Introduction

I am completing this article, in mid-November, as news reports indicate that the grand jury’s decisions will be announced in the near future. Unlike perhaps too many others, however, I do not intend to offer unsolicited advice to the young activists who have maintained a steady presence on the streets about what they should do next. They did well enough on their own at the beginning and they have undoubtedly learned from the events of the last two months. By way of example, a recent article on VICE described developments within the movement this way:

Some protesters had never really thought much about the civil rights movement before, let alone imagined that their activism would be likened to it.

“I thought it was just a protest, but my brother, who’s a little older than me, was like, ‘No, this is a civil rights movement,” Dontey Carter, a leader of the Lost Voices and a regular presence at the protests, told VICE News. “I was like, ‘Really?’ I didn’t really put it in that perspective. I thought I was just a protester, but he’s like, ‘No, you’re a civil rights leader,’ and I was like, ‘Wow…’ ”

Carter, a 23-year-old former Crips member and a father of two small children, had never been to a protest prior to August 9, when Brown was shot. He was at a friend’s house in Ferguson when he saw television news broadcasts of the crowd assembling on Canfield Drive.

“I went down there and people started protesting and standing up, and I was like, ‘This is where it’s at,’ ” he said. “Me being there by myself felt kind of weird, but when we all did it together, it was amazing.”

By the time Brown was buried at a funeral attended by thousands of people, Carter and nine others he met on the streets had formed the Lost Voices—a group of Ferguson youth that camped out on West Florissant Avenue, the epicenter of the protests, for weeks before police eventually removed them, as Carter put it, “because we were taking too much of a stand.”

But that was just the beginning.

“It went bigger than camping out. Camping out was just to make a statement, to show that we would not be moved,” Carter said. “The officers talked to the business owners, saying that they would get some type of violation, but we still kept the movement going.”

The group was at “ground zero,” as its members called it, every night—facing SWAT teams, tear gas, and even a noose that someone left in a parking lot near their encampment. When VICE News spoke with two girls from the group at Brown’s funeral, they told us they called themselves Lost Voices because they wanted to speak for a generation of poor and marginalized black youth who had never been listened to.

Less than two months later, the group had gained dozens of friends in Ferguson and hundreds of supporters on Facebook. In October they dropped the “lost” and changed their name to Found Voices.

“Once we were lost but now we are found,” Carter said. “We were the Lost Voices but then people got a hold of who we really are, what this movement is truly about. It became our voice. We’re not lost anymore.”

Carter described the past two months as a “spiritual awakening.”

“My life changed radically,” he remarked. “I had friends die left and right—drugs, gangs, violence—and I’ve pulled away from all of that working for the movement.”

He’s not the only one. Ferguson’s black community became united during the protests, with groups setting beefs aside to march on the streets with a common purpose. Protesters recognize that police brutality is just one form of violence that intrudes on their lives. As they work to redress this, they have also come together in other ways.

“There was so much depression going on around here. It’s hard for you to actually think straight, to do something with yourself, cause there’s so much around you that’s negative,” Carter said, adding that the movement has changed that. “It wasn’t all about me. Other friends that were all about gangs and violence, they let all of that go, and they stood together. They weren’t too concerned about any of the stuff that was going on beforehand.”

“People are gonna wake up, they’re gonna take the wool off their eyes, and they’re gonna see the truth, cause only the truth can set you free,” he went on, switching into the protest leader role he naturally adopted. “I’ve seen the truth. I understand what’s going on. I understand how the system works, and I just want the people that’s unaware of what’s going on to be conscious of how the system works.”

On the other hand, I do have some ideas about the larger set of circumstances that resulted in Michael Brown’s murder and some suggestions for things that might be done to bring the fight where it needs to be fought beyond the streets of Ferguson.

My major points will be the following:

• There are, somewhat predictable, scripts of reaction, which the police, their organizations, the prosecutors, the elected officials, and even many of those who oppose what the police do follow in the aftermath of police killings and it would be wise if we recognized their unfolding.

• The events surrounding Michael Brown’s murder are the product of a complex set of historical developments in the St. Louis area. Those developments include: the central place of Missouri in the struggle over slavery; patterns of racial discrimination across the better part of the twentieth century; deindustrialization and the emergence of the financial and real estate sectors as centers of economic activity over the last forty years; policing practices; and the development of a “new whiteness” in the post–Civil Rights era.

• The key to mounting a fight against police harassment, assaults, and killings is to break up the social bloc that supports the cops. In the case of the St. Louis area, this bloc largely resides in the suburbs with large numbers of white residents that are the legacy of almost one hundred years of making segregation.

The Scripts

As most readers will probably know, police killings are not all that uncommon. When they occur, a somewhat typical train of events ensues. The authorities (at the local and federal levels) promise investigations. The police unions quickly insist that no one should pre-judge the cop involved. Indeed, they usually claim that there’s a good chance that the victim had been involved in some kind of criminal behavior and/or that he (almost always) had engaged in threatening behavior. In the Michael Brown case and that of Eric Garner in Staten Island (in New York City), those arguments needed to be softened a bit because of the availability of video evidence about what had actually happened.

In any case, after the killing has occurred, legal proceedings are initiated which stretch out for as long as possible—to buy time for the anger that emerged in response to the killing to die down. In Ferguson, this approach has not worked very well because those on the streets have been determined to refuse to let the anger “die down.” Michael Brown’s reputation was still fair game, however. During the drawn-out proceedings, leaks from various sources are used to suggest that, once again, the victim was not a law-abiding citizen in the past and that perhaps there is good reason to suspect that he got what he more or less deserved. Meanwhile, efforts to support the accused killer are put into full gear—support organizations are formed, funds are raised, buttons are sold and rallies are held. Not surprisingly, relatives and friends of police officers play a prominent role in these efforts. And everyone waits to see what the grand jury will do.

Which brings us to the moment that we’re at now. Many are convinced that no charges will be made against Officer Wilson; some (including this writer) think that the grand jury will return a number of less than really serious indictments with the expectation that Officer Wilson will be found innocent of the most serious and possibly guilty of the least serious; almost no one seems to believe that he will face serious charges.

Different groups are preparing. The police equip themselves with more weapons to use against protesters and develop plans for how they’re going to deal with various scenarios of violence and the governor considers calling out the National Guard.^[1]

Some, mostly well-meaning folks, offer suggestions for how to keep things under control. See, for example, the statement of the Don’t Shoot Coalition

Other radical groups are preparing to urge the activists in Ferguson to return to the streets and engage once again in rebellious, if not riotous, actions. As I mentioned above, I’ll abstain from giving advice to the activists on the streets of Ferguson. But I do have some advice for others:

1. They should not cooperate with the government.
2. They should pay more attention to the social base of the support for Officer Wilson and try to imagine how they might mount a challenge to that support in the communities where it is concentrated. In other words, they should think about confronting not just the police on the streets of Ferguson but their supporters across the white belt of suburbs around St. Louis.

Which is why I’ll now turn to an effort to understand the historical development of that base of support.

Historical Developments

Missouri—Not Far From the Center of the Country

If we leave out Alaska and Hawaii, the geographical center of the United States is in northern Kansas, but Missouri, its neighboring state, has probably played a more central role in the nation’s history. Missouri was among the territories claimed by the United States under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, part of the fallout of the defeat of Napoleon’s army by the free people of Haiti. From soon afterwards, slavery was the defining issue.

In 1820, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state along with Maine as a free state. At the same time, the so-called Missouri Compromise prohibited the extension of slavery to any other parts of the territory covered by the Purchase (territory that includes what is now Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, as well as Louisiana west of the Mississippi River). Here’s a map with.a bit of an explanation of the geography:

While slavery was legal in the state, not all African Americans were enslaved. This seems to have especially been true in St. Louis. Furthermore, as was the case in many Southern cities, slaves who could perform various kinds of skilled labor were often “rented out” to individuals or businesses. To some extent, these workers were able to move around the city. As a result, both free and enslaved individuals were in frequent contact with each other. At the same time, this hardly meant that slavery was not a permanent reality, and St. Louis became a major center for the buying and selling of slaves. By the 1840s, about 5 percent of the population in St. Louis was black—approximately two-thirds of whom were enslaved. As elsewhere, the stage was set for a battle between the supporters and opponents of slavery.

The Road to the Civil War

Elijah Lovejoy moved to Missouri in 1827 and became the editor of the St. Louis Observer He subsequently became a.Presbyterianminister and established a church. His Observer editorials criticized slavery (he identified himself as an abolitionist—in favor of the abolition of slavery) and other church denominations for their failure to do the same. In May 1836, after anti-abolitionist opponents in St. Louis destroyed his printing press for the third time, Lovejoy moved across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois (a free state). He began publishing the Alton Observer On November 7, 1837, a pro-slavery mob attacked the warehouse where the printing press was housed. Lovejoy and his supporters exchanged shots with the mob and he was fatally wounded. He became an abolitionist hero.

In 1846, Dred Scott (a slave who had often been “rented out”) sued for his, his wife’s and their two daughters’ freedom in St. Louis. Scott had traveled with his owner John Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, who was frequently transferred to different army bases. During these transfers, Scott spent time in Illinois, a free state, and the Wisconsin Territory, now Minnesota—where slavery was prohibited because of the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. .^[2] Subsequently, the army transferred Emerson to St. Louis and then to Louisiana (places where slavery was legal). After getting married in Louisiana, Emerson commanded the Scotts to return to him. They did so.

The Emersons and the Scotts returned to Missouri in 1840. In 1842, Emerson left the army but died soon afterward. His widow inherited his estate, including the Scotts. For three years after Emerson’s death, she continued to hire out the Scotts. In 1846, Scott attempted to purchase his and his family’s freedom, but Mrs. Emerson refused, leading Scott to file his suit in St. Louis Circuit Court. The Scott v. Emerson case was first tried in 1847. The judgment went against Scott but the judge called for a retrial because of problems with the evidence. In 1850, a second jury found that Scott and his wife should be freed since they had been illegally held as slaves during their time in the free jurisdictions of Illinois and Wisconsin. Mrs. Emerson appealed. In 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the lower court ruling, and ruled that the precedent of “once free always free” was no longer the case, overturning 28 years of legal precedent.

