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Reading about the current RTD strike made me remember my eighth-grade history teacher talking about the Denver Tramway strike of 1920, how he'd just stepped off a train and found himself caught up in a brick-throwing mob that stormed the Denver Post.
That came after the transit company had hired
security
during the 1920 strike, and makes one
wonder just how secure people will feel if RTD spends
$500,000 a month with a Cleveland contractor for security
teams composed of ex-military and retired cops.
Back in 1920, the security team
began as a corps
of 600 scabs led by a professional union-buster, John
Black Jack
Jerome of San Francisco. According to the
company, his nickname came from his favorite card game;
labor organizations said it resulted from his fondness for
using the blackjack against striking workmen.
In 1920, the Denver Tramway Corp., with its extensive streetcar network, controlled almost all mass transit in the city -- and there wasn't much other urban transit. Few people owned automobiles or horses, and most streets were unpaved, and thus not amenable to bicycling.
The company was controlled by powerful Colorado families, like Boettcher and Evans. Employees belonged to Local 746 of the Amalgamated Association. Tensions had been building for several years. Workers wanted a raise to 75 cents an hour, since prices had gone up by 35 percent in the preceding 18 months. Tramway wanted to raise fares from a nickel to six or seven cents, and most of the public opposed that.
To quote from the best source I could find (Robert
Speer's Denver: 1904-1920
by Phil Goodstein), By
late July, an explosion was imminent. Tramway wanted to get
rid of the union. The streetcar operator scorned all public
efforts at accommodation. In the face of this, members of
local 746 knew they had to fight back. After assembling
around 2 a.m. on Sunday, August 1, they voted at 5 a.m.,
887-11 to strike against Tramway as of 5:30 that morning.
Nine hundred and six workers walked out.
It turned violent within days. The strike-breakers tried to operate the streetcars, and union supporters responded by heaving bricks at the streetcars. The scabs sometimes responded with gunfire. Labor crowds fought back by tipping over and burning the streetcars.
The Denver Post, like the Rocky Mountain News and even
the generally pro-labor Denver Express, condemned the
walk-out and urged the strikers to go back to work. On Aug.
5, after the burning of some streetcars in front of the
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on East Colfax
Avenue, someone in the crowd shouted Let's get the
Post.
In Bill Hosokawa's fine history of this newspaper,
Thunder in the Rockies,
he tells what happened next.
... a crowd estimated at a thousand persons, many of
them curious spectators, started toward downtown Denver
and arrived at 1544 Champa Street, where Someone threw a
rock through the glass of the locked front door.... More
rocks were thrown ... members of the mob poured into the
building. They overturned desks in the business office on
the first floor, smashed typewriters, dumped out the
contents of file cabinets.... the press equipment [was]
attacked with rocks, pipes, and lumber.... A roll of
newsprint was trundled into the street and unwound down
Champa. The street was so jammed with spectators that
police and firemen were helpless.
No one was killed there, though. Most off-duty
strikebreakers stayed in Tramway's carhouses, and fired
their guns out at crowds. Two teenagers were killed by scab
bullets on Aug. 5, and the next night, a volley aimed at
protesters from a carhouse killed five and wounded 13 --
none of the victims were strikers or brick-throwers.
Goodstein writes that Denver police made no effort to
arrest any of Jerome's toughs. The district attorney's
office similarly ignored the shootings. No one ever stood
trial for them.
So much for security
during the 1920 strike.
Federal troops were summoned on Aug. 7. They disarmed the
scabs while protecting the streetcars -- and the strike and
union were broken. As Goodstein notes, The walkout had
cost it [Tramway] $500,000 -- more than enough to have paid
for the workers' wage hike.
Could that also be said of the $500,000 a month that RTD plans to spend on security this time around?
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