The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History 9781487530679

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THE VIOLENCE OF WORK New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History Edited by Jeremy Milloy and Joan Sangster

From mining to sex work and from the classroom to the docks, violence has always been a part of work. This collection of essays highlights the many different forms and expressions of violence that have arisen under capitalism in the last two hundred years, as well as how historians of working-class life and labour have understood violence. The editors draw together diverse case studies, integrating analysis of class, age, gender, sexuality, and race into the scholarship. Essays span the United States and Canadian border, exploring gender violence, sexual harassment, the violent kidnapping of union organizers, the violence of inadequate health and safety protections, the culture of violence in state institutions, the mythology of working-class violence, and the changing nature of violence in extractive industries. The Violence of Work theorizes and historicizes violence as an integral part of working life, making it possible to understand the full scope and causes of workplace violence over time. JER EM Y M ILLOY is the W.P. Bell postdoctoral fellow in Canadian

studies at Mount Allison University.

JO AN SANG STER is a professor in the Department of Gender and

Women’s Studies at Trent University.

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The Violence of Work New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History

EDITED BY JEREMY MILLOY AND JOAN SANGSTER

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0467-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3068-6 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-2343-5 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4875-3067-9 (PDF)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The violence of work : new essays in Canadian and US labour   history / edited by Jeremy Milloy and Joan Sangster. Names: Milloy, Jeremy, 1979–, editor. | Sangster, Joan, 1952–, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200311980 | Canadiana (ebook)   20200312561 | ISBN 9781487504670 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487523435   (paper) | ISBN 9781487530686 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487530679 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Violence in the workplace – Social aspects – Canada –   History. | LCSH: Violence in the workplace – Social aspects – United   States – History. | LCSH: Violence – Social aspects – Canada – History. |   LCSH: Violence – Social aspects – United States – History. | LCSH:   Working class – Canada – Social conditions. | LCSH: Working class –   United States – Social conditions. | LCSH: Labor – Canada – History. |   LCSH: Labor – United States – History. Classification: LCC HM1116 .V56 2021 | DDC 363.32 – dc23

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction: Accounting for Violence  3 jeremy milloy 1 The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal: Seeking Security and Justice in the Face of Violence, 1810–1842  16 mary anne poutanen 2 The Rules of Discipline: Workers and the Culture of Violence in Progressive-Era Reform Schools  42 james schmidt 3 The “New Solution”: Anti-Labour Kidnapping, D.B. McKay, and the Legacy of the Second Seminole War  62 chad pearson 4 Billy Gohl: Labour, Violence, and Myth in the Early Twentieth-Century Pacific Northwest  88 aaron goings 5 Slow Violence and Hidden Injuries: The Work of Strip Mining in the American West  112 ryan driskell tate 6 The Murder of Lori Dupont: Violence, Harassment, and Occupational Health and Safety in Ontario  133 sarah jessup

vi Contents

7

“By the Numbers”: Workers’ Compensation and the (Further) Conventionalization of Workplace Violence  160 robert storey

8 Gender Violence in the Hospitality Industry: Panic Buttons, Pants, and Protest  184 emily e. lb. twarog Contributors 199  

Acknowledgments

One of the biggest joys of working on an edited collection, especially for often solitary historians, is the connection and collaboration with other scholars. The editors first of all thank their co-authors for contributing their research and expertise to this project and for their enthusiasm and professionalism throughout this process. We also thank Mason Godden, who did crucial work formatting and preparing the manuscript for submission. This project began as a proposal to host a workshop at Trent University. In that, the editors were supported by the generosity of the Symons Trust, the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, and the Department of History. We thank these funders and supporters for helping make this project a reality. That what you are reading now exists is in large part because of the hard work of many people at the University of Toronto Press. Len Husband championed this project and guided it through peer review. Alexandra Grieve led the elegant design of a book containing much ugliness. Janice Evans and Matthew Kudelka devoted skill and rigorous dedication to editing our prose. We offer grateful thanks to them and to everyone at UTP. We thank you for reading this book, which is dedicated to working people everywhere.

