Violence in Labor Conflicts
By L. A. S.
STATISTICS prepared by Mr. Slason Thompson, and published in The Outlook, of violence attending labor conflicts, show a total of 198 persons killed, 1,966 persons injured, and 6,114 arrests made in the United States in connection with such conflicts for two years and nine months ending Sept. 30, 1904. These figures are the outcome of an inquiry “instituted to secure the concrete facts, if possible, and some reliable data as to the mortality through the unceasing war which labor unions have been waging in the United States during recent years.” “The difficulty of obtaining anything like full statistics of the violence attending strikes,” Mr. Thompson says, makes it certain that these figures greatly understate the truth. Nor do they, he adds, “begin but to tell the whole harrowing tale of violence and outrage attending strikes during the period mentioned,” as “may be judged from the fact that in the State of Pennsylvania alone, between May 1 and Nov. 3, 1902,” in connection with a “peaceable” strike, “there were thirty occupied dwellings dynamited; forty trains obstructed or wrecked; four dams and bridges dynamited; scores of houses burned, stoned, shot into, or otherwise attacked; unnumbered riots and assaults with clubs, stones, and other weapons; cattle poisoned, doctors forbidden to attend the sick, ministers boycotted for ministering to the dying.” In this work Mr. Thompson has had in mind two questions ‘put to him by Mr. John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers of America: “Can strikes be conducted without violence?” and, “Can they succeed when not accompanied by lawlessness?”—which questions Mr. Mitchell answers with a positive “Yes.” Mr. Thompson, however, finds himself led to a different conclusion. “Unfortunately,” he says, “stern and inexorable facts which I have gathered from every section of the Union prove that if strikes can be conducted without violence, without assaults, without lawlessness, without riots and murder, they are not, and, with rare and insignificant exceptions, they never have been.” “A strike without violence of some sort is a barren ideality that exists only in the minds of self-deceived sentimentalists, professional agitators, and unsophisticated economists.” Such figures impress us with the fact that war is going on in our earth not alone in far-off Manchuria or Africa, but at our very doors and under conditions of nominal peace. The spirit of selfishness which fills the world is accompanied everywhere by lawlessness and strife, which oftentimes produce results but little short of those attending a military campaign. There is a vast amount of nominal peace, but very little real peace, in the world. As it was just prior to the first destruction of the world, in the days of Noah, when “the earth was filled with violence,” so it is to-day, and we know that the earth is ready for a second visitation of the wrath of God.
L. A. S.