The logic and limits of "plant loyalty": black workers, white labor, and corporate racial paternalism in Chicago's stockyards, 1916-1940.

"It all sounds pretty good to me, but what does Mr. Armour think about it?" This oft-quoted response to a union organizer's pitch by an anonymous Black laborer at Chicago's anti-union Armour and Company packinghouse in 1919 matches a once commonplace white laborite notion of how Black industrial workers responded to unionization early in the twentieth century.(1) Those workers' clear and widespread resistance to labor organization prior to the late 1930s and 1940s(2) was taken to reflect the naive sentiments of Black workers viewed by trade union supporters as tragic, child-like victims of forces and actors beyond their understanding - a southern paternalist legacy, corporate paternalism, and cowed Black elites who simply and unanimously sold Black labor out to employers.(3)

A more recent historical literature that includes several studies of Chicago's stockyards (the leading center of Black industrial labor during World War One) during and immediately after the Great War has challenged this once conventional laborite wisdom. It suggests that Black workers' anti-union behavior reflected not so much paternalization and ignorance as the distinctive lessons of Black historical experiences mediated through intelligent, proud, and race-conscious calculation. It argues effectively that the most essential facts behind the "failure" of most Black workers to join unions prior to the 1930s were those workers' criticism of trade union and white working-class racism both South and North, their self-active struggle to escape racist southern oppression for the superior material opportunities and racial milieu of the North, and the anti-union efforts and resources of employers. It shows that Black workers' "company loyalty" was not proffered in an unqualified, absolute fashion and that the Black community contained tendencies merging race-consciousness with bi-racial working-class solidarity. Some Black workers and community leaders did in fact support interracial trade unionism prior to the 1930s. That support might have found a durable, mass base in the Black working-class but for white working-class racism and the repressive/divisive roles of employers, the state, and some union officials.(4)

This literature situates historically and qualifies a phenomenon that has too often simply been taken for granted and assumed as absolute. The phenomenon is clearly significant. Black workers' initial resistance to unionization had profound negative consequences for both the labor movement and race relations during the first third of this century.(5)

Nevertheless, recent scholarship on race and labor in Chicago's stockyards remains incomplete in at least four interrelated ways. First, it has not fully appreciated the significance of Black workers' entrance to strategic, prestigious workplace positions in shaping both the logic and limits of Black company loyalty. Second, it has curiously downplayed important forms of Black worker behavior and consciousness - working both for and against employers - that developed autonomously from the question of trade-union membership. Third, its focus on white working-class racism (or the lack thereof), has led it to underestimate the importance of employers' racial attitudes in shaping Black workers' activity. Finally, it has failed to bridge the chronological gap and make plausible and explicit connections between the early anti-unionism of most Black workers and the rise of Black participation in militant industrial unionism during the 1930s and 1940s.

This article explores the experience, consciousness, and self-activity of Chicago's Black packinghouse workers during the interwar period with these criticisms in mind. The first section recounts the rise of a large Black packinghouse workforce shaped by an employer strategy of racial paternalism and racial divide-and-rule during and after World War One (WWI). A second section places Black packinghouse labor's "plant loyalty" (a term used by packinghouse mangers to describe what they expected and felt they received from "colored" labor during WWI and the 1920s) within the context of Black workers' distinctive historical situation within and beyond the stockyards. It simultaneously and critically examines contemporary white laborites' interpretation of Black workers' behavior and consciousness. The third and fourth sections suggest the limits of Black "plant loyalty," revealing hidden patterns of Black resistance - outside as well as within trade unions - to corporate racial paternalism in the stockyards during WWI and the 1920s. A final section shows the ultimate limits of Black loyalty by widening the time lens to include the Depression decade. It examines the logic of remarkable Black labor militancy in the 1930s stockyards and suggests some curious continuities between that militancy and the outward Black company loyalty of the 1920s.

The Rise of a Black Workforce

In 1915, just 1100 Blacks worked in Chicago's packinghouses, less than 5 percent of the workforce. Within three years, the "Yards" (as the South Side meatpacking district was commonly called by Chicagoans) employed more than 10,000 African-Americans - nearly 20 percent of the workforce. Most were recent newcomers from the deep South, participants in an historic northward Black movement encouraged by the packers - the Great Migration (1916-1930). Laid-off in large numbers during the recession of early 1921, Blacks were re-hired in large numbers to break the national meatpacking strike of that same year. They remained to compose roughly 30 percent of Chicago's packinghouse workforce for the rest of the 1920s.(6)

Numerous factors made Chicago's packinghouses a leading industrial destination for the Great Migration. African-Americans seeking to escape racial oppression and economic stagnation in the ex-slave states of the "New South" provided an obvious, practical new supply of workers for the giant, expanding packinghouses of the labor-starved war years. At the same time that defense orders poured into the meatpackers, the war drained off workers to the military and restricted the inflow of the Eastern European immigrants who made up the majority of the packinghouse workforce by 1910. "We took the Negro in," recalled one packinghouse superintendent in the late 1920s, "because we needed the labor."(7)

The prevailing racial stereotype held that Blacks were poorly adapted to machine tasks but possessed rare endurance for simple, exhausting, and labor-intensive toil amidst high temperatures, wetness, and filth. The stockyards were a haven of such "Negro work," which many whites fled when war-induced expansion opened jobs in cleaner, better-paid, and higher status industries.(8) It did not hurt that Chicago was the main terminus for trains from the deep South or that Armour and Swift's "placarded warehouses, set close by the railroad dotted every town of the South ... calling for men" to work in Chicago's "colossal abattoirs."(9)

But more than an historical conjuncture of packer manpower needs, racial job stereotypes, disagreeable work, rail connections, and warehouse advertisements explains the rise of a large Black workforce in the stockyards. Wartime inflation, labor demand, and idealism combined with restrictions on migrant workers' return to Europe to generate militancy and unionization throughout the United States' largely immigrant-based industrial working-class communities.(10) Associated by industrial employers with the increasingly radical aspirations of the European working class, the wartime revolt of American immigrant workers produced a new managerial criticism of "foreign" labor combined with a new appreciation of more "loyal" and "American" Black labor. American industrial managers were enticed by the common notion that Blacks were inherently "immune" to both "Bolshevism" and unionism.(11)

The meatpackers embraced that notion. When the manager of their Denver packinghouse reported "labor trouble" in the summer of 1917, Swift and Company's Chicago office quickly prescribed an increase of "colored help."(12) The same racial Machiavellianism certainly informed the packers' personnel policy in Chicago, where managers had successfully used Black strikebreakers on two previous occasions (in 1894 and 1904).(13) If the Yards were perhaps the chief workplace destination for the Black migration, they were also home to one of the country's most remarkable expressions of immigrant labor militancy during the war - the Stockyards Labor Council (SYLC). Led by syndicalists William Z. Foster and Jack Johnstone and endorsed by the popular Polish leader John Kikulski, the SYLC enlisted more than 90 percent of the Yards' mostly Eastern-European immigrant employees to force unprecedented wage and hour concessions from the powerful "Meat Trust."(14) One Chicago packinghouse manager interviewed in the mid-1920s recalled how he and his stockyards counterparts used Black labor to survive their wartime confrontation with what they felt to be "Red" immigrant workers:(15)

You know the foreigners we had were Bolsheviki, dangerous, radical ... They made up all sorts of trouble by thinking up dangerous plots against the country. They were just the kind of foreigners who would go out and listen to agitators and create a big disturbance and strike in America.... Therefore, the big business men in the stockyards got together. We sent our agents into the South, to Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and we paid Negroes to come and work in the stockyards. We did it and most of the stockyards companies did it.... troubles were not ended by importing Negroes. We had a terrible time with them, but we pulled through the war and the last strike ... because we could count upon the Black man.