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THE VIOLENCE OF WORK New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History

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Introduction: Accounting for Violence jeremy milloy

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. Studs Terkel, Working (1972)

In the mid-1990s, Margery Wardle was a heavy equipment operator for the City of Nepean, Ontario. She loved her career. She was “really proud of what I did for a living,” she reflected in 2018, long after it had been taken away from her. On the job, Wardle worked in an environment where pictures of women portrayed as sex objects were posted up. Her own sexuality was questioned and bandied about. She was followed into the washroom. She was grabbed while at work. When she fought this, she got nowhere. Her harassers were promoted. After she spoke out about her treatment, retaliation made her working life unbearable. She left the job and was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder As Sarah Jessup details in this volume, Ontario’s labour law prohibits harassment and the creation of a toxic workplace environment. Yet the province’s Workplace Safety Insurance Board denied Wardle’s claim for benefits, claiming that “interpersonal conflict is a typical feature of normal employment and is generally not considered to be a substantial work-related stressor.”1 Despite legislation and policy, workplace violence is persistent, contested, and unsettled. Wardle is not alone. Workplace violence is a major problem for working people today. In 2016 there were five hundred workplace homicides in the United States, which accounted for one of every ten occupational fatalities. In a 2015 survey, 45 per cent of Canadian workers polled reported experiencing bullying in the workplace; more than

4  Jeremy Milloy

one-quarter of these workers left their jobs in response. In the United States, 27 per cent of those surveyed reported direct experience with abusive conduct at work. “Victimization in the Workplace,” a 2007 Statistics Canada study, reported that almost 20 per cent of incidents of violent victimization occurred in the victim’s workplace. While workplace violence has often been framed as a “new” or “growing” problem, workers under capitalism have always experienced violence on the job. Workplace violence has been decried by trade unionists and socialists since the nineteenth century and has often been understood as embedded in the profit motive of capitalism. In that century, the primary forms of violence at work involved mass violence – inflicted by bosses, their private armies, and the state against unionizing or striking workers; by strikers against scabs, and vice versa; by strikers versus police and militia – and, as the bloody backdrop to all of these conflicts, the death, disease, and dismemberment of working people that underwrote economic development in the industrial age. Over the twentieth century, the dominant trope of workplace violence shifted from mass to individual, with lone workers directing aggression against bosses, coworkers, and customers, a shift I tracked in my book Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80. Despite this shift, mass violence has persisted: the group violence of bullying and mobbing, the economic violence of layoffs and deindustrialization, the death, disease, and dismemberment that together underwrite capitalist profit in the twenty-first century. The authors in this collection investigate these complex forms, facets, and directions of workplace violence, which is essential to understanding this multifarious phenomenon. Social welfare investigators, critics of industrial development, and health experts have also chronicled violence at work, though more often in large workplaces and mass industries. In such studies, violence is often categorized and siloed into discrete categories such as “accidents” and, more often than not, attributed to individual or unusual fault rather than to systemic problems. Currently, every Canadian jurisdiction has legislation in place that seeks to prevent violence in the workplace, although it is important to note that the definitions of violence vary among them. In the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has no regulations about violence at work, although it does provide advice and resources on reducing risk factors. Seven US states mandate that employers establish workplace violence programs.2 As Wardle’s case shows, however, many types of workplace harm are not formally considered violence. This reflects a long history of masking,

Introduction: Accounting for Violence  5

denying, and mislabelling behaviour, events, and experiences of workers, who even themselves often have not used a language of violence. In 2016 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 5,190 workers died from fatal work injuries in the United States, and in Canada, the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards reported that 905 workers died on the job. How many were victims of violence? What of workers who die quickly on construction sites or highways, or slowly after years of exposure to toxic chemicals? How many workplace deaths were never recorded at all? That hundreds of General Electric Peterborough workers are currently battling Ontario’s occupational health authority for compensation for what they claim are cancers caused by their work raises questions about what forms of the violence of work may be overlooked by much current discourse, research, and policy. The WSIB’s ruling in Wardle’s case prompts us to consider what levels of violence are indeed understood as everyday, normal, and unremarkable, and what levels are not. Why are some forms of violence decried, and others accepted? Which expressions of violence arise in the workplace itself, and which come from without? The persistence of these questions, and of workplace violence itself, indicates that fresh approaches to this issue are necessary. In this volume, research on contemporary violence is presented alongside historical analyses of violence at work in order to better reveal the causes, forms, uses, and effects of violence at work. This scholarship tells us much about the phenomenon of workplace violence but it also indicates that analysing violence is a promising way to understand and theorize more broadly about work under capitalism.3 In the past twenty-five years, a great deal of research has been published on workplace violence, including work in labour studies, psychology, management studies, and health sciences. We have learned much of importance from this literature, especially that workplace violence takes a variety of forms, from harassment to homicide. We now have a much better idea of the prevalence and impacts of workplace violence. At present, few scholars have undertaken dedicated historical studies of violence in the workplace. Exceptions include Steven Meyer’s work on mid-century auto factories and the editors’ previous analyses of horseplay and grievance records, and workplace violence in Chrysler plants in the 1960s and 1970s.4 However, though work dedicated to understanding workplace violence as a specific historical phenomenon has begun appearing only recently, violence has long been a concern for historians of labour. It appears in scholarship dealing with sexual harassment, strikes, Jim Crow and racial violence, and prison labour, to name only a few topics. Louis Adamic wrote about the fundamental role of class violence in America in Dynamite!, an early landmark