Under Missouri law at the time, after Dr. Emerson had died, the powers of the Emerson estate were transferred to his wife’s brother, John Sanford. Because Sanford was a citizen of New York, Scott’s lawyers argued that the case should be brought before federal courts. After losing again in federal district court, they appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Taney delivered the majority opinion. The Court ruled that any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, was not a citizen of the United States and that neither the Ordinance of 1787 nor the Missouri Compromise legislation could grant either freedom or citizenship to non-white individuals. The Court also ruled that because Scott was the private property of his owners he was subject to the provision of the Fifth Amendment that prohibited the taking of property from its owner “without due process.”

Following the ruling, Scott and his family were returned to Emerson’s widow. Due to changes in Mrs. Emerson’s circumstances (she had married into an abolitionist family), the Scott family was set free less than three months after the decision. While the consequences of the decision were not devastating to the Scotts, the decision nonetheless made clear the determination of the slave power to preserve the bondage of millions of people.

Scott went to work as a porter in a St. Louis hotel but died less than two years later. He was originally interred in Wesleyan Cemetery in St. Louis, but his coffin was later moved to the Catholic Calvary Cemetery.^[3]

A video filmed in the cemetery offers a moving appreciation of the significance of Dred Scott and the decision that bears his name.

Scott’s wife survived him by 18 years and there are descendants of the family still living in the St. Louis area.^[4]

The prohibition against slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territories had already been effectively ended by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which stipulated that the slave or free status of those states would be decided by the popular sovereignty (votes) of white males. That legislation opened up the chapter now known as Bloody Kansas, in which slavery supporters from Missouri served as shock troops to terrorize those who had moved to Kansas to oppose slavery. Which brings us to John Brown in Missouri.

In December 1858, Brown heard that a slave named Daniels from Missouri had crossed into Kansas looking for assistance in rescuing his family from sale to another slave owner. By the next day, Brown had organized a raiding party of nearly twenty abolitionists. The band split up into two groups so that they might be able to free other slaves on the same trip. Brown’s group captured Daniels’s owner, Harvey Hicklan, and rescued the Daniels family. All told, the two groups freed eleven slaves. Slave owners and their supporters were outraged by the theft of property and the killing of one of their own that had taken place during the raid. The governor of Missouri offered a $3,000 reward for Brown’s capture immediately afterward.But Brown was not done. For three winter months, he led the rescued slaves across Nebraska and Iowa. Along the way, anti-slavery folks provided food, clothing, accommodations and protection for the fugitives. The freed people secretly boarded a train to Chicago and another one to Detroit. Finally, they took a ferry to freedom in Windsor, Canada. But John Brown did not rest. The Missouri raid launched him on the last great deed of his life—the assault on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Although the assault failed and Brown was executed, it “startled the South into madness” and led step by step to the war of slave emancipation.^[5]

The Civil War

While Missouri had been a slave state, it was not clear which side it would be on during the Civil War. In part, this was the result of the arrival of large numbers of German immigrants in the St. Louis area during the 1850s. Some of them were refugees from the failed German revolution of 1848, and some were followers of Karl Marx, including Joseph Wedemeyer.^[6] They began to make their presence felt in 1861. On New Year’s Day, German immigrants stormed a slave auction to stop it from going forward. At the same time, the St. Louis Arsenal housed a large supply of weapons and ammunition. The pro-slavery governor of the state launched a plan to seize it. German immigrants with some Irish and native-born allies mobilized against the plot. Eventually more than 5,000 men assembled to protect the arsenal. When the Confederate supporters attempted an attack on the arsenal, they were overwhelmed by a superior force and surrendered without a fight. Soon afterward, many of those German immigrants volunteered to serve in the Union Army, but not much actual fighting took place in Missouri.

After the end of the war, Missouri adopted a new state constitution that prohibited slavery and required that African-American children be enrolled in schools (that would only enroll black children). Soon afterward, the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the establishment of Reconstruction governments across the South appeared to herald a new day. But the promise would not last and the end was tragic. Instead, the Reconstruction era launched at the end of the war ended in tragedy, with all of the promise of emancipation squandered, and, as W.E.B. Du Bois commented, “Democracy died, save in the hearts of Black folk.”^[7]

The Making of a Segregated Metropolitan Area

During the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the black population of St. Louis grew. Black and white residents mostly lived in separate parts of the city but housing conditions were not necessarily worse in the black sections. But soon enough, whites adopted a method to their madness. In 1915, voters approved a local law that prohibited any one from moving to a block where more than 75 percent of residents were of a different race. When the law was overthrown by a court decision, the St. Louis Real Estate Board supported the establishment of neighborhood associations whose members signed fifty-year covenants forbidding sales to non-whites. That practice would not be outlawed until a Supreme Court decision in 1949.

In the years before fair housing laws passed, black real estate brokers faced death threats, assault and bombings of their residences by angry whites intent on policing the color line. Furthermore, white vigilantes frequently attacked blacks that were attempting to move into white neighborhoods or to use whites-only recreational facilities. According to George Lipsitz,

When the city of St. Louis announced the desegregation of its municipally owned and operated swimming pool in Fairgrounds Park in 1949, thirty Black children showed up for a swim. More than two hundred whites brandishing weapons and shouting racist epithets surrounded the pool to drive them out. Police officers escorted the Black youths to safety, but whites began attacking Blacks they encountered in and around the park. By nightfall, five thousand whites assembled at the site. They cornered Black pedestrians, attacking them with lead pipes, baseball bats, and knives. Two white men advised the crowd to “get bricks and smash their heads.” Police officers restored order temporarily but in response to the upheaval the city rescinded the desegregation order and closed its pools entirely.^[8]

In that same year, the American Housing Act dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in urban renewal and the construction of public housing. In St. Louis, the Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority expanded the Gateway Mall (a green belt that stretches from the Arch at the Mississippi River through downtown) by tearing down what were considered to be slums, and the Housing Authority quickly launched plans for the building of 5,000 units of low-rent public housing in five major locations—Plaza Square, Cochran Gardens, Darst-Webbe, the Vaughn Apartments and the Pruitt-Igoe Apartments. While the “projects” were initially welcomed as a great benefit and were somewhat integrated, they quite rapidly lost their appeal; the white residents left and, as the developments filled with black tenants, they were effectively abandoned. Soon enough, many of those black residents left for other dwellings.^[9]

By the end of the 1960s, blacks had been crowded into the north side of the city. In How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz summarized the developments:

In a city where direct discrimination confined Blacks to an artificially constricted housing market, landlords and real estate brokers were free to charge them high costs for inferior and unhealthy dwellings. Slum clearance, urban renewal, and redevelopment programs made a bad situation worse by bulldozing houses inhabited by Blacks without providing adequate replacement housing. The majestic Gateway Arch on the river-front, the corridor of municipal buildings and parks near City Hall and Union Station, the midtown redevelopment area near St. Louis University, and the downtown baseball and football stadia all stand on land formerly occupied by housing available to Blacks. Seventy-five percent of the people displaced by construction of new federal highway interchanges in the downtown area were Blacks. Redevelopment in the Mill Creek Valley area alone displaced some twenty thousand Black residents, creating new overcrowded slums in the areas into which they were able to relocate.^[10]

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Federal Housing Administration used strict “redlining” guarantees to determine eligibility for its subsidized home mortgage loans. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government’s highway building program increased the value of homes in racially exclusive suburbs. Lipsitz writes about St. Louis:

Even after direct references to race disappeared from federal appraisers’ manuals, race remained the crucial factor in determining whether borrowers receive federally supported mortgage loans. Only 3.3 percent of the 400,000 FHA mortgages in the greater St. Louis area went to Blacks between 1962 and 1967, most of them in the central city. Only 56 mortgages (less than 1 percent ) went to Blacks in the suburbs of St. Louis County. Three savings-and-loan companies with assets of more than a billion dollars worked together to redline the city effectively, lending less than $100,000 on residential property inside the city limits in 1975. The local savings-and-loan institutions made loans totaling $500 million in the greater St. Louis area in 1977, but just $25 million of that total (less than 6 percent ) went to the city, almost all of it to the two mostly whites zip codes at the municipality’s southern border.^[11]

A 1990 survey reported that St. Louis was the eleventh-most segregated city among the more than two hundred largest metropolitan areas in the United States. (The stark character of the segregation is well known in St. Louis and is reflected in the common use of the term “Delmar Divide” to specify the boundary between white and black St. Louis. The “Divide” has even become the topic of a BBC documentary.)

While the disadvantages of segregation for blacks are often enough acknowledged, what is not usually acknowledged are the advantages for “whites.” Lipsitz argues:

Although many of the practices that secured these gains initially were outlawed by the civil rights laws of the 1960s, the gains whites received for them were already locked in place . Even more important, nearly every significant decision made since then about urban planning, education, employment, transportation, taxes, housing, and health care has served to protect the preferences, privileges and property that whites first acquired from an expressly and overtly discriminate market [emphases added].^[12]

For the white folks, their relative advantages led them “to believe that people with problems are problems, that the conditions inside the ghetto are created by ghetto residents themselves.”

Not surprisingly, many of the black people held more or less captive in undesirable circumstances in the city of St. Louis looked to get out. But they did not escape the effects of segregation. Once again, Lipsitz:

Since the 1970s, Blacks have gradually started moving to the suburbs. Yet Black suburbanization is largely concentrated in areas with falling rents and declining property values, most often in older inner ring suburbs. For example, census tracts that had more than 25 percent Black populations in St. Louis County in 1990 were concentrated in one corridor adjacent to the city’s north side. Suburbs with Black populations above 60 percent (Bel Ridge, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Hillsdale, Kinloch, Northwoods, Norwood Court, Pagedale, Pinelawn, Uplands Park, and Wellston) lay in contiguous territory outside the city limits.^[13]

Things have not changed much since. Earlier this year, researchers at Washington University and St. Louis University reported that African Americans constituted between 45 percent and 97 percent of the population in the zip codes covering the northern part of the city and the suburban cities just north of them (including Ferguson). At the same time, in the zip code areas south and west of the city, African Americans constituted less than 5 percent of the population.

