Enemy of the people

Yesterday in LGM's long running This Day In Labor History series, we found this post on the New Orleans General Strike of 1892.

On November 12, 1892, the New Orleans General Strike ended with a major victory for workers. One of the few true general strikes in American history, it demonstrated the potential power of workers, even in the face of race-baiting and military opposition in the Gilded Age.

I don't like copy/pasting too much of a post you should just go read. But some of the details are worth taking special note of.  For example, even though this episode is considered a win for labor, the fallout led to one of the first instances of the Sherman Anti-trust Act being turned against unions.   Also Governor Murphy Foster The First appears here as a racist strikebreaker a full century before Governor Murphy Foster The Second was elected to basically promote the same vibe.

Most remarkably, at least in this telling, is the failure of  the New Orleans Board of Trade to brake the strike with race-baiting tactics. This was not for lack of help pushing the narrative.

At the same time, the Board of Trade decided to racebait the strike. How dare white and black workers organize together!!!! Of the Triple Alliance unions, the Teamsters were primarily black and the Scalers and Packers mostly white. So to break the strike by race, the Board of Trade announced they would come to an agreement with the two white-dominated unions but not the Teamsters. Newspapers began running stories of black workers forming mobs and rampaging through the streets, of course threatening white women and other typical claims designed to whip up violence against African-Americans.

Because we are currently ruled by crypto-fascists, we have to contend with a lot of deliberate bad faith nonsense about "fake news" from blowhards like Donald Trump.  But the right wing has always bullied the press and largely gotten what it has wanted from it as a result.  The "liberal media" trope has been a favorite crutch for Republicans looking to work the refs for decades. Just because the popular idiom is slightly more crass these days doesn't mean the substance of the argument has moved very much.  The results are the same, anyway.  The more the right bullies the press, the more the press treats their bad faith arguments as a legitimate side of an unresolvable "balanced" debate.

That is, except for the occasions when we find the news media actually working in lockstep with the right in order to bully the powerless as the New Orleans newspapers did during these strikes. Among the many insults Trump deploys against the press in order to keep them in line has been "enemy of the people." And like Trump's many insults it isn't really true. Not in the way he means it anyway.

However, it is fair to say that the portion of the press employed by the large corporate entities who dominate the market to frame the political narrative day to day are deeply invested in defending the status quo.  Which is how we end up with an overpaid pundit class all too happy to mock the idea that housing might be an unaffordable burden for a working class person moving into the D.C. area.  For the same reasons, the storytellers of New Orleans in 1892 were all too happy to smear and disrupt a working class asking for a fairer share of what it produced.  Little has changed. The ruling class's scribes defend their own against the people they choose to define as an enemy.

It's something to keep in mind next year if, say, Louisiana's teachers are forced by an inattentive legislature or by their school boards' continuing deference to the privileges of oligarchs to decide they have to walk out in the middle of a statewide election. But that's a different day in labor history yet to come.