While researching Fannie Sellins, I was shocked that no one was ever held responsible for her violent killing. This violated my personal sense of justice and, in my opinion, American values. But I soon realized that Fannie’s murder was not an isolated instance, and the failure to pursue justice was not unusual at the time. The facts of the case are hardly even remarkable when viewed in the context of the persistent violence perpetrated against American workers for much of our early history.
In this book I’ve included facts and figures about some of that violence. However, official records of union people like Fannie killed over decades of worker strikes are spotty. No official body count, no reliable numbers of physical assaults, and no definitive records of worker jailings without due process truly document the violence of the struggle for workers’ rights. But evidence does exist of a distinct pattern of intimidation and harassment of workers by company-hired gunmen, local law enforcement, and National Guard troops—with little or no redress for the victims. And when this brute force failed to halt strikes, industrial and business owners could often count on the strong arm of the United States Army for assistance, as they did in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. (See this page.)
Did workers, too, ever instigate violence in pursuit of their cause? Yes, there are records of union members blatantly attacking company guards and killing scabs. However, this violence was rarely, if ever, officially condoned or orchestrated by the unions, as it was on the part of company owners and managers.
After the shooting of Fannie Sellins, unions across the country used her martyrdom to rally workers in the first nationwide steel strike on September 22, 1919. When 350,000 laborers took to the picket lines in cities such as Lackawanna, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Pueblo, Colorado, hired gunmen, police, and soldiers lined up against them. Hundreds of workers were intimidated, beaten, hauled from their homes, and jailed on flimsy charges. Federal troops put down the strike in many cities, leading to more violence and several workers’ deaths. The combination of anti-immigrant propaganda, armed forces, and a fundamental devaluing of the lives of workers slammed unions into submission. Within ten weeks, the strikers folded. As had happened time and again, they went back to work with no gains, their effort a dismal failure.
Was Fannie Sellins’s death, then, in vain? Did her courage and belief in the rights of workers accomplish nothing?
Hardly. True, the lengths to which powerful corporations have been willing to go to protect their profits highlights an unbroken trail of shame running through our nation’s history. And changing those conditions required many, many sacrifices like Fannie’s over a long time—more than a century.
National Guard soldiers funded by business magnate John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company aim machine guns at a tent camp, temporary home to 1,200 union families. Pelting the tents with rifle and machine-gun fire, they kill an eleven-year-old boy. After a fourteen-hour siege, the soldiers burn the camp. Nineteen people die, including two women and eleven children trapped beneath their tent. Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.
The power of law—President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s labor-friendly New Deal and the U.S. Congress’s 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act)—finally compelled business and industry to pay attention to workers’ grievances.
It was ordinary people who wanted change and demanded it. Ordinary people, such as Fannie Sellins, with hope and vision made sacrifices so that all of us might receive benefits such as workplace safety, the five-day work-week, the eight-hour workday, sick pay, and paid vacation time. Though these ordinary, everyday, hardworking people might not be recorded in history books, they strove to create the change America needed.
After workers made gains in the mid-twentieth century, American labor unions lost strength. Today, opponents debate the need for a minimum wage and workers’ right to organize. Many companies cut health benefits and retirement. The gap between the rich and the poor stretches as wide as it did in Fannie’s lifetime. At the time this book went to print, thirteen million American children were living in poverty, some half million of whom labor in the fields that grow America’s food.
Poor workers thirst for hope. They hunger for the kind of leadership Fannie Sellins modeled. When I started researching her story, I had one question: How did she have the courage to stand up for the working poor against such huge and deadly odds? Her death in 1919 is well documented in public records, photographs, witness accounts, and newspaper articles. The United States census records Fannie’s birth in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1872. But between those two notable dates are few details. I found no living family members, and as is true for much of history, there exists little written record of poor people’s lives.
Fannie told union miners in Illinois in 1919 that she had “known nothing but a sewing machine for fifteen years.” Census records from April 1910 note that she lived in a rental house in St. Louis, Missouri, with three of her children: John (age seventeen), Josephine (age fourteen), and Julia (age twelve). It seems that her oldest daughter had, by then, left home. Fannie reported that her younger daughters attended school that year, that she was a widow and mother of four, and that she worked as a seamstress.
History did not record precisely what Fannie said to her fellow seamstresses to convince them to organize and join Ladies’ Local 67 of the United Garment Workers of America. Likewise, there is no hard evidence of how discouraged she might have felt when facing powerful mine owners, such as Lewis Hicks, or of exactly what she shouted to the men on the train from Birmingham, Alabama, in February 1917. In these instances, I believe that her actions speak even louder than whatever words she might have said, so I have filled in some cracks in the research with my own phrasings. Still, I believe that this book as a whole truthfully portrays Fannie Sellins’s life and her commitment to working people. And in writing it, I discovered that many people shared the same courage she demonstrated. They may not be remembered individually like Fannie, but throughout history many ordinary people had the courage to risk their lives to fight a system they believed was unjust.
They did not look away from the problems in their neighborhoods, communities, and workplaces. Like Fannie, they tackled them head-on. Today, we still need leaders with Fannie’s courage, commitment, and compassion, leaders who will not flinch but will keep dreaming of and working toward fairness for all. Maybe each of us carries the capacity to demonstrate those qualities in some way that will make a difference.