6  Jeremy Milloy

work of American labour history. Stephen Norwood has written about the connection between the valorized violence of strike-breaking in early twentieth-century America and discourses of masculinity and whiteness. Indeed, the violence of strikes, be it meted out by workers, employers, police, private actors, or the state, has long been a focus of labour scholarship and continues to be one, evidenced by Paul Lipold’s work assessing strike fatalities. In Community of Suffering and Struggle, Elizabeth Faue analysed the relationship between working-class violence, activism, and gender, showing how valorization of violence often worked to marginalize and exclude women. The same lesson is apparent in reading about Detroit’s radical Black workers in the work of Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin and that of Heather Ann Thompson. Legal scholar and historian Constance Backhouse did pioneering work on sexual harassment in the 1970s. Many of the most deeply studied and hotly debated topics in North America’s labour and left history – Haymarket, the Winnipeg General Strike, and the Colorado Coal Wars – have violence at their heart. Furthermore, the literature on unfree labour, which is not our focus here, explicates the profound links between violence, slavery, human trafficking, and other forms of involuntary servitude. These works illustrate the importance of violence in capitalism’s operations, the labour process, workplace cultures, and workers’ lives. In doing so, they highlight the need for a more specific, sustained inquiry into violence as a key variable in the workplace. What factors influence the amount, or forms, of violence in a particular worksite? How have the definitions, forms, and effects of workplace violence changed over time? Just how important has violence been in maintaining workplace hierarchies? In halting campaigns for wages and justice? In stimulating those campaigns? In producing or destroying solidarity? The chapters in this volume consider these questions for a multitude of geographical, occupational, and temporal locations. Before the work of any of these scholars, the understanding of capitalism as fundamentally violent in the relationship between workers and capital was first and best expressed by Marx. Wolfgang Streeck’s 2016 analysis of contemporary political economy, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System draws on Marx’s observation that it is often labourers themselves, by organizing to prevent capital’s unrestrained ravaging of their lives and health, who have acted as a necessary brake on the pursuit of profit and commodification – a pursuit that threatens the viability of capitalism itself, a point Streeck believes we have now reached in the twenty-first century.5 Marx wrote that “for ‘protection’ against ‘the serpent of their agonies,’ the labourers must … as a class … compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall

Introduction: Accounting for Violence  7

prevent the very workers from selling, by very contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.”6 To Marx, then, the coercion of market labour, facilitated by the dispossession of peasantry and the rapacious process of primitive accumulation, contains no intrinsic protection of workers from exploitation and harms. In the view of both Marx and Streeck, capitalism is so inherently violent that it threatens to destroy its labourers, its resources, its ecology, and itself, if not restrained from doing so by workers or the state. Nevertheless, despite the centrality of violence to the history of work under capitalism and theorizations of capitalism itself, this is perhaps the first transnational collection that attempts to draw together a diversity of studies of violence at work in an effort to contemplate a broader analysis of its historical and present-day roots, manifestations, and definitions. Why is this? Labour scholarship has often explored violence in discrete categories, such as “occupational health,” not necessarily theorizing more broadly about its relationship to capitalism: historians, for example, have explored the tragic poisoning of the “Radium Girls” in the United States and the fate of asbestos miners in Canada. Studies of the postwar Fordist period also initially concentrated on the way in which labour conflict was diverted and rationalized into bureaucratic and legal conflict rather than raw instances of class conflict, though writing in both the United States and Canada has shown that the “accord” might be better termed an ongoing “tug-of-war” as it was fractured by violent class skirmishes and struggles, including by workers outside the protection of the accord: immigrants, women, racialized workers.7 While many scholars have illustrated the violence of class relations on picket lines or in riots, the everyday violence used and experienced by workers has often been a backdrop in studies of work rather than a central area of analysis. In this collection, we both focus our lens to look at everyday violence often ignored, and zoom out to reveal the wider violences of work under capitalism that create the context of that everyday violence. What do we learn from doing so? The work collected here attests to violence’s role as a significant dynamic shaping a wide variety of labour settings and types of work and as an important factor in working lives in many different times and locations. Having studied the intersections of work and violence, these authors have much to tell us about how each creates and influences the other. While the contributors’ inquiries are diverse and their methods wide-ranging, their work overall demonstrates that violence plays a crucial role in establishing, maintaining, and contesting workplace relations and cultures and that much of the violence experienced at work arises from these cultures

