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THE MAKING OF THE SPRINGFIELD WORKING CLASS  
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Gabriel Winant
September 30, 2024
The New York Review
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_ Each generation of this country’s workforce has always been urged
to detest the next—to come up with its own fantasies of cat-eating
immigrants. _

Champion Machine Works, Springfield, Ohio, 1907, Library of
Congress/Wikimedia Commons

 

In September 1917, Ohio Governor James M. Cox—soon to be the
Democratic nominee for president in 1920—marked Labor Day with a
lengthy public address. After a few words praising the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) for patriotically complying with the war
effort, he turned to the then-emerging phenomenon that we now call the
Great Migration. “There is one symptom, however, in the present
situation which presages serious trouble unless society and the state
act together and avert it,” he said: “the large influx of colored
people from the southern states.” City life, the governor warned,
would transform black southerners from simple rural folk into
“vicious types.” Their “importation” threatened “to break
down the standards of labor, and to jeopardize the ideals of a
progressive state.”

A budding media mogul (whose name graces today’s cable and newspaper
empire), Cox had launched his political career by buying newspapers in
two industrial cities in central Ohio: Dayton and Springfield. By and
large, he was the same type of Progressive as the incumbent, Woodrow
Wilson: cautiously friendly to workers and farmers, internationalist
in orientation, racist as a matter of course.

Springfield, one of his crucial bases of support, had a history of
racial terror. In 1904, after lynching a black man named Richard
Dickerson, a white mob torched the town’s small black neighborhood.
(No one died in the flames because authorities told the residents to
leave, then allowed their homes to burn.) Two years later a bar fight
and a shooting led to another episode of mob violence and arson. In
1921 a third eruption was brought on, as the historians August Meier
and Elliott Rudwick put it, by “white awareness of a ‘Negro
influx.’”

 As violence spread, the National Guard occupied the town. The next
year Springfield resegregated its schools, which had been integrated
under state law since 1887, establishing an all-black elementary
school for a district it named “Needmore.” The superintendent and
two of the five members of the school board were later discovered to
be enrolled members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan parading through Springfield, Ohio, 1923.
Corbis/Getty Images

Spasms of white mob violence, in other words, were a feature not just
of the Jim Crow South but also of the industrial North, where they
likewise enforced a daily regime of segregation and exploitation. The
violence peaked in the years during and just after World War I. Much
of it was concentrated in smaller industrial centers—East St. Louis,
Chester, Indianapolis, Omaha, Gary. At times it was focused on black
strikebreakers, “imported” (often unknowingly) for the purpose.
But it was common for self-fashioned friends of labor like Cox to
imply that all black migrants had been “imported” this
way—“dropped on Springfield,” as one might hear it said today.

Springfield’s central industry, agricultural equipment, was crucial
to America’s industrial takeoff in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The enormous productivity of American
farming—made possible in large part by the innovations of
International Harvester, John Deere, Caterpillar, and Springfield’s
own Champion Machine Works and Oliver Farm Equipment—had generated a
massive trade surplus, which in turn stimulated the expansion of the
railroads used to ship farm products out of the plains. Railroads, of
course, are made of steel, as are the reapers, mowers, and binders
that sped the flow of grain from the heartland. In this way American
farms indirectly invigorated the steel industry, which matured to
furnish the material for skyscrapers, highways, and automobiles. Thus
economic development from the 1870s to the 1950s turned on the fulcrum
of agricultural productivity, for which cities like Springfield grew
to supply the instruments.

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At each phase of this process, new sources of manpower had to be found
to dig the ore and lay the tracks, stoke the furnaces and smelt the
metal, rivet the parts and weld the edges. Typically, labor came from
the widening shatter zone of collapsed rural economies on the
peripheries of Europe. Peasant households could not withstand
integration into the global capitalist system, where cheap American
grain now set the prices. Instead they journeyed to the source.

Adjusting to industrial America could be an ordeal. In 1912
the _Springfield Daily News _ran an article headlined, “Work of
Aliens in Factories Is Important,” illustrated with an account of
“a large plant in Ohio, which employs several hundred Magyars. When
they first came they had the usual undesirable qualities of the new
immigrant,” the journalist observed. “But the superintendent
planned to eliminate these qualities.”  

