The Black Legion movement in the USA - 1930s

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Black Legion (political movement)

For the Croatian World War II brigade, see Crna Legija.

The Black Legion was an organization that splintered from the Ku Klux Klan and operated in the United States in the 1930s. The organization was founded by William Shepard in east central Ohio.[1] The group's total membership, estimated between 20,000 and 30,000, was centered in Detroit, Michigan, though the Legion was also highly active in Ohio and one of its self-described leaders, Virgil "Bert" Effinger, lived and worked in Lima, Ohio.

The Associated Press described the organization on May 31, 1936, "as a group of loosely federated night-riding bands operating in several States without central discipline or common purpose beyond the enforcement by lash and pistol of individual leaders' notions of 'Americanism.'" The death of Charles Poole, kidnapped and murdered in southwest Detroit, caused authorities to finally arrest and successfully try and convict a group of twelve men, thereby ending the reign of the Black Legion.

The Black Legion was organized along paramilitary lines and had five brigades, 16 regiments, 64 battalions, and 256 companies. Although its members boasted that there were one million legionnaires in Michigan, it probably had only between 20,000 and 30,000 members in the state in the 1930s, one third of whom lived in Detroit.

Members wore black uniforms with skull and crossbones insignia and were allegedly responsible for numerous murders of alleged communists and socialists, notably Earl Little, Malcolm X's father.

In media

A film based on the movement called Black Legion was released in 1937 by Warner Brothers and starred Humphrey Bogart.

The April 1, 1937 episode of True Detective Mysteries, a radio show based on the magazine of the same title, was based directly on the Black Legion and the murder of Poole.

The March 20, 1938, episode of the radio show The Shadow, with Orson Welles in the title role, was entitled "The White Legion"; it was based loosely on the Black Legion movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legi ... ovement%29

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More Jew crowing... ---CSR
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The murder that brought down the Black Legion

August 5, 1997

Image Charles Poole, an organizer for the Works Progress Administration, was murdered by the Black Legion after they accused him of beating his wife.
   

      The gang that killed Poole was part of the Black Legion, and the triggerman was Dayton Dean, an employee of the Detroit Public Lighting Department and, by all accounts, a man who simply lived for violence. As such, Dean fit the profile of the Black Legion, whose propensity for violence, as one contemporary observed, made the Ku Klux Klan look like a cream puff.

      The Black Legion was founded in the mid-1920s as the Black Guards, a security force for the officers of the Ohio Ku Klux Klan. A Michigan regiment was established in 1931, with Arthur Lupp of Highland Park as its major general. Organized along military lines, the Michigan Legion had five brigades, 16 regiments, 64 batallions, and 256 companies. Although its members boasted that there were one million legionaires in Michigan, it probably had only between 20,000 and 30,000 members in the state in the 1930s, one third of whom lived in Detroit.

      The legion had various fronts to cover its activities, such as the Wayne County Rifle and Pistol Club, whose members frequented a downtown Detroit sporting goods store with a backroom firing range. It also had a political front as well, the Wolverine Republican Club. The legion's political objectives were broad and, at the same time, narrowly specific. As one of its promotional pieces stated, "we will fight political Romanism [the Catholic Church], Judaism, Communism, and all 'isms' which our forefathers came to this country to avoid."

      Some legionaires, more inclined toward outright violence for the sake of violence, went further in their plots to rid America of those they called undesirables than fearmongering and night riding. It was alleged, for instance, that Major General Lupp had explored ways to inject typhoid germs into milk and cheese delivered to specific undesirable neighborhoods in Detroit. The fact that Lupp was an inspector for the Detroit Department of Public Health lent some credence to this story, in the minds of many who heard it.

Image Poole's widow, Rebecca, and their 16-month-old daughter, Mary Lou.


   

      Labor and civil rights lawyer Maurice Sugar, who believed he was targeted for death by the legion, claimed that his investigations had uncovered a plot by the legion to release cyanide gas in synagogues during Hanukkah in 1935, although no official investigation supported the allegations. There was clear evidence, however, that Sugar's 1935 campaigns for a seat on Detroit Recorder's Court and on the city's Common Council were targeted by legionaires for a series of dirty tricks and outright sabotage.