This profound cleavage and the sharp differences in living conditions and life possibilities that it both creates and symbolizes has left its marks in the minds of the residents of both the white and the black communities. Here’s an illuminating, and contemptible, recent video by a white man traveling in his car through the heart of the black community of St. Louis.

I wasn’t able to find any comparable travelogue produced by a black journey through the white suburbs, but I believe that it’s not too hard to imagine why we have witnessed the extraordinary solidarity on the streets of Ferguson. That solidarity “stems not so much from an abstract idealism as from necessity. Pervasive housing discrimination and the segregation it consolidates leaves Blacks with a clearly recognizable linked fate. Because it is difficult to move away from other members of their group, they struggle to turn the radical divisiveness created by overcrowding and competition for scarce resources into mutual recognition and respect.”^[14]

Deindustrialization, the FIRE Economy and Policing in the Post–Civil Rights Era

At more or less the same time as the segregated world of St. Louis was being solidified, momentous changes began to change the shape of the United States economy and the lives of people across the country. St. Louis was in the center of the maelstrom.

Let’s go back. By 1900, St. Louis had a population of 575,000 people (the fourth largest in the country at a time when New York City’s population was about 3.5 million) and had become a large manufacturing and transportation center. By 1930, it had grown to about 820,000 people while New York had doubled to just under 7 million. The city was still a vibrant center of manufacturing. But, starting with the beginning of the Depression, the city lost half of its manufacturing production; more than 30 percent of the population was unemployed and black unemployment was at 80 percent. Only with the introduction of large scale war production in anticipation of the entry of the United States into World War II, and the further expansion of that production once the United States joined the conflict, did the number of jobs and residents increase again. But the uptick was short-lived and, as soon as Japan surrendered, war contracts were terminated and thousands lost their jobs. By 1960, the city’s population had declined to about 750,000. To some extent, the decline within the city was offset by the rapid suburbanization that took place afterward—made possible by the construction of new highways and thereby spreading the population ever further away from the center of town.^[15] However, a relatively high level of industrial employment was maintained until the 1970s. But then the bottom started falling out—between 1979 and 1982, St. Louis lost 44,000 industrial jobs. This led to the loss of still more people from the city.

The decline of St. Louis reflected the emergence of a new era in American social and economic life—an era characterized by:

• factory closures and plant transfers to lower-waged locations;
• elimination of jobs through automation;
• extensive technical innovation in communication, transportation and production—resulting in still more job losses;
• the development of finance as a major source of profits (even for industrial firms);
• a rise in part-time or temporary jobs as primary employment;
• the depopulation and physical destruction of cities (such as St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore);
• gentrification in many urban neighborhoods and the rise in political importance of the social groups formed by that gentrification (although this is not much of a reality in St. Louis);
• sharp decreases in unionization rates in the private sector;
• lowered wages and reduced benefits;
• the establishment of credit (at either normal or usury rates) as an indispensable way of life for many members of the middle and working classes.

These large developments have had specific features in St. Louis.

Land and property have been important for a long time. The importance they have in cities is quite different from the importance they have elsewhere. Within the cities, the value of the land has little to do with its fertility or the resources hidden beneath its surface. Instead, it has a great deal to do with relative desirability. Residential real estate speculation within cities has been preoccupied with manipulating desirability—most recently symbolized by gentrification. But gentrification, at least in the forms that it has taken in cities like Washington and New York, has not been a major development in St. Louis. At the same time, commercial real estate speculation has been preoccupied with the value of attractions—things that bring people with money to places where they will spend it—museums, monuments, theaters, parks and sports arenas. This speculation has constituted the predominant model of urban economic development for the last few decades and has fostered intense inter-city and intra-city competition to provide developers with the most favorable terms. Which brings us to professional sports.

Lipsitz begins his third chapter, “Spectatorship and Citizenship,” with a sports story—the St. Louis Rams’ win in the 2000 Super Bowl over the Tennessee Titans:

When the St. Louis Rams defeated the Tennessee Titans on January 23, 2000, to win the National Football League Super Bowl championship, the team’s players, coaches, and management deserved only part of the credit. Sports journalists covering the games cited the passing of Kurt Warner and the running of Marshall Faulk as the key factors in the Rams victory. Others acknowledged the game plan designed by head coach Dick Vermeil and the player personnel moves made by general manager John Shaw. But no one publicly recognized the contributions made by 45,473 children enrolled in the St. Louis city school system to the Rams’ victory. Eighty-five percent of these students were so poor that they qualified for federally subsidized lunches. Eighty percent of them were African-American. They did not score touchdowns, make tackles, kick field goals, or intercept passes for the team. But revenue diverted from the St. Louis school system through tax abatements and other subsidies to the Rams made a crucial difference in giving the football team the resources to win the Super Bowl.^[16]

While the schools were starving, tax deals like the one for the Rams were taking away seventeen million dollars every year from public education.

Lipsitz argues that the stadium “would have never been built without government funds and subsidies—because stadiums don’t make money,” and he explains that recovering the costs involved in the debt for the construction would require the scheduling of a total of more than 500 “events” in the stadium each year—an obviously impossible possibility. But Lipsitz reminds us that the actual debt is only part of the story—debt demands interest. He writes, “At least twenty-four million dollars a year in city, county, and state tax dollars will continue to be spent on the St. Louis stadium project through the year 2022.” But even that’s not enough—provisions of the contract that the Rams have with the city allows the team to leave for still another city if the subsidies don’t match what other teams are getting or if the stadium’s attractions are considered not as good as those in other places. Lipsitz bitterly comments:

The Rams can always move again. After all, they were the Cleveland Rams before they were the Los Angeles Rams. Even inside Los Angeles, the team moved from the Los Angeles Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium after officials in that suburban city expanded the size of their facility from 43,250 to 70,000 seats, constructed new executive offices for the team’s use, and built 100 luxury boxes for use by Rams fans.

…

Subsidies to previous franchises did not prevent St. Louis from losing the basketball Hawks to Atlanta or the football Cardinals to Phoenix. In fact, by using subsidies to provide the Rams with more profit in a metropolitan area with three million people than they could get in one with more than nine million, the backers of the stadium have unwittingly increased the number of their potential competitors. With subsidies like these, professional football franchises can move virtually anywhere and make a profit. The Tennessee Titans, defeated by the Rams in the 2000 Super Bowl, previously played in Houston as the Oilers, until a subsidized stadium in Nashville persuaded team owner Bud Adams to move his operations there. He could make more money in a smaller city because of government subsidies.^[17]

In 1975, state and local governments sold $6.2 billion of tax-exempt bonds for commercial projects; by 1982, the total was $44 billion. At the same time, bond sales for the construction of schools, hospitals, housing, sewer and water mains, and other public works projects declined. According to Lipsitz:

Twenty-nine new sports facilities were constructed in US cities between 1999 and 2003 at a total cost of nearly nine billion dollars. Sixty-four percent of the funds to build those arenas—approximately $5.7 billion—came directly from taxpayers. In Philadelphia, construction of a new baseball stadium for the Phillies and a new football stadium for the Eagles cost $1.1 billion. City funds supplied $394 million, and state tax revenue contributed an additional $180 million.^[18]

Just recently, the City of Detroit, in spite of being bankrupt, agreed to contribute $200 million in tax increment financing to subsidize the construction of a new arena for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team.^[19]

This pattern reflects an intense competition between different cities which “produces new inequalities that can be used in a race to the bottom by capital, promoting bidding wars between government bodies to reduce property taxes and other obligations while increasing subsidies and the provision of free services to corporations.” Lipsitz argues:

The subsidies offered to support structures like the domed stadium in St. Louis proceed from this general pattern. In the Keynesian era, St. Louis financial institutions invested in their own region. But since the 1980s they have been shifting investments elsewhere, exporting locally generated wealth to sites around the world with greater potential for rich and rapid returns. Building the domed stadium offered them an opportunity to create a potential source of high profit for outside investors in their region. Large projects like this generate some new short-term local spending on construction, financing, and services. They clear out large blocks of underutilized land for future development. But because they are so heavily subsidized, projects like the domed stadium wind up costing the local economy more than they bring in while they funnel windfall profits toward wealthy investors from other cities.

The ability of local and state governments to sell these projects depends fundamentally on the genuine popularity of professional sports, especially football. Lipsitz has something interesting to say about this:

[P]rofessional sports fill a void. They provide a limited sense of place for contemporary urban dwellers, offering them a rooting interest that promises at least the illusion of inclusion in connection with others. The illusion is not diminished by contrary evidence, by the fact that every St. Louis Ram would become a Tennessee Titan and every Tennessee Titan would become a St. Louis Ram tomorrow if they could make more money by doing so, by the fact that team owners preach the virtues of unbridled capitalism while enjoying subsidies that free them from the rigors of competition and risk, by the fact that impoverished and often ill schoolchildren are called upon to subsidize the recreation of some of the society’s wealthiest and healthiest citizens.^[20]

Policing in the Post–Civil Rights Era

Everyday in Ferguson, its surrounding areas and all across the country, the police stop, mostly young, black men. Most of the everyday encounters are not recorded—other than in the memories of the young people themselves and, in quite different ways, in the memories of the cops involved—for others to see. If recordings were available, what we’d likely see are encounters that include verbal and physical abuse designed to intimidate and humiliate—cops reaching into the young men’s pants, pulling down their pants, throwing them to the ground or against a wall. In virtually all of these instances, the cops have the upper hand—they have the handcuffs, clubs and guns; they have their fellow cops ready to back them up; they have the ability to fabricate charges and they can rely on the slow administration of justice to make sure that they will face no consequences. Perhaps others can understand why the young people are outraged at what happens to them and why the cops may very well be terrified because of their understandable concern that the young people have not forgotten and, as they have done in Ferguson, that they might take things into their own hands and that others might join with them.