Postwar quotas on European immigration favored Blacks' persistent presence in the packinghouses through the next decade. Also significant, however, was managers' taste for what they called "strike insurance." Alma Herbst interviewed numerous Chicago packinghouse officials during the mid-1920s. Black workers were praised for "their loyalty and reliability during labor troubles" as well as for their willingness to perform tasks that others shunned. Herbst found that the chief reason for employing Blacks "cited by every establishment" was fear of "future strikes and attempts to unionize the butchers" [my emphasis].(16)

The Logic of Loyalty

Consistent with this managerial reckoning, the SYLC probably never recruited more than 20 percent of Chicago's Black packinghouse workers. Foster admitted that "we could not win [the] support" of southern Black migrants. "They were constitutionally opposed to unions, and all our forces could not break that opposition."(17) African-Americans comprised a crucial, "loyal" non-union reserve during the violent 1921-22 packinghouse strike, which resulted in the defeat of unionism in the meatpacking industry for more than a decade. They did so largely with the blessing of Black Chicago's middle-class elite, whose churches and civic associations received contributions from the city's largest meatpacking corporations.(18) They stayed on to provide the most outwardly "loyal" segment of the stockyards workforce through the postwar decade. As one superintendent explained, "Negroes are poor trade unionists. It is almost impossible [for trade unionists! to organize them ... on the other hand, we have found that the Negro is very much interested in our employee representation plan [ERP]" (the packers introduced "company unions" as a counter to working-class organizations in 1921). Black "loyalty" found a related expression in labor market behavior. Herbst's detailed analysis of company records showed that Blacks were much less likely to quit packinghouse jobs than whites during the mid-1920s.(19)

Whence this special Black "company loyalty" in the stockyards? The Black worker perceived by white managers, white packinghouse trade unionists, and outside white observers was commonly a gullible man-child right off the cotton plantation: he understood neither his own exploitation in the packing-houses nor the benefits which might result from working-class organization. According to the predominant white perspective, the legacy of southern white planter paternalism - the northward transplantation of which is captured well in the quote presented at the beginning of this article - had combined with Black workers' supposed intellectual limitations and inexperience with unions to make Blacks little more than docile, alternately "happy-go-lucky" and "hopeless," and "ignorant" tools of the employers' game of divide-and-rule. A related culprit explaining Black "company loyalty" was a northern Black middle class which preached non-union company loyalty in return for cash payments from the meatpackers. By the analysis of white laborites, "the poor, illiterate [working-class] Negro, coming from the plantations, drawn to the North by stories of undreamed wealth" was victimized by "bad advice" from its own community's elite - advice purchased by white corporate officials. According to white trade unionists, finally, both the packers and the Black bourgeoisie were guilty of sparking false migrant expectations of the "glorious North" as "heaven on earth" for Blacks. That image, they claimed, made Black workers' exploitation in the packinghouses seem endurable as a ticket to life in the "promised land."(20)

There was more than a kernel of truth in the white labor interpretation. African-Americans in the deep South environment which provided the greatest number of Black packinghouse workers had been forced to rely on personal solutions and the rare benevolent and powerful white ally in their struggle for security and safety. Black southern migrants had rarely joined or been directly exposed to unions before coming North and knew little about the struggles between industrial employers and employees in northern cities. A Black packinghouse worker who arrived from Alabama in 1916 confessed that he "cannot understand why [unions] strike and keep men out of work." The Black middle-class did by the time of the 1921-22 strike counsel Black workers against unionism. Black civic associations did receive material support from Chicago's leading meatpacking corporations. And both Black elites and the packers' labor agents may well have painted an overly optimistic picture of opportunities for Black southern migrants in wartime and postwar Chicago.(21)

Still, the reality of Black workers' mentalite and behavior during the war and the 1920s was far more complex, self-active, and sophisticated than the conventional white labor wisdom allowed. The proudly race-conscious "New Negro[es]" of the war and postwar years had rejected white paternalism by moving North in the first place. And thousands of Blacks militantly defended their neighborhoods during the 1919 Chicago race riot. As the young journalist Carl Sandburg walked through those neighborhoods in the "red summer" of 1919, he found "thousands of young men" discussing the questions "'What are we ready to die for? Why do we live? What is democracy? What is the meaning of freedom, of self-determination?'" Six years later, Black sociologist Charles Johnson noted the profound anger which many black newcomers felt in the face of northern discrimination:(22)

There is a reorganization of [Black] attitudes [in northern cities] ... For those who fed their hopes on a new status which would afford an escape from the unrighteous and oppressive limitations of the South, there is a sensitiveness about any reminder of the station from which they have been so recently emancipated - a hair-trigger resentment, a furious revolt against the years of training in the precise boundaries of their place.

With thoughts and feelings like these haunting its laborers as well as its lawyers and doctors, Chicago's wartime and postwar Black community was hardly home for faithful innocents blind or indifferent to northern forms of racism and class exploitation.

But Black workers' northern options were much more limited in ways that encouraged non-union company loyalty as a rational strategy for both self- and racial-advancement. Many of Chicago's wartime and postwar employers purposefully refused to hire any or all but a small number of Blacks. The packinghouses, by contrast, employed more than half of the city's Black industrial workers by 1920.(23) Most Chicago industrialists employed Blacks exclusively in the least prestigious available positions. The packers were somewhat different. To be sure, Black workers as a whole were lumped in the dirtiest, wettest, lowest-paid, and least secure jobs and departments in the stockyards. They were effectively banned from certain favored and publicly sensitive jobs and departments. Few if any Blacks worked in the "auxiliary" packinghouse crafts (e.g. as carpenters, electricians, and steamfitters, etc.) or as foremen, jobs that Poles and other recent immigrant groups were entering by the early 1920s.(24) Still, Blacks took an unusual number and share of prized and middling skilled and semiskilled production jobs in the stockyards - knife positions on the all-important killing floors. They worked as cattle-"splitters," "floormen," "rumpers," and in numerous other difficult, delicate, and exhausting knife jobs vital to the packers' feverish pursuit of "uninterrupted production."

Blacks' predominance on the killing floors in the interwar years - by the mid-1930s Chicago's killing gangs were, by one estimate, 90 percent Black - reflected the wet, filthy and mostly unskilled nature of work in those departments. It also reflected a conscious managerial strategy of divide-and-rule and the interrelated historical roles of the "kills" as the strategic beginning point of the vast "continuous flow" packinghouse labor process, strongholds of irreplaceable knife skill, and the center of packinghouse labor protest.(25) Alongside the considerable presence of Black workers in the big (Swift's, Armour's, and Wilson's) packers' ERPs(26) and their large numbers in the stockyards, their entrance into the packing-house knife "aristocracy" meant that Black packinghouse workers interviewed by Herbst in the middle and late 1920s had reason to "feel more nearly on a competitive equality with white workers than in any [other] industry in the city."(27)

Other factors less reflective of employers' supposed benevolence encouraged Black "plant loyalty." Blacks' ghettoized residential concentration in the "Black belt" just one mile east of the stockyards enhanced dependence on the packers in the simple sense that Black workers enjoyed less freedom to move to other workplaces and neighborhoods. The relative absence and weakness in the Black belt of the supportive neighborhood culture which the city's white-ethnic communities had developed since the late 19th century (a reflection of the greater poverty, more recent formation, and religious fragmentation of the Black ghetto) meant that Black workers were especially reliant on wages and benefits (especially insurance) provided by the meatpacking industry.(28) And Black workers' relative lack of access to the packinghouses' informal, largely ethnic- and foreman-based hiring networks meant that they especially depended on the "favor" of top packinghouse managers and packer-subsidized agencies (especially the Black YMCA and the Urban League) to win packinghouse jobs in the first place.(29)

At the same time, Black 'loyalty' was conditioned ironically by packinghouse managers' racist criticism of Black capacities and their related tendency to view all Black workers as a single undifferentiated mass. As one local Black journalist lectured Black workers in 1923, African-Americans were either "employed by the bunch in certain industries, or they are kept out as a group." Given managers' common definition of Black workers' as 'shiftless,' the latter knew well - and "race leaders" were sure to remind them - that their initial entrance and continued presence in the packinghouses depended largely on managers' perception of them as a loyal, anti-union reserve. They could risk the appearance of disillusionment with workplace conditions far less than could white workers. There was, noted NAACP field secretary William Dean Pickens in 1923, little space for Black workers when it came to choosing between company loyalty and labor militancy. "The Negro worker," wrote Pickens, "cannot afford to be neutral. He must either be for labor organization or against it."(30)

The attitudes and behavior of the white working-class community on Chicago's South Side added yet further to the northern logic of company loyalty in ways that were not acknowledged by stockyards labor activists who insisted that white labor made "every [possible] effort ... to organize the colored workers."(31) Black workers had reason to view white workers as hostile, even lethal opponents. Elmer Thomas, a Black Armour sheep butcher interviewed during the 1930s, learned from veteran Black butchers how white workers violently resisted Blacks' initial entrance into skilled knife jobs during and after WWI:(32)

I know fellas, told me when they started in the Yards and tried to learn to butcher, white men on the floor didn't like to see it. They'd do almost anything to keep them from learning, throw anything they could lay hands on at them, knives, sheep-fat cups, punches ... anything. The white butchers hated the Negroes because they figured they would scab on them when trouble came and then get good-paying, skilled jobs besides.

