tension opens the door to police intervention and, ultimately, to a confrontation with the militia that brings about defeat for the strikers. Poole's novel insightfully underscores the rise of violence with the use of African American strikebreakers and, in general, employers benefited most from state intervention that protected company property and strikebreakers.

With a low level of European immigration around World War I, strikebreaking by African Americans intensified. When the war ended, jobs became scarce, and the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People and the Urban League, while on record as opponents of African American strikebreaking, did little to discourage it (Dietrich 44). Still, by the 1930's, fictional treatments of the subject would take an intriguing shift to place greater emphasis on the African American perspective.

The Disinherited fictionalizes author Jack Conroy's experiences as a leader of the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 and as a migratory worker at the onset of the Great Depression. A key figure among proletarian and working-class writers of the 1930s, Conroy edited The Anvil at his home in Missouri, a "little magazine" that published stories by Richard Wright, among others. Through his work with the Illinois Writers' Project during the Depression, Conroy became friends with black novelist Arna Bontemps, and the pair later teamed to write They Seek a City (1945), which deals with the Great Migration of blacks from the agrarian South to the industrial North. The literary endeavor is "perhaps the first instance of bi-racial literary collaboration between novelists" (Wixson, "Jack Conroy," 205). (8)

In the early sections of The Disinherited, Conroy draws on his childhood experiences in a small Missouri coal mining camp, where black miners labored on equal terms with mostly British and Irish immigrants. Blacks were imported to coalfields as strikebreakers, but they would later become part of the community and the union. Conroy's father, a union officer, apparently adhered to the UMW constitution rule prohibiting discrimination according to color, and welcomed black union members into his home.

While the bitterness against strikebreakers is reminiscent of the works by Sinclair and Poole, Conroy's text offers some critical differences. For example, describing a scene in which a strike prompts men, women, and even toddlers to hurl curses at "scabs" arriving at the mines, Conroy--through his first-person narrator, Larry Donovan--places no emphasis on race or ethnicity, leaving open the possibility that the strikebreakers are not exclusively black. Later, after his father's death in the mines, the narrator's home is unsettled by the arrival of a strikebreaker--an African American from Alabama. Conroy calls attention to violence against the character by noting that the unexpected visitor's face was severely cut and bruised during an assault by white strikers. The narrator's mother is not surprised about the beating when she learns what brought the man to the mines: "'Oh, you were scabbing!' Mother said accusingly. 'You were taking another man's job. You should expect to get beaten up for that'" (81). In contrast to the mass of African American strikebreakers in earlier novels, The Disinherited expands the individual strikebreaker's story. The man explains that a "white boss man" came to Mobile and offered him a job in Missouri, and he insists that he didn't know he was taking another man's job: "Shoot me fo' a black buzzard ef I knew I was doin' any hahm" (81). The poor family manages to provide a meal for the strikebreaker, and the novel's young protagonist tags the scene with an important observation:

   The Negro ate and drank gratefully,
   and departed with fervent vows never
   to be inveigled into such a situation
   again. I had always regarded a scab as
   a sub-human beast endowed with an
   inherent vileness. I had never before
   regarded a scab as a puppet manipulated
   by those who stood to gain the
   most, but who never braved the wrath
   of the striker. I could not hate the
   Negro with his doggy, pleading eyes,
   his humble, ingratiating smile. (81)

Given the autobiographicality of The Disinherited, this incident could well have occurred in Conroy's home. The scene also advances the author's commitment to racial solidarity. But Conroy's depiction of African American strikebreakers as ignorant about labor struggles, and easily manipulated by white men, is rhetorically naive. As Warren Whatley points out, "[t]he majority of African-American strikebreakers were neither rural nor deceived. Most of them had prior work experience in southern factories, which is why they were effective strikebreakers" (544).

