The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History

摘要

American strikes are not like European strikes: they are usually bigger and longer. They have been a lot bloodier as well, because, to nobody's surprise, there are often lots of guns around. People get killed when Americans goes on strike. There was a "classic" period of strikes in America, roughly from the 1870s to the 1930s, when this was true in excelsis. Take for example the strike of miners in the Trinidad District of Colorado, 1912-1914. This, and the Ludlow Massacre which accompanied it, resulted in over 20 deaths, most of them strikers and their families.rnConversely, the violence was sometimes, although less commonly, meted out by the strikers themselves. An instance of this was the massacre at Herrin, Illinois in 1922 - also a miners' strike. The enraged miners corralled a bunch of blackleg workers, who had been imported by the mine bosses, into a barbed wire pen and then shot, beat or knifed them to death: 20 people lost their lives. There has been an elemental quality about American strikes, a struggle for survival which European strikes have never equalled. The aim was not simply to win but to annihilate the other side.