      Some politicians supported the legion's efforts to preserve the American System against foreign influence and often spoke before the Wolverine Republican Club, whose members circulated petitions and conducted get-out-the-vote campaigns for their favorite candidates. Too often, however, the legion's political activities tended to violent acts of retaliation against those candidates running against a legion favorite.

      Running through the literature and rhetoric of the Black Legion was the fear of an international Communist takeover of the United States. Legionaires were ordered by their superiors to be prepared to take over federal government buildings with arms at what they called "zero hour," the date and time that communists would rise up throughout the United States and launch their attack on the country. In truth, however, the legion was led by unsophisticated men, "petty men," as one researcher has noted, who were most interested in the "pettiness of personal reform."

      Thus, the legion saw as its enemies not only blacks, Jews, and Catholics, but also welfare workers and recipients and labor union organizers. Homer Martin, the first president of the United Automobile Workers union, believed beyond any question that legionaires had infiltrated his union for the express purpose of providing inside information to the automobile manufacturers and that many black knights were members of the "Dawn Patrol," the private security force that guarded many Detroit auto plants.

      The legion also provided a job service for its members. Many joined the organization during the economically unsettled 1930s with the understanding that legionaires would look out for their own in terms of jobs and promotions. It was alleged that the Packard and Hudson automobile plants were controlled by the legion and that members would enjoy in those shops 'special privileges' as a result. It is worth noting, in this regard, that later investigations of the legion revealed that none of its known members were unemployed and that many of them had positions in the public services.

      By and large, the typical Black Legionaire was a lower-class, Anglo-Saxon male, poorly educated with few industrial skills, and were Southerners transplanted to the Detroit area during the heyday of the city's industrial growth during the 1920s. Why did they join? They believed that the American System was being undermined and their obligation was to counteract that trend

      They were also frustrated by the uncertainty generated by the economic problems of the 1930s and they felt alienated in a large metropolitan area and within a huge industrial complex. In general, they were beset by the feeling that, although their ancestral roots in America stretched back to the nation's earliest years, they were being left behind; they believed foreigners were competing for jobs they considered their own, that Jews and Catholics were supplanting Protestants among the nation's influential political and economic leaders, and that racial integration was leading America to social anarchy.

      In the Black Legion, members found a sense of security and a sense of superiority. For those of a more violent bent, the group quenched their thirst for adventure and, in some cases, personal injury and murder. Most especially, the legion provided easy answers to the complex questions that plagued Americans during the dark days of the Great Depression. As its oath of allegiance proclaimed, "the native-born white people of America are menaced on every hand from above and below. If America is in the melting pot, the white people of America are neither the aristocratic scum on top nor the dregs of society on the bottom which is composed of anarchists and Communists and all cults and creeds believing in social equality. ... We regard as enemies to ourselves and our country all aliens, Negroes, Jews and cults and creeds believing in racial equality or owing allegiance to any foreign potentates. These we will fight without fear or favor as long as one foe of American liberty is left alive."

Image Michigan's Black Legion had its roots in the Ohio Ku Klux Klan, right.
   

      The murder of Charles Poole broke open the secrecy surrounding the Black legion. This young man, an organizer for the Works Progress Administration, left behind a wife and children whose plight was highlighted in newspaper articles and photographs and raised public support for a trial and a thorough investigation.

      Opposition to the Legion was spearheaded by the Detroit Conference for the Protection of Civil Rights, representatives of 311 churches, and labor union, farm and fraternal groups in Michigan. Wayne County Prosecutor Duncan McCrea pledged to bring Poole's murders to the bar of justice, a pledge he kept despite accusations by some of those he prosecuted that he had joined the legion himself. Eleven of the 12 men he tried in the Poole murder case were convicted, nine by a jury on Sept. 29, 1936, and two in a bench trial.
Image Black Legion members reputedly enjoyed "special privileges" at some auto factories, like The Hudson Motor Car Co.plant on Connors north of Jefferson.
   

