“I HAVE THE EAGLE”: CITIZENSHIP AND LABOR IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1890-1925 A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By: Stephanie Lynn Taylor, M.F.A. Washington, DC August 20, 2017 Copyright 2017 by Stephanie Taylor All Rights Reserved ii “I HAVE THE EAGLE:” CITIZENSHIP AND LABOR IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1890-1925 Stephanie Lynn Taylor, M.F.A. Thesis Advisor: Joseph A. McCartin, Ph.D. ABSTRACT During the critical years of American industrialization and rising status as a world power, a great struggle unfolded in the United States over workers’ status as citizens and what rights their status entailed. The outcome of this struggle shaped and constrained what workers would achieve in twentieth-century America. Just as imperialism raised the question of whether “the Constitution followed the flag” abroad, industrial conflict in those years raised the question of whether the flag – and the Constitution it symbolized – would follow laboring men and women into workplaces, streets, homes, and interactions with employers and government authorities. This dissertation argues that labor conflicts in this period were frequently fought over the boundaries and content of working-class citizenship. However, by the dawn of the New Deal era, the right to organize had become narrowly defined as a matter of market regulation, not as a matter of constitutional principles. This dissertation draws on the experiences of a wide range of workers to make its argument, including Japanese plantation laborers in Hawaii, agricultural workers along the U.S.-Mexico border, coal miners in Colorado, ore miners in the Midwest, and mill workers in the Northeast. Their struggles are situated in the context of a U.S. working- class undergoing rapid transformation, the expanding power and reach of the American iii state, and the simultaneous emergence of imperialism, racial segregation, and disenfranchisement that illuminated the limits of constitutional protection of the rights of those deemed non-white – as well as those who posed a threat to capitalist interests. This dissertation demonstrates that the power of the state, primarily expressed through the courts, armies, and militias, was repeatedly deployed on behalf of employers to defeat the organizing efforts of workers, especially nonwhites and immigrants. Yet it also shows that workers repeatedly resisted repression from both employers and the state by claiming rights – whether or not they enjoyed the formal status of U.S. citizen. In doing so, they ultimately offered an alternative interpretation of the Constitution, influenced the New Deal, and created a more expansive vision of what citizenship should and could mean. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you first and foremost to my advisor, Joseph McCartin, for his generosity and kindness in guiding both this dissertation, and my overall development as a scholar. We are lucky to have his brilliant mind and good heart devoted to the project of working- class history. Thank you also to my extraordinary committee of Katherine Benton-Cohen and Marcia Chatelain, as well as Michael Kazin. I am grateful for the immeasurable support and guidance you have each given me over the years. I have learned so much from all of you about how to analyze and learn, but also how to make the study of history an integral part of the present. This project has resulted in many hundreds of hours of research in archives around the country. Thank you to Andrea Nakamura of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library; to Roz Lightfoot, Holly Buland, and the staff of the Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Museum in Maui; to Weckea Lilly at the Pennsylvania Historical Society; and to the research staff of the Benson Latin-American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin and the National Guard Museum and Archives in Madison, Wisconsin. Above all else, thank you to my partner, Sascha Meinrath, for your astonishing love, support, and taking on more than your share of domestic responsibilities so I could finish this dissertation. This work is for our girls: Clara, Alice, and Eleanor Meinrath. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1. The Militia: Citizens, Soldiers, Capitalism and Imperialism………........22 CHAPTER 2. Citizen by Contract: The Japanese in Hawaii……………………………55 CHAPTER 3. The American Flag: Ambiguous Uses………………………………….108 CHAPTER 4. The Question of Access: Strikes as a Mechanism to Enforce Rights…..133 CHAPTER 5. “Constitutional Rights,” Rhetoric, and the Battle Over Injunctions……163 CHAPTER 6. Bordered Rights: The AFL and the Mexican-American Experience…...200 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………...230 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………...238 vi LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1. National Guard soldiers unload equipment in Colorado strike zone, 1914....53 FIGURE 2. (LEFT), U.S. soldiers and a native collaborator apply the “water cure” to a Filipino “insurgent.” (RIGHT), Life cartoon: European colonial powers mock the United States. …..………..............................................................................................................53 FIGURE 3. National Guard soldiers prepare to lynch a labor supporter in Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1904…………………………………………………………………………54 FIGURE 4. Japanese immigrants arrive in Maui, 1899………………………………...106 FIGURE 5. National Guard soldiers pose with bound prisoners in Leadville, Colorado, during an 1897 mining labor strike of the Western Federation of Miners…….………..132 vii INTRODUCTION During a 1913 strike in Calumet, Michigan, the American flag became a source of struggle between strikers and soldiers. Annie Clemenc, an American-born daughter of Croatian immigrants, led daily marches down Main Street carrying an enormous flag. One morning, Captain Frank L. Blackman of the Michigan State Militia tried to wrestle the flag out of Annie's hand. Annie yelled, “This is the flag for freedom, and we want freedom!” During that scuffle, Blackman managed to seize the brass eagle from the top of her flagpole. Afterwards, he told reporters that he “had the eagle, and intended to keep it.” 1 This site of conflict between an immigrant striker and a soldier, especially in the midst of American expansion, speaks to a host of major historiographical themes in the working-class history of the Progressive Era — Americanization, race, gender, immigration and migration, mobility, imperialism, and citizenship all are linked together in that one moment of struggle. This dissertation will explore why. The small confrontation in Calumet reveals a much larger dynamic of state power, patriotic ideology, and worker organization at a crucial moment in the development of the United States as a world power. At the turn of the twentieth century, as American soldiers were deployed to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, there was a corresponding rise of militarized violence at home against workers and people of color. Many of the same soldiers and units who fought overseas in the Philippines were deployed at home to combat largely immigrant strikers. Veteran troops were deployed against striking miners in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Coeur 1 Denver Times, September 14, 1913, 1. 1 d'Alene, Idaho, in 1899, Telluride, Colorado, in 1901 and 1903, and Idaho Springs and Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1903. Nearly 10,000 soldiers were deployed to Pennsylvania in 1904. Arizona Rangers were mobilized to protect American business interests in Mexico in 1906. Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt of the Colorado National Guard, who fought in the Philippines, was charged with the murder of a Greek strike leader in the southern Colorado coal strike in 1914. State militias were mobilized 328 times between 1886 and 1895, for many reasons, but most often to put down strikes and “brush away all obstructions to interstate commerce.” 2 The soldiers and militiamen deployed in these interventions, whether foreign or domestic, often used the same tactics and language to describe their adversaries. They also interpreted their projects in similar ways. Tactics such as water boarding, adopted by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines, were later used against striking miners in Colorado, and even to punish “unruly” girls at reform schools in New York, placing labor strife, colonial insurgency, and social control along a graphic continuum.3 Violence in the Philippines and Mexico became linked in the public imagination to violence in Colorado, Michigan, and Massachusetts. Workers responded with 2 On the rise of state policing of labor conflict, see David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Here Montgomery is quoting the U.S. Supreme Court ruling during the 1894 Pullman boycott, in which it made clear the coercive role of the military to support the market: “The entire strength of the nation may be used to enforce in any part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers and the security of all rights entrusted by the Constitution to its care. The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to interstate commerce or to the transportation of the mails. If the emergency arises, the army of the nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the nation to compel obedience to its laws.” (97) For more on the Coeur d’Alene strike and the years of conflict that followed, see J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). For more on the Cripple Creek strike, see Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), in which she analyzes the development of class politics in Cripple Creek over the course of a decade. For a broader view of the Colorado mine wars, and the interactions between workers and the state, see George Suggs, Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H.