8  Jeremy Milloy

and relations. Overall, this volume demonstrates the value of analysing work through the lens of violence. Understanding violence as both a strongly material reality and a powerful element of cultural understandings allows us to unite insights from materialist perspectives with insights from feminist, anti-racist, and disability studies. By doing so, these authors reveal violence as central to workplace processes, workplace cultures, and the experiences of workers. Many of the chapters also build on intersections between labour and body studies, showing how violence – emotional, psychological, physical – “marked” workingclass bodies in classed, gendered, and racialized ways.8 The study of violence reminds us that working bodies must be understood for their sentient, experiential, corporeal, material presence. They existed in social contexts in which suffering and alienation were deeply felt: as Marx wrote, within capitalism, workers became “estranged” from their bodies, humanity, and nature.9 At the same time, those with more social power who analysed, oversaw, and disciplined workers often discursively mapped meanings onto the working-class body, in turn shaping workers’ options and experiences. Heat, exertion, and even accidents were assumed to be more easily tolerated by some workers, particularly racialized, migrant labourers: the very word “hunky” (or “bohunk”), used to disparage eastern and southern European immigrants, was a product of injury and accidents on the job.10 Looking at violence as fundamental to work under capitalism also provides a platform for a necessary rapprochement of labour history and labour studies. The historical work here provides crucial data and analysis to help us understand the context of contemporary labour relations and workplace violence as trenchantly analysed by the contributors. The contributions here are organized chronologically, allowing the reader to notice connections, changes, and continuities across time, space, and workplaces. The volume begins with Mary Anne Poutanen’s investigation of violence in the lives of nineteenth-century sex workers; continues with James Schmidt’s analysis of the use of violence by educators in Gilded Age industrial schools; and moves to Chad Pearson’s account of Tampa elites employing kidnapping and exile in the early twentieth century to suppress worker organizing in the Big Guava. Next are two pieces that expand our understanding of violence in the American West, integrating class and environmental violence as essential to an understanding of this capitalist frontier – Aaron Goings’s account of the strange career of Billy Gohl: labour organizer, radical, convicted murderer, and purported serial killer; and Ryan Tate’s analysis of the many threads of violence shot through Western mines. Tate’s work shifts us into

Introduction: Accounting for Violence  9

more recent territory: Sarah Jessup’s study of the murder of nurse Lori Dupont and the creation of anti-violence and harassment legislation in Ontario pairs revealingly with Robert Storey’s look at the disabling violence of worker injury and disease in Ontario, and the silencing of that violence by the practices and messages of the aforementioned WSIB. Finally, Emily E. LB. Twarog’s work on hotel workers and sexual harassment highlights the working-class roots of current high-profile campaigns against gender and sexual violence and is thus particularly relevant to contextualizing current campaigns like #MeToo and Time’s Up. There are more insights in this volume than can be captured in a brief introduction, but I would like to highlight some key themes that emerged from reading and reflecting on the work that follows. First, the authors demonstrate the very multiplicity of violences issuing from the labour process and the power dynamics at work. In the pages that follow, we learn about interpersonal physical violence between workers; violence directed upwards at bosses and downwards at subordinates; and violence committed by state agents toward workers and vice versa. Ryan Tate’s piece on miners in the American West calls attention to how workers directed violence inward in an individualized class structure, with alienation, frustration, and despair being channelled into harmful use of drugs and alcohol. This not only helps us understand the real toll of mining work touted by corporations as safer but also encourages us to consider the contribution of pain – physical, mental, and emotional – visited upon the worker under capitalism to the ongoing opioid crisis. In the context of the earlier pieces here, it also raises the question of periodization: To what extent have workers always responded to the demands of work in this way, and to what extent have these responses shifted along with changes in workplace organization and working-class cultures? How have changes in capitalism – here, neoliberal capitalism – shaped and reshaped the experience of violence? The chapters in this volume also make it clear that some forms of violence at work have been accepted, or even encouraged over time. The words “part of the job” echoed in my mind as I read so many of these pieces. James Schmidt’s work revealingly historicizes the fraught historical moment occupied by nineteenth-century teachers at industrial schools: those teachers were situated between an early nineteenthcentury during which public corporal punishments of workers and prisoners were common and accepted, and an early twentieth-century culture during which control and punishment were understood to involve more of a internalized, rehabilitative orientation. These workers often used violence to control and discipline children, in ways we