      The Poole murder case, as The Detroit News put it, shattered the "romantic air" that had surrounded the legion. "Hooey may look like romance and adventure in the moonlight," stated The News, "but it always looks like hooey when you bring it out in the daylight."

      In the end, 11 members of the legion were given life sentences for the Poole murder and others that were revealed during the trial and a subsequent grand jury investigation. Thirty-seven other members were sentenced to prison terms.

      The Black Legion was dead. Its reputation, however, remained and reached all the way to Hollywood. One of Humphrey Bogart's least-known movies was entitled "The Black Legion," in which Bogart plays a factory mechanic whose expected promotion to foreman is instead given to a foreign-born worker. Bogart first joins, then stands up to the legion. Watch for it on late-night television or ask for it at your favorite video store; it is rare and worthwhile, and its roots are here in Michigan.

Image Legion members are returned to their cells following guilty verdicts for 11 of 12 charged in the Poole murder. 1. Lowell Rushing; 2. Herschell Gill, the only man acquitted; 3. Edgar Baldwin; 4. Paul Richards; 5. Ervin D. Lee; 6. John Bannerman; 7. Virgil Morrow; 8. John S. Vincent; 9. Urban Lipps; 10. Thomas R. Craig; 11. Albert Stevens; 12. Harvey Davis, alleged to be a colonel in the legion.
   



http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=151

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http://www.rapdict.org/Detroit




The city's crime-ridden sections have brought it notoriety.[3] Detroit's crime figures are often among the highest in the U.S. The city is currently listed as the most dangerous city with a population over 500,000 by the Morgan Quitno's statistics,[77] but comes after St. Louis, Missouri overall.[78] Detroit is consistently in the top five for homicide rates. Murders peaked at 714 in 1974 (garnering Detroit the nickname "Murder City", a play on "Motor City") though the highest murder rate was recorded in 1991, when there were 615 homicides and the city's population was just over a million, which factors into a murder rate of roughly 60 per 100,000.[citation needed] In 2003, there were 361 homicides, the lowest count in recent years.  

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Detroit Demographics

Population - 886,675 Latino 5% White 1.5% Black 89.6% Other 1.7%

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Lost in Middle America  (and What Happened Next) Part 1  -- LIMA
[youtube:22m6ata3]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPveTk2Pi6c[/youtube]22m6ata3]

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Keep an eye open...  

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Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America

Posted Thu, 2003-08-14 20:00 by backend
Author:
Norwood, Stephen H.  
Reviewer:
Sundstrom, William A.  

Published by EH.NET (August 2003)

Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii + 328 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8078-2705-3; $19.95 (paper), ISBN: 0-8078-5373-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by William A. Sundstrom, Department of Economics, Santa Clara University.

Strikebreaking was a popular and often successful strategy for U.S. employers prior to the federal labor legislation of the 1930s. Replacement workers, as they are known these days, were used in more than 40 percent of late nineteenth century strikes, and strikebreaking had a strong, positive correlation with the likelihood of the employer winning the strike (Rosenbloom 2002, chapter 6). Strikebreaking often plays a central role in accounts of the violence in the struggles between labor and capital in American history. Striking workers had to keep "scabs" out to shut down production, and they resorted to a range of persuasive and coercive tactics to do so. Employers, for their part, sought out strikebreakers who would be resistant to persuasion or coercion, and who could give as good as they got.

In Strikebreaking and Intimidation, Stephen Norwood, professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, examines several episodes and aspects of strikebreaking during the early twentieth century. The book has something of a split personality, which is revealed in its title and subtitle. On the one hand, it provides vivid, if not unbiased, accounts of the ruthless tactics pursued by American employers in their efforts to break strikes and weaken unions, with a special emphasis on entrepreneurial thuggery and espionage. These stories will not be entirely unfamiliar to students of American labor history, but Norwood has added some fascinating and often disturbing details. On the other hand, the book aspires to a more ambitious interpretation of strikebreaking, linking it with a putative crisis of American masculinity as the country entered the twentieth century. The evidence in defense of this provocative thesis is uneven and ultimately unconvincing.

