“Labor’s Answer” published June 30, 1934 by the Social Problems Club of Montgomery County. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, IL

Here’s a new document from the archives of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, IL. “Labor’s Answer”, a socialist publication from the tiny community of Taylor Springs, IL, was published June 30, 1934 by the Social Problems Club of Montgomery County. It includes reports on the mine war, the Women’s Auxiliary and a definition of the term “Red”: “A Red is a person who is trying to makes this a better world to live in for the workers, and is not afraid of the big bosses and the politicians.”

The meaning of the term “Red” was contested and leading into the 1930’s, red-baiting was frequently used to discredit radicals in the labor movement.  In this excerpt from my upcoming audio documentary on Agnes Burns Wieck and the Illinois Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners of America, Historian Rosemary Feurer discusses how red-baiting began to be deployed within the labor movement:

“I think red-baiting is a uniquely powerful tool of elite forces in American society and had been since the 19th century. To associate it with ‘the other’. To somehow make fear a vital part of being able to wipe out democratic voices was a core strategy of business, of elite power structures, and of elite political structures. Planting fear.

What I think is critical to remember that until the 1920s, the American labor movement didn’t buy into that at the basic local level.  After WWI, lots of unions and the American Federation of Labor and in the UMWA simply used red-baiting as a mechanism to get rid of dissenters of all sorts.

For people like Agnes Burns Wieck, she would have suggested that it was a trumped up way of squashing voices. To her, any idea was open and she trusted workers vitally to make their own decisions and to make good decisions.  And to simply say, ‘You can’t be a member of the union because you’re a socialist’ would have seemed nonsensical to her.”

Here’s the link to follow the Historical Society of Montgomery County, IL on Facebook.

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