Varying Assessments
At the time, the 1892 general strike was considered a success, demonstrating that black and white workers could maintain solidarity in the Deep South. The strikers had avoided violence, won most of their demands, avoided military repression, and succeeded in overcoming racial hatred. Samuel Gompers declared:
| “ | To me the movement in New Orleans was a very bright ray of hope for the future of organized labor and convinces me that the advantage which every other element fails to succeed in falls to the mission of organized labor. Never in the history of the world was such an exhibition... With one fell swoop the economic barrier of color was broken down. | ” |
However, subsequent analyses declared the strike a failure, and that unions had "sold out" workers because the unions failed to win the union shop. Just a month later, The New York Times editorialized: "Labor's Defeat In New-Orleans; The Victory of the Employers Complete." Many histories written in the next 40 years suggested that the strike's "massive" failure led the AFL to reject general strikes absolutely thereafter and remain intensively hostile even to limited strikes.
More recently, however, historians have re-assessed the strike's success. Declared one historian, "The failure of the strikers to win a preferential union shop did not detract from the significance of the struggle." The success of the workers in overcoming racial divisions in one of the major cities of the Deep South is notable (and would rarely be achieved again until the 1960s), as is the unification of skilled and unskilled worker.
Read more about this topic: 1892 New Orleans General Strike
Famous quotes containing the word varying:
“... looped with the creep of varying light,
Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles
Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)