Chapter 2: Raising an Arm in Defense of Their Cause

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive.

Today we're jumping into a really fascinating chapter of American labor history, zeroing in on the New Orleans waterfront, particularly in the late 19th century.

That's right.

Our sources today lay out this incredible story, really, of how a workforce that was deeply divided racially and by job managed to build this powerful interracial solidarity.

And we kick off with a scene that just perfectly captures this shift.

Picture this, New Orleans, September 1881.

There's a huge waterfront strike going on, massive tension.

But right then the city's focus is on a funeral.

A man named James Hawkins.

He was a black union teamster and he'd been killed by a police sergeant just the day before.

And the gathering for him was just enormous.

Observers at the time said it was inconceivable only a few years before.

We're talking, what, maybe 2000, possibly 3000 people.

Wow.

Yeah, men, women, black, white, all gathered together.

A really sorrowful crowd, you know, for this one man caught in this larger conflict.

And the makeup of that crowd is what's so striking.

You had the black union members leading about 500 from Hawkinson's own teamsters union, another 400 black cotton yard men.

But then right behind them, and this is the detail that just stops you,

were 800 white cotton yard men and screw men.

The source calls it an unprecedented show of recognition.

Really was.

Genuine solidarity right there in the open amidst all the grief and tension.

The local black newspaper pointed out that the crowd was

subdued.

And that quietness, they said, was far more impressive and ominous than loud threats of vengeance.

It was a signal, really.

A signal to the city's elite.

Exactly.

A signal to the commercial powers, and maybe to you listening now, that the whole game on the docks, the balance of power, it had fundamentally changed.

Okay, so let's dig into that change.

Because a funeral like that, that kind of unity, it doesn't just happen overnight.

No, definitely not.

It came during this huge strike, sure, but it really reflected this new organizational strength that workers had only recently built.

So our mission in this deep dive is to trace that journey.

How did these like 10 ,000 waterfront workers in New Orleans build this, starting from a place of, well, deep division and struggle?

Yeah, and to understand that, you first have to grasp what New Orleans was economically back then.

It wasn't really about manufacturing.

It was all about transshipment, moving goods.

Especially cotton, right?

Wasn't that the main Absolutely.

Cotton was king.

The New Orleans Times even said the city existed chiefly by reason of the cotton trade it controls.

Everything, I mean everything, revolved around getting cotton from the fields down the river and onto ships heading out to the world market.

And you can picture the waterfront itself reflecting that.

The Mississippi River is described as the axis on which all the world of life revolves.

Sources talk about travelers just being stunned by the sheer scale of it all.

Acres upon acres of cotton bales piled high on the levee.

A real world in miniature, as one observer called it.

You had people and products from everywhere, all converging in this kind of chaotic bustling hub.

But that chaos, that volume, required a huge workforce and crucially a highly specialized one, which, as you mentioned, made unity tricky.

Extremely tricky.

Our sources estimate around 13 ,000 workers were tied into this cotton economy on the docks.

And they weren't just workers.

There was a very rigid hierarchy.

Okay.

So break that down for us.

It wasn't just one big pool of labor.

Not at all.

At the very bottom, you have the rouskabouts.

These were often formerly enslaved people or the newest arrivals.

Conditions were brutal.

Pay was the lowest.

Right.

Then you have the longshoremen.

That was the largest group handling general cargo, not just cotton.

Okay.

But at the top, the absolute elite, the guys everyone looked up to or maybe resented, those were the cotton screwmen, the aristocrats of the levee, they called them.

The screwmen.

Why were they so special?

What did they do that put them at the pinnacle?

It sounds strange now, but it was about physics and packing.

They used these incredibly heavy, powerful jack screws, hence the name screwmen.

Oh, okay.

And they used these tools to physically compress the bulky cotton bales much, much tighter into the ship's hold than any group of men could do just by hand.

So they could fit more cotton on each ship.

Exactly.

Maximized the cargo, which was vital for these long expensive ocean voyages.

Their skill was unique, totally essential for the cotton trade as it was then.

It couldn't be easily replaced.

So that gave them real leverage.

Huge leverage.

But, and this is the key point for all workers, whether you were a skilled screwman or roused about, you faced this constant problem.

Work was incredibly irregular.

Right, because it depended on when ships arrived, the season.

Precisely.

It was boom and bust.

Busy season was roughly October to March, the cotton season.

Outside of that, things could get very lean very quickly.

And that basic vulnerability, that insecurity, it really got worse in the 1870s, didn't it?

The city faced a double whammy.

First, the economy just tanked.

Yeah, the big national depression that started in 1873 hit New Orleans hard and lasted pretty much through 79.

Unemployment was rampant.

One estimate from 1875 suggests maybe 5 ,000 men were jobless in That's huge for the time.

It was devastating.

And it particularly hurt the black community because the failure of the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company just wiped out so many people's savings.

