Decline of the Strike

These days, we associate the right to bear arms with right-wing cranks who think they are defending themselves when they bring their assault rifles with them to Chili’s. But consider a few episodes from American labor history. During the Great Strike of 1877, workers beat back hutindreds of National Guardsmen with stones, brickbats, and pistols, taking over most of St. Louis for a few days. In 1892, during a running battle with local militias in the town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, miners loaded a railroad car with powder and a burning fuse and sent the makeshift bomb down a hill into a mill where strikebreakers and their militia protectors had been staying. In 1922, after armed guards fired machine guns at strikers trying to convince strikebreakers to rejoin the strike, hundreds of miners accompanied by an airplane dropping dynamite bombs attacked the mine personnel.