From THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE: THE ENDURING LEGACY OF RICHARD GREGG, a biography by John Wooding (November 2020 from Loom Press)
Richard Bartlett Gregg
Twentieth-century pacifist Richard Gregg began his work in conflict resolution as an advocate for labor interests in the United States. His route from railroad unions to the ashram of Mohandas Gandhi is revealed in John Wooding’s forthcoming biography of Gregg. This Labor Day is a good time to reflect on the long struggle between labor and capital as workers seek a more fair share of the fruits of their labor. Gregg (1885-1974) grew up in Colorado in a family with New England roots. He graduated from Harvard University and entered the legal profession. In the mid-1930s, he wrote THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE, which became an essential manual of theory and practice for activists seeking social change through peaceful means. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and American civil rights movement leaders acknowledged the influence of Gregg on them. King wrote the introduction to one edition of Gregg’s book. The excerpt follows.—PM
“Needing work, Richard Gregg accepted a position in the summer of 1920 at the Railway Employees Department (RED) of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), headquartered in Chicago. Created in 1905, RED brought together seven of the national craft unions of the railroads. These included, among others, the Carmen; the International Association of Machinists; the Blacksmiths; the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers; Iron Shipbuilders and Helpers of America; the Electrical Workers; and the International Brotherhood of Firemen. RED bargained on behalf of these unions on a wide range of issues affecting their wages and working conditions. At the time, Leland Olds directed the Research Bureau at RED. An impressive figure whom Gregg had met while working at the National War Labor Board, Olds got him the job at RED.
“Olds shared many of Gregg’s values: both were deeply spiritual and committed to social justice issues. Olds became convinced of the need to link social justice to his religious beliefs and spent some time working in a social settlement in Boston soon after he graduated from Amherst College. Later he studied economics at Harvard and Columbia universities and became a Congregational minister at a church in Brooklyn, New York. He went on to serve as industrial editor of the Federated Press, a labor news service, and as an economic consultant to labor organizations. In the early ’30s, he worked on power utility regulation in New York State, pushing for greater public control of power utilities. President Roosevelt appointed him Federal Power Commissioner in 1939, a position he kept for ten years.
“A key figure during the New Deal, Olds played a significant role on a commission studying European cooperative enterprises for Roosevelt. When he was being considered for reappointment as Commissioner during the Harry S. Truman administration in 1949, Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (then Chair of the confirmation sub-committee) worked to remove him with a vicious campaign of red baiting (citing his radical writings from the ’20s). It was not one of Johnson’s finest moments. Olds had been a leading advocate of regulating the oil and natural gas industries and, at the time, was deeply critical of American capitalism and interested in collective ownership and cooperatives, especially for power production. Gregg’s association with Olds exposed him to someone of high intellect who shared Gregg’s developing views. Olds’ interest in cooperatives resonated with Gregg, who would later see the connection to the work of Gandhi.
“Gregg was pleased with the move back to Chicago, but the work was hard. The intense struggles around the railroads necessitated many sleepless nights and long, intense periods of work. The job required that he prepare testimony and arguments for the unions to present to the U.S. Railway Board, write publicity, and appear on behalf of the unions at the Interstate Commerce Commission. This required a lot of traveling to towns where the disputes were most intense. Here, too, Gregg found that corruption and injustice reigned. For example, in November 1921, he went to Louisiana to investigate the complaints of the railroad workers in Bogalusa, a small town created and constructed in 1908 by Goodyear to house workers for the Great Southern Lumber Company, which, when completed, was the largest lumber sawmill in the world. The sawmill was the site of the Bloody Bogalusa Massacre in 1919, where black workers who had attempted to form a labor union were shot and killed by a private militia, the Order of Self Preservation and Loyalty League, paid for by the lumber company. The sawmill manager who worked for Goodyear was also the town’s mayor until he died in 1929 and had almost complete control of the town. The killing of both black and white unionists became a national scandal and tragedy. Gregg arrived there only a year or so after the Massacre.
“Gregg’s visit made him even more acutely aware of how bad things had become. He wrote to Alan:
“The town where I had to make my investigation is ruled body and soul by a big lumber company. As you get out of the RR station you are greeted with a big sign about fifteen feet high—lighted at night by two arc lights—reading “Bogalusa wants 20,000 good citizens by 1925. Advice to Bolsheviks and Agitators, This is No Place for You. Get Out. By Order of the Self Preservation & Loyalty League.” Cordial, isn’t it! They killed 5 labor leaders there in the autumn of 1919 in cold blood in their own yard. The congregation will now rise and sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty!” The poor devils there have had their hearts nearly ground out. It’s a grand life, if you don’t weaken.
“This experience, and others like it, gave Gregg yet more education in both the state of labor and capital relations and of Black Americans, especially in the South. Conflicts increased further in the early 1920s, while Gregg was at RED, especially with the Great Railroad Shopmen’s Strike of 1922. This massive confrontation involved nearly all the existing railway unions—some 400,000 railways workers put down their tools. The initial cause of the strike was an announcement by the Railway Labor Board that it was going to cut wages by seven cents an hour as of July 1, 1922. That summer, the Railway Shopmen were joined by other railroad workers, making it the most massive strike in the U.S. since the great Pullman Strike of 1894. Owners hired strikebreakers, and the state deployed more than two thousand deputy U.S. Marshalls (bolstered by the national guard) to clamp down on protests and union meetings. Company guards and hired cops killed ten strikers. Strikers and picket lines were initially peaceful, but eventually the railroad companies put together an “army of armed guards” and “Major confrontations ensued on July 8 when shopmen were fired upon by railway guards.” Marshals and troops responded. Violence escalated.
“For now, the shopmen strike and shut down railroads across the country. The strike was notorious for the acts and sentiments of the then U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty in the Warren G. Harding Administration. Virulently anti-union, the AG persuaded the courts to issue an injunction against strikers and other forms of union activity; this became known as the “Daugherty Injunction,” and represented one of the most sweeping acts against fundamental constitutional rights in the U.S. As a result, the workers were forced to capitulate, and most were back at work at less pay by the late fall of that year.
“This strike and the violence of its repression affected Gregg deeply, making him even more conscious of the injustices prevalent under capitalism. His close-up experience during the strike was undoubtedly the straw that broke the camel’s back and helped launch him on a very different path. Having experienced two of the major labor conflicts of the twentieth century and seen, at first hand, the amount of labor unrest, corruption, and exploitation that marked the century’s first two decades, it is hardly surprising that Gregg became increasingly disillusioned with American industrial capitalism.” . . .