Generations of accumulated wealth gone.

And on top of that economic crisis, you had intense political turmoil.

This is the end of reconstruction we're talking about.

Exactly.

A really ugly period.

You had the violent pushback against black political power culminating in things like the 1874 Battle of Liberty place.

Right, where that paramilitary group, the White League, actually briefly overthrew the state's Republican government.

Until federal troops stepped in.

So the whole political environment was incredibly hostile, especially for black workers trying to organize.

So how did they try to organize in those early years, given the hostility?

Well, black workers leaned heavily on institutions they already had.

Fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies.

There were hundreds of these during reconstruction.

These gradually evolved into occupation specific groups like the Longshoremen's Protective Union Benevolent Association formed in 1872.

They offered support like sickness and death benefits.

But they also had union -like goals.

Oh, absolutely.

They explicitly aimed to regulate the time and fix the price of labor.

They were trying to build worker power, often sort of disguised as self -help or charity, to avoid immediate suppression.

But those early efforts, like the big 1872 strike demanding $4 a day, they mostly failed, right?

Why couldn't they make gains?

The core problem was isolation.

What one historian calls racial sectoralism.

When the black Longshoremen went on strike in 72, what happened?

The police cracked down.

Yes.

The police force, even under a supposedly friendly Republican administration,

protected the strikebreakers brought in by employers.

But maybe even more importantly, white workers didn't join in.

They largely stood aside.

R .T.

Matthews, the black union president at the time, bitterly complained that the white unions failed to support them heart and soul.

They were left on their own.

So the white workers, especially those elite screw men in their benevolent association, the SBA, they were prioritizing their own status, maybe their racial identity over class solidarity.

Completely.

The SBA fiercely guarded its position.

They deliberately limited the number of black workers allowed to become screw men, capping it at just 20 gangs, which is only about 100 men total.

Wow, that's explicit exclusion.

It created this deeply fractured workforce.

Employers could always exploit these divisions, pit one group against another, use black workers as strikebreakers against whites, or vice versa.

That was the fundamental weakness throughout the 1870s.

Okay, but then things started to shift.

The economy picks up around 1879, 1880.

Right.

Prosperity returns.

And suddenly there's this explosion of organizing activity, as the sources put it.

Workers felt more confident, perhaps.

And they had a key early success that showed a different path was possible.

Yes.

A huge one in 1880.

You had black and white cotton yardmen working in the cotton presses, not on the ships directly strike together.

Interracial cross trade.

Exactly.

And the result.

They closed every press in the city, total shutdown.

And they won their demands almost immediately.

It was proof positive that unity, real unity across race and trade lines actually worked.

That must have been electrifying.

Did that victory lead directly to a more permanent structure?

How did they finally overcome that fragmentation problem?

It seems to have been the catalyst.

They created the mechanism they needed.

The Cotton Men's Executive Council formed in late 1880.

This was the game changer.

The Cotton Men's Executive Council, what did it do differently?

It brought together all the unions involved in handling cotton,

screwmen, longshoremen, teamsters, yardmen, black unions, white unions.

All 13 ,000 or so workers were now potentially represented under one umbrella organization.

So no more isolated strikes.

Precisely.

The council had the authority to commit all member unions to support any single union struggle.

It ended that fatal sectoralism.

There was a German economist observing this, wasn't there?

He described the logic.

Yes, August Sartorius Freyer von Waltershausen.

He saw exactly what was happening.

He called it the logic of alliance.

If one group, say the longshoremen, went on strike, the council would ensure everyone else stopped work too.

That's it.

The teamsters wouldn't haul the cotton.

The yardmen wouldn't handle it.

The screwmen wouldn't load it.

Suddenly the employer wasn't facing just one small strike.

They had, as von Waltershausen put it, eight such strikes on hand.

Making it incredibly difficult for the employers to win.

Simple math.

Exactly.

It massively shifted the balance of leverage towards the workers.

And they used this newfound power for more than just wages, right?

You mentioned they tackled racial pay differences.

They did.

There's a striking example from an 1881 dispute.

Employers tried to replace lower paid black screwmen gangs with white ones.

But the council, driven by the alliance, didn't just let that happen.

What did they do?

They essentially forced the employers to strike action to raise the wages of the black screwmen up to the same level as the white union standard, rather than allowing them to be fired.

Wow.

So they used their collective power to enforce equal pay,

actively fighting the racial wage structure?

It showed a commitment to class unity that went beyond just immediate self -interest for any one group.

It was about building a stable, unified front, which leads us right into that massive 1881 showdown, the strike during which James Hawkins was killed.

Because the stakes were getting higher now.

It wasn't just about dollars and cents anymore.

No.

The core issue in the 1881 strike, according to the sources, was fundamentally about control.

Control over the labor process itself.

The employers were digging in their heels, insisting on their absolute right to hire and fire whoever they wanted union or not.

And the employers organized too, didn't they?