There was, in fact, remarkably little racial violence inside the packinghouse district during the bloody South Side 1919 race riot. This reflected the anti-racist role of the SYLC and, perhaps, what some investigators found to be congenial shop-floor relations between Black workers and workers of Polish ancestry. Still, the most significant fact for the Blacks was probably that two white workers killed a Black laborer named William Dozier outside the Chicago Swift plant. And there was considerable violence against Black workers in the white-ethnic, working-class "Back-of-the-Yards" neighborhood adjacent to the packinghouses. On the second day of the riot, local white "mobs carrying baseball bats and bricks" pulled Black packinghouse workers from city streetcars and beat one to death. Several Black workers may have been drowned in the neighborhood's infamous "Bubbly Creek," an especially polluted fork of the south branch of the Chicago River.(33)

The community's hostility to Blacks hardly waned after the war, thanks to the destruction of packinghouse unionism partly through the use of Black "scabs" in 1921-22. At the same time that they were losing an enlightened labor leadership to counsel them in the virtues of interracial solidarity, white-ethnic Back-of-the-Yards residents naturally resented Blacks' strikebreaking role. The resentment found horrible expression on December 7, 1921, when mostly Polish-American strikers stoned and drowned a Black laborer. The common Back-of-the-Yards proverb, "No Negro Better Show His Face West of Halsted Avenue" noted by radical journalist Harold Preece in the 1930s probably had its origins in the events of 1919 and 1921.(34)

Yet there had been much for Black Chicagoans to question even in the wartime labor movement. Most of the numerous craft unions affiliated with the SYLC had maintained strict bans on Black members. The SYLC's practice of recruiting Blacks into a separate, neighborhood-based local brought the charge of "Jim Crow" segregation from Black community leaders. The wartime labor movement lodged little or no protest against the packers' blatantly racist personnel practices. Along with some SYLC leaders' comments about the supposed unorganizability of "hopeless, oppressed, and discouraged Negroes," these practices and silences certainly reminded many Black migrants and Black community leaders of the racially exclusionary trade unionism they had witnessed or heard about in the South and which was evident in other industries and crafts throughout Chicago. As one Black packinghouse worker told the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, "unions ain't no good for a colored man. I've seen too much of what they don't do for him." This Black cynicism about unions - easily understood in terms of Black workers' experience both North and South - was never quite acknowledged by white labor leaders who defensively preferred to portray Black workers as simply "ignorant" of the real history and role of trade unions. It may have been more accurate to say that many Black workers knew too much about unions from a race-conscious perspective.(35)

What of the trade unionist lament that Black workers were naive victims of "bad" Black middle-class "advice" purchased by the meatpacking corporations? The Black middle-class' anti-union counsel certainly reflected its simultaneously race-conscious and self-interested effort to build up a local Black capitalist economy (what sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake termed "Black Metropolis") on the basis of Black industrial workers' purchasing power as much as it resulted from corporate bribery.(36) And Black workers had definite job-conscious reasons to heed that counsel. During the postwar strike and through the 1920s, Black ministers, social workers, and lawyers were far more influential in securing jobs for Blacks than were white-run unions.(37) Beyond this material self-interest, moreover, historian James Grossman has shown that many Black migrants to Chicago shared with Black lawyers, preachers, doctors, and journalists a racially-centered experience and consciousness which significantly transcended class differences within the ghetto. From their common restriction to the ghetto to their exclusion from "white only" positions, Black laborers, businessmen, and professionals shared a common subordinate status based on skin color. They also commonly shared the striving, "liberal" world view which so richly informed the Great Migration. The title of the middle-class Black Urban League's journal accurately described many lower-class Black migrants' view of the North, epitomized by the industrial metropolis of Chicago: "opportunity."(38)

It was a view that was significantly validated by their Chicago experience when compared to the South. Tragic though it may seem in light of the special workplace exploitation, ghettoization, and physical danger faced by Blacks in wartime and postwar Chicago, most Black migrants still experienced the northern industrial metropolis as a considerable improvement over the not-so "New South." Black workers' situation in Chicago's workplaces and neighborhoods may have been inferior to that of the city's mostly white-ethnic working-class. It remained vastly superior to paltry sharecropping incomes, debt peonage, open segregation, stifling, small-town racial oppression, and primitive living conditions in the ex-slave states. Obtaining even one of the worst jobs in the "Hellish" stockyards could seem a truly liberating experience for the Black migrant. That job became part of the way to a frankly better world. If the reality of Black Chicagoans' northern experience fell short of the "heaven" union organizers accused packer labor agents of advertising, it was still significantly less of a Hell than southern Black experience.(39)

The Limits of Loyalty I: Black Union Supporters

Black workers' "loyalty" to the packers, then, was no simple, undiluted expression of docile Black paternalization. It was mediated by a proud "race consciousness" and by a realistic calculation of Black self-interest. It reflected both the core, self-active Black impulses behind the Great Migration and the influence of a race-conscious Black middle-class leadership. It was offered because the packers (for all their racism) were especially favorable to Black workers, because the labor movement and the working-class community in and around the stockyards were tinged by racism, because stockyards employment was a ticket to the relative racial freedoms of the North and (though this is the most difficult to gauge) because of the dream of an independent Black metropolis built on wages earned in white-owned industries. It was contingent, and therefore reversible when and if - as occurred during the 1930s - employers came to be seen as working against "the race," northern opportunities waned, and a new unionism could emerge to meet "the race's" needs.(40)

Not surprisingly, there were limits to Black company loyalty - chinks in the armour of the Black workers' supposed paternalized quiescence - even before the 1930s, during WWI and the 1920s. Both James Barrett and James Grossman have shown that Chicago's wartime and postwar Black community was in fact divided to some degree over the union question. A significant minority of Black packinghouse workers, perhaps as many as one in four (probably fewer), did join the wartime labor movement before the fateful 1919 riot. A smaller number of Black workers even stayed with the union cause through the 1921-22 strike, refusing to "scab" and picketing employment agencies in the Black belt. It was to such workers that the influential Black daily Chicago Defender referred when it claimed that "colored ... workmen obeyed the dictum of their superior union officials and did exactly what their white brothers did."(41)

Little is known about these Black union supporters in the stockyards. They may have included a small number of migrants who had once belonged to the few southern unions that aggressively organized Blacks on a basis of equality (the Industrial Workers of the World and the United Mine Workers, for example),(42) but it was disproportionately composed of "northern Negroes," men and women resident in the North since the prewar era, whose often long experience in the stockyards had stripped them of any notion of the packinghouses as an industrial promised land. Many of the "prewar Negroes" had also likely been exposed to the interracial organizing efforts of an extraordinary semi-industrial packinghouse union campaign conducted by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters between 1900 and 1904.(43)

"Northern" Black workers joined unions in roughly the same proportion as white workers. Ninety percent signed up by early 1918. Barrett notes that they "created the type of institutions commonly associated with stable working-class communities - unions, cooperatives, fraternal groups, and an independent political organization [the Colored Club of the Cook County Labor Party!." They provided a "nucleus of Black union activity, serving on [SYLC] floor committees and recruiting for the SYLC." Within that nucleus were such individuals as Robert Bedford and Frank Custer, both long-service packinghouse workers and elective SYLC floor committeemen on the Wilson plant's cattle-killing floor. While they possessed a strong consciousness of race, Bedford, Custer, and other Black SYLC militants braved the scorn of anti-union Blacks (one of whom called them "a lot of white folks' niggers") to advocate labor unity "irrespective of race, creed, color, nationality or sex." Their struggle reminds us that there were individuals within the Black working class striving for industrial unionism prior to the 1930s. It also suggests that Black workers' race consciousness was not completely or inherently opposed to working-class solidarity.(44)

In a similar and related vein, the anti-union sentiments of the Black middle class were not absolute. Noting the impressive interracial efforts of some SYLC activists and sensing that the local Black economy benefitted from wartime union wages, the Defender and the Chicago Urban League pragmatically and cautiously supported the SYLC even after the 1919 riot. They did not shift to an explicitly anti-union position until the middle of the 1921 strike, when massive unemployment leading to what the Defender called "near starvation" proved the union could not win.(45) Even then, the Black elite did not offer unqualified support to the employers. Chicago's Black middle-class religious and civic leaders told the packers that they favored strikebreaking to protest the then-current manifestation of trade unionism in the stockyards, not to reject the labor movement per se.(46) Consistent with that claim, in the 1920s the Defender, while highly critical of trade union racism, called not for the elimination of trade unions but for "the opening up of all trades and trade unions to Blacks as well as whites."(47) The "Black [capitalist] metropolis" dreams of the Black elite did not completely or unambiguously translate into support for the employers' "open shop" American Plan. Even before the 1930s, that elite had never completely rejected the possibilities of interracial labor solidarity.