Perhaps it’s this fear that we see when we look at what happens when shots are fired and the cops are involved—a cop shoots somebody or, less often, somebody shoots a cop. In either case, lots of cops arrive in minutes, with sirens screaming, from all directions—they put up their yellow tape and they tell everyone to keep away. They answer no questions and they threaten anyone who keeps asking. They make sure that the cop involved is quickly removed from the scene. The contrast with what the cops did after Michael Brown was shot is excruciating—there they arrived in their usual numbers and they made sure that people stayed away but there was no urgency about Michael Brown—he was just left lying on the ground for hours. It would be a really good question to ask them—WHY? Dead was not enough?

In the aftermath of the shooting, the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) was quick to come to Darren Wilson’s defense. It purchased newspaper ads and wrote letters to people like Attorney General Eric Holder. Its arguments were not vulgar ones—they insisted that the facts were not yet known and that people should wait to see what the investigations revealed. Its messages are clearly designed to shape the ways in which cops across the country think about and talk about the issues and, in turn, to shape the ways in which the supporters of the police think and talk about them.^[21] NAPO is no two-bit operation. It currently includes organizations that represent approximately 240,000 police officers (including cops in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York and Portland, as well as St. Louis) and 100,000 civilian supporters. They all stand ready to defend cops just about anywhere.

As is often the case, the details of the regularly awful things that happen everyday only emerge into daylight when something “really awful” happens—as with the killing of Michael Brown. In the cities north of St. Louis and in Ferguson, in particular, the everyday routines of police harassment of black people have taken on a particularly mercenary character. It appears that, because Ferguson is a small city and does not have the real estate tax base that it needs to support its budget (in spite of the fact that the city is home to a Fortune 500 corporation, Emerson Electric), the city relies heavily on public safety and court fines that have skyrocketed in recent years.^[22] A recent review of the city’s financial statements indicated that court fines accounted for twenty percent of its revenue. The city took in more than $2.5 million in court revenues in the last fiscal year, an 80 percent increase from two years earlier. This is no accident—it’s a business plan. A local law professor, Bryan Roediger, estimates that the court—which only holds three sessions a month—heard 200 to 300 cases an hour on some days. A recent report also argues that the court routinely begins hearing cases 30 minutes before the scheduled start time and then locks the doors 5 minutes after the official start. Those who arrive late face an additional charge for failing to appear. According to Governing, “the Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases in 2013, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”

Ferguson is not the only city that plays the traffic stop game. Often enough, when someone is stopped in one jurisdiction, it’s discovered that there are outstanding warrants in other ones. As a result, the person gets sent first to one jail until a bond is posted, then to another and then to another—with money being collected at each stop along the way.

The anger that is fueling the rebellion in Ferguson has been shaped day in and day out by these experiences for many years. A reporter from. VICE suggested that the scope of the anger is “best captured by one of the protesters’ favorite slogans: ‘ The whole damn system is guilty as hell.’ ”^[23]

A New Whiteness

As many have argued, whiteness is historical. It is not a natural condition—like being left-handed. Over time, groups once excluded from it were allowed in. The only group permanently excluded was the blacks. But these last two decades or so had provided a good deal of evidence to suggest that whiteness is not quite what it used to be—such as on the one hand, the presence of black individuals at the head of Fortune 500 corporations and, perhaps needless to say, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency and, on the other hand, the ineffectiveness of the traditional privileges of whiteness in protecting white workers from being thrown out of their jobs when the factories shut down. However, I’d like to suggest that the white question has not been settled.

In addition to the more or less open white supremacist groups on the far right, there are many who want to preserve, if not enhance, the privileges accorded to those considered white. Their convictions and their assumptions reflect the material circumstances of their lives as well as a good deal of absent-mindedness and historical amnesia. As George Lipsitz has convincingly argued, the legacy effects of previous discrimination are very significant and they are, in many ways, crystallized in the sharp demarcation between the concentrations of blacks in hollowed out center cities and in inner-ring suburbs and the wide dispersal of “whites” across the broad suburban landscapes around the cities. Lipsitz:

Racialized space enables the advocates of expressly racist policies to disavow any racial intent. They speak on behalf of whiteness and its accumulated privileges and immunities, but rather than having to speak as whites, they present themselves as racially unmarked homeowners, citizens and taxpayers, whose preferred policies just happen to sustain white privilege and power.

With or without being asked, many police officers have been actively engaged in enforcing the racial separations defined by space. At the same time, it is clear that there are some, perhaps many, in the highest political and economic circles who would prefer that policing be conducted in accordance with the protection of civil rights and civil liberties but, at least in this instance, they do not always have the last word.^[24] The police’s jobs are to protect property and to deal with the all but inevitable consequences of the immiseration that has become pervasive in the last forty years—as a result of the transformations in the American economy described above. To a not insignificant extent, however, the police often act autonomously and they are seldom called to account when they do so. In that context, the power of police unions (especially as reflected in their ability to influence politicians seeking their support) plays a major part in maintaining their protection. These unions have come a long way—they seldom have any need for any recourse, at least publicly, to explicit pronouncements of any racial intent. The “new whiteness” is perhaps the lie that does not have to speak in its own name.

Conclusion

By way of a conclusion, I would repeat my earlier point about the central task of confronting the social bloc that the police count on for support. At the same time, it remains essential to support and defend those who have taken the lead in Ferguson. But, we should also not underestimate the need to address the profound shaping of the lives of the people involved by the larger set of circumstances created and sustained by the particular ways in which capital rules St. Louis.

1. ^[1] In what might be considered a parallel process of attempting to control the situation (or to win over at least some local residents), institutions, such as Emerson Electric and St. Louis University, have committed themselves to various improvement efforts. See, for example, “Emerson donating $4.4 million for Ferguson scholarships, job training,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch and “Here’s the Agreement that Ended the Occupation of Saint Louis University,” Riverfront Times ↩
2. ^[2] . The Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789 had prohibited slavery in the territory that now includes Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. ↩
3. ^[3] William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union Army General whose March to the Sea broke the back of the Confederacy and led to the North’s victory, is buried in the same cemetery. ↩
4. ^[4] The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the defining feature of the city’s landscape, was designed as a memorial to the westward expansion of the United States (initiated by the Louisiana Purchase) and to the early European explorers. No memorial was built about the consequences of that expansion for the Native American peoples who were pushed off their lands. Subsequently, the Arch was incorporated within the Jefferson National Park to also include the city’s Old Courthouse (the scene of the two Dred Scott trials). The whole project seems to be a fitting symbol for the ways in which the writers of what we might consider the “good” version of American history want to have it both ways—celebrating the frontier and freedom while obscuring the ways in which, for many years, it was the official policy of the United States government to implement the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of those of African descent. ↩
5. ^[5] For more on John Brown, see W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown, Modern Library Classics (2014). ↩
6. ^[6] Marx and Engels closely followed the developments in the United States leading up to the Civil War and during it. They wrote numerous articles about the events, a limited number of which are available online More important, they played a major role in ensuring that the International Workingmen’s Association would be a mainstay in the effort to prevent England from entering the war on the side of the South and to enforce a boycott of Southern cotton—even when it meant lost jobs for English factory workers. ↩
7. ^[7] . W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (The Free Press: 1988), p. 30. ↩
8. ^[8] George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Temple University Press: 2011), p. 26. Lipsitz’s book was an invaluable source for most of the information and analysis in this section. ↩
9. ^[9] At this point, only Plaza Square, which had been sold to private owners, remains standing. All of the others have been demolished. Most infamously, one of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings was blown up for the world to watch in 1972 (less than twenty years after they had been built). What remains in most instances are empty, and over-grown, lots. ↩
10. ^[10] Lipsitz, p. 76. ↩
11. ^[11] Lipsitz, p. 75. ↩
12. ^[12] Lipsitz, p. 3. ↩
13. ^[13] Lipsitz, pp. 55–56. ↩
14. ^[14] Lipsitz, p. 56. ↩
15. ^[15] These trends have continued for the last fifty years. In 2013, St. Louis’s population was down to approximately 318,000 (making it the fifty-eighth largest city in the country). At the same time that the city’s population was declining, the population in what is called the Metropolitan Statistical Area (that includes the suburbs) had grown to about 2,795,000. This means that the city itself only constitutes a bit over 10 percent of the population in the area. By comparison, New York City constitutes about 40 percent of the population in its area. ↩
16. ^[16] Lipsitz details the grim realities in the St. Louis public school system that were exacerbated by underfunding—underpaid and inexperienced teachers, a low high school graduation rate and a dropout rate that, at times, was more than three times the state average. See pages 73–74. ↩
17. ^[17] Lipsitz, pp. 90–91. In spite of all this, I suspect that George Lipsitz might be a Rams fan. If I’m right, I admire his willingness to share his analysis with the rest of us who are fans of other football teams or not fans of any. ↩
18. ^[18] Lipsitz, p. 86. ↩
19. ^[19] On Detroit, see “New Detroit Red Wings Arena: Plenty of Public Subsidies; Few Public Benefits,” Planetizen. ↩
20. ^[20] . Lipsitz, pp. 92–93. ↩
21. ^[21] The text of the message that NAPO sent to its members is available ↩
22. ^[22] . In 2009, Emerson Electric received state income tax credits and local property tax abatements to support its construction of a new computer center on its headquarters campus. Perhaps that’s why traffic stops had to increase ↩
23. ^[23] In 1941, CLR James wrote about the attitudes of sharecroppers who were fighting against their conditions in southeast Missouri that: “[T]hese workers, in a fundamental sense, are among the most advanced in America. For, to any Marxist, an advanced worker is someone who, looking at the system under which he lives, wants to tear it to pieces. That is exactly what the most articulate think of capitalism in southeast Missouri.” Perhaps the same might be said of the people on the streets of Ferguson in 2014. ↩
24. ^[24] I’d suggest that the dispatching of Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson to express his concerns and to promise an investigation was not just an exercise in going through the motions—they would really prefer that the cops be equal opportunity upholders of the law. It’s also the case that many of these same people have been responsible for and supportive of the equipping of police departments with battlefield quality weaponry and equipment—such as were seen on the streets of Ferguson and during the police occupation of Boston after the Boston Marathon bombing. Whatever their views might be on the question of race, there is no question about the extent of their commitment to the preservation of the rule of capital—by any means necessary. ↩

For an academic work, this is a quite good, fact-packed, but flawed, book about a militant strike in the United States, the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995–2000, which took place during a generally bleak decade for class struggle. Clowns such as Bill Clinton’s then–Labor Secretary Robert Reich openly wondered whether unions still had a role in the much touted, “entrepreneurial,” (and now happily forgotten) “new economy” of the dot.com bubble. One must, of course, be wary of a book plugged by Kate Bronfenbrenner, who runs Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and for whom Rhomberg’s book shows why “worker-community solidarity and filing legal challenges are no longer enough to win strikes.” That is indeed what Rhomberg’ s book shows, but ultimately not for reasons Bronfenbrenner, or perhaps Rhomberg himself, is about to discuss in a book pitched to a respectable audience of labor academics, labor lawyers and trade unionists. Another flashing yellow light is an endorsement by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, who in 1995 lent his voice to the bubbly enthusiasm among “progressive academics” for newly-elected and ultimately hapless AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.