The Disinherited fell into the Left's 1930s fiction program by demonstrating a conversion to working-class radicalism and a movement of increasing union solidarity. But in the 1940s, two "Great Migration" novels, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Alden Bland's Behold a Cry (1947), downgraded social class in the strikebreaking question and placed greater emphasis on race. Both novels illustrate the obstacles facing African American workers who migrated to northern industrial cities. Attaway was born in Greenville, Mississippi, to a physician father and a schoolteacher mother, and was part of the Great Migration. His parents did not want their children to grow up in the segregated South, so, in 1921, they moved to Chicago. Attaway rebelled against the professional career his parents wished for him, opting instead to follow his interest in writing and working-class issues. After holding a variety of jobs--from mechanic to labor organizer--his professional writing career began in 1935 when he joined the Chicago Federal Writers' Project. He scored a critical success when he fictionalized the first wave of the Great Migration in his 1941 novel, Blood on the Forge. (9)

Blood on the Forge focuses on black sharecroppers and half-brothers--Big Mat, Melody, and Chinatown Moss--who are seduced from a Kentucky farm by a northern labor recruiter for a western Pennsylvania steel mill. Attaway's novel is notable for its vivid depiction of the industrial scene; he draws heavily on events during the 1919 Steel Strike--a national event affecting mills in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. (10) Notably, Attaway develops his depiction of the 1919 Steel Strike and its divisions between black and white workers through the lens of limited gains that African Americans made in organized labor during the New Deal era. (11) At first, racism is subordinated as Attaway depicts a hierarchy of Irish, Slavic, Italian, and black workers struggling for survival. But when issues of unionization and strikes arise, tolerance quickly erodes: "The message Attaway seems to have for us is that during the first part of the great migration, working-class whites started thinking of Southern blacks as niggers only after having perceived them as a threat to the unions or even to the ability to put food on the table" (Lemann xvi).

Attaway explores the isolation felt by African American workers during the Great Migration, showing the first-generation black urban immigrants, particularly those who were sharecroppers like the Moss brothers, as out of place in their new urban environments. Indeed, one of the brothers, Big Mat, is homesick for the farm and reminisces about planting time while the noise of the steel mill echoes around him. Their collective difficulty in adjusting to the new environment extends to union issues. While whites join the union, blacks do not--for a variety of reasons. Big Mat and Melody Moss are described as men more brawn than brain. The question of union versus nonunion confuses them, so they keep to themselves (210). Besides, compared to sharecropping, the work in the mill at least provides a steady wage and "[f]ora man who had no personal liberties even the iron hand of the mills was an advancement" (176). Also, Attaway shows that the owners of the steel mill "bought" corrupt African American politicians who tell workers "that the men who now ask for your help in a strike are the same men who have spit on you on the streets because of your color" (180). As Lemann notes, "the brothers are shown to be on a trajectory of decreasing solidarity with their fellow workers" (xi). Labor tensions rise as strikebreakers from the South begin arriving by freight. The Moss brothers can identify with the "black cargo" and will eventually side with capital in the struggle: "They knew all of those men herded in the black cars. For a minute they were those men--bewildered and afraid in the dark, coming from hate into a new kind of hate" (212).

The novel's tragic ending focuses on Big Mat, the eldest brother and core of the family. On the Kentucky farm, Mat is religious and copes by studying the Bible. But in the industrial north, he becomes morally corrupted. He gives up religion, fails to send for his wife, takes up with a teenage prostitute, and drinks heavily. As his name suggests, Big Mat is a figure of tremendous physical strength, which impresses his white co-workers and overseers. A largely silent figure, he valiantly endures the working conditions at the steel mill until a strike offers him a new opportunity. Not only does Big Mat become a strikebreaker, but he is later deputized as a law-enforcement official. This role gives him a false sense of power. Attaway makes it clear that Big Mat does not take the position because of money: "Always within him was that instinctive knowledge that he was being turned to white men's uses. So always with him was a basic distrust of a white. But now he was ... the law. ... He was a boss, a boss over whites" (197). In assessing Big Mat's motivations, Cynthia Hamilton makes a connection between the protagonist of Blood on the Forge and Xuma in Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy: "These men were driven by forces within: their old standards of self-reliance and self-sufficiency, their unyielding nature in the face of force, and their traditional conceptions of manhood, which centered around a silent tolerance and endurance of pain and the constant desire for respect. Ironically, the combination drove them, helplessly, into the arms of capital, which transformed all of these motives into profits for the owners and bosses" (158). The novel culminates when Big Mat attacks the Slav meeting hall and erupts with "bitterness toward all things white" (231). As part of a cycle of violence, he kills an elderly striker. And then a young Slav striker beats Big Mat to death with a pickax handle. He has been used one final time.