The arrogance of historical hindsight suggests that pro-union Blacks had no chance of winning over the mass of mostly migrant Black workers during and right after WWI. It is suggestive of an alternative potential, however, that Chicago's packinghouse managers clearly perceived: they dedicated considerable effort to keeping Black workers out of unions and fueling divisions between white and Black employees. Managers dramatically fired white SYLC members and replaced them with Black migrants. They made large cash contributions to strategic Black churches and associations, contributing nearly one fifth of the Chicago Urban League's budget by 1919. They gave favored treatment to a number of veteran Black workers whose job it was to harass pro-union Blacks like Bedford and Custer within and beyond the workplace. They guaranteed jobs to members of the "American Unity Labor Union" (AULU), led by Black labor agent Richard Parker, a self-declared "Race Man" who warned Blacks not to join any "white man's union." While they barred SYLC activists from company property, they granted Parker access to packinghouse employment offices. On the eve of the 1921-22 strike, Joseph Ogden Armour (whose father had made "frequent allusions to the loyalty of the Negro") repeatedly met with influential Black community organizations. "You think the Negro will stand by us if we have trouble in the Yards, don't you?" Armour would ask, adding, "we always count on the Negro and would hate to be disappointed."(48)

Chicago packinghouse managers developed a more subtle cultural influence with Black migrants through sponsorship of "Efficiency Clubs" at the Wabash Avenue YMCA. The clubs, to which Armour offered a free membership after one year's employment, provided basis for all-Black singing groups, dances, picnics, and sports leagues, playing a major role in migrants' adjustment to an unfamiliar, hostile environment. But they expressed more than the packers' supposed benevolent concern for what a 1919 Armour pamphlet called the "welfare" of its "colored workers." If efficiency club leaders taught knife skills and industrial work discipline, they also preached non-union "plant loyalty" as "responsibility" in the modem world of the North. "Black workers were lectured and taught," Jack Johnstone accurately claimed, "that the thing to do is to keep out of organized labor."(49)

The Limits of Loyalty II: Informal Resistance and Negotiated Loyalty

A different type of evidence on the limits of Black company loyalty has little to do with unions and strikes per se. The ideal-type worker portrayed in packinghouse company literature during the "welfare capitalist" 1920s was not only suspicious of unions, strikes, and radicalism - the classic outward expressions of working-class discontent. He or she was also disciplined, efficient, and dutiful throughout the entire daily shop-floor routine.(50) By the packers' own reckoning, the racial group which best matched the first part of this equation (African-Americans) was the worst fit for the second. Numerous Chicago packinghouse managers interviewed by Alma Herbst in the mid-1920s made identical complaints about Black unreliability: "twice as many Negroes as one wishes must be kept on the payroll; they have no sense about a job; they lay-off on account of minor ailments." Black workers were said to lack "hope on the job." The president of one stockyards establishment voiced time-worn stereotypes of Black males as men-children who required physical driving to work efficiently:(51)

The Negro men are getting lazy now that the weather is getting warmer ... The trouble with the Negro is that he is very lazy. Ambition is entirely lacking. The only way to get work out of him is the way they got it out of him in the South - with a whip.

As this comment suggests, managers' judgments were skewed by racist evaluations of Black labor discipline appropriated from southern overseers. Still, the likelihood of Black "inefficiency" seemed obvious to at least one clearly anti-racist investigator and to some intensely race-conscious middle-class Black writers. Herbst found that Black packinghouse laborers performed their tasks "reluctantly" and with the "least possible effort." In a typical 1923 news item entitled "Laborers From the South Fail to Deliver the Goods," Defender writer Eugene Brown claimed that Black migration was "bathing" Chicago "in the practices of the South, good and bad." Many Black workers, he claimed, reasoned that their northern incomes entitled them to "layoff three days a week, just for the fun of it, or go on some pleasant excursion." Brown felt the practice was appropriate revenge for the "virtual slavery" and hopeless inefficiency of the South; but it was inappropriate in the industrial North where high wages, job security, and efficiency supposedly prevailed. If Blacks were to lose their recently attained positions in northern industry, Brown felt, managerial prejudice would not be the reason.(52)

Perhaps the chief difficulty with managers' image of Black work practices was their interpretation of the Black indolence that did exist. Lacking any notion of Black workers exercising control over their own industrial experience, they did not think to mention that Black "unreliability" reflected Black protest, however muted, against racial discrimination and class exploitation. There was a conflict between some Black migrant's "preindustrial work rhythms" and what contemporary observer Niles Carpenter called "the time-clock routine of northern industry." A plant superintendent told the Chicago Commission on Race Relations that his large Black workforce was "not reconciled to working six days a week" since "down South they are accustomed to taking off Saturdays." When A.L. Jackson of the Wabash Avenue 'Y' asked a recently fired Black packinghouse worker if he had gone to work each day, the migrant responded, "Goodness no, I just had to have some days off for pleasure." For this worker, "high" northern wages translated into more leisure, not greater dedication at the workplace.(53)

But more than preindustrial inertia likely informed Black shop-floor resistance. Black southern working people had never experienced a large measure of preindustrial workplace autonomy: quasi-industrial plantation gang-labor and seasonal stints in southern factories provided Black migrants with what historian Peter Gottleib calls "surprisingly adequate preparation" for northern industrial positions. At the same time, African-Americans had, since slavery, protested racial inequality and resisted onerous white labor demands through indifference and fatalism at work that overseers chose to (mis)interpret as "natural laziness."(54) Numerous observers of Black industrial labor in the 1920s noted that employer dissatisfaction with "colored labor" was positively correlated with racial discrimination and resulting Black alienation in particular firms and plants.(55)

Black workers' enthusiasm for the relatively liberal racial freedoms of the urban-industrial North did not necessarily translate into uncritical acceptance of employers' racially discriminatory workplace practices. Nor did it mean the complete abandonment of older, pre-migration strategies of work resistance. Beneath the racist interpretations of supervisors and the persistence of preindustrial patterns among recent migrants, many of the "lazy" and "discouraged" Black workers who agitated packinghouse managers were likely exercising a rough, "sub-political" form of shop-floor protest. Middle-class Blacks like Eugene Brown might tell Black workers that their Southern Black work ethic, forged in the crucible of "cotton slavery," was inappropriate in the "free" industrial North. These Black elites did not have to work in a hot and steamy killing room, a fertilizer house, a tannery, or a "gut shanty," under an abusive, racist foreman, and the driving rhythm of an overhead "endless chain."(56)

Yet packinghouse supervisors and managers in the postwar decade did not merely confront the persistence of southern Black work culture. They faced Black workers who increasingly learned and applied northern industrial workers' forms of informal workplace resistance. This was especially true on the bloody, strategic killing floors, with their long history of slowdowns, stoppages, and rugged proletarian mentalite, where Blacks predominated by the late 1920s (and retained their position even in the face of mass lay-offs of Black workers during the 1930s). The oral history of Phillip Weightman, a Black hog butcher from Virginia who would become a union leader in the 1930s, is suggestive of this Black shop-floor "manliness." Employed on the hog-kill at the East St. Louis Armour plant during WWI, he initially supported the AFL meatcutters union but became disillusioned by the union's segregationism. Weightman switched to the more progressive, welfarist Swift company in St. Louis, where whites and Blacks had a "close working relationship" on the killing floors. He was a "fast butcher, very fast," though his brother, a hog splitter, was "the artist." Weightman "knew that [he] excelled with the knife, and there was no packing plant that wouldn't hire me." He had taken "a liking to doing my work as proficiently and perfectly as I could and the company took a liking to me because of that." Weightman was, in his own words, "Swift oriented."