10  Jeremy Milloy

rightly find repugnant today. However, it is not enough to simply condemn the violence that took place. Schmidt shows us the workplace culture in which that violence thrived: a culture that accepted and even advocated violence as part of an educator’s toolbox. Similarly, in contemporary times, the hotel workers Emily E. LB. Twarog’s writes about have experienced sexual harassment so regularly, and have had so little attention paid to it by those with the power to change their workplace dynamics, that many of them have internalized it as “just part of the job” – not worthy of comment, let alone action or struggle. Many of the contributors make useful temporal arguments about violence. While often we think of violence as something happening in an instant – a sudden assault or a gunshot ringing out – Ryan Tate deploys Rob Nixon’s framework of slow violence to understand the toll that mining work took on those who did it. Those of us who study deindustrialization and its impacts note not just the sudden, shocking economic and cultural impact of a plant or mill that had been at the centre of a community closing down or moving on, but the longer-term impacts: the downward mobility of generations to come; the reckoning with tainted land and water; the occupational diseases appearing in the bodies of workers; the climbing addiction and suicide rates. Slow violence is also revealed in Robert Storey’s coruscating account of the toll of late-twentieth-century workplace practices. The injuries and losttime “accidents” that appear as deracinated, neutral data in the tabulations of worker compensation boards are played out in pain, suffering, and diminishment over decades in the lives of workers, their families, and their communities. While we know a great deal about employer and state violent repression of strikes and worker organizing at Homestead and Ludlow, and the overt and covert violence directed at Black worker organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Chad Pearson’s work on the kidnapping of leaders of Tampa’s cigar workers encourages us to think more deeply and widely about violence directed at individual workplace activists as a fundamental historical tool in capital’s arsenal. Our current moment, when the role of the whistle-blower, whether over sexual abuse, military malfeasance, or the often-hidden workings of the powerful, is so central, highlights the importance of the violence directed at individual workers to enforce silence and acquiescence. Pearson’s work is a powerful reminder that Trevor Griffey’s dictum in the context of left politics – that repression, because of its silencing impact and secretive nature, is often harder for the scholar to apprehend and thus underappreciated as a causal factor – is also true for workplace activism and struggle.11

Introduction: Accounting for Violence  11

Indeed, as scholars of work continue to try to come to grips with violence’s crucial role in shaping the history of the workplace, we must always be cognizant of how violence, while often spectacular and visible in the historical record, is so often silencing, veiling, and hard to apprehend in both its nature and its impact. This is starkly delineated by Aaron Goings’s argument that Billy Gohl was first railroaded by Grays Harbor elites in order to handicap labour organizing there, but then mythologized as a serial killer in order to further discredit him and the local labour movement. Goings’s account of how this myth, first propagated to limit the aspirations of working people, has in the community’s post-industrial life become a piece of cultural capital exploited by local businesses attempting to attract the tourist trade, is ironic and poignant, and challenges us to further consider the roles played by workplace violence in shaping our perceptions and memory of work, workers, and activism. Another particularly salient theme that emerges from these chapters is that efforts to reduce violence have long been an important focus for workers and their allies. Workers have consistently organized to reduce violence in their workplaces, but their means of doing so have always presented them with a dilemma: Should they press for reformist measures that mitigate some of the worst issues but leave the structural conditions of capital’s dominance, racism, and sexism largely intact? Or should they work for larger structural changes in workplace dynamics – changes that, while transformative, have proven consistently elusive? Workers’ efforts to confront the violence of work have ranged widely, taking in informal rebellion on the job, formal union protest, and lobbying of employers and the state for legal changes to work regimes. Some responses simply provided comfort and commemoration, through fraternal aid to families and decent burials for those who lost their lives on the job. Violence might also be met with the public power of collective silence: when three striking miners were shot by the RCMP during a peaceful protest in Estevan, Saskatchewan, in 1931, a sober, massive funeral march through the town made a political point about workingclass solidarity, as did the wording on their gravestones: “Murdered … by the RCMP.”12 Jessup’s work speaks to organized protest that can emerge from violence. She shows how worker and feminist organizing against the gendered workplace violence that claimed the lives of Theresa Vince and Lori Dupont resulted in the first meaningful legislation against workplace violence and harassment in Ontario. However, advocates were disappointed at the limited scope of the legislation, which failed to understand violence as a fundamental aspect of workplace practices,