While Attaway emphasizes the shift from agriculture to industry setting during the Great Migration, Alden Bland's Behold a Cry (1947) also argues that the urban setting and slums factor significantly in the strikebreaking question. Bland has been placed among the disciples of Richard Wright who produced novels of racial protest in the mid-1940s (Bone 157-160). Like Attaway, Bland focuses his historical novel on the years following World War I; however, instead of the steel mills of Pittsburgh, he situates strikebreaking against the background of the Chicago race riots of the summer of 1919. Approximately five days of rioting, which involved roaming mobs and gunmen in automobiles, left 16 blacks and 15 whites dead and over 500 people injured. In addition, police officers shot and killed seven African Americans during the havoc in the city. (12) Bland's novel tells the story of Eddie Tyler, a ladies' man who has preceded his family to Chicago. He has promised to send for his family when he has earned enough money; however, he is already living in an apartment with a mistress before they arrive. Eddie's attempt to keep his wife, two sons, and mistress in the same apartment fails, and his family moves deeper into the ghetto and more atrocious living conditions. He faces more problems at his job on the killing floor of a large Chicago meatpacking firm.

Highly motivated by the threat of African Americans as strikebreakers, labor indeed pushed to organize Chicago's black workers following World War I. However, most African Americans resisted unionization, largely because of lingering racism and segregation within the labor movement. Bland's dialogue in Behold a Cry fully develops African American workers' debates about the question of unionization and strikebreaking. Segregated locals generally resulted in inequality in promotions, wages, and hours. In the novel, one of Eddie's fellow workers complains about being forced to join the city's largest all-black local--Local 651 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America: "But where you going to find more prejudice than in the unions? ... Now take us, in the sheep-kill, here. We knife men, ain't we? And knife men is supposed to join the Butchers'. Can we? Hell no! All Negroes join 651. All niggers--not butchers!" (61). (13)

Behold a Cry also notably analyzes the impact of the end of World War I on U.S. race problems. Chicago's workforce ballooned when the conflict ended in Europe, and as tensions over jobs increased, so did racial tension. Bland indicates that the war had changed African Americans, and fostered urban riots: "The first hint of trouble appeared in Washington and St. Louis. Race riots flared up and died.... The Negro had tasted respect and dignity in France. He would never again supinely suffer the inferiority status thrust upon him in America. It further prophesied more widespread rioting was to be expected" (64). The historical origins of Chicago's worst riots are depicted in Behold a Cry when Eddie takes his sons to the beach. A young African American crosses onto the white section of the beach, then is killed in a stone-throwing incident. The failure of police to make an arrest at the scene ignites a race riot. Eddie unwisely decides to go to work the next day, ignoring threats by whites that African Americans stay within the Black Belt. On his way home from the meatpacking plant, he is assaulted and nearly killed by a gang of whites. The beating effectively kills Eddie's slightest thoughts about joining the union: "You know, it didn't make no difference to me at first, union or no union. But I found out one thing from this riot. They pounded it in my head. White folks really hate us! You can't trust them no more than you can a snake. I wouldn't belong to nothing they belong to!" As Robert Fleming indicates, after the white gang beats him, "union" for Eddie means "maintaining an unremitting hate for the whites and striking out at them violently when a chance arises" (77). When the meatpackers' union calls a strike, Eddie, like many black workers, have few qualms about continuing to work. Bland graphically describes the hatred and tension on the picket lines as strikebreakers enter the yards. Because the strike has slowed work at the plant, Eddie can go to the roof of the plant to survey the scene around him. To his horror, he watches pickets brutally capture a friend and a fellow worker. The fatal violence reinforces Eddie's hatred of whites, and he takes satisfaction as black strikebreakers "trampled the strike with a million feet" (215). To Eddie, strikebreaking is heroic because it returns a measure of vengeance against whites. Eddie's philosophy of hatred ultimately leads to his destruction; he abandons his family as the novel ends.

The Wagner-Connery National Labor Relations of Act of 1935 briefly established some strike regulations in favor of labor. In cases in which the labor struggle was caused by unfair labor practices, strikers were guaranteed re-employment at the end of the strikes. At about the same time, changes in local ordinances and law-enforcement policies limited the use of professional strikebreakers and forced employers to change strikebreaking strategies. As a result of these legislative changes, there was a brief cessation in the wholesale practice of the permanent replacement of strikers. The last strikes in which African American strikebreakers were employed in notable numbers were at Chrysler in 1939 and Ford in 1941. Strikebreaking, in general, had entered a new, more subdued period. The position of African Americans in organized labor also shifted in favor of unionization over strikebreaking. A shining example is the effort to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), which was initiated by A. Philip Randolph in 1925. Despite numerous obstacles, the BSCP won recognition from the Pullman Company in 1937 (Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 112). Even at the time when Attaway was writing Blood on the Forge, blacks were joining the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in large numbers, and they continue to play an important role in organized labor--often in the very industries in which they were recruited as strikebreakers in the early twentieth century. So it would seem that these "historical" novels are no longer relevant. But, of course, that's not so. The economic forces that inspired the novels by Sinclair, Poole, Conroy, Attaway, and Bland still operate. And the novels do more than demonstrate the importance of interracial labor solidarity. They remind readers that racialized hatred and violence are never without socioeconomic, political, and moral consequences.

