The National Guard’s History of Violent Labor Repression
Donald Trump recently commandeered California’s National Guard to repress anti-ICE protests in LA. The National Guard has a long history of being deployed to break up protests and strikes, including violent repression of strikes by immigrant workers.
National Guard troops stand with bayonets fixed as striking African American workers peacefully march by during the Memphis Sanitation Strike in Tenneessee, 1968. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
Ludlow, Colorado, 1914: eleven thousand mine workers had been on strike for seven months against John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, protesting low pay and dangerous conditions. They were overwhelmingly immigrants, from Greece, Italy, Mexico, Croatia, Austria, Montenegro, and elsewhere, speaking at least twenty-two different languages. The company had evicted them from their homes, so they were camped out in the snow in a tent colony, frozen and starving.
The morning of April 20, the Colorado National Guard, called in at Rockefeller’s behest, opened fire from a machine gun set up on a hill above the strikers’ homes, then rushed in to burn down the whole colony. “The soldiers and mine guards tried to kill everybody, anything they saw move, even a dog, they shot at,” one witness reported. The Guard killed three unarmed strikers who were holding aloft white flags, including their Greek leader, Louis Tikas, among others. It used fuel oil to incinerate three women and eleven children huddling in cellars.
What became known as the Ludlow Massacre offers a sharp reminder of the long and vicious history of superrich employers using the National Guard to break strikes, especially between 1877 and World War I. As we recoil with horror at President Donald Trump sending the National Guard and the Marines into Los Angeles to repress pro-immigrant demonstrations, discussions of the National Guard’s history have focused either on the authority of a president to deploy it against the will of the governor or its role during the civil rights era.
The Guard itself is often talked about as a neutral or even benevolent force. But for fifty years from the onset of large-scale industrialization in the 1870s, the National Guard was funded, launched, and celebrated by elites as a strike-breaking force, and its use against the labor movement continued well into the late twentieth century, often in tandem with federal forces. It’s important that we remember the full class and racial politics of the National Guard’s history, which often involved hostility to working-class immigrants and overlapped with the use of federal troops to suppress domestic dissent and anti-racist protests.
Anti-Labor Shock Troops
The National Guard evolved out of state and local militias during the colonial period. In the South, militias served as organized vigilantes, who rode on horseback with whips to hunt down enslaved people, enforcing a captive labor force. After the Civil War though, militias declined in popularity; by 1870 most states had no militias at all.
But as industrialization took off in the late nineteenth century, drawing in hundreds of millions of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, and generating horrific working conditions, working people began to protest and strike by the tens of thousands. Business interests and their allies in government promoted militias — renamed the National Guard in 1903 — to repress popular protest and, most centrally, to break strikes. Elites worked with the mainstream media to fuse immigrants, left-wing radicals, and unions into a single, violent threat to the nation, embodied in the racialized image of the black-mustached, bomb-throwing anarchist.
The turning point was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Four years into a deep economic depression, a cabal of four major railroads announced they were cutting wages an additional 10 percent. In response, workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, began uncoupling rail cars and blocking tracks. Working-class members of the Pittsburgh militia refused to attack their fellow workers; so the companies sent in the Philadelphia militia, which attacked a crowd with bayonets and opened fire. Twenty people died.
The class politics were raw: “My troops will see the trains pass,” declared Tom Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In response, rage spread like wildfire along the nation’s railway lines, producing strikes, track blockages, and riots by desperate workers, largely without unions at this point, and stretching all the way to Galveston, Texas, and San Francisco. General strikes shut down large swaths of St Louis and Chicago. President Rutherford B. Hayes then sent in 3,700 federal troops, who joined local militias, police, and private forces to viciously and successfully repress the rebellion.
After that, business interests poured private funds and political power into the development of state Guard units. Their efforts paid off most famously during the next recession. When workers struck steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and private Pinkerton forces engaged in a pitched battle with strikers, the state militia escorted strikebreakers into the plants, breaking the strike.
Two years later, over 260,000 workers in Chicago and elsewhere, many of them now unionized, refused to move railroad cars of the Pullman Company in protest against wage cuts ranging from 25 to 40 percent, and shut down most rail traffic nationwide. So President Grover Cleveland sent in 8,500 National Guard troops, who joined militias from six states to break the strike and destroy the union. “There is ample proof sufficient to make it clear . . . that the United States government was at the beck and call of the railroad corporations,” declared Eugene V. Debs, the union’s president.
By the first two decades of the twentieth century, overt government hostility to working-class immigrants and leftists had elicited the repeated use of federal and Guard forces to break strikes against miners in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada as well as Colorado, and against labor opponents to World War I in Montana, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
The tide turned during the Great Depression though, as the labor movement exploded in popular legitimacy and power. When the new United Auto Workers occupied a General Motors plant in the audacious Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike of 1936–37, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to send in federal troops, and progressive governor Frank Murphy deployed the National Guard not to break to strike but to protect the strikers inside the plant, while deescalating hostilities outside it, promoting negotiations that led to a spectacular victory by the union.
During the civil rights era, the National Guard turned out repeatedly — sometimes on the side of the Freedom Struggle, sometimes against it. When nine courageous African American students tried to desegregate a Little Rock, Arkansas, high school in 1957, the governor sent in the Guard to block them; President Dwight D. Eisenhower then took over the Guard and sent it, along with federal troops, to protect the students. Meanwhile, governors continued to deploy the Guard against strikes — including the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968, in which African American workers famously carried pickets reading “I Am a Man,” and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon sent in federal troops to break a national strike by a union of 200,000 multiracial postal workers. This time, though, the strike wasn’t broken, and postal workers won an unprecedented contract.
In other cases, the Guard’s work was brutal: African American hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina, striking against racial discrimination at work and supported by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), faced vicious violence from one thousand National Guard and state troopers. In Arizona, in 1983, a Democratic governor sent in 325 members of the National Guard to help break a strike of Mexican American and white copper workers at Phelp Dodge. And of course, at Kent State in 1970, the National Guard infamously shot and killed four white students protesting the Vietnam War, wounding nine others; eleven days later, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, police and state troopers killed two African American students and injured twelve.
Trump’s recent deployment of both the National Guard and the Marines in Los Angeles not only violates the Posse Comitatus Act and the authority of governors to decide how to use the National Guard but also displays his willingness to use federal and federalized troops as part of a larger program of terrorizing and repressing immigrants.
We can put that together with his increasingly overt hostility to the labor movement: he has revoked collective bargaining rights for federal workers and gutted the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service; most recently, the Veterans Administration declared that its medical practitioners can discriminate against union members, Democrats, and unmarried people. The historical record warns us: it is far from unthinkable that Trump could launch the National Guard or other troops to repress and even kill people once again for striking, as part of a larger project of closing off all spaces for peaceful protest.