Yet despite his workplace/craft and company pride and disgust with unionism, Weightman maintained an outspoken shop-floor presence. He led a work stoppage protesting poor safety conditions in 1923. Three years later, on a morning when the rapid pace of the hog-killing conveyor was "killing" workers, Weightman asked his white foreman George Davis to reduce the speed. When Davis refused, telling Weightman he would "run these hogs by you so fast that they're going to fan you," Weightman "said, 'hold that chain,' and the whole operation stopped." Weightman dramatically cleaned his knives and left his work station, telling Davis, "'You catch 'em, let'em fan you.'"(57)

It is likely that similar conflicts between Black workers and white managers occurred in Chicago's stockyards during the 1920s. The leading organizer of the CIO packinghouse union in the 1930s recalled that the Packinghouse Workers' Organizing Committee (PWOC-CIO) in Chicago did not have to "invent" the weapon of the work stoppage (heavily employed by that union in the late 1930s) on the mostly Black killing floors. The union seized on a tradition of direct workplace action and shop-floor dignity which had survived the collapse of the last great unionization campaign in the stockyards. "Even before a union," in the non-union interval between 1921-22 and the mid 1930s, leading PWOC activist Herbert March recalled that skilled knife workers on the "kill and cut" were "not timid." The cattle "splitters" and "floormen" - the most skilled, "aristocratic" positions, both of which Blacks had entered by the late 1920s - were especially "outspoken." They reserved their right to step down from raised platforms, leaving valuable, perishable carcasses dangling from the "endless chain" when the speed of work was too fast, when conditions were unsafe, or when the heat was too intense. These chief bearers of the stoppage tradition in meatpacking now included large number of Black workers who absorbed the "rules of the game" of worker resistance on the shop-floor.(58)

In 1929 Weightman came to the Chicago Swift plant, where he would become, by his own account, "a strong company man." But his notion of company loyalty was consistent with what historian Gerald Zahavi has termed "negotiated loyalty." It included the right to stop work if workers felt that speed and safety were being ignored by supervisors. It was related to the fact that he had "been able," by the account of one union organizer, "to get grievances settled" through informal discussions with Chicago Swift supervisors. By 1938, when Weightman concluded that a manager unfairly discharged a fellow worker, it would include, to the shocked surprise of supervisors, the right to join the militant CIO. Seemingly overnight, Weightman became an especially aggressive CIO activist, loudly daring supervisors to fire him for his open, "cantankerous" union activism.(59)

The Logic of Militancy

The packinghouse employers' racist divide-and-rule personnel practices backfired - one might even say boomeranged - in the late 1930s. Harold Preece of the Defender and the University of Chicago's Oscar Hutton both found "colored workers" to be "the backbone" of the recently formed PWOC in 1939. One year earlier, sociologist Horace Cayton learned from a PWOC officer that Blacks had supplanted Polish-Americans as the "best union men" in "the Yards." The mostly African-American kill floors were the PWOC's most militant and earliest organized departments in Chicago and the pivotal wedges of CIO power in the stockyards. They became centers of epidemic shop-floor turbulence, as mostly Black killing gangs engaged in countless "quickie" work stoppages protesting packinghouse conditions and the employers' refusal to recognize the new packinghouse union. As one stockyards laborer told Cayton, "colored people has woke up to unionism now. He won't accept the boss-man's telling him, 'You don't want to be with the white man."' This momentous change in Black worker allegiances took place mostly with the blessing of Black middle-class leaders.(60)

Racially discriminatory lay-offs in the Great Depression provided crucial context for this transformation of Black attitudes towards the labor movement in the stockyards. Between 1930 and 1940, the packers rewarded Blacks' historical role as "strike insurance" by reducing Blacks share of Chicago packinghouse jobs from 31.2% to 19.6%.(61) Black workers need not have previously been fully "plant loyal" to feel the sting of injustice when the packers disproportionately removed them from company payrolls. As Elmer Thomas told Betty Burke of the Federal Writers' Project in 1939:(62)

When they raise a gang - that's a term they use in the Yards when there's new men being hired - you can bet you won't see any Negroes coming in. Like in '33, they were hiring young boys, sixteen and eighteen years old, raw kids, didn't know a thing, but there were plenty of colored boys waiting for the same chance who never got it. Hank Johnson [PWOC's Black assistant national director! said just the other night he'd bet there hadn't been a Negro hired in Armour's in seven years. He knows what he's talking about.

This "weeding out" of Black labor, facilitated by the special starring of Black time cards, graphically suggested the limits of what outward, non-union loyalty brought Black workers and the Black community as a whole. It significantly undermined rank-and-file Black faith in the significance of the fact that Black workers had become "company union" officials in the larger packinghouses. It undercut Black middle-class leaders' tendency to preach non-union company loyalty as a tool for "advancing the race" and building a Black capitalism.(63)

But Black workers in the stockyards would not likely have overcome their historical suspicion of the "white man's union" without a dramatically new approach on the part of union organizers. Nowhere in northern industry was the Black civil rights dimension of the Depression-era industrial workers' movement more evident than in Chicago's stockyards. Reflecting the practical lessons of past union failures in the stockyards and the Communist affiliation of its leading organizers - Communist stockyards activists believed strongly in both racial equality and the radical potential of Black labor(64) - the PWOC (formed in 1937) made a special effort to reach Black workers and overcome racial divisions in the workforce. Chicago PWOC activists used the threat of stoppages on the strategic killing floors to end Armour's and Swift's deeply resented (by Black workers) starring of Black time cards. They opposed what they called the packers' "lily white" job-ceiling, threatened to expel white union members who expressed racist sentiments, and won from Swift's a 1937 agreement to hire Blacks "according to their proportion in Chicago's population." They successfully encouraged Blacks to take an unlimited share of union offices (Black skilled workers headed 9 of 15 Chicago PWOC local unions by 1939). They sponsored interracial social gatherings at a time when "mixed" interaction was still nearly taboo and threatened union boycotts against local taverns and restaurant owners who denied service to Blacks. The PWOC even organized a demonstration outside a white-ethnic Catholic parish (St. Agnes) where Black packinghouse workers had been harassed as they attended the wedding of a Polish-American co-worker.(65)

Yet more than discriminatory layoffs and Left-influenced union interracialism created Black labor's special new militancy in the stockyards of the late 1930s. Given managers' racist historical labelling of them as inherently inefficient workers, useful primarily as an anti-union reserve, Black packinghouse workers had been compelled to take an outwardly deferential attitude towards managers. Once they burned the paternalist bridge through participation in the PWOC, Black workers' stake in the success of the union was especially great. The longstanding fact that they could "not afford to be neutral" in labor-capital disputes provides some explanation for the dramatic way in which some Black workers in the Depression-era stockyards made sudden shifts from company loyalty to union militancy.(66)

Blacks' persistent, even deepening position in the strategic killing rooms fed Black militancy in the 1930s. It was on the "kill and cut," where, according to March, workers were least "timid" of all, that the PWOC's "natural [shop-floor] leaders" were recruited. Early Black skilled worker PWOC militants like Weightman, Pete Brown, Jefferson Beckley, and Jesse Vaughn - each headed a Chicago PWOC local in the late 1930s - were hardly introduced to the killing gangs' "long tradition of stoppages" by CIO activists. They had imbibed the rugged spirit of shop-floor dignity and the potent tactic of direct workplace action in the packinghouses' most strategic departments - the PWOC's key weapon - through long years spent in key knife tasks on the killing floors preceding the rise of the CIO.(67)

