Repressing worker dissent: lethal violence against strikers in the early American labor movement

Despite U.S. labor-management history having long been recognized as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation, unanimity has failed to materialize regarding its impact on concomitant labor protests, organizations, and politics. We examine the impact of striker fatalities on the strength and trajectory of the early American labor movement against the null hypothesis that such bloodshed is largely random and/or inconsequential by building recently constructed measures of fatal strike violence into time-series regression models of strike frequency, union membership, and membership within the Socialist Party of America. The results suggest that killing strikers, labor organizers, and strike sympathizers had deleterious consequences for labor: dampening strike activity through the long-term cumulative history of picket-line deaths - particularly strikes for union recognition; and hampering union and Socialist Party organizational growth. Thus, repressive elite violence appears to have contributed, in part, to propelling the American labor movement along what has traditionally been characterized as an 'exceptional' path of weakening labor's potential power during its formative decades.