What did contemporaries say about labor issues?
Just started to read a 1910 book titled “Strikes: When To Strike, How To Strike,” by Oscar T. Crosby. The joy in reading century-old writing is that it was expected to be colorful and personal and usually it doesn’t take a reader long to understand a writer’s take on the subject.
Here’s the opening:
“In the word ‘Strike’ there is something manly, inspiriting – violent.
“It suggests the blacksmith’s hammer, the woodsman’s axe, the patriot’s sword — a trinity of tools with which man has made for himself, poor savage that he was, a home and a country. He has struck against Nature who would starve and freeze him; he has struck against his fellows who would enslave him.”
Okay. That’s one side.
“But the blacksmith has forged manacles for the free; the edge of the axe has been laid against the sheltering roof-tree; the sword has been in the assassin’s hand. Men have struck for bad things as well as for good things. It is always so. Every force, every instrument that may be used to help, may also be used to hurt.”
So perhaps Mr. Crosby will attempt a balanced look at strikes as he perceived them in 1910. If so, it will be an unusual treatise from that age. Nevertheless, it will prove instructive.
Why read such an archaic work? Because to understand what people thought at the time of the Bisbee Deportation, it’s necessary to know what they were reading. No less than a complete understanding of the American Revolution requires reading what Jefferson read, as well as reading Jefferson, so too is the requirement of understanding issues of labor and patriotism a century ago. One must digest the left, the right and the center to understand the whole.
Fortunately, men were unabashed in stating their opinions and certainly they held them on all issues of the age, great and small. Fortunately, too, there was a weeding process that’s not as pronounced today — editing by the publishing house. No one could do easily what I’m doing now, and disseminate his opinion to one and all with little or no vetting against established thought. Which is many ways is good for historical research. Otherwise, who could possibly consume even a small percentage of what was written?
I will close now and begin to read chapter 2 — “Morality of the Strike.”