Similarly, Black workers' "race consciousness" now increasingly worked for and not against working-class solidarity. Whence the skilled Black knifeman's common cause with the Black common laborer in the PWOC? The brutal, highly subdivided killing-floor labor process reminded even the most skilled knifemen of his common lot with the rest of "the gang." While skilled white workers commonly lived in "respectable" surroundings beyond the working-class, white-ethnic slum, ghettoization meant that more Black skilled workers lived in regular contact with their less "respectable" co-workers. A common racial identification and consciousness rooted in American historical racial apartheid meant that skilled Black workers who remained steadily employed through the 1930s may have felt a stronger fraternal identification with lower paid unskilled laborers of their own race than did white skilled workers.(68)

Historical Black race consciousness shaped the new Black labor militancy in a different way. In Cayton and Drake's findings, Depression-era Black Chicagoans denied access to the best jobs and homes expressed "race pride" in compensatory ways, including leadership in civic and other organizations. "Race heroes" like Joe Louis and Jesse Owens beat whites "at their own game" and were "fearless in their approach to white people." Black packinghouse workers likely expressed this "fearless," race-conscious mentalite in recurrent rugged shop-floor confrontations with white packinghouse supervisors and by taking a leading role in the new CIO packinghouse union. Among Black workers in Chicago, Oscar Hutton found that the PWOC's dynamic Black assistant national director "Hank" Johnson became "a symbol of the [assertive and fearless] New Negro in the trade union movement." Once mobilized on behalf of the labor movement, the interwar years' version of "Black power" encouraged Black workers to seize more than a secondary role on the shop-floor and in the industrial workers' movement.(69)

Chicago packinghouse managers and not a few white packinghouse workers felt surprised by the rise of Black labor militancy in the Depression-era stockyards.(70) They had wrongly taken Black company loyalty for granted, missing its conditional, calculated, and race-conscious logic and its real, related limits. Black workers' transition from mostly informal and passive resistance to a more potent, active, and organized union militancy in the 1930s was no small breakthrough. Yet even in the 1920s, the heyday of welfare-capitalist company allegiance, Chicago's Black packinghouse workers challenged their stereotyped image as tragic martyrs to corporate racial paternalism and managerial racism. They understood the race and class contradictions of life and labor in the stockyards during WWI and acted upon that understanding. The minority of Black workers who joined the wartime labor movement in the stockyards and the support initially given to packinghouse unionism by some Black community leaders shows that African-American Chicagoans had never completely rejected working-class solidarity and were not in fact "constitutionally opposed to unions."

Black Chicagoans' "special relationship" with the meatpacking corporations prior to the Great Depression combined company loyalty, racial subordination, shop-floor resentments, strategic workplace position, and race-consciousness in ways that might - given the right circumstances - help transform Black workers' race-conscious self-activity from strikebreaking to labor militancy. Not the least of those circumstances would be the emergence of a trade union cadre which repudiated conventional labor notions of Black workers as hopeless victims of forces and actors beyond their comprehension. When those circumstances emerged, the limits of Black packinghouse workers' company loyalty became fully apparent. Chicago's Black packinghouse workers, the truest heirs of The Jungle in the interwar years, showed that their own experience, culture and consciousness provided special resources for and contributions to working-class protest.

Social Science Research Institute 148 N. Third Street DeKalb, IL 60115

ENDNOTES

The author is grateful for criticisms and suggestions provided by Bruce C. Nelson and by the referees and staff of the Journal of Social History.

1. Sterling Spero and Abram Harris, The Ellack Worker (Port Washington, NY, 1930), 130; William Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: 1970), 108-156; James Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Urbana, 1987), 219; Rick Halpern, "Race, Ethnicity, and Union in the Chicago Stockyards, 1917-1922," International Review of Social History 37 (1992): 36.

2. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker; Horace Cayton and George Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (Chapel Hill, 1939); David Brody, Steelworkers in America: the Nonunion Era (Cambridge, MA, 1960), 184-225; David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle (New York, 1993), 18-19; August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979), 3-33.

3. For examples of this conventional white laborite wisdom see, among many possible citations (I have especially chosen examples relating to Chicago's stockyards), Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York, 1960 [1905]), 265-271; articles by Amalgamated Meat Cutters President Cornelius Hayes in the Butcher Workman (June 1921): 3; (July, 1921): 7; Mary McDowell, "The Negro in Industry," The World Tomorrow (March 1922): 72; Earl Browder, "Some Experiences in Organizing the Negro Workers," The Communist 9 (1930): 40-41; Alma Herbst, The Negro in the Slaughtering and Meatpacking Industry in Chicago (Boston, 1932), 28-65.

4. Tuttle, Race Riot, 108-156; Barrett, Work and Community, 202-224; James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), chapter 7; Halpern, "Race, Ethnicity, and Union," 25-58; Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit; Peter Gottleib, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-1930 (Urbana, 1987); Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: the Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Urbana, 1985); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (New York, 1991); Peter Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1898 (Urbana, 1985).

5. William Attaway, Blood on the Forge, a Novel (Garden City, 1941); Tuttle, Race Riot, 108-156; Elliot Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis (Cleveland, 1966); American Social History Project, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (New York, 1992), vol. 2, 241-242, 261-264; Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 18-19.

6. Lorenzo Green and Carter Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (Washington, DC, 1930), 272-274; George Haynes, The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction, U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics (Washington, DC, 1921), 54-55; Alma Herbst, The Negro, xvii-66; Barrett, Work and Community, 48, 202-224, 254-263; Paul Taylor, Mexican Labor in the U.S.: the Calumet Region (Berkeley, 1930), 40, 66-123, especially 118; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of Population, IV, Occupations (Washington, DC, 1932), 447-450; Estelle Scott, Occupational Changes Among Negroes in Chicago (Chicago, 1939), 217-18; "Palmer's New City," no. 7, 1923, 4-6, in Mary McDowell Papers, Chicago Historical Society, Box 3, Folder 15, 6; William Z. Foster, "The Organization of Negro Workers," Daily Worker, 16 May, 1929.

7. Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York, 1920); Birtha Swindell, "Negro Migration," in "The Negro in Illinois Survey," Illinois Writers Project, Works Progress Administration, at Carter Woodson Branch of the Chicago Public Library, reel 5; Louise Venable Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward (New York, 1930), 42-55; Tuttle, Race Riot, 74-107; Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: the Origins of the New Factory System, 1880-1920 (Madison, 1975), 146-48; Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900-1920 (Garden City, 1975); Alma Herbst, "The Negro in the Slaughtering and Meatpacking Industry in Chicago" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1928), 129.

8. On racial stereotypes and industrial work assignments, see Charles S. Johnson, "Employers' Opinions of Negro Labor," in Johnson, ed., The Negro in American Civilization (New York, 1930), 78-81; Niles Carpenter, "The Negro in Industry," in Johnson, ed., The Negro 389; Charles S. Johnson, "How the Negro Fits in Northern Industries," Industrial Psychology I (June, 1926): 408; Herman Feldman, Racial Factors in American Industry (New York, 1931), 52-55; "Racial Adaptability to Various Types of Work," employment chart of the Central Tube Company, Pittsburgh, 1925, reproduced in John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana, 1982), 240; Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900-1933 (Albany, 1987), 25; Trotter, Black Milwaukeee, 12, 15; Gottleib, Making Their Own Way, 99; Jack Conroy, The Disinherited (New York, 1933), 247. For evidence that such stereotyping informed Black assignments in the Chicago stockyards, see Herbst, "The Negro," 127 and The Negro, xxii.

9. Charles S. Johnson, "The New Frontage on American Life," in Alaine Locke, ed., The New Negro (New York, 1925), 278; Tuttle, Race Riot, 84.

10. Selig Perlman, A History of Trade Unionism in the United States (New York, 1922), 225-240; Brody, Steelworkers, 180-213; Jeremy Brecher, Strike: the True History of Mass Insurgence in America From 1877 to the Present (San Francisco, 1972), 103; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: the Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York, 1987), 332.

11. Gottleib, Making, 161; Arthur Kampfert, "A History of Unions in the Meatpacking Industry," unpublished manuscript [1949], State Historical Society of Wisconsin, vol. II, 104; Herbst, "The Negro," 131.

