In Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century, Chad E. Pearson argues that to understand the history of American labor relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we need to pay closer attention to violent vigilante organizations led by businessmen focused on labor control. The book consists of a series of effectively chosen case studies drawing on archival research in no fewer than seventeen states.
The first two chapters seek to revise our understanding of both the (first) Ku Klux Klan and the Law and Order Leagues that sprang up in the 1880s. The following two chapters consider specific local cases of labor repression led by prominent businessmen turned vigilantes. The final two chapters highlight continuities in violent, repressive tactics and reveal the storytelling in which these businessmen (and their heirs) engaged – how they painted vigilantism and violence as a defense of hardworking, ordinary Americans.
Despite the title’s provocative usage of the term “terrorists,” the book is not limited to direct violence perpetrated by employers. Pearson develops a three-level hierarchy of repression, with “hard” repression (whippings, shootings, and the like) forming one tier, and “soft” repression (firings, blacklistings, and so forth) another tier. In the middle, “hybrid” repression covers acts that had elements of both, such as intimidating labor activists to leave town before sundown, or else. In many ways, the simple fact that it is possible to develop such a hierarchy and find numerous examples of each category underlines the truth of Pearson’s basic claim: that business elites engaged in what amounted to terrorism against workers. To be sure, it might have been useful to discuss shifting definitions of terrorism at somewhat greater length. One could also be clearer about whether so-called soft repression tactics deserve the label of terrorism. Nevertheless, the basic point stands: both hard and hybrid repression involved violent actions (by non-state actors) calculated to intimidate and perpetrated in pursuit of a broader political or economic purpose. Even for simply calling our attention to this framing of the labor problem, Pearson’s book is valuable.
The chapter that will likely invite the most pushback is the first one, on the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction South. Pearson reframes the Klan as an employers’ association – that is, an organization of capital focused on controlling labor. Pearson neither denies that racism was at the heart of the organization, nor that a significant number of ordinary whites were involved in it. He does argue, however, that the Klan was led by “financially comfortable males” (25) and that it was, in the words of a contemporary, “a brotherhood of property holders” (26). Moreover, he emphasizes that the Klan had “unmistakable managerial interests” (26). Pearson’s evidence for seeing the Klan as an employer association comes on two levels, one direct and the other indirect. On the direct front, perhaps his strongest case is the example of Klan leader John Hunnicutt. Hunnicut, an Alabama cotton planter who found himself unable to secure workers after his murder of an outspoken African American laborer, set about enlisting his fellow Klansmen in a display of force in “Negro town” (39). According to his account, the Klan successfully intimidated its residents to stop, in Hunnicutt’s words, “boycotting me” (38). On the indirect front, Pearson emphasizes the need to see actions usually attributed exclusively to racism as also motivated by a desire to control labor. For example, attacks on African American educational efforts or political activity can be seen in terms of white insistence that such pursuits were uppity and would upset the racial hierarchy. But they can also be viewed as devices to maintain a labor force that had few options and little agency. Education made one qualified for things better than plantation labor; it also gave one access to news about employment opportunities in cities and in the North. Political activity might, at the very least, give one ideas. Both thus invited harsh repression. As Pearson points out, though, this repression had to be somewhat strategic in scope and timing so as not to induce the workforce to flee altogether.
Chapters two through four demonstrate that employers engaged in terrorist tactics against workers in multiple contexts. In Sedalia, Missouri, in the 1880s, the businessman, printer, and newspaper publisher J. West Goodwin led the formation of the first Law and Order League, which organized business elites into an armed force that took independent (that is, vigilante) action against labor when it deemed action necessary. In Idaho, the Mine Owners’ Association armed the mine owners and managers and kept arrested strikers in outdoor bullpens under harsh conditions. In Tampa, Florida, another newspaper owner and businessman, D. B. McKay, led the effort to kidnap and deport thirteen cigar workers to an island near Honduras, leaving the ongoing strike at the tobacco factories leaderless and floundering. All these cases mattered beyond the local context. For instance, the Law and Order Leagues spread far beyond Sedalia, while the Tampa kidnap-and-deport strategy, which Pearson speculates may have been inspired by McKay’s studies of the Second Seminole War, received praise for its efficacy in trade publications and newspapers. The strategies these cases displayed also had staying power: the intimidation, jailings, appeals to law and order, and spreading of false news remained, as chapters five and six show, part and parcel of employer strategy into the twentieth century. Even if labor historians have delved into some of these cases before, the new light in which they are presented here and the wealth of detail accompanying them are important contributions.
My chief critique of this book is that the reader is sometimes hard put to sift out the most important points and examples from among a surfeit of information. Still, the sifting pays off, and the book’s core argument will surely provoke discussion.