Notes

(1.) For the collegians, strikebreaking was often "a 'lark' equivalent to 'stealing signs' or 'class numeral painting'" (Norwood 331). Strikes offered an opportunity for students to be initiated into a "cult of muscularity" (335). For rich details on the relationship between strikebreaking and college students, see Stephen Norwood's "The Student as Strikebreaker."

(2.) A thorough treatment of African American strikebreaking in the early twentieth century is found in Chapter Three of Stephen Norwood's Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002). Extensive details about the role of African Americans and the labor movement are found in two studies by historian Philip Foner: Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 and American Socialism and Black Americans.

(3.) Quotations from The Jungle are taken from the 1988 edition published by the University of Illinois Press. Sinclair's depiction of African American strikebreakers is found in Chapter 26. In his notes to the text, James R. Barrett notes that "Sinclair's description of the strikebreakers reveal his nativism and racism most clearly" (348).

(4.) In his introduction to a 1981 edition of The Jungle, Morris Dickstein notes that the theme of enslavement, which is raised in this passage, runs throughout the entire novel; however, "Sinclair makes no effort to see these hapless strikebreakers as human beings in their own right. They are simply an alien mass who make solidarity harder to achieve, which was just the way many labor unions saw blacks and immigrants" (xv).

(5.) Among the strongest commentary on the Socialist Party and race is R. Laurence Moore's "Flawed Fraternity--American Socialist Response to the Negro, 1901-1912," The Historian 32 (November 1969), 1-18. For a critical discussion of scholarship dealing with American labor history, see Herbert Hill's "The Problem of Race in American Labor History, Reviews in American Labor History 24.2 (June 1996), 189-208. Hill argues, in part, that "certain important issues in labor history are ignored, such as the history of white strikebreaking activity including white strikebreaking against black workers, and the working-class base of militant white supremacist groups" (197).

(6.) Arguably, the work of Ernest Poole significantly influenced Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. In his introduction to the novel, James R. Barrett indicates that Poole's article, "From Lithuania to the Chicago Stockyards--An Autobiography: Antanas Kaztauskis, "probably helped to shape the character of Jurgis Rudkus" (xxxi). In addition, Barrett says Sinclair's description of discrimination against union members in The Jungle is taken from an account written by Poole, and some of the words are lifted from the account "verbatim" (348). In his autobiography, The Bridge, Poole describes Sinclair as a man "digging for 'the inside dope' on conditions in the Yards" (95). He adds: "I gave him some tips on where to get more, and the color that he wanted" (95).

(7.) In addition to Poole's autobiography, the most detailed studies of Poole are by T. Frederick Keefer. Analysis and criticism of Poole's works are provided in Keefer's Ernest Poole (New York: Twayne, 1966). His doctoral dissertation, "The Literary Career and Literary Productions of Ernest Poole, American Novelist" (Duke University, 1961) provides biographical details about the author of The Harbor. For a more recent analysis of The Harbor, see Mark Noon's dissertation, "'Nothing to Arbitrate': The Strike in the American Novel, 1888-1915" (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1998).

(8.) Quotations from The Disinherited: A Novel of the 1930 are taken from the 1991 edition published by the University of Missouri Press. The edition features a helpful introduction by Douglas Wixson. For additional biographical information on Conroy, see Wixson's Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of the Midwestern Literary Radicalism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994).

(9.) Blood on the Forge did not sell well despite favorable reviews. Notably, Richard Wright's Native Son was published in the same year. Over the decades, however, the novel has received more critical attention from both historians and literary scholars. Editions of the novel include that published in 1970 by Collier/Macmillan with an introduction by Edward Margolies and a 1993 edition by Anchor/Doubleday with an introduction by Nicholas Lemann.

