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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, JAN 21–27, 2026  
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_ A High-Water Mark for U.S. Labor Unions (1946), The Night the U.S.
Air Force Almost Nuked North Carolina (1961), A Massive Protest Was
Cancelled, But Not Before It Had Great Success (1941) _

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_A HIGH-WATER MARK FOR U.S. LABOR UNIONS_

JANUARY 21 IS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY of what some consider the
high-water mark for organized labor in the U.S. It was on that 1946
day that 750,000 members of the United Steel Workers walked out of
almost every major steel plant in the country, starting the largest
single strike in U.S. history.

The steel strike was only part of a huge proletarian offensive against
employers going on at the same time. On the same day the Steel Workers
struck, 30,000 members of the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers
walked off the job to back up their demand for a big raise in pay at
International Harvester’s 11 factories.

And that wasn’t all, because there were already major strikes in
progress at General Motors, General Electric, Westinghouse, Western
Union, American Telephone and Telegraph, the American Tobacco Company,
and all of the major meat-packing companies in the U.S. 

All told, the total number of striking workers in the U.S. on that day
was nearly 1.7 million – some three percent of the civilian labor
force – a number that has never been surpassed. Virtually all the
major strikes at the time were successful, providing workers with
substantially higher pay, benefits and job security.

The success of unions in the aftermath of World War 2 continued for
more than 17 months, until it ran into stiff political opposition,
when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which eliminated many of
the rights that workers and their unions had obtained as a result of
the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. 
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_THE NIGHT THE U.S. AIR FORCE ALMOST NUKED NORTH CAROLINA_

JANUARY 23 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of the crash of a U.S. Air Force
bomber that had been carrying two 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs until the
bomber broke up in mid-air, allowing both bombs to fall through the
open air until they both hit the ground 50 miles east of Raleigh,
North Carolina. 

Each of the bombs was 260 times more powerful than the weapon that
destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. One of the bombs was later discovered to
have automatically gone through every step but one of its
pre-detonation sequence. 

Had the detonators completed the last step, the bomb would have
exploded. Hundreds, if not thousands of people would have been killed
immediately and highly radioactive fallout could have caused death and
injury in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and
Baltimore, Maryland, at the very least.

Soon after the 1961 accident, the Air Force disclosed that the two
H-bombs had fallen to earth, but insisted that there had been no
chance of either of them exploding. It was not until 52 years later
that the military released documents, requested under the Freedom of
Information Act, that revealed the truth, which was that if a single
electrical switch had malfunctioned, one of the bombs would have
created the most deadly nuclear mishap
ever. [link removed]

 

 

_A MASSIVE PROTEST WAS CANCELLED, BUT NOT BEFORE IT HAD GREAT
SUCCESS _

JANUARY 25 IS THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY of the announcement of a plan for
a massive protest march demanding an end to racist employment
discrimination and an end to the racial segregation of the armed
forces of the U.S. The March on Washington was projected to take place
in five months, on July 1, 1941.

The leaders of the proposed March on Washington Movement or MOWM, as
it was widely known, were A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, A. J.
Muste and Bayard Rustin.  Randolph was the radical president of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a labor union with membership
that was almost entirely Black, not because the union discriminated,
but due to their employer's notorious hiring practices. Walter White
was the long-time head of the NAACP. Muste was the head of the
Fellowship of Reconciliation and had decades of experience as a
radical labor organizer. Rustin, who was decades younger than the
other three, was an experienced, radical anti-racist organizer.

As it happened, the march was called off at the last minute, but it
was cancelled as a result of a deal between the organizers and the
White House. The agreement came about because just the threat of the
demonstration produced a welcome sea-change in the struggle against
racial and ethnic employment discrimination in the U.S, which is
widely considered to be a major turning point that might otherwise
have taken years to bring about. Here’s why.

During the six months before January 1941 the German army was brutally
occupying most of Europe and the Japanese army was doing the same
throughout the industrialized part of China.  The U.S. was still at
peace and would remain so for another year. 

But the likelihood that the U.S. would soon be drawn into World War 2
was growing fast. Government and industry and a large portion of the
general public had started to prepare for that eventuality. Congress
had appropriated funds to pay for more than 60,000 new military planes
(many more planes than the number of pilots in the U.S.), and for
enough new ships to enlarge the U.S. Navy by 70 percent. The number of
soldiers and sailors and bases for them mushroomed at the same time,
thanks to the institution of the first peacetime military conscription
in U.S. history.

As a result of the huge sums being spent on armaments and other war
preparations, the U.S. economy was booming, bringing an end to the
deepest depression the U.S. had ever experienced.  But the benefits
of the industrial expansion were, of course, not evenly distributed
among workers, because racist (and to a lesser extent, ethnic)
discrimination in employment was the rule and not the exception in
almost every industry. African-Americans were the last hired, and if
they were hired at all, it was usually for the worst-paid jobs.  At
the same time, German-Americans and Italian-Americans were
experiencing explicit employment discrimination because the nations
from whence they or their ancestors came were the enemy, or at least
the enemy in waiting.

That was the context for the unveiling of the MOWN, a plan for a march
and demonstration with at least a hundred thousand participants
demanding racial integration of the armed forces and an end to
employment discrimination.

Faced with the virtual certainty of that many fired-up anti-racists
making an unprecedentedly massive demonstration in the streets of
Washington, the Roosevelt administration decided to try to head them
off by giving in, at least in part. Less than a week before the
planned march, after extensive discussions with the MOWN organizers,
the White House issued an Executive Order that prohibited racial and
ethnic discrimination in the U.S. defense industry, the first federal
action promoting equal employment opportunity.

The march organizers did not achieve one of their main goals, which
was to end the segregation of the U.S. armed forces (that would not
happen for another seven years), but knowing that they had achieved a
great deal, they called the demonstration
off. [link removed]

For more People's History,
visithttps://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/

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