They formed their own council.

They did.

In July 1881, they created the Employers Council.

This brought together the big players, the cotton factors, the cotton press owners, the boss draymen, the shipping agents.

They were unified in their opposition.

And they weren't looking for compromise.

Not at all.

The cotton exchange president, Thomas L.

Airy, flatly rejected any arbitration.

He argued that compromising would just delay the evil day of reckoning.

They were preparing for a fight to the finish.

And their main weapon was strikebreakers.

Yes.

They started importing hundreds of workers, mostly black laborers, from places like Mobile and Savannah.

These became known as minersmen, after the agent who recruited them.

They were brought in under heavy police protection to try and break the strike.

Did this cause cracks in the workers' unity, given those old racial tensions?

It did, unfortunately.

The sources are clear that the longstanding resentment, particularly among some black workers over the white screwmen's history of exclusion,

led a minority to break ranks.

Some black screwmen and longshoremen did go back to work under employer protection.

So the unity wasn't absolute?

It wasn't perfect, no.

Those deep -seated racial divisions were still a vulnerability the employers tried hard to exploit.

But the core alliance held.

And then the situation escalated dramatically.

With the killing of James Hawkins.

Yes.

On September 11, 1881, Sgt.

Thomas Reynolds shot and killed Hawkins, the black teacher we started with.

And that death, that act of violence, it didn't break the strike.

It actually seemed to galvanize it.

How so?

It ignited what the sources call widespread popular indignation.

It wasn't just the union members anymore.

The broader black community, especially women and young people living near the docks on streets like Chupatulas, they took direct action.

What did they do?

They started stopping cotton wagons, sometimes attacking the police, guarding them.

It became a community uprising against the strikebreakers and the authorities protecting them.

The situation got so tense that the mayor, Joseph Shakespeare, panicked about anarchy breaking out.

And he called in the militia.

He did.

Mobilized 2 ,000 state militiamen to try and regain control of the streets and protect the strikebreakers.

But even with the militia, the employers couldn't move the cotton, could they?

No.

The council's strategy was working perfectly.

Commerce was paralyzed.

Nothing was moving.

That complete economic shutdown, combined with the explosive social unrest after Hawkins' death,

finally forced the employers' council to back down.

They agreed to arbitration.

Yes.

They realized they couldn't win by force.

The resulting settlement was a major victory for the workers.

They won most of their wage demands across the board.

But the key win wasn't just money, was it?

No.

The really crucial victory was institutional.

The agreement mandated that foremen could only hire workers who were members of the recognized associations, the unions.

Ah, so that gives the unions control over the hiring process, essentially a closed shop.

Effectively, yes.

It cemented their power on the docks.

And perhaps just as importantly, they proved something politically.

Neither the combined might of the employers nor the mayor and his police and militia had the power to outright crush this new unified labor structure.

So looking back at that decade, it's an incredible transformation.

You start the 1870s with these isolated failed strikes, deep racial divisions being exploited.

Total fragmentation.

And you end in 1881 with this powerful, resilient structure, the Cotton Men's Executive Council, that has fundamentally changed the dynamics of both race and class on the waterfront.

And remarkably, that structure, that alliance, proved incredibly durable.

It basically held together, shaping labor relations in New Orleans for the next four decades.

Which is astonishing.

Now, let's connect this back to the city's politics.

Why couldn't the city's elite, the powerful merchants and factors who ran the cotton trade, just use their political clout to break these unions?

They clearly wanted to.

That's a fantastic final potion, and it's key to understanding the union's long -term success.

The commercial elite did try, repeatedly.

They backed various reform tickets, trying to take complete control of City Hall, install their own people, and basically crushed the unions through police power and hostile legislation.

But they didn't fully succeed.

They kept failing to completely dislodge the existing political machine, often called the Democratic Ring.

And crucially, figures within that ring, like a powerful ward boss named John Fitzpatrick, had deep connections to organized labor, particularly the waterfront unions.

So the unions had political allies, or at least the elite didn't have total political control.

Exactly.

That lack of complete political dominance by the commercial class was vital.

It meant the unions weren't facing a totally unified state apparatus, determined to destroy them.

They had some political breathing room, some allies, some leverage within the system.

That political space allowed them to consolidate their workplace gains, to maintain that control over hiring, and essentially defend their position decade after decade.

The bosses couldn't quite get the political alignment they needed to deliver the knockout blow.

So it's a powerful lesson in how workplace organizing, especially when it tackles racial division head -on, can build lasting power, but also how the broader political landscape shapes what's possible.

Control of the docks depended, in part, on not letting the employers gain total control of City Hall.

Absolutely.

The two were deeply intertwined.

A really stunning story of resilience and strategic power building.

Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into how labor unity emerged on the New Orleans waterfront.

We hope this journey through the sources gave you a clearer picture of that crucial transformation.

Indeed.

Thanks for listening.

Until next time.