Rhomberg, as he shows in this book and in an earlier work on Oakland, California entitled No There There1 , is anything but naive. His historical portrait of post-1945 Detroit, as background to the strike, is an almost textbook case of the race-class dynamic in America. Detroit, coming out of the mass CIO strikes of the 1930s and 1940s, was the American union town par excellence; in 1945, 60 percent of the population belonged to a union or was related to a union member. Yet, at the very height of the 1943 wildcat strikes in auto, against the no-strike pledge, Detroit was also torn apart by race riots in which 34 people died—17 of them blacks killed by police. The post-war era saw little respite, with white opposition to integrated housing an ongoing reality.2 White flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s and, as early as 1958, there were 25 new suburban auto plants; that flight accelerated after the 1967 riots in which 43 people were killed. By 1990, 2.9 million people, 95 percent white, lived in a suburban ring, surrounding a hollowed-out city of less than one million, majority black people and shuttered factories. (Contemporary propaganda blaming “overpaid auto workers” for the current devastation of Detroit is naturally silent on this dynamic.).

Militant late 1960s actions by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers had forced auto companies to hire black foremen and also forced the United Auto Workers (UAW) to hire black staff.3 In 1973, Detroit elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young, who remained in office for 20 years. The decline, however, was relentless: Detroit in 1950 had 1.8 million people and 300,000 manufacturing jobs; by 2000, 62,000 such jobs remained within the city. Following the 1967 riots, a much-trumpeted attempt to remake the dying downtown area, where unrented commercial space abounded, was a failure; it featured the ill-fated “Renaissance Center,” which lost $130 million in its first five years. By 1982, 250,000 auto workers had lost their jobs; 42 auto-related companies closed between 1978 and 1981 alone. Membership in the UAW fell by nearly half, from 1.5 million in the late 1970s to 800,000 by the late 1990s.

(A more up-to-date, undoubtedly ill-fated, renewal attempt is underway today, focused on the renovating powers of the so-called “creative classes”—yuppies—a renovation which of course offers nothing to the remaining long-term, overwhelmingly black residents except higher rents and further marginalization.)

The 1990s had also seen a small “rebirth” in the pathetic (and not only in Detroit) “post-industrial” turn to casinos and sports arenas.As background to the dynamics of the strike, Rhomberg provides interesting material on the history of the newspaper in the United States, tracing out the demise of the small town paper as well as of the multi-paper urban press; as early as 1960, 90 percent of newspapers had no local competitor. Total US daily circulation peaked in 1974 at 63 million and fell to 55.8 million by 2000. Detroit by the 1990s still had two papers, the News and the Free Press . In contrast to many of the “suburbs in search of a city” that had grown up in the Sun Belt in the postwar era, Detroit’s papers were rooted in gritty urban realities and by the very nature of Detroit provided labor coverage long after most big urban dailies had closed down their labor beats and were covering strikes primarily in terms of inconvenience to the “consumer.” By the mid-1990s, the News and the Free Press were the ninth and tenth largest newspapers in the United States, and still had strong ties in what remained of the local community. But they were hardly immune to the larger trends; in the 1970s and 1980s, technology eliminated more than half the jobs, wages fell by 25 percent, and finally the News and Free Press were forced to merge.

The 1990s were not as strike-free as they might have seemed in the hangover of the 1989–91 recession and the deceptive glitz of the Clinton years. Coal miners in Pittston, Virginia, had fought off an attempt to shred their UMW contract in 1989–90; the New York Daily News was also struck in 1990, as was Colt Firearms in Hartford, Connecticut; under duress, beleaguered unions were making more serious attempts at community outreach, as in SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. In spite of all the downsizing, there were still 600,000 union members in southeastern Michigan in 1995, creating a broad base of sympathy, rooted in the history of the region, which would have been available to strikers in few other American cities. In 1997, around the time that the militant actions of the Detroit newspaper strikers had been rerouted into years of ultimately futile (and predictable) NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and court proceedings, the Teamsters struck UPS nationwide for two weeks, one of the few winning strikes of significance against a backdrop of general rout. The UPS strikers won wage increases and the conversion of 10,000 part timers to full time, while holding the line on pensions, with very strong and visible support from the “public,” i.e., a good part of the working class which was reeling from nearly two decades of rollback.

One of the more arresting parts of Rhomberg’s book is his detailed description of how the management of the News and Free Press prepared for the 1995 strike for two full years in advance, far more carefully than the unions, spending $2 million in the process. Rhomberg frames his overall analysis in terms of a clash between a declining set of labor-management relations left over from the New Deal and the new open season on workers that took off in the 1980s, where management simply walked away from the “broken table.” Such a framing, while obviously of some validity, overlooks a long history, from the mid-1950s at the latest, of wildcat strikes and rank-and-file revolts,4 quite outside any postwar “accord.” But let that go for the moment. The fusion of the Gannett ( News ) and Knight-Ridder ( Free Press ) managements into the Detroit Newspaper Association (DNA) had brought on hardball tactics of a kind for which the multiple unions under contract with the two papers were ill prepared.5 The DNA carefully studied the two-week strike of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, involving 2600 workers in 1994. They enlisted Huffmaster, Inc., a private strike security firm. They cultivated ties with the police department of suburban Sterling Heights, where a new printing plant was located. (While there was a still more modern plant in Detroit itself, management felt that their strikebreaking activities would be poorly received in Detroit proper, and that the plant would be harder to defend.) Their goals were a much greater use of merit pay in the newsroom, elimination of overtime in the already downsized pressroom, replacing full-time with part-time staff in the mailroom (organized by the Teamsters), and further restructuring of the circulation department, whose work force had already been reduced by 80 percent since the previous contract. Even though the papers had turned a profit of $55 million the previous year, management was out to impose a “far more wrenching change” on the various unions involved. Plans for security guards, quasi-military equipment and blueprints for the Sterling Heights Police Department (SHPD) were worked out down to the smallest detail, such as providing hot meals for scabs on the job. The SHPD contacted police forces in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn more about the Chronicle-Examiner strike. The police were informed by DNA management that “a strike was likely, that it would be violent, and that the SHPD would need to develop anti-riot capacity.” Police trained in the use of riot gear outside Sterling Heights City Hall. In contrast to previous contract negotiations, sensing that new printing technology put them even more on the defensive, the unions did show unity against a management strategy to pick them off one by one. But as in other US strikes of the 1980s and 1990s, the Detroit newspaper unions, organized in the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU) were still trapped in the mindset of the superannuated postwar “accord,” such as it had been. Headed by chief negotiator John Jaske, the DNA stunned the unions with its opening offer, which amounted to a demand for almost total surrender. On April 30, 1995, contracts covering 2,500 employees expired. The DNA was partially successful in breaking the front of the several unions involved, and set a June 30 deadline for settling the contracts. As things moved inexorably toward a strike, hundreds of potential scabs (my word; Rhomberg’s terminology is more polite) “were being housed in hotels and motels across southeastern Michigan.” Prior to the strike deadline, the DNA offered most of the unions 10–11 percent wage increases over the three years of the contracts, but with so many clauses undermining the old relationships on the job that, as one member put it, “when it’s all over with, we’re not going to have enough membership to survive.”

On July 13, the unions struck. Given the DNA’s superior bargaining position and two years’ preparation, “for the newspapers, the striking employees were now perhaps little more than a problem of waste disposal, a hazard to be controlled.”

The unions organized in the MCNU did everything they were “supposed to do,” according to the long-superseded script of post-World War II “labor relations.”They got considerable material support from other unions in the region, especially the UAW; they organized a boycott of the two papers; subscriptions were cancelled, most newsstands stopped carrying both the News and the Free Press and circulation plummeted. Many businesses pulled their advertising. Many local politicians and religious leaders implored the DNA to come to its senses and restore the happy family of the status quo ante. There was picketing throughout the region, breaking down old professional and craft divisions among the strikers and broader parts of what Rhomberg problematically calls “civil society,” in a bow to post-Marxist academic jargon. (One presumes that calls for solidarity strikes in other sectors, which was never attempted, is not part of the vocabulary of “civil society.”) The AFL-CIO got into the act, and even then-President Bill Clinton “ordered his executive staff members to decline interviews” with the struck papers. Despite the excessive heat and storms of a Midwest summer, the unions managed to establish 24-hour pickets at far-flung sites. Most strikers, unfortunately, ran through savings fairly quickly and within a few months, the already-low union strike benefits were exhausted; strikers began seeking and sometimes finding other jobs for the duration.

One key factor in management strategy, which had already proved decisive in otherstrikes of the new era, was the 1938 Mackay decision by the United States Supreme Court allowing struck employers to use “replacement workers” (i.e., scabs) who could become permanent employees after the settlement, unless the NLRB ruled that “unfair labor practices” had provoked the strike. Mackay had rarely been invoked in the three decades of the postwar “accord” but was increasingly dusted off during long strikes, as in the “three strikes” of 1993–95 in Decatur, Illinois.6 Even militant post-1980 strikes, (in contrast to pre-New Deal “good old union tactics”) that stop short of physically preventing scabs from working, have been and continue to be defeated as long as workers, contained within the legalistic union framework, continue to play by the old rules. To break with those rules, as the Detroit strikers on occasion did, would mean breaking with a New Deal legal structure that, among other things, bans strikes (i.e., wildcats) during the life of a contract, and also means breaking with the union apparatus that enforces rules drawn up and approved by the class enemy. Immediately, the News and the Free Press had 500 scabs at work, including many flown in from other cities from elsewhere in the Gannett and Knight-Ritter newspaper chains. Some scabs received a $750 weekly bonus and slept and were fed on site; others were housed in dormitories and bussed in. Guards escorted the distribution trucks. Scab carriers were given cars, cell phones and beepers; the DNA “rented six hundred cars, occupied one thousand hotel rooms, and put nine thousand cellular phones into use.”