12  Jeremy Milloy

not simply free-floating bad behaviour, and which failed to extend the same protection against harassment as it did against physical violence. Tate’s work shows us how regulation meant to provide safer workplaces can be downloaded onto workers themselves, allowing bosses to claim public relations victories while intensifying stress and exploitation. Storey shows how a worker’s compensation system set up to provide workers with some sort of stability, dignity, and redress for the ongoing toll of capitalism is always shaped by its political and economic context. Storey makes a powerful argument that Ontario’s WSIB reflects a neoliberal turn in public institutions, which operate according to a business logic and seek to minimize obligations to workers at any cost. These scholars establish that the contemporary Illinois hotel workers organizing and lobbying for a workplace free of harassment are operating on a terrain that has provided victories and protections for workers, but ones that have been incomplete, uneven, and impermanent. The connections between gender, work, and violence emerge as a particularly salient, enduring theme of this collection. Violence is fundamental to shaping work under capitalism; and at the same time, the gendered character of work shapes workplace violence. Mary Anne Poutanen’s work demonstrates that disparities in gender power created particular risks to women selling sex for money as a survival strategy in a patriarchal capitalist economy, on the streets, in brothels, and before the law. Twarog’s and Jessup’s researches suggest that the feminized spaces of health care and of hotel work have influenced the prevalence of gendered and sexual violence, the long-standing invisibility of much of that violence, and the activism directed against that violence. The work of all three scholars troubles settled categories of workplace and domestic violence, showing us that there is so much overlap between what is commonly understood as domestic violence and what is classified as workplace violence that it is often much more revealing to study their intersection. Goings’s chapter underscores arguments by scholars like Stephen Meyer and Stephen Norwood that violence has long been seen as a key ingredient of working-class masculinity, while Pearson shines a light on violence as a way to coalesce the class identity of upper-class elites. This is an understudied topic but a necessary one if we are to break from a lazy and ultimate corrosive stereotype of working-class men as inherently violent.13 Interestingly, scholars here demonstrate that endurance of the everyday violence at work is expected of both men and women alike. The scholarship here suggests that violence is a fundamental dynamic shaping wage labour under capitalism in multiple ways. Because of

Introduction: Accounting for Violence  13

violence’s location at the very heart of the wage labour relationship, rippling out to so many aspects of wage labour and intersecting with so many of the key categories influencing life and struggle in a capitalist society, including race, gender, sexuality, ability, and environment, there is much more work to be done in this regard. Some of that work is suggested by the contributions here. Pearson’s work encourages more research on the links between capitalism, colonialism, and workplace violence, while Schmidt’s work prompts us to consider what of the violence of Indian residential schools was a labour practice, and how it overlapped and departed from other teacher violence in North America. Similarly, workplace hazing is another form of violence long accepted in workplace cultures, and its forms and functions are worth a more sustained inquiry. Although workplace violence, like violence more generally, is often stereotyped as a male phenomenon and prerogative, the work here points out that women too use violence at work. We need scholars to recover and theorize the workplace violence of women, as well as the differing shapes of violence in womendominated sectors. The prevalence, forms, and impacts of violence in other settings, such as office work, digital labour, and the gig economy, also demand investigation. The work-related suicides that have become a flashpoint for the degradation of workers’ lives in France, China, and elsewhere – are these a new phenomenon, or do they have important historical precedents? Finally, and perhaps most crucially, is violence a useful way to understand and resist the links between capitalism, work, and the accelerating destruction of this planet? The contributors here show us that to challenge the violence of work under capitalism is to challenge capitalism fundamentally and broadly – its exploitation, sexism, and racism; its killing and destruction.14 NOTES   1 Sara Mojtehedzadeh, “She Was Grabbed, Endured Sexual Taunts, and Followed into the Washroom,” Toronto Star, 5 January 2019.   2 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “There Were 500 Workplace Homicides in the United States in 2016,” https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/there -were-500-workplace-homicides-in-the-united-states-in-2016.htm?view _full (accessed 1 February 2019) ; CareerBuilder, “Nearly Half of Workers Feel Bullied on the Job,” 12 November 2014, https://www.careerbuilder .ca/ca/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?sd=11/13/2014&siteid =cbpr&sc_cmp1=cb_pr68_&id=pr68&ed=12/31/2014 (accessed 1 February 2019); Sylvain de Léséleuc, Criminal Victimization in the Workplace