The alleged connection between strikebreaking and the crisis of masculinity is most clearly presented in the first chapter, which explores the employment of college students as strikebreakers early in the century. Citing some other studies, Norwood argues that social and economic change had by the late nineteenth century undermined the props of preexisting norms of masculinity in American culture, particularly among the elite. The cultural response was the rise of a "cult of masculinity," which in the collegiate setting was epitomized by football and violent "cane rush" rituals. Norwood documents several strikes during which brawny college football players were recruited by local employers to replace striking workers, usually with the blessings of their coaches and college administrators, and sometimes with violent results.

That college students sometimes cut class to bust unions was new and interesting to me, but Norwood urges the reader to see a deeper significance: "Strikebreaking was the perfect replacement for the banned violent rituals [e.g. cane rushes]. It provided students with the opportunity for mass participation, denied in organized college athletics, and satisfied their pressing need for a 'test of masculinity'" (p. 24). The claim is a functionalist one, and difficult to prove. Too often Norwood adds his own gendered spin to evidence that might be given other interpretations. For example, during a 1903 Great Lakes shipping strike, University of Chicago track and field athletes were recruited as strikebreakers. Norwood notes that "One of the students summed up his manly adventure by declaring, 'It was more fun than a track meet'" (p. 25). The phrase "manly adventure" is Norwood's; what the student was thinking, beyond that it was fun, is hard to tell. Was he happy for an excuse to avoid homework? Was he slumming it with his mates? Was he fulfilling the expectations of his dad, perhaps a Great Lakes shipper or other anti-union capitalist? Was he ordered to do it by his coach, and then making the best of it? Nothing in the book allows us to distinguish among these motives, and this is not an isolated example.

Subsequent chapters recount episodes of strikebreaking in specific industries, with a focus on the entrepreneurs and companies that specialized in recruiting and protecting strikebreakers or company managers put in charge of strikebreaking and labor espionage. Chapter 2, for example, explores the genesis and operations of such national strikebreaking companies as Bergoff Bros. and Waddell, which recruited and transported replacement workers on a contract basis, most notably during the numerous urban transit strikes of the early twentieth century. Whatever one's views of scab labor, Norwood establishes that replacement streetcar workers had a tough job. The lack of a centralized work site made it difficult or impossible to protect them from the guerilla tactics of striking transit workers and their supporters, who sometimes resorted to blocking or blowing up streetcar rails and beating or stoning the strikebreakers. Norwood suggests that the strikebreakers often carried firearms and were not afraid to use them. Given the circumstances, it is not hard to understand why.

Journalistic accounts of the strikebreaker often compared him with the frontier gunslinger popularized in the westerns of the time. Norwood finds great significance in this metaphor, and even embellishes it with his own, comparing strikebreakers with modern-day fighter pilots (p. 48). But this reader was left wondering what had been demonstrated here. The inclination of journalists to dramatize or even sensationalize events by appealing to icons of popular culture is with us still and may ever be; but can we infer from these accounts the motivations or interpretations of the participants in the events? Was it the strikers and strikebreakers who suffered a crisis of masculinity, or merely their journalistic observers? Similarly, when striking coal miners impugned the strikebreakers' masculinity or portrayed themselves as defenders of virtuous womanhood against immoral and barbaric scabs, were these rhetorical tactics or genuine reflections of how the miners understood their struggle? A proper understanding of the connection between mercenaries and masculinity would seem to demand answers to such questions, but Norwood is often surprisingly uncritical of the reliability or context of his primary sources.

