Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Bay View Massacre

WYTS: Green Bay Packers. Original post here.

In theory I'm supposed to link these events to places sports teams play. The Packers play in a tiny town called Green Bay, thanks to a quirk of history. Green Bay is extremely boring - historically speaking, I've never been there personally. The closest thing to a riot in this town was in November 1984 when Mrs. Nesbit got into a shouting match with a store manager at the SuperValu because her 30% off coupon for Bratwurst had expired and the cashier wouldn’t honor it. The people of northern Wisconsin were stunned that such things could happen there. There’s a monument on the spot today. #NeverForget. 

Anyway, let’s go to a less boring-place, Milwaukee. The Bay View Massacre of 1886!

This May 5th shooting took place a day after the much more famous Haymarket Affair, on May 4th. That was a bigger protest with bigger ramifications. Both events were part of the same sequence of labor rights battles focused on a single target: the eight-hour workday. In Chicago’s Haymarket Square, somebody other than the anarchists blamed for the act, tossed dynamite into the crowd, setting the police and union organizers off against each other. 11 people died, dozens were injured, and four innocent men were hanged.

Bears, fans, don’t get hype. The annoying thing about writing this history tied to sports teams is that you end up with some cities that do not have interesting histories, like Green Bay, and some with just way too much. Chicago would need at least three NFL teams to do it justice, NYC would need about seven, Rome needs like ten, please put a team in West Virginia too. But consider this your de facto Haymarket Affair coverage since these two battles are so closely-linked, only 92 miles away on Interstate 41 today.

When Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the full exploitation horror of factory labor and bourgeoisie power was only just getting started. Some factories were bad even in the 1840s and textiles cost a lot of little Dickensian moppets’ their fingers, but to get to Upton Sinclair grotesque scenes, we need to jump forward some decades. The second industrial revolution is when you imagine when you think of urban factory exploitation. Most workers were just off the farms, or just off the boats, and were very expendable to management. This was a brand new kind of human existence at mass scale, and there of course, conflicts. Socialism gets its big day on the world stage with the 1871 Paris Commune, the first Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which ended badly... as did all the other ones that followed. (Paris, get an NFL team and maybe we'll talk about the Commune more.)

By the 1870s and 1880s, labor questions were becoming un-ignorable factors in politics in the US as well. The Republican Party on a national level shifted tracks from its origins in emancipation to full-on business-y business concerns, more on this to come. The right to strike at all was an open question and going on strike meant being ready to go to war. The bourgeoisie were better prepared for the battle and would shed blood to keep the workers quiet.

The focus in the 1880s was this: “8 hours labor, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest”, as the banners read. This had been a demand on and off across every English-speaking part of the world through this century. There were no guarantees of protection from exploitation, bosses could work you to death - literally. Shifts could be as long as 16 hours. And forget four-day workweeks, you had one day off a week: Sunday, for church. The American Federation of Labor (AFL, not the football one) is founded this year, 1886, to organize skilled tradesmen. Meanwhile the older Knights of Labor were more ambitious, trying to combine all of the working class, skilled/unskilled, white/Black, male/female into a single solidarity force with vast social reforms goals. In 1886 they had almost 800,000 members and wanted to make a major statement.

Instead, they were struck down.

Milwaukee was growing rapidly in the back half of the 1800s, it doubled in population between 1880 and 1890. A lot of this new population were Polish, escaping repression and poverty back home in the German and Russian Empires. They still did not have their own country even after a century of revolutionary movements. They built their own grand Catholic churches in their new home, such as the gorgeous St. Stanislaus Church on Mitchell Street where a lot of our strike was organized out of. They took part in local politics, and founded in 1874, the Kosciuszko Guard, named after a Polish general who served in the Continental Army in our Revolution. Polish immigrants were often on the bottom of the wage scale, so they were very active in the 8-hour strike movements and other labor reforms.

However, as you can see, you have Poles in on both sides, strikers and in the gendarmerie. You could live right next door to the man who would shoot you, going to the same church and social clubs.

Starting May 1st, 1885, in events that would inspire International Worker’s Day/May Day, a general strike hit much of the industrial US. That included Milwaukee, which shut down nearly every business in town from the beloved breweries on up. 25,000 laborers marched in parades and went factory to factory to stop the machines and force the bosses to agree to the 8-hour demands. The last factory standing was the biggest one in town, the Milwaukee Iron Company (its name seems to vary depending on the source, I believe it changed names about half a dozen times) in the Bay View neighborhood. That business made steel ties for the booming railroad industry. On May 4th, the strike focused here, its Final Boss. Governor Jeremiah L. Rusk was already in the city, and as a good Republican, he bent to the demands of his terrified businessmen clients. He sent in National Guard units to protect the Foundry. There was a brief stand-off the evening of the 4th, but it ended with a peaceful retreat as the day had grown long.

The next day, the 5th, news had arrived of the Haymarket Square bombing, and that only increased tensions. Strikers again marched on the Steel Foundry, chanting slogans like "Eight hours is our battlecry" and “The workmen do not beg, they demand" (gotta get a tattoo of that). Many of the Poles in the strike then saw their neighbors in the Kosciuszko Guard arrayed before them, in battle lines. The governor’s orders, we’re told, were only to fire if the strikers attempted to enter the steel works. Somehow that got misinterpreted to “fire on the crowd immediately”. The Guard would not even wait to see the whites of the enemy’s eyes, to borrow a Revolutionary War quote, giving them only 200 yards before they started firing at around 9 AM.

The volley of fire from Pole-on-Pole violence killed about seven people. Two of the dead were just onlookers, one a boy of thirteen. Chaos erupted as the strikers fled for their lives, leaving Catholic priests to give last rights in the middle of the street. A couple more unidentified bodies were also found nearby, nobody knows who they were. The gunfire broke the strike at once.

Governor Rusk was too chickenshit to take any responsibility for the shooting. Some factories had bent to the eight-hour demands during the height of the strike, then went back on the agreements, and in fact, fired their Polish workers. It seems the anti-Polish sentiment did not last long, Milwaukee became more interested in anti-Chinese riots by 1889.

Robert Shilling, a Knights of Labor organizer, and socialist Paul Grottkau were both put on trial for “conspiracy to riot”. Grottkau served six weeks in prison. They’d both be involved with the People’s Party in Wisconsin AKA, the Populist Party who were destroyed in the Wilmington Coup, remember them? Small world. In the 1888 election Milwaukee responded by electing a more pro-labor city government. In 1910 the first socialist mayor of a major city, Emil Seidel, took office in Milwaukee. The Knights of Labor were so stunned by the reprisals in Milwaukee and - but mainly Chicago, let’s be honest, that mattered a lot more - that it rapidly faded away as a major political force. The AFL and other unions would pick up its sword, but a single general labor union across all social lines never reemerged in the US.

Capital won in 1886, and would keep fighting against eight-hour workdays for generations. Unions kept demanding it as a general standard of fair labor laws, winning most of those battles by around WWI. It would not be until the New Deal that a 40-hour workweek became finally became enshrined in law. Companies have been trying to circumvent it ever since.

Governor Rusk went on to serve in the Benjamin Harrison administration, a presidency of not very much importance at all. The Milwaukee Iron Company seems to have shut down around 1929. The last remnants of the railroad industry in Milwaukee were gone by the latter-half of the 20th century, with the slow painful death of the Milwaukee Road railroad, dying a century after our story in 1986.