14  Jeremy Milloy (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2007); “States Address Workplace Violence via Legislation,” AORN.org, https://www.aorn.org/about-aorn/aorn -newsroom/health-policy-news/2016-health-policy-news/states-address -workplace-violence-via-legislation (accessed 1 February 2019).   3 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2016,” 19 December 2017, https://www.bls.gov/news.release /archives/cfoi_12192017.pdf (accessed 1 February 2019); Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, https://www.ccohs.ca/events /mourning (accessed 1 February 2019).   4 Stephen Meyer, Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Joan Sangster, Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Post-War Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010): 145–98; Jeremy Milloy, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).   5 Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? (New York: Verso Books, 2016).   6 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (1976; reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 416.   7 Ben Isitt, Militant Majority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 20; Bryan Palmer, “Wildcat Workers in the 1960s: The Unruly Face of Class Struggle,” in Labouring Canada: Class, Gender and Race in Working-Class History, ed. Bryan Palmer and Joan Sangster (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2008), 273–93; Michael Honey, “Operation Dixie: Labor and Civil Rights in the Postwar South,” The Mississippi Quarterly 45, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 439–52; Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s (New York: Verso, 2010).   8 Michael K. Rosenow, Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865–1920 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 7.   9 Joan Sangster, “Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-Class History,” International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 247. 10 David Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 43. 11 Trevor Griffey, “History Declassified: Using U.S. Government Intelligence Documents to Write Left History,” Left History 16, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 115–28. On capitalist repression in history, see also Larry Isaac, “To Counter ‘The Very Devil’ and More: The Making of Independent Capitalist Militia in the Gilded Age,” American Journal of Sociology 108, no. 2 (2002): 353–405.

Introduction: Accounting for Violence  15 12 The words were scratched out, presumably by the RCMP or allies, but restored later by labour activists. On Estevan, see James Endicott, Bienfait: The Saskatchewan Miners’ Struggle of ’31 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 13 Stephen Meyer, Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 14 On these suicides, see Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (New York: Verso, 2015).

1 The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal: Seeking Security and Justice in the Face of Violence, 1810–18421 mary anne poutanen

One evening in January 1830, as Sarah Noxon was about to fasten the outside door of her brothel, she noticed a small gathering of people standing in front of the entrance wearing hooded cloaks to conceal their identity. Without warning, someone fired a pistol, wounding her in the left arm. The perpetrator of this violent act then followed Noxon into the house, made threats, exited abruptly, and discharged two more shots from the handgun. Before the crowd dispersed, another person threw stones at the building, shattering a windowpane.2 Noxon was understandably alarmed by this brutality. As the proprietor of “Chez Sal,” she was keenly aware of the risks inherent in her line of work and would have tried to find a balance between being far enough from the town’s police patrols to avoid unwanted scrutiny but sufficiently close to obtain their assistance if necessary. Noxon responded to the assault by laying a complaint before Justice of the Peace Samuel Gale against the alleged perpetrators, merchant clerk James Niles and apothecary clerk Daniel Daly. He charged them with maiming. As the events transpiring at Noxon’s brothel unfolded in a series of court documents, a complicated narrative emerged. The case involved a prostitute who worked in another establishment, a jealous lover, a possible situation of vigorous competitive business practices, and a small party of men who committed this assault during an evening that began at Tobias Denack’s Eating House, where the two accused purportedly loaded their pistols, and ended in a sexual tryst at Lucie Rolland’s bawdy house.3 Criminal court records of the Quarter Sessions of the Peace document hundreds of episodes of violence perpetrated by clients, husbands, lovers, security men, policemen, neighbours, kin, and fellow brothel-keepers and prostitutes on women who marketed sex. These cases ranged from slander, insults, and threats to rioting, spousal abuse, assault and