12. Kampfert, "A History," II, 104-105; Arbitration of Wages and Hours of Labor in the Packing Industry, IV, 230-304, Samuel Aschuler Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

13. Ernest Poole, "The Meat Strike," Independent LVIII (July 28, 1904): 80-82; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 265-268; William Tuttle, "Labor Conflict and Racial Violence: The Black Worker in Chicago," Labor History X (Summer 1969): 408-432.

14. William Z. Foster, "The Packinghouse Campaign" [1936], in Foster, American Trade Unionism (New York, 1947), 21-32; Kampfert, "A History," vols. I and II, 97-136; Barrett, Work and Community, 188-239.

15. Quote from Herbst, "The Negro," 130-131. For other examples of managerial criticism of Eastern-European immigrant labor in the packing industry, see also John Calder (industrial relations chief at the Chicago Swift plant in 1919-1920), Capital's Duty to the Wage Earner: A Manual of Modern Industrial Relations Practise (New York, 1923), 151; "Memorandum of Address June 17th Before the Interracial Committee of the Union League Club," 1926, Julius Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago, Box 40, Folder 2, 2-3; Armour Magazine (April, 1927): 5-6; Swift Arrow [the company newspaper of the Chicago Swift plant!, 24 January, 1924, 4; 4 October, 1927, 6: "Americanization Aids Standards;" Arthur Carver, Industrial Relations Executive, Swift and Company, Labor and Personnel Problems in the Packing Industry (Chicago, 1928), 6.

16. Herbst, The Negro, xxi-xxii, 75; Herbst, "The Negro," 127-129, 131-132; "Memorandum of Address," 2-3. Herbst's dissertation contains numerous explicit quotes from managers illustrating their divide-and-rule orientation.

17. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago (Chicago, 1922), 429; Barrett, Work and Community, 204-230.

18. Defender, 17 December, 1921, editorial: "The Strike at the Yards;" Chicago Tribune, 10 December, 1921, 2; Kampfert, II, part 2, 2-3; William Evans, Industrial Secretary of the Chicago Urban League, "The Negro in Chicago Industries," Opportunity I (February, 1923): 15-16; Herbst, The Negro, 63-65; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 273; Arvarh Strickland, History of the Chicago Urban League (Urbana, 1966), 72-73; Grossman, Land of Hope, 224-245.

19. Herbst, "The Negro," 131-132. On Black versus white quit-rates, see Herbst, The Negro, 127-147.

20. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 120; Herbst, The Negro, 36-37, 60-61, 72, 77; Taylor, Mexican Labor, 88; Herbst, "The Negro," 127-128; articles by Amalgamated Meat Cutters President Cornelius Hayes in the Butcher Workman (June 1921): 3, (July, 1921): 7; Browder, "Some Experiences," 40-41; Grossman, Land of Hope, 242.

21. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York, 1984), 32; Herbst, The Negro, 61, 63-65; Alan Spear, Black Chicago: the Making of a Black Ghetto (Chicago, 1967), 134-229; Defender, 17 December, 1921, editorial; Chicago Tribune, 10 December, 1921, 2; William Evans, "The Negro in Chicago Industries," Opportunity I (February, 1923): 15-16; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 273; Strickland, History, 72-73; Grossman, Land of Hope, 215, 224-245; Barrett, Work and Community, 212-13, 255; St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1946), passim. Quotation from Spear, Black Chicago, 160.

22. Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots of July, 1919 (New York, 1919), chapter two; Johnson, "New Frontage," 287; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago, 1932), 49, 79-81, 244; Tuttle, Race Riot, ix, 106, 159, 181, 208-241.

23. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Chicago's Industrial Workers, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, 1990), 36, 207, 354; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, V, Occupations, 447-450; Walter Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry, (Philadelphia, 1970), 29, 45-46; Scott, Occupational Changes, 221-22; Defender, 20 August, 1927, 10: "Race Pays Tribute to Great Magnates".

24. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 214-152, 223; "The Negro in Illinois Survey," Illinois Writers Project, Works Progress Administration, reels 2 and 5; Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, The Employment and Growth of Women in Slaughtering and Meatpacking (Washington, D.C., 1932), 20, 31, 51, 53; Herbst, The Negro, xviii-xxii, 70, 76-80; 85, 89, 112, 171; 70, 76-80; 85, 89, 112, 171; Scott, Occupational Changes, 219; Swift Arrow [Chicago plant newspaper] 28 December, 1928, 7 (for photographic evidence); transcribed oral history interview with Herbert March [hereafter "March Recollections"! by Elizabeth Balanoff, November 17, 1970, Roosevelt University Oral and Labor History Project [hereafter "ROLHC"], 55-56.

25. Paul Street, "Working in the Yards: A History of Labor in Chicago's Meatpacking Industry, 1900-1955," (Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1993), 112-115, 299-300.

26. Ibid, 300-301. Kampfert, "A History," vol. III, 22.

27. Herbst, The Negro, xxiii.

28. Elizabeth Hughes, Living Conditions for Small Wage Earners in Chicago (Chicago, 1925), 14-57; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 430-495; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 148-151; James Allen, The Negro Question (New York, 1936), 159-160; interview with Phil Weightman by Roger Horowitz and Rick Halpern, October 7-8, 1986, United Packinghouse Workers Oral History Project [hereafter "UPWOHP"], State Historical Society of Wisconsin, tape 288, side 2.

29. See Robert Slayton, Back of the Yards: the Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago, 1986), 81, for a typical example of informal occupational networks among white-ethnic workers in the stockyards. The weakness of such networks in northern Black industrial experience is discussed in Bodnar et al., Lives of Their Own, 80. For evidence of bureaucratic centralization of hiring in the core Chicago packinghouses during the war and early 1920s, see Kate Adams, Humanizing a Great Industry (Chicago, 1919), Armour and Company, Yearbook for 1918 (Chicago, 1919), 19; Harold Swift, "Guaranteed Time in the Stockyards," Survey 67 (November 1, 1931): 125.

30. Defender, 7 July, 1923, 3.

31. Grossman, Land of Hope, 226.

32. Interview with Elmer Thomas by Betty Burke of the Federal Writers' Project, Works Progress Administration, reproduced in Ann Banks, First Person America (New York, 1981), 68.

33. Chicago Commission, The Negro in Chicago, 32-33, 399-400, 579-591, 667; Herbst, The Negro, 50-51; Barrett, Work and Community, 221-224; Joseph Parot, "Ethnic versus Black Metropolis: The Origins of Polish-Black Housing Questions in Chicago," Polish-American Studies 29 (1972): 5-33; Thomas Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Baltimore, 1993), 96.

34. Mary McDowell, "The Negro in Industry," The World Tomorrow (March 1922): 72; Chicago Tribune, 8 December, 1921, 2: "List of Stockyards Riot Victims;" Slayton, Back of the Yards, 117, 129-148; Harold Preece, "What Goes on in Packingtown," Defender, 23 September, 1939, 15.

35. Chicago Commission, The Negro in Chicago, 424, 428-430; Foster, "The Packinghouse Campaign," 22-23; John Fitzpatrick, Meeting of the President's Mediation Commission, 38-40, quoted in Herbst, The Negro, 37; Tuttle, Race Riot, 143; Herbst, The Negro, 30-31, 37, 61; Barrett, Work and Community, 194-195; Grossman, Land of Hope, 214-215, 226-227, 242.

36. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 80-81; Allen, The Negro Question, 139, 160. For examples of Black capitalist thinking, see Defender, 23 April, 1923, editorial; 23 June, 1923, editorial; 22 September, 1923, editorial; 1 September, 1923, 13; 22 September, 1923, editorial; 13 October, 1923: "American Imperialism;" 17 November, 1923, Part II, p. 1: "Businessmen Hear Binga;" 24 November, 1923, pt.II, p. 1: "Race Men Find Chance in Steel Industry."

37. Herbst, The Negro, 63.

38. Grossman, Land of Hope, 244-295; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 101.

39. Defender, 4 August, 1923, 13. See also Defender, 1 September, 1923, 4; 10 November, 1923, 12-13; Grossman, Land of Hope, passim.

40. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 76-89, 302-341.

41. Defender, 29 August, 1919, editorial; 17 December, 1921, editorial; Brody, The Butcher Workmen, 85; Barrett, Work and Community, 205, 208-09, 212-213, 215; Grossman, Land of Hope, 232-234, 236-239.