The workers and their allies struck back. “Vandals,” according to Rhomberg, damaged two thousand newspaper racks per week. All in all, however, the DNA “never missed a day of delivery,” however thinned down the papers were. Picketing at the Sterling Heights plant immediately led to violent confrontations with police and security guards, as the latter periodically opened gates for trucks to enter and exit. Strikers followed these trucks, and security guards followed these strikers, ramming cars and forcing them off the road. Thugs from the Huffmaster security services “verbally and physically taunted” strikers to the point of irritating the Sterling Heights police; Huffmeister thugs went to strikers’ homes to harass them, enough so that the DNA had to terminate them in early August. Large Saturday night pickets at the printing plant, intended to stop delivery of the Sunday edition, were attacked by police, with arrests and serious injuries. According to one estimate, the DNA was spending $600,000 a day in the early weeks to defeat the strike. The Knight-Ridder owners of the Free Press had had a more laid-back management style than the Gannett owners of the News ; in 1994, the Free Press had even criticized the defeat in Congress of a bill forbidding the use of “replacement workers.” By early August, 1995, however, Free Press management issued an ultimatum, threatening to use just such scabs, and by late August 40 percent of newsroom employees had crossed the picket lines and returned to work. The Free Press also criticized the unity of the unions which “yoked” reporters and other “professional” employees to solidarity with, God forbid, the Teamsters, and invoked such “class” distinctions in personal phone calls to strikers, with some (but by no means complete) success in getting people to cross the picket lines. By the end of August, the Free Press as well was hiring one new scab a day.

The ante was upped as both papers began calling the scabs “permanent replacement workers.” Newly-hired Vance security personnel increasingly replaced the weary Sterling Heights police (some of whom were friends and relatives of the strikers) at the plant gates, fully provided with riot helmets and bullet-proof vests. On the Labor Day weekend, a nearby rally of three thousand joined four hundred pickets at the plant gate, ultimately countered by reinforcements from twenty suburban police departments. In the early hours of September 3, a full-blown battle ensued as the strikers and their supporters rained bricks, bottles and picket signs on trucks attempting to leave the plant. The DNA countered with a convoy of semi-tractortrailer trucks attempting to ram another gate. Only the following morning, when the crowd had dwindled, did trucks manage to leave the plant. On Labor Day itself, Monday September 4, “big labor” brought in its heavy artillery, including then–AFL-CIO president Tom Donahue and his soon-to-be successor John Sweeney, then president of SEIU. Other luminaries were left Democratic Congressman John Conyers and the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (Such spectacles, however well intended some of the participants may be, are usually a symptom that a struggle is losing momentum.) These luminaries led a march of 5,000 people. This peaceful mobilization of the left wing of the establishment did not prevent a battle involving three hundred pickets at the Sterling Heights plant that night, when they were attacked by police using batons and pepper spray, to which the pickets responded with sticks, rocks and ultimately five-inch steel rods found nearby. One striker, Ben Solomon, was “gassed, beaten, arrested and detained” and later hit with multiple charges, along with fifteen others. (Many years later, in 2000, after the defeat, Solomon won $2.5 million for punitive damages.)

The following weekend, two thousand pickets kept the plant shut for ten hours, after which the DNA brought in helicopters, managing to take out only one-fourth of the Sunday edition. At 4 AM, a caravan of tractor trailers exited the plant, some at considerable speed; there were, however, only a few minor injuries to pickets. Three days later, a judge issued an injunction restricting pickets to ten at the main plant entrance. This anticipated move nonetheless back-footed the union leaders, who claimed it was not clear how many people were willing to risk an escalation of possible fines and jail sentences.7 The decision to halt mass picketing as a result of the injunction provoked some serious opposition from rank-and-file militants; Rhomberg does not mention this,8 nor does he mention that both the recent Pittston strike of 1989–90 and a more recent Teamsters strike in 1994 had defied injunctions and won. Whatever its limitations and its immersion in exactly the New Deal “accord” touted by Rhomberg, the CIO in the 1930s was itself built by defying court injunctions.9 The unions instead fell back on their “corporate campaign” strategy of circulation and advertising boycotts, and pickets went to distribution centers around the city. The DNA ultimately lost $90 million in the first six months of the strike, but they had shown a willingness to escalate by “any means necessary,” an escalation the unions and their rank-and-file were, for better or for worse, unwilling and/or unable to match.

Rhomberg regrets the demise of the New Deal order, which “served to steer the actors toward a peaceful, negotiated settlement.” Again, he forgets a bit quickly the “dark underside” of that order, as in the showcase union, the UAW, where management granted wages increases and benefits while taking full day-to-day control of the shop floor, where banned wildcat strikes increasingly became the main practical alternative to a slow, ineffective grievance procedure and where the shop steward increasingly became a cop enforcing the contract against his or her own base. This dichotomy had erupted into plain sight as early as 1955 when Walter Reuther, then head of the UAW, came back from “Big Three” negotiations with what he thought was a great contract for wages and benefits, only to be stunned by wildcat strikes across the Midwest in response. This same downsized UAW had also not lifted a finger during the mass layoffs in the auto industry of the 1980s and 1990s, part of the general employer offensive of which the Detroit newspaper strike was one example. Neither does Rhomberg say much about the large sectors of the work force which had been specifically omitted from “peaceful, negotiated settlements,” starting with farm labor; for an author otherwise attentive to a race and class problematic, he does not mention other ways in which New Deal labor law had been written to remain virtually a dead letter in the Jim Crow South in order to keep the “Dixiecrats” within the New Deal coalition. The increased use of “permanent replacements” after 1980 under “Mackay” accelerated; in more than 300 strikes, “walkouts last an average of 217 days when permanent replacements were used”; 46 percent of “contract negotiations involving major violence” involved the use of such scabs. All this, of course, undermined workers’ legal right to strike, as enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Permanent replacement workers—scabs—increase management’s incentive to go to the mat in order to get rid of the previous work force; one Knight-Ridder spokesman said in October 1995 that the cost of the strike “would be recouped in long-term savings from operating with a smaller and more efficient workforce.” (A Detroit regional NLRB did later rule that DNA management had engaged in “unfair labor practices” at the outset of the strike, implying that all strikers must be rehired and scabs let go; that decision was, of course, overturned on appeal.)

Leaders of the unions at the international level in October 1995 “began informally to raise the possibility of the Detroit locals making an unconditional offer to return to work”10 ; local MCNU leaders rejected the move, along with many rank-and-filers, who rightly saw it as unconditional surrender. Instead, the MCNU offered a “conditional” return to work with a “good faith” agreement to negotiate job cuts and come up with $15 million in savings in labor costs for the DNA. Management rejected this proposal peremptorily, saying “it would not fire the replacement workers.” The DNA by October 1995 was intent on eliminating the striking work force, which remained on the picket lines; it also specified that it would take back no worker guilty of “misconduct” during the strike. Strains had developed between the DNA and Sterling Heights officials because of the increasing expense borne by the city for the “super bowl of labor disputes.” The DNA responded by immediately writing checks to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars for police overtime, riot gear and related costs, saying it was a “good corporate citizen.” When the payments became known, the strikers were further enraged, flashing signs saying “Bought and Paid For” at the Sterling Heights police. Ultimately, however, more than two hundred strikers were fired for misconduct during the strike; some of those cases were reversed “but only after years of litigation, and many fired workers never got their jobs back.” Firings occurred for alleged “punching and spitting on picket line crossers, vandalizing property, throwing rocks and star nails, and threatening persons with physical harm.” Many cases were dismissed because of “fabricated evidence, collusion by company witnesses” and “reports filed months after the fact.” Of these cases, 121 were only overturned in 1999.Violence intensified in the fall of 1995 at sites around the Detroit area. One striker had his skull fractured by a security guard; another was run over by a scab van, but survived. No one was charged in either case. Militant and sometimes violent demonstrations of several hundred strikers kept some distribution centers closed on Sunday mornings but such centers were only a fraction of the total, and the DNA stood fast. Individual violence increased on both sides. Then, in mid-November, just before Thanksgiving and “its anticipated heavy advertising volume,” the DNA charged the unions with conspiracy under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, with possible huge fines and expenses.11 DNA management was pushing for unconditional surrender. One striker said “I never thought in Detroit I would see the level of raw power demonstrated against ordinary working people….”