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  17

battery, rape, and murder. I argue that such real and potential violence underscored the everyday experiences of sex workers, the complex relationships they established with others, and the need to institute and promote judicious rapport with those with whom they came in contact. Since these women could not depend on the criminal justice system for protection or even to have their cases treated with fair-mindedness, they introduced a number of measures to make their workplaces and homes, both on the streets and in brothels, as safe as possible. Strategies included hiring armed security men, soliciting in pairs or groups, seeking clients in the town centre where some of the streets were illuminated and where police and watchmen patrolled, utilizing interpersonal skills to allay danger, developing relationships with constables, nightwatchmen, and soldiers, and carrying weapons for self-defence. They also turned to magistrates – the same ones they faced at court when charged with prostitution-related offences – to accuse others of perpetrating violent acts on them and to seek justice. Such court cases not only highlight the aggression embedded in prostitution as marginalized labour but also reveal that Montreal’s criminal justice authorities often refused to intervene on behalf of the women who were targeted. Elites tended to blame ineffective policing for the violence associated with sex commerce. They did not view that violence as a crime against the person, nor did they see these popular-class women as entitled to protection by the local state. Prostitution in the period under study was viewed in overtly moral terms. Women who marketed sex were considered non-respectable, transmitters of immorality and disease, a necessary evil to protect reputable women from the excesses of the male sex drive, and therefore not entitled to security or to the impartiality of the lower courts. I have organized the discussion as follows. It begins with an overview of Montreal’s sex trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. Then I consider the violence that sex purveyors encountered both at home and at work before exploring some of the common strategies they instituted to reduce risk. Lastly, I examine the consequences of laying charges against perpetrators of aggression and of seeking justice at court. Prostitution in the City Over the first half of the nineteenth century, Montreal underwent significant social, economic, and demographic change. While it remained predominately Catholic, by the early 1830s more Montrealers spoke English than French, and more women than men resided in the city, given the large numbers of domestic servants. Prostitution has an important

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place in the history of Montreal; it contributed to the local economy of hospitality by encouraging men to spend money on services such as food, beverages, and lodging, and for the women who marketed sex, it provided an essential source of income. In the early nineteenth century, more than 2,000 women were charged with more than 4,500 prostitution-related offences.4 They had turned to sex commerce – be it full-time as prostitutes and brothel-keepers or part-time as casual acts – in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families at a time when the city was undergoing a significant upheaval associated with the transition in work, demography, and geography, as well as with transformations in the attitudes and laws governing social regulation, women’s sexuality, and law enforcement. As the moral economy came under attack and eroded a community’s surveillance and discipline of its refractory members, a more repressive local state apparatus – embodied in peace officers – appropriated a larger role in regulating disorderly houses as well as disorderly women and, thus, in public prosecution. Women chose this form of work for a variety of reasons, not all of them a consequence of destitution. It provided popular-class single, married, widowed, and abandoned women the means to achieve short- and long-term subsistence goals. A small group of women marketed sex on a permanent basis as a response to problems of chronic indigence, alcoholism, and homelessness. They established mutually dependent relationships with one another as well as networks of assistance. For others, it was a career, one that offered economic, social, and sexual independence. For most of the women however, prostitution was a subsistence strategy that provided a livelihood through difficult periods: some of them were unmarried and had disembarked from overseas crossings only to face limited employment possibilities; others had husbands who were unemployed or underemployed, ill, dead, or incarcerated, or had abandoned their families. For still other women, sex work was a means to escape spousal abuse or a drunken husband, notwithstanding that alcohol consumption and violence were embedded in sex commerce. Women with dependents integrated brothel-keeping labour into their homes, allowing them to maintain a household, look after their children, and earn a living. Historian Olwen Hufton’s concept of spinster clustering can be applied to unmarried women in Montreal who earned their subsistence by combining their capital, knowledge, and labour to operate brothels.5 For young women, the sex trade allowed them to escape from brutal family situations or unhappy apprenticeships and work conditions or to negotiate sex in a culture in which men tried to take what they wanted.6

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  19

As daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers, sex workers were integral to city neighbourhoods: they shared housing, purchased goods at nearby markets and stores, frequented local taverns, attended church services, and solicited on city streets, in green spaces, and in houses of prostitution. Streetwalkers often navigated these social spaces in groups, looking after one another by divvying up resources, and they sometimes fought with or stole from those outside their own circles of kin and friends. Sex workers served as informal ambassadresses to men, many of whom were soldiers, sailors, migrants, or labourers who were newcomers to the city. They had a notable presence in public space, where they rubbed shoulders with men, women, and children of all social classes and ethnic groups while going about their daily activities. The popular classes were ambivalent about sex work, even though the boundaries between the respectable and nonrespectable could be blurred. It was the task of the criminal justice system to discipline refractory brothel-keepers, brothel prostitutes, and streetwalkers. Women shouldered domestic responsibilities to stretch inadequate wages no matter their reputations and how they earned a living; at the same time, money paid to sex workers diminished household revenues, associating with women who marketed sex could tarnish one’s reputation, and men who visited them might infect their wives with venereal disease, given that prostitutes had unprotected sex. Women marketed their