Springfield’s factories, however, drew more of their labor from the
internal hinterland than from the peasantries of Italy, Poland, and
Austria-Hungary. The poor folk of the US South who could no longer
scratch out a living as debt peons growing cotton or digging coal
endured the ordeal of adjustment as well. And not only the black
migrants whom plebeian white Northerners greeted with violence, but
also the thousands of white “hillbillies”—the ancestors of J.D.
Vance. As the historian Max Fraser shows in his recent
book _Hillbilly Highway_, they too had “the undesirable qualities
of the new immigrant.”

 In nearby Dayton, for example, landlords rented to “hillbillies”
by the week, fearing they would skip out on leases; the health
department bemoaned that they had to be instructed on “cleanliness,
immunizations, sanitation, and nutrition” at a fourth-grade level.
“Our laws and customs are different from anything they’ve
known,” complained a Cincinnati cop.

With each new wave, the same howl rose from an American throat: this
group is too different, too unprepared, too ill-bred: these Irish,
these Chinese, these Italians, these Jews, these “colored people,”
these hillbillies, these Mexicans, these Salvadorans, these
Venezuelans, these Haitians. In 1909, for instance, California
newspapers published stories claiming that Chinese gang warfare in San
Francisco was fueling a trade in cat meat. “There is a superstitious
belief among the Chinese that if their warriors are fed on the flesh
of wild cats, they will assimilate the ferocity of the beasts.” In
1911 a Brooklyn man accused “a gang of foreign
laborers”—ethnicity unspecified—of catching and eating his three
cats. Then, as now, the provenance of the account was indirect; the
story was thirdhand by the time it was printed.

A view of the Springfield Metallic Casket Company manufacturing plant,
from William Mahlon Rockel’s 20th Century History of Springfield,
and Clark County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens (Biographical
Publishing Co., 1908) Internet Archive/Wikimedia Commons

To say that economic development and the creative destruction that
attends it—discarding or elevating old working populations,
installing new ones—creates a new phantasmagoria of cat-eating
immigrants in every generation is only to describe from another angle
the basic historic problem of the American working class. Continually
flushed with new entrants, the working class in this country has
always heard in one ear an appeal to detest the newcomers, to abhor
their lawless ways and their degenerate habits. This voice has
sometimes come from within the house of labor, although almost
invariably its right wing. In 1902 the president of the AFL, Samuel
Gompers, cowrote a pamphlet insisting that “sixty years’ contact
with the Chinese, twenty-five years’ experience with the Japanese
and two or three years’ acquaintance with Hindus should be
sufficient to convince any ordinarily intelligent person that they
have no standard of morals by which a Caucasian may judge them.”

More influential, though, are the voices of politicians who speak the
language of class consciousness to divide rather than unite the
working class. Woodrow Wilson, for example, a Jim Crow champion who
tentatively courted organized labor, compared the consequences of
Asian immigration to those of the Atlantic slave trade—for white
people, that is: “Remunerative labor is the basis of contentment.
Democracy rests on the equality of citizens. Oriental coolieism will
give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our
lesson.”

The purported enmity between different kinds of laborers—free and
slave, native-born and immigrant, skilled and unskilled, black and
white, male and female—is not a vestige of a bitter past. It is
continually reactivated. A primary task of the American left, then,
has been to mediate between one generation of working people and the
next, to find the openings between their diverse traditions and
connect them.

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The working-class black migrants who came to Springfield in the 1910s
organized civil rights protests as early as 1922, boycotting and
picketing the newly segregated schools. The Civil Rights Protective
League that they formed was led by a small group of black
professionals, but its rank and file came from new migrants,
concentrated in “Needmore” and congregating in so-called
“hellfire” churches. The League denounced preachers who would not
collect for its cause on Sundays, confronted black teachers who worked
in segregated schools, and visited families that did not honor the
picket line.