Finally, with the approach of Christmas, the Detroit mayor, a US senator for Michigan and a Roman Catholic cardinal pleaded for a resumption of negotiations. In a four-hour meeting in the mayor’s office, management insisted on the reduction of 650 positions, on its right to retain 1,400 replacement workers, and rejected amnesty for strikers accused of misconduct. Management further urged retirement for 289 workers who were eligible. Retirement or relocation was management’s main suggestion to the strikers. Nothing came of the meeting. (Dennis Archer, the mayor, had earlier defended the deployment of hundreds of Detroit cops to assure distribution of the Sunday papers, saying it was necessary to create a “good business climate” to attract investment to Detroit.)12 Having been checkmated on the picket lines by the fierce management offensive described above, the unions in early 1996 turned to what Rhomberg calls “new areas in civil society and the state.” However interesting some of these attempts may have been, they were clearly a fallback line of defense in what was shaping up as a near total defeat. A strikers’ newspaper, the Detroit Sunday Journal, was founded in late 1995. A coalition called “Readers United” (RU) talked, thank you, of “the responsibilities of the newspapers and their civic function in the community.” (To be fair, RU did carry out some militant actions later on.) The newspapers responded with their own attempt to frame the strike. The unions turned to the state to determine “whether (the strike) was an ‘economic’ one or an ‘unfair labor practice’ strike.” Rhomberg, with some justification but with some serious dose of apparent naïveté, once again posed his own overarching analysis of “the ascendant anti-union regime” and “a declining New Deal order.” That order was indeed breaking down, and “the institutions intended to reinforce negotiation gave way to litigation instead.” Does Rhomberg seriously think that the capitalist state (our term) was ever, when the chips were down, a neutral arbiter of class struggle?One can hardly quibble that outreach to other workers (as opposed to the “public”) in a long strike is a necessity in getting struggle beyond the “shop floor” and the plant gate. This was exactly what was missing—an attempt to broaden the strike to other parts of the Detroit and regional working class—from the strike strategy, and given the union leadership’s turf mentality, probably inevitably. Television played its mystifying role, showing slick presentations by management and counter-posing to them “the first person who would talk to them on the picket line,” as often as not a foul-mouthed Teamster. Top labor officials such as John Sweeney and Newspaper Guild president Laura Foley bankrolled the Detroit Sunday Journal, which by summer 1996 was self-supporting and ran 165,000 copies per week, ultimately becoming the “largest weekly and third-largest Sunday paper in the state.” This was followed by a “corporate campaign” of the kind which “Mr. Strikeout Artist” Ray Rogers had attempted in a series of losing strikes in the 1980s (such as the previously mentioned, ill-fated P-9 meatpacking strike in Minnesota). This involved an advertising and circulation boycott of management’s other newspapers, such as Gannett’s USA Today. In April 1996 strikers and supporters intervened—politely—in Knight-Ridder’s annual board meeting. Shortly thereafter, 500 strikers and supporters, including Teamster president Ron Carey, intervened at the Gannett board of directors meeting, with similarly little result. Corporate campaigners spread out through the country raising support. Back in Detroit, renewed pressure was brought to bear on advertisers and with “ambulatory picketing,” whereby pickets followed newspaper carriers on their routes. A Teamster organizer who had played a role in the 1989 Pittston coal strike, a relative (defensive) victory, was brought in.13 Several hundred strikers were trained in non-violent direct action tactics, and in the spring and summer of 1996 carried out militant demonstrations at the homes of DNA executives. With these and other tactics, in Rhomberg’s view, “the unions pushed their activity into the community and outward toward a larger public sphere…they challenged the distinctions between the private economy and the public good, the boundaries between commercial property and civic space.” Religious leaders became involved, deploring “the use of violence, both personal and institutional, by anyone involved on either side.” The previously mentioned Readers United and other groups staged a series of non-violent actions, involving arrest by high-profile religious and union figures such as a UAW regional director and retired UAW president Doug Fraser. Several hundred people were arrested in such actions. The DNA, for its part, predictably reacted to such protests with indifference and contempt, though it did put out reams of what one source called “company agitprop masquerading as news,” against what was deemed the pro-strike bias of local television and other media. The papers retailed the now-familiar mantra about the unions as “privileged” and “featherbedders,” a ploy that resonated with some after decades in which hundreds of thousands of other jobs had been eliminated. As has been seen in many later attacks on public employees, decades of gutting private sector industrial unions have made it easy for capital to portray the last unions standing as “privileged”; this does not absolve the workers in such unions from reaching out on a class-wide basis to the larger downsized and casualized strata to raise general wages and benefits and to counter the inexorable “race to the bottom.”

The DNA also played the race card in overwhelmingly black Detroit, which enraged black strikers but was not without its effects in the city at large. Rhomberg provides figures showing that of the 2,025 “replacement workers” hired during the strike, 487 were hired as part-time or casual employees, among whom blacks outnumbered whites 3:1 and of whom one-third were terminated by June 1996. A great majority of those blacks hired were enlisted as janitors and mail handlers, while only 8 percent of new reporters were black. But such figures were largely unknown at the time and the papers, which had only 18 percent total blacks on the pre-strike payroll, had some success in portraying the strike as “white” and “suburban” to the “large, dependent and low-wage labor pool” left over from massive industrial downsizing, especially given Detroit’s race and class dynamic since at least the 1940s, as previously presented by Rhomberg. The fact that the papers, and not the unions, were doing the pre-strike hiring was lost from view.

Starting in 1996, the struggle was, fatally, increasingly fought out at the NLRB and in the courts. In July of that year, an NLRB decision in Washington compelled the unions to sign an agreement promising to cease violence, coercion and threats against scabs. Some advertisers used the NLRB to force unions to stop “picketing, blocking entrances, intimidating customers, and engaging in an unlawful secondary boycott.” A “non-violent guerrilla war” was fought with police over the right to continue leafleting and residential picketing on public property. The UAW was added to the DNA’s RICO lawsuit. The unions had to disavow some non-violent direct actions by groups such as Readers United. The different fronts in the struggle, for Rhomberg, “signaled the extent to which contemporary labor disputes exceeded their traditional boundaries, spilling over into multiple areas of civil society and the state.” Detroit mayor Dennis Archer again proposed to mediate the strike, but the newspaper “categorically rejected” the proposal. More ritual ensued on Labor Day, 1996, when the new AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and secretary-treasurer Rich Trumka (former head of the United Mine Workers) came to town to be arrested for civil disobedience along with other high-profile union, religious and political leaders; everything in this gambit was choreographed in advance with the Detroit police.

Nonetheless, concludes Rhomberg, “for a year and a half, the strikers had fought and in many ways won the battle of Detroit, But the newspapers’ response raised doubts as to whether the struggle could be decided at the urban metropolitan level.” International leaders of the six unions were increasingly pushing for a “settlement.” Responding to this pressure, the unions in the MCNU in February 1997 decided to make an unconditional offer to return to work14 and to gamble on having the strike declared the result of unfair labor practices, which would require reinstatement of strikers and “back pay liabilities of $250,000 per day.” The papers insisted it was an economic strike and took back only certain strikers. Some of those taken back were generally downgraded and took major pay cuts while scabs took over their original jobs. Returning printers had to attend a week-long “orientation” that consisted of a large dose of “verbal abuse, gloating and sarcastic treatment.” They were later put in an isolation room with nothing to do, and “had to ask permission to go to the bathroom or get coffee.” They remained in what was dubbed the “decomposing room “ until February 1998, costing the company $1 million, before they were finally put back to work in the composing room. The focus turned to the NLRB. The unions were planning a huge march, “Action! Motown 1997,” beginning on June 20, with supporters coming from as far away as San Francisco. This was further pitched, says Rhomberg, as “part of the renewal of the United States labor movement under AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.”15 Emotions were further ramped up on June 19, the day before the weekend event was to begin, when a local NLRB judge ruled that the newspapers had indeed been guilty of unfair labor practices, implying almost total victory to the strikers: reinstatement with full back pay and all scabs laid off. Euphoria took hold. The weekend included a teach-in at Wayne State, benefit concerts for locked-out workers, an interfaith religious service and nonviolent protests (one at the home of a DNA CEO in upscale Grosse Pointe Farms); all of this was followed by a march of perhaps 100,000 people and a mass rally. Trade unionists came from 45 states and from twelve countries. It was in fact the largest rally in Detroit since the 1947 UAW demonstration against the Taft-Hartley Act, and was unfortunately destined to be no more successful. Sweeney spoke of “dignity and respect,” and Trumka called on the newspapers to be accountable to a “democratic public.” For Rhomberg, furthermore, the NLRB ruling “illustrated the power of the state to fix the meaning of events.” Indeed.With almost 20 years hindsight, and knowing what ultimately happened, it is hard not to be cynical. The culminating weekend event, Action! Motown 1997, impressive as it may have been, had the smell of respectability about it, what French militants call “la manif de l’enterrement,” i.e., the funeral demo. The institutions of official society—“civil society” in Rhomberg’s idiom—had held together, and justice seemed to be at hand, won ultimately not in the streets or at the plant gate, but through the NLRB. And even that eventually proved to be an illusion. Despite the euphoria, the newspapers were not beaten, and were preparing an appeal of the NLRB decision. Various contract complexities created a “shell game” that lawyers on both sides would fight out in a legal labyrinth. One might say that the unions and the papers had battled each other to a standstill “on the ground,” and henceforth everything would be in the hands of judges and lawyers. Where was the spirit of the old IWW, for which lawyers were “shysters” and barred from membership? Rhomberg is quite right that the institutions of the New Deal were confronting a new drive against workers, but was not the problem precisely those institutions’ ongoing ability to channel militant struggle onto the terrain where raw power—class power—was no longer decisive?

The legal labyrinth cannot be described here. Amendment 10(j) to the National Labor Relations Act under Taft Hartley seemed to promise expedited enforcement of the unions’ apparent victory at the local NLRB, thereby avoiding processes that could, and ultimately did, take months or years. The newspapers brought in new legal heavy hitters, including a lawyer who had authored a Wharton Business School manual entitled Operating During Strikes . Five weeks after Action! Motown 1997, the lawyers for the two sides confronted each other at an August 1 hearing. The key issue was the full reinstatement of the strikers and dismissal of the “replacement workers.” Two weeks later, after further shell games, the judge issued a decision saying that an “unfair labor practices” ruling would have to await completion of the full appeal process. This decision “tilted the balance of power toward those actors with greater resources and staying power,” namely the newspapers. Litigation would in fact continue for three more years. The DNA CEO had said “the companies would drag out the appeals for so long that the strikers would eventually get other jobs, retire, or die,” which is more or less exactly what happened. Only one-third of the strikers returned after the final settlement at the end of 2000; up to 20 died during the five years of the strike and the appeals. Protest actions, boycotts and publication of the strikers’ Sunday Journal continued through 1997 and 1998, by a group of rank-and-filers, but it was an uphill battle. James R. Hoffa, son of the late Jimmy Hoffa, was elected president of the Teamsters in December 1998, and promptly fired a Teamster activist who had helped keep the movement alive. The Detroit Sunday Journal ceased publication in November 1999, after four years’ publication. The strikers’ main remaining leverage was the huge back pay settlement, if the unfair labor practices ruling held through the final appeal. The end came in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in May 2000, presided over by three judges appointed by Ronald Reagan. The court’s July 7 decision completely reversed the unfair labor practice ruling. In late 2000, the various unions signed contracts with open shop clauses, hefty wage reductions, and merit pay. Lawsuits were dropped, including the newspapers’ RICO charges. James P. Hoffa ended the circulation and advertising boycotts. The Detroit newspaper strike was over.