(10.) On the issue of race and the 1919 Steel Strike, see Cliff Brown's Racial Conflict and Violence in the Labor Market: Roots in the 1919 Steel Strike. (New York: Garland, 1998). Brown explores why some communities were able to forge interracial coalitions during the strike while others were unable to overcome racial division.

(11.) For a rich discussion of fictional treatments of African-American workers in the 1920's and 1930's, see Chapter 8, "From Black Folk to Working Class: African American Labor Fiction between the World Wars," in Laura Hapke's Labor's Text: The Workerin American Fiction (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2001). In her discussion of Blood on the Forge, Hapke notes that Attaway's "post-Depression" perspective is significant: "From the vantage point of the New Deal era, then, Attaway rewrote the early labor history of the Great Migration. In the factory story no writer of the Harlem Renaissance era told, he explored the chimera of opportunity, revealed the corruptions of leisure culture, and argued for the interracial working class solidarity that eluded even the most committed 1920's author" (214).

(12.) The most detailed study of the Chicago Riots of 1919 is Tuttle's Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer.

(13.) Another text that provides insight into the problem of segregated locals is Alexander Saxton's 1948 novel The Great Midland (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997). The novel details efforts by the CIO to organize African-American railroad workers during the 1930s. Despite moving to the top of union seniority lists as part of an "auxiliary lodge," the African American workers are forced to fight for jobs that were rightfully theirs.

Works Cited

Attaway, William. Blood on the Forge. 1941. New York: Collier, 1970.

Barrett, James. "Introduction and Notes." The Jungle. Upton Sinclair. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. xi-xxxiii.

Bland, Alden. Behold a Cry. New York: Scribner's, 1947.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 3rd. ed. New York: Continuum, 1996.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1958.

Brown, Cliff. Racial Conflict and Violence in the Labor Market." Roots in the 1919 Steel Strike. New York: Garland, 1998.

Conroy, Jack. The Disinherited: A Novel of the 1930s. 1933. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991.

Dickstein, Morris. "Introduction." The Jungle. Upton Sinclair. New York: Bantam, 1981. v-xvii.

Dietrich, Julia. The Old Left in History and Literature. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Fleming, Robert. "Overshadowed by Richard Wright: Three Black Chicago Novelists." Negro American Literature Forum 7 (1973): 75-79.

Foner, Philip. American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport: Greenwood, 1977).

--. Qrganized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973. New York: Praeger, 1974.

Halpern, Rick. Down on the Killing Floor." Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997.

Hamilton, Cynthia. "Work and Culture: The Evolution of Consciousness in Urban Industrial Society in the Fiction of William Attaway and Peter Abrahams." Black American Literature Forum 21 (Spring/Summer 1987): 147-63.

Hapke, Laura. Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2001.

Hart, John. "Heroism Through Social Awareness: Ernest Poole's The Harbor." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 9.3 (1967): 84-94.

Hill, Herbert. "The Problem of Race in American Labor History. Reviews in American Labor History 24.2 (June 1996): 189-208.

Keefer, T. Frederick. Ernest Poole. New York: Twayne, 1966.

Lemann, Nicholas. "Introduction." Blood on the Forge. William Attaway. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, vii-xviii.

Leach, Eugene. "Chaining the Tiger: The Mob Stigma and the Working Class, 1863-1894." Labor History 35.2 (1994): 187-215.

Moore, R. Laurence. "Flawed Fraternity--American Socialist Response to the Negro, 1901-1912." The Historian 32 (November 1969): 1-18.

Norwood, Stephen. Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.

--. "The Student as Strikebreaker: College Youth and the Crisis of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century." Journal of Social History 28.2 (Winter 1994): 331-49.

Poole, Ernest. The Harbor. 1915. New York: Sagamore, 1957.

Saxton, Alexander. The Great Midland. 1948. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. 1906. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988.

Tuttle, William. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

Whatley, Warren. "African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal." Social Science History 17 (1993): 525-58.

Wixson, Douglas. "Introduction." The Disinherited: A Novel of the 1930s. Jack Conroy. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991. 1-24.

--. "Jack Conroy, the Sage of Moberly. Book Forum: An International Transdisciplinary Quarterly 6.2 (1982): 201-06.

Mark Noon is a composition instructor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. His scholarship focuses on fictional responses to major labor struggles. His most recent publications include an essay on pioneer socialist writer Laurence Gronlund (1846-1899) for Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Radical and Reform Writers, as well as a series of labor related entries for Encyclopedia of American Social Movements and Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor.