McLoughlin's Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis
a few comments on a pretty good reference work
This book offers a rather thorough play-by-play and appraisal of the July 2, 1917 race riot in East St. Louis. Officially, 39 black people were murdered by white mobs; but many more were likely not recorded and their bodies burned or floated down the Mississippi (not out of contrition, to be clear, but as a sort of victory lap). Additionally, thousands of black workers and families, many of them recent Great Migration arrivals seeking industrial work in the north, found themselves in St. Louis, seeking refuge, in the aftermath. Contemporary newspapers called the events a “Blood Orgy”, comparing it to the Armenian genocide. McLoughlin persuasively expands the riot beyond the night and day of blood that appears in most accounts, situating the event as a prelude to the Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa massacre in 1921, but also with previous racially-motivated activity on May 28th and June 10th of that same year. But most important for McLoughlin is an underpinning narrative of working class reaction on the heels of a excruciatingly dismantled strike by workers at the Aluminum Ore Company of America, which was sundered not in one lethal blow but by a thousand cuts from April 1917 until it finally broke in June. The book is exhaustively researched, building its case from not only the findings of the 1917 Select Congressional Committee report on the riots but Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census data to represent a startlingly complex and detailed demography of the town at the time and in the decade prior. The context presented may boil down to 3 main considerations: first, the city itself may be thought of as an industrial park of St. Louis across the river, enjoying a time of great prosperity due largely to the extremely generous provisions for capital from an extremely corrupt local government, itself making most of its money from vice because they found taxing corporations anathema; second, that this allowed capitals tremendous power over labor, and as if that wasn’t enough, they had long developed strategies to leverage the ‘floating’ population of continuing migrants (foreign and domestic) against the nascent power of local unions to devastating effect; and finally, labor itself appeared before capital as already self-flagellating, due to its overidentification with “the South” and long-simmering backdrop of racial violence, even before the flames were fanned.
McLouglin’s central thesis revolves around a rather typical narrative of “white replacement”, though his presentation of the East St. Louis context illustrates how for the white workers of the town (most of them “old immigrants”: Germans, Irish, Scots, and other “American-born whites” feeling the pressure of incoming Hungarians and Russians, along with the rising tide of black northern migration) the fear of replacement was coupled with existing racist sentiment by Superintendent Fox of the Aluminum Ore Company to break the strike. The thesis goes that Aluminum Ore under Fox, one of several large metalworking corporations in East St. Louis to enjoy the cheap land and inputs that the town was known for, explicitly and almost solicitously reached to the burgeoning and underpaid “reservist” group of local black workers as strikebreakers – again, a rather typical practice – and further pursued mass firings of white union (AFL-CLTU) skilled workers and their immediate replacement by black, previously unskilled workers.
What ensues is, sorry to say, a typical representation of capitalist “genius”: splitting the working class contingent into skilled/unskilled and black/white designations while capitalizing on the storied ineptitude and unwillingness of the AFL to treat with black workers from the south. So, in one act, the corporation in question defangs and deflates a nascent union effort, splits it in two, and receives for its efforts continued production with a workforce that is not union, and not even under consideration for unionization by the union itself, while also being content working for lower wages. Additionally, Fox, especially following May 28th’s minor surge in racial violence and the resulting deployment of the Illinois National Guard in defense of the Aluminum Ore Co. plant (and black workers as they came to and from work), played perfectly to the long-simmering fears of “replacement”. However, Fox is not solely to blame. As striking workers faced down a line of National Guard, with bayonets fixed, defending their former workplace and the scabs within, it is a resounding failure on the part of strikeleaders, the AFL, and the CLTU to not recognize the black strikebreakers as potential allies in the struggle against capital, but to replace with them the face of their true enemy. Instead of advancing an interracial idea of class solidarity, these workers retreated into imbecilic, violent reaction, smarting at the sense of a loss of a privileged position and the shattering of a white concordat. When the National Guard broke up a union meeting, and when the mayor did not support the strike as he had done for others in the town, violence escalated, and strike meetings exhibited a propensity to spin off violent joyriders to smash up black businesses in the “Valley” vice district downtown or attack black streetcar riders.
The book falters at one point, in the development of an thesis earlier within the book that the Valley district, a long-standing hotbed of prostitution, gambling, and the like centered around City Hall and the Commercial Hotel, bred a psychologically violent culture all on its own. I find this to be nearly a cop out, or at the very least, to say nearly nothing to the presence on July 2nd of not only the genocidiares and their spectators. This is not to say violence in the Valley is not salient to this account, but rather that it takes the form of a nearly “madness of crowds”-esque mass psychology diversion with little explanatory power. By McLoughlin’s own telling, a “culture of violence”, or whatever, wasn’t necessary as “doxa” or whatever, but existed already in the racist culture of southern Illinois and the greater south/southwest, wherein, as he notes multiple times, mob justice and the lynch mob were seen as reasonable extensions of more legal forms of justice. These people, already prone to everyday violence in the forms of exclusion and segregation, needed only the lightest of touches to ‘graduate’ to lynchings, shootings, and beatings, as the history of East St. Louis easily attests to. In turning to the discussion of masculine, psychological violence in the Valley, it is almost as if McLoughlin describes the bullet and the gun, but pauses to inquire into the home life of the killer. Sure, it may matter – but not that much.