Rhomberg concludes his book with a balance sheet of the strike and attempts to generalize some of its lessons, above all in the post-1980 assault on the right to strike as supposedly codified in the National Labor Relations Act. He points to some of the specific factors in the length and depth of the strike, such as Detroit’s character as a “union town.” He reiterates his thesis about the “deinstitutionalization” of unions in the new era, and goes on to say that “bringing civil society back in illustrates how the meaning of strike action has changed in the post-accord era” (though apparently not enough to win anything). In this era, he says, the strike has become a “more basic struggle…to reconstitute the spaces governing labor relations and workers’ rights.” He points out, as indicated previously, that the newspapers benefited from the long-term racial divide in Detroit, and that despite support from “civil rights and liberal leaders…many ordinary black Detroiters felt distant from both sides and did not see the struggle as their own,” given the “disproportionately white, relative to the central-city population” work force. He contrasts it with the victorious UPS strike of August 1997 (which took place just as the Detroit newspaper strike had made its turn to the NLRB and the courts), and the factors that made it possible for the Teamsters to force UPS to make 10,000 part-time jobs into full time and to rescind its threat to pull out of the pension plan. He argues that “widening the scope of collective action” (as in the greater involvement of “civil society”) “can also enlarge the spaces for public engagement and civic mediation between management and unions.” He argues that Gannett’s “scorched earth” policy not only led to $130 million in expenses but questions whether such a stance “benefited the workplace, the community or even the shareholders in the long run.” After the final defeat of the strike in the courts, Detroit newspaper circulation was down 32 percent from 1995

And, by 2011, was down by half a million readers. This is to be seen in an overall crisis of the newspaper industry, as witnessed by the fall in Gannett’s stock for $91 per share in 2004 to $1.85 in the first quarter of 2009. “The past few decades,” Rhomberg writes, “have seen a profound reduction in the social accountability of private enterprise,” under the offensive of “unfettered market power.” Karl Marx wrote long ago ( Communist Manifesto ) that, win or lose, the real gain of struggles such as the Detroit newspaper strike was the “ever-growing unification of the working class.” In reality, the strike described by Rhomberg joined the long list of post-1980 defeats, beginning with PATCO, by way of the Greyhound strike (1983), the Phelps-Dodge copper strike (1984), the P-9 meatpackers’ strike (1985–86), the Jay, Maine pulp and paper workers’ strike (1987–88), and the “three strikes” in Decatur Illinois (Caterpillar, Bridgestone-Firestone, and Staley) of 1993–95. The period, however, was not entirely bleak. In addition to the above-mentioned Pittston coal miners’ strike of 1989–90 and the Teamster strike at UPS in 1997, other workers fought and won against the general rollback. A group of Latino cannery workers in 1985 in Watsonville, California, rejected a sweetheart contract full of givebacks, threw out the leadership of their Teamster local, and in 1987 finally won a contract restoring much of what management had tried to take away. Non-academic employees at Yale University struck nine times between 1968 and 2003, mostly successfully, and in the latter year won an 8-year contract with 5.8 percent wage increases per year. 750 Latino workers struck the food giant ConAgra in King City, California for two years and prevailed in 2001.

The post-1980 period has certainly been characterized by more defeats than victories, but a recomposition of the working class in the United States is in fits and starts remaking the class terrain. A new breakthrough will probably not be centered on the remaining auto or steel industries, as with the CIO in the 1930s, but will, in all likelihood, feature the Latino workforce, greatly expanded by immigration, militant nurses who have distinguished themselves at the likes of the California health care giant Kaiser, or the truckers in the west coast ports, who are increasingly organized and militant, or perhaps even the sped-up and fed-up workers at Amazon and Wal-mart.16

If and when such a breakthrough occurs, it will be essential to recall the wisdom of Marx’s advice regarding the growing unification of the working class—WIN OR LOSE. It is clear that such unification will seldom happen automatically; instead, militants must be prepared to advance the efficacy of strategies and tactics explicitly aligned with such a goal. More than anything else on offer, increased working class unity, as exemplified by the independent collective actions of workers across workplaces and communities (and not by ritualized performances orchestrated by union leaderships), might shift the balance of forces.Rhomberg cannot of course be faulted for not offering such a perspective on the years after the Detroit newspaper strike. Looking back, and taking account of the experiences of all the major defeats that preceded it, it is difficult to see how theDetroit newspaper workers could have won in the period 1995–2000 when they were forced to strike. One can fault Rhomberg, however, for paying little or no attention to the rank-and-file dissidents of the newspaper unions who did attempt to oppose the “corporate campaign” strategy that increasingly imposed itself after the September 1995 injunction against mass picketing at the Sterling Hills printing plant. There was in fact at least a militant minority that, contrary to the “unions” which Rhomberg discusses as an uncritical, undifferentiated whole, was prepared to take the risks of defying the injunction. The strike may well have been defeated anyway, but the injunction was clearly the moment at which it embarked on the road to more or less certain defeat. Raw class power, and not corporate campaigns, NLRB rulings and court decisions, not mass demonstrations led by the John Sweeneys and Rich Trumkas (not to mention scripted “arrests” of such notables) is, in the first and last instance, all the working class has.Rhomberg does not seem aware of the extent to which the New Deal “accord” of the three decades after 1945 shackled the American working class, in ways to which we have alluded. Even militant unions of the rank-and-file have to deal with 500-page contracts requiring teams of lawyers; eviscerated grievance procedures; Taft-Hartley restrictions on wildcat strikes, sympathy strikes and boycotts; and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 giving the United States Department of Labor direct oversight of internal union affairs.The next upsurge of workers in the United States will look more like the classic IWW of the pre–New Deal period than like the CIO, which ultimately put such strictures in place.

Originally posted: August 12, 2014 at Insurgent Notes

• 1Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class and Political Community in Oakland (University of California Press, 2004). This book shows, against Gertrude Stein’s remark used in the title, that in fact a great deal happened in Oakland, from mass KKK rallies in the 1920s to the general strike of 1946 to the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
• 2See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996).
• 3James A. Geschwender, Class, Race and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Cambridge UP, 1977).
• 4See Stan Weir, “The Rank-and-File Revolt,” in George Lipsitz, ed., Singlejack Solidarity, 2000.
• 5Gannett in particular owned many other newspapers around the country, most of them non-union, and had an eye on Wall Street’s evaluation of its profit margins. It represented the more hardball force in management, which the Knight-Ridder management of the Free Press did not oppose.
• 6See Stephen Franklin, Three Strikes (New York, 2001).
• 7They asked strikers and supporters as an alternative to drive around the plant and snarl traffic, which resulted mainly in lots of traffic tickets. (See Labor Notes, October 1995, p. 9.) Other union leaders argued against mass picketing at the plant with an eye to the Sterling Heights elections on November 7, in hopes of re-electing the majority on the city council which had forced the resignation of the city manager in charge of earlier mass police repression. (I bid .)
• 8One somewhat exasperating aspect of Rhomberg’s book is his use of the term “unions” with absolutely no critical attention to dissidence within them, In fact, a “Unity for Victory Caucus” had formed precisely to pressure union leaders to return to Sterling Heights (ibid). ACOSS (Action Coalition of Strikers and Supporters) was another independent pressure group pushing for national action.
• 9 One Teamster said later, in spring 1997: “[F]or much of the strike, (our energy) was bottled up by the old-style tactics of the presidents of the six striking unions. They seemed to feel we could win the strike by walking in circles outside the plant gates…in an era of replacement workers (this attrition strategy) no longer works. We made a huge error in the strike’s early months by not defying the injunction that prohibited mass picketing…We had crippled the papers’ Sunday distribution…when we let the courts open the gates, we took away our main weapon…” Labor Notes, April 1997, p. 9. No statement of this kind is quoted by Rhomberg.
• 10 This echoed, for example, the more intense pressure brought to bear on Local P-9 of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota, in 1985–86, the only local to reject the shredding of the union contract, and which then struck for 18 months, with broad outside support, before going down to defeat.
• 11The RICO law was ostensibly created to combat organized crime, but it seems to have been used more against unions. The DNA lawsuits were only settled out of court in 2000.
• 12 Labor Notes, November 1995, p. 5, not quoted by Rhomberg.
• 13The 1989–90 strike was set off by an attempt of the Pittston Coal Company to halt health care and pension benefits to miners, their families and retirees, an attempt which was defeated by miner militancy at the pits and a solidarity campaign by the United Mine Workers that brought tens of thousands of working-class supporters to southwest Virginia. Despite Rhomberg’s occasional references to the non-violent character of the Pittston strike, there was plenty of low-key violence brought to bear in guerrilla actions by miners, often at night and primarily against company property.
• 14 Once again, Rhomberg omits a key “fact”: the New York Times reported, in early 1997, on the occasion of Clinton’s second inauguration, that Teamster president Ron Carey, CWA (Communication Workers of America) president Morton Bahr, and other top union leaders had decided to order the Detroit strikers back to work with no membership vote. Eric Chester wrote in the Industrial Worker (newspaper of the IWW) that “Last summer [1996 —LG] union leaders began secretly discussing a plan to end the strike. This fall, as Carey sought re-election in a hotly-contested campaign, he neither explained how he would win the Detroit strike nor did he reveal the ongoing discussion to end it. Once the election was over, and the votes counted, Carey joined two other international presidents in unilaterally ending the strike with an unconditional offer to return to work. This decision was not only made without consulting the rank-and-file, but over its adamant objection.” Reprinted in Impact, v. 5 no. 3, June 1997.
• 15One laid-off worker from the defeated Staley strike in Decatur, Illinois, asked the appropriate question: “Will the weekend be more than a symbolic display of unity?” Labor Notes, June 1997, p. 7. Unfortunately, given the high-profile labor principals involved in the mobilization, from Sweeney on down, that is exactly what it was.
• 16On the latter, see the concise book on the computerized and surveillanced work place by Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (2014).