42. Eric Arnesen, "Following the Color Line of Labor: Black Workers and the Labor Movement Before 1930," Radical History Review 55 (1987): 53-87; Grossman, 213.

43. Herbst, The Negro, 21-22; Barrett, Work and Community, 131-147; Harold Wilson, Mary McDowell, Neighbor (Chicago, 1928), 100.

44. Barrett, Work and Community, 209-210, 215; Halpern, "Race, Ethnicity, and Union," 42-43.

45. Defender, 29 August, 1919, editorial; 17 December, 1921, editorial; Spear, Black Chicago, 173; Barrett, Work and Community, 205, 212-213; Grossman, Land of Hope, 232-234, 236-239.

46. Herbst, The Negro, 64, n. 1.

47. Defender, 10 February, 1923, editorial: "Unionism;" 26 May, 1923, editorial: "Help Wanted;" 7 July, 1923, 3: "Next Step in Workers' Control;" 31 March, 1926; 19 November, 1927. For the complexity of the Defender's position on unions, see William Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Phillip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-1937 (Urbana, 1977), 44, 46-47, 131, 133.

48. Kampfert, "A History," II, 104-105; Spear, Black Chicago, 163; Herbst, The Negro, 29-66; Chicago Commission, The Negro in Chicago, 422-23, 427; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 269-282; Tuttle, Race Riot, 108-109, 121-156; Barrett, Work and Community, 212-224, 254-256. For Armour's meetings with Black leaders, see Herbst, "The Negro," 123.

49. George Arthur, "The YMCA Movement Among Negroes," Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life (March, 1923): 17-18; Chicago Commission, The Negro in Chicago, 427; Adams, Humanizing a Great Industry, 21; Spear, Black Chicago, 174; Tuttle, Race Riot, 151; Barrett, Work and Community, 213, 254; Grossman, Land of Hope, 200-202, 228.

50. John Calder, Capital's Duty; Carver, Labor and Personnel Problems; Street, "Working in the Yards," chapter 6.

51. Herbst, The Negro, xxi, 72, 77, 108, 127; Herbst, "The Negro," 127-132; Taylor, Mexican Labor, 88.

52. Eugene Brown, "Laborers From South Fail to Deliver the Goods," Defender, 9 June, 1923, 2; Herbst, The Negro, xix-xx, 71. Cf. Grossman, Land of Hope, 204-206. See Gottleib, Making Their Own Way, 117-145, for an interpretation of Black workers' response to northern industrial work discipline that is somewhat closer to mine.

53. Carpenter, "The Negro in Industry," 389; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 75; Chicago Commission, The Negro in Chicago, 373; Brown, "Southern Laborers;" Spear, Black Chicago 156; E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-97.

54. Gottleib, Making Their Own Way, 12, 17-33, 117-124; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made (New York, 1976), 285-304; W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York, 1979), 169, 225, 702; Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1980), 99-108; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), 132-34, 138. Foner (Politics and Ideology, 108), criticizes historians' tendency to interpret whites' complaints against "lazy and idle" Black workers as reflecting nothing more than the complainers' clear racism.

55. Johnson, The Negro, 81. See also Feldman, Racial Factors, 182-183; Defender, 10 August, 1927, Part II, p. 1: "Denied Chance to Prove Ability." For examples of Black workers' "inefficient" job behavior as protest against discrimination, see Gottleib, Making Their Own Way, 135-137.

56. Brown, "Southern Laborers."

57. Weightman, UPWOHP tape 284. Paul Street, "The Swift Difference: Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism in the Chicago Stockyards, 1917-1942," invited paper given at the Scholars Seminar on Work and Community in the Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry, Center for the Study of Recent U.S. History, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, April 15, 1995.

58. Interview with Herbert March by Les O'Rear, December 19, 1982, Illinois Labor History Society [hereafter "March ILHS tape"]; interview with March, 1986, UPWOHP tape 295; Weightman, UPWOHP tape 284; Preece, "What Goes On."

59. Weightman, UPWOHP tapes 284-287; Gerald Zahavi, Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: the Shoeworkers and Tanners Endicott-Johnson, 1890-1950 (Urbana, 1988), 99-125; Kampfert, "A History," IV, part 2, 5-6.

60. Preece, "What Goes;" Oscar Hutton, "The Negro Worker and the Labor Unions in Chicago" (Masters' Thesis, University of Chicago, 1939), 112 103-06; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 309, 314; interview with Anna Novack in Banks, First Person, 64; transcribed interview with Sophie Kosciolowski by Elizabeth Balanoff, December 16, 1970, ROLHC, 12; March Recollections, 75; taped interview with Vicky Starr by Rick Halpern and Bruce Fehn, UPWOHP, 1986; Street, "Working in the Yards," chapters nine and ten. Paul Street, "Breaking Up Old Hatreds and Breaking Through the Fear: The Rise of the CIO in Chicago's Meatpacking Industry, 1933-1940," Etudes d'Histoire et Politique, V (1986): 68-85; Paul Street, "The 'Best Union Men': Black Workers, Company Loyalty, and the Early CIO in Chicago's Stockyards," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Missouri Valley Historical Association, Omaha, Nebraska, March 15, 1991.

61. Herbst, The Negro, xxii-xxiii; Fogel, Negro in the Meat Industry, 49-51; March Recollections, 55-56; Novack interview, Banks, First Person, 64.

62. Thomas in Banks, First Person, 69

63. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 270-71; Defender, 14 January, 1933; Kampfert, "A History," IV, part 2, 3; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 83-89, 735-737; Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians: the Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago, 1935), 325-341. By the Depression years, Black workers' time-cards in the larger Chicago packinghouses were starred to ensure that they were removed first in the event of major layoffs and not given jobs reserved for whites. See CIO News: Packinghouse Workers' Edition, 2 January, 1939, 2; March Recollections, 55-56; Banks, First Person, 64.

64. William Z. Foster, "The Organization of Negro Workers," Daily Worker, 16 May, 1929; Herbert March, UPWOHP tapes 293-94; March ILHS tape; Stella Nowicki, "Back of the Yards," in Staughton and Alice Lynd, eds., Rank and File: Personal Histories of Working-Class Organizers (Princeton, 1981), 70, 74, 76; Weightman, UPWOHP tape 286, side 2; Gosnell, Negro Politicians, 32; March Recollections, 40.

65. March, UPWOHP tapes 294, side 1,298, side 1; Preece, "What Goes;" CIO News, 2 January, 1939; Kampfert, "A History," IV; March Recollections, 55-56; Swift CIO Flash, 26 June, 1939, 1; Banks, First Person, 64, 67-71; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 312-341; Weightman, UPWOHP tapes 285, side 2, 286, side 2; Nowicki, "Back of the Yards," 83, 88; Hutton, "The Negro Worker," 104-107, 109-112; Theodore Purcell, The Worker Speaks His Mind on Company and Union (Cambridge, MA, 1954), 57, 319, n.4; Newell, 241-242, 57; Banks, First Person, 67-71.

66. Interview with Kosciolowski, 33; Hutton, "The Negro Worker," 106; Weightman, tapes 284-286. For a suggestive analysis, see Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 317.

67. March ILHS tape; interviews with Weightman, Jesse Vaughn, and March, UPWOHP tapes 32-33, 299-300, 284-288, 295.

68. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, chapter eight; Street, "Working in the Yards," 118. See the discussion of "fraternal relative deprivation" in Thomas Pettigrew, "When a Black Candidate Runs for Mayor: Race and Voting Behavior," in Harlan Hahn, ed., People and Politics in Urban Society (Beverly Hills, 1971), 91-105. See the comments of Elmer Thomas in Banks, First Person, 69.

69. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 390-396; Hutton, "The Negro Worker," 112. In a brilliant 1980 historiographical essay, David Montgomery suggestively referred to the "simultaneous emergence of union, political, and race consciousness which Drake and Cayton sensed among Chicago's black packinghouse workers" during the late 1930s. The process described here might better be described as the merging of Black workers' longstanding historical race consciousness - previously expressed partly through company loyalty - with an unprecedentedly strong and widespread union consciousness on their part. Montgomery, "To Study the People: the American Working Class," Labor History 21 (Fall 1980): 510.

70. Hutton, "The Negro Worker," 112; Kampfert, "A History," IV, part 2, p.5.