Herman Henry Wessel: The Farm Implement Industry (mural study for the
Springfield, Ohio, post office), 1936. Smithsonian American Art
Museum/Wikimedia Commons

In retaliation the local prosecutor charged five sets of working-class
parents under truancy law and a laborer named Waldo Bailey for
assaulting a teacher crossing the picket line, but secured no
convictions. The League, on the other hand, won favorable rulings in
litigation over the schools and even organized to defeat Klan
candidates for the school board, although not for city commission or
police judge. But it never managed to reintegrate the schools. White
supremacy prevailed by inertia. “The victory of the Springfield
Negroes was an empty one,” Meier and Rudwick observed.

More durable change arrived in the 1930s, with the breakthrough of the
labor movement and the rise of the political left. William and Mattie
Mosley, for example, came to Springfield from Tennessee with their
children in the Great Migration. By 1920 William was working as a
molder in a foundry, although he left at some point to become a
gardener. Mattie became involved in the movement to boycott the
segregated schools. Their son Herbert got a job as a laborer at the
Oliver Farm Equipment Company. When the new industrial union movement
swept through Springfield in the 1930s, for the first time uniting the
industrial working class across lines of race, ethnicity, and skill,
it would have swept them up too. The Mosleys likely joined integrated
organizations—United Auto Workers Local 884 for Herbert—which
advocated for their right to access civic institutions and defended
them at their workplaces.

These new unions had internal shortcomings, significantly on matters
of race, but they nonetheless formed a kind of unity out of the
polyglot generational cascade of Slavs, Italians, white Appalachians,
and southern black migrants. In the process they brought real
democracy for the first time to places like Springfield, by harnessing
white workers to the struggles and sometimes even the leadership of
their black neighbors. As a small item in the _Springfield Daily
News _observed in 1942, a meeting of the city’s CIO Council that
had convened to consider political endorsements also appointed a
committee of two UAW officials—one white, one black—“to
investigate the existing recreational facilities for Negro members of
the CIO in Springfield. The committee will go before the City
Commission Monday night to discuss proposals to better these
facilities.”

It is not too much to say that the early phase of the civil rights
movement grew in part out of these experiments in working-class unity.
Sometime in the 1940s, Mattie Mosley sat down at the Springfield
Woolworth’s lunch counter; she went on to coordinate boycotts of
movie theaters and restaurants.

 From the next generation, she was joined by Veda Patterson, a
nurse’s aide and daughter of a janitor at the gas company, who
organized students from Antioch College, one town over in Yellow
Springs, to join picket lines. (Police harassed Patterson out of town
in the 1960s, after she got involved in the black nationalist Republic
of New Africa.) In 1964, when a Yellow Springs barber refused to serve
black clients, two hundred people sat down and locked arms across
Xenia Avenue. With gas and fire hoses, the police tried and failed to
break up the action in what the _Springfield News-Sun _called “a
wild, hour-long melee.”

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The twentieth-century generations each brought something to the
workers’ movement and the political left that grew symbiotically
with it. In the Great Migration generation, the courage and endurance
learned in the Jim Crow South became steadfastness in facing down the
Klan. In the years of depression and war, black workers banded
together with hillbillies and immigrants to triumph over the
agricultural equipment companies. In the 1960s and 1970s the racial
liberalism they made possible interacted with other, sometimes more
radical traditions—black nationalism, student politics. Even a
hillbilly New Left cropped up in some pockets of the country, most
notably Chicago. In those decades Springfield elected a Jewish mayor,
Maurice K. Baach, followed by a black mayor, Robert C. Henry—making
it briefly the largest city ever led by an African American.

Over the past four decades this accumulated solidarity has diminished.
At the end of the 1960s, as growth slowed and inflation set in,
economic and social tensions within New Deal liberalism came to the
surface. In the early 1980s a cascade of plant closures and mass
industrial job loss followed. The link that organized labor had forged
between the ideological left and the industrial working class ruptured
almost completely under these pressures. Even where factories remained
open, workers’ numbers were reduced and their confidence was broken
for a generation.