The book is on more solid ground, in my view, in documenting the centrality of violence and espionage as anti-union tactics prior to the Wagner Act. Outside of the skilled trades, unions had difficulty monopolizing the labor supply, and strikes were often a necessary tactic in gaining union recognition or a closed shop. Thus in many strikes, much more was at stake than just the terms of a contract. To mobilize and protect strikebreakers and spy on or infiltrate unions, employers often hired outside agencies such as the Pinkertons, the Bergoff Brothers, or the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Some firms, including Ford Motor Company, handled union-busting internally. Harry Bennett, the head of Ford's notorious "Service Department," may have been driven by a "lifelong need to affirm his masculinity" (p. 175), but such pop psychology aside, it is remarkable that during the 1920s and 1930s this immense, technologically progressive, and much-admired American company left its personnel management largely in the hands of a thug with mob connections.

Norwood relies extensively on accounts of pro-union journalists and interviews with former union activists, and there can be little doubt that these are necessary sources for reconstructing these events. Still, at times he treats union polemics with more credulity than they deserve, and one is left wondering how often violence was instigated or exacerbated by strikers, who from a position of weakness may have acted "with the folly and extravagance of desperate men," as Adam Smith once put it.

Once strikes turned violent, local or state authorities often entered the picture, more often than not on the side of the employers. State militias and state police played a role in many strikes, and the militias were responsible for some of the most infamous incidents of strike-related violence, including the so-called Ludlow massacre at a strikers' tent colony during a 1914 Colorado mining strike. Private enterprise may have played a uniquely important role in American, as compared with European, union-busting, but time and time again the state became involved even in the United States, and often decisively.

It would be asking too much of the author to expect a full-blown comparative study of strikebreaking, but a little more attention to the contrast between U.S. and western European strikes would have been informative. In particular, U.S. employers may have been less reluctant to threaten, employ, or provoke violence during strikes because they could have some confidence that the state would intervene on their behalf if violence erupted. By contrast, labor's greater influence in European politics made it less certain that the state would take the employers' side, as Gerald Friedman (1988) has pointed out. Such differences in the political context of labor struggle may be more important than the insecurities and yearnings of the American male psyche in explaining the violent character of American labor relations.

Strikebreaking and its associated violence became much less common after World War II. By creating a legal and bureaucratic route to union representation and contract negotiations, the National Labor Relations Act largely obviated recognition strikes. Prohibitions of unfair labor practices constrained the anti-union tactics available to employers. Norwood acknowledges these factors but also attributes some of the change to evolving norms of masculinity. As he puts it, "By the 1960s the conflation of masculinity with physicality and aggression was less pronounced than in the early twentieth century, even in the working class" (p. 229). The consequence was a decline in both the demand and the supply of physical violence on both sides of labor disputes. Perhaps so (although a scan of the Hollywood blockbusters of recent years suggests that the old machismo may have made a comeback); still, one wonders whether the timing of these alleged cultural changes is consistent with the regularization of labor relations as early as the conservative 1950s.

Unions have been in decline in the U.S. private sector for several decades, and Norwood like many observers sees a renewed aggressiveness in corporate anti-unionism as a significant contributing factor. But how significant is it, relative to the broad industrial, occupational, technological, and ideological shifts that have taken place in the United States over the same period? The last line in the book approvingly quotes a union official, who states that "intimidation and interference by employers is such a standard practice in today's workplaces that the freedom to form a union doesn't really exist at all" (p. 247). Anyone who has read the book's harrowing accounts of strikebreaking -- state militiamen setting fire to tents occupied by strikers' families at Ludlow in 1914, Harry Bennett's thugs kicking the daylights out of UAW organizers in 1937-- is likely to question the author's sense of perspective.

References:

Gerald Friedman, "Strike Success and Union Ideology: The United States and France, 1880-1914," Journal of Economic History 43 (1988): 1-26.  

Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Looking for Work, Searching for Workers: American Labor Markets during Industrialization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.  

William A. Sundstrom is professor of economics at Santa Clara University. His current research interests include internal migration in the United States and the labor-market effects of New Deal policies.

Geographic Area:
North America
Subject:
Labor and Employment History
Time period:
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

http://eh.net/bookreviews/strikebreakin ... ry-america