Socialist Courier continues its occasional series of drawing attention to the forgotten figures of the Scottish labour movement.
Few have heard of the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, the largest and most important clash between management and organized labor in 19th-century Texas history. In Bruceville, 16 miles south of Waco, is a monument to Martin Irons, who was the strike leader. Some historians and contemporaries cast Irons as the epitome of impatient, romantic, and even deluded labor activist. Irons became a special target of the railroad bosses, the newspapers , particularly the New York Times, and he also angered Powderly, the head of the union because of his militant and unwavering leadership in the strike.
He was born in Dundee in 1827 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14. He was friendless, penniless, alone and had a clear head and a warm heart. He saw and felt the injustice suffered by his class.
He worked as a machinist for the railroads all over the Southwest. According to Ruth Allen's "The Great Southwest Strike" ( University of Texas, 1942), his politics consisted of anger "at the encroaching domination of corporate business as monopolist and employer, with agrarian insistence upon ownership of the land as the basis of liberty."
Irons, a master workman, joined the Knights of Labor in 1884 and helped form District Assembly 101, composed of workers for Jay Gould's Southwestern railroads. He was later elected chairman of the executive committee of the union assembly. Jay Gould was, to put it gently, a Robber Baron who controlled all the Southwestern railroads through interlocking companies. Jay Gould made himself famous by saying, “I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
In 1885, the year before the Great Strike, Gould fired the Knights of Labor shop men of the Wabash line, causing a walkout. The Knights working for other railroads refused to operate any train with Wabash cars and so brought Gould to the bargaining table. It was a great victory for the workers, and the Knights gained members increasing from about 100,000 to over 700,000, more than 30,000 members in Texas in 1885.
But Gould was determined to destroy the union. As Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party of America writes:
“as chairman of the executive board of the Knights of Labor of the Gould southwest railway system, defied capitalist tyranny, and from that hour he was doomed. All the powers of capitalism combined to crush him, and when at last he succumbed to overwhelming odds, he was hounded from place to place until he was ragged and foot-sore and the pangs of hunger gnawed at his vitals.”
In March 1886, Irons called a strike against Gould's Texas & Pacific Railway over the firing of a foreman in Marshall. The T&P strike soon spread to other railroad lines, as in the '85 strike. The workers uncoupled cars and seized switch junctures. Gould hired scabs and the Pinkertons (another Scot’s connection). The Pinkerton "detective agency" was union-busting force in those days, and also specialized in busting heads.
According to Debs “ Gould did not have gold enough to buy Irons. This was the greatest crime of labor's honest leader. The press united in fiercest denunciation. Every lie that malignity could conceive was circulated. In the popular mind Martin Irons was the blackest-hearted villain that ever went unhung. Pinkerton blood-hounds tracked him night and day.”
Gould also asked for military assistance from the governors of states affected by the strike. Texas Gov. John Ireland sent the state militia and the Texas Rangers to Buttermilk Switch in Fort Worth. This early example of using the Rangers for union-busting is of particular interest to those who remember the Rangers' strike-breaking activities in the Valley during efforts to organize the farmworkers in the 1960s. The ensuing violence turned public opinion against the strikers. Gould refused to negotiate, and the strike failed.
“Failure of the Great Southwest Strike represented the first major defeat sustained by the Knights of Labor and proved to be a fatal blow to their vision of an industrial union that would unite all railroad workers in the Southwest into 'one big union.' Once again, an emerging labor organization was crushed when competing with powerful, determined and well-organized industrialists in command of nationally based corporations," Ruth Allen concludes.
Irons had served, suffered for and honored his class. But he had lost. His class now turned against him and joined in the execration of the enemy. This pained him more than all else. But he bore even this without a murmur. “He was a despised agitator and shunned of men too mean and sordid to comprehend the lofty motive that inspired him....He endured the taunts and jeers and all the bitter mockery of fate with patient heroism."
Martin Irons was blacklisted and could not hold a regular job. He moved to St. Louis, Little Rock, Ark., and Fort Worth for brief periods, sometimes using an assumed name. Debs describes the life:
“For fourteen long years he fought single-handed the battle against persecution. He tramped far, and among strangers, under an assumed name, sought to earn enough to get bread. But he was tracked like a beast and driven from shelter. For this “poor wanderer of a stormy day” there was no pity. He had stood between his class and their oppressors-he was brave, and would not flinch; he was honest, and he would not sell; this was his crime, and he must die.’
In 1894, his health was failing; G.B. Harris of Bruceville, a socialist, offered him a home. Allen reports that Irons continued to work for social reform until his death in 1900. Debs says when Irons “spoke of Socialism he seemed transfigured, and all the smouldering fires within his soul blazed from his sunken eyes once more.”
A lot of busted heads and broken lives went into making the eight-hour workday a reality. Think how mad Martin Irons and all those other fighters would be at ho the corporations are getting away with mandatory overtime and 60-hour work-weeks. The thing about corporations is that they never give anything away out of the goodness of their non-existent hearts. The only social obligation of a corporation is to make money. Workers still have to fight for a decent life.
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