In Springfield, for example, workers at International Harvester joined
a major national six-month strike against the company in 1979–1980.
They seemed to win, only to be slammed by major waves of layoffs, then
forced into wage and benefit concessions by 1982. The company, now
operating under the name Navistar, is still there, but the workers and
their union lost the initiative and never got it back. In bitter
struggles over schools, neighborhoods, jobs, and welfare, the politics
of racism and xenophobia resurfaced, summoned by the emboldened
politicians of the New Right in the 1980s and their successors down to
the present.

On the ground, certainly, local activists have attempted to hold the
community together while Donald Trump and Vance summon a racist panic
to rip it apart. Many of the institutional legacies of the 1930s and
1940s persist in some diminished form: the UAW is still there. But
they are shadows of their former selves. Even as neo-Nazis parade in
the streets and the Klan covers Springfield with its literature,
liberal politicians at the national level, most notably Kamala Harris
and Tim Walz, are pretending that the problem will go away if they
denounce the racist slander in Springfield while maneuvering rightward
on border politics.

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Springfield has declined in population by about a third since its
midcentury peak. The county lost 22,000 manufacturing jobs in the
1990s. But in recent years it has been a modest exception to the
region’s bleak trajectory, attracting new investment from
manufacturers and logistics companies. The relatively strong labor
market is a novelty of recent years. No doubt the whiplash of decades
of decline followed by sudden growth has led to some of the present
dislocation.

In any case, over the past few years, Springfield’s Haitians have
done the same as so many prior waves of immigrants: legally in the
country under Temporary Protected Status, they followed word of mouth
to find their way to where the work is. For now, they are employed in
classic greenhorn jobs—blue-collar, less likely to require
English—and starting to form a new community: a couple of
restaurants, a community center, an employment agency, mutual aid
through the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Soon enough, their anglophone
children will be teaching in the schools and nursing in the hospitals,
as many Haitian Americans do in Florida, New York, and across New
England.

Members of Boston’s Haitian community and their allies rallying
against anti-Haitian racism, Boston, Massachusetts, September 24.
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

The Haitians at the center of the story are themselves, in other
words, perfectly ordinary. The racist panic about them, however,
bespeaks the special role of Haiti in modern history. In a real sense
the Haitians who overthrew slavery were the first modern proletariat:
they came from many nations, spoke many languages, and followed many
cultural and religious traditions; yet they welded themselves together
to defeat the world’s most powerful empires. Their revolution came
in this respect to stand for the power of enslaved people to transcend
the differences imposed upon them, and thereby for the threat and
promise of working-class unity. Wealthier states have punished the
island nation for that unique crime ever since, and in the nineteenth
century fear of the Haitian Revolution was a potent force across the
Western Hemisphere.

Perhaps the 1790s are too long ago for this to matter, but I think
not. The image of Haiti as a country beyond the pale, populated by
bestial and superstitious brutes, has circulated widely in recent
weeks, and it surely owes something to this history. Invocations of
voodoo, “white genocide,” and IQ scores form an unmistakable link
between the panicked response to the revolution in the eighteenth
century and the politics of white supremacy today. The memory of the
revolution, for that matter, might also be readily available to
Haitian workers themselves, who are often committed trade unionists in
their concentrations in the hospitality and health care industries in
the northeast and Florida. Perhaps for this reason, SEIU and UNITE
HERE have been relatively outspoken about events in Springfield.

In my experience in the labor movement, I’ve rarely seen workers or
organizers give the kind of speeches you might see in a movie about a
strike; organizing happens in conversation, not oratory. Once, though,
I was helping out with some hotel workers organizing in Connecticut;
the housekeeping staff was all Haitian. Prior to going out to canvass
their coworkers, the organizing committee convened for a small rally.
An organizer got up on a picnic table and addressed the group in
Creole. I couldn’t make any of it out, except one phrase at the
emotional high point of the speech: “Toussaint Louverture.”

_GABRIEL WINANT is associate professor of history at the University of
Chicago and a volunteer organizer with the Emergency Workplace
Organizing Committee. (September 2024)_

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS has established itself, in Esquire’s
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language.” The New York Review began during the New York
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* Immigrants
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* Working Class
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* U.S. history
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* Racism
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* Springfield OH
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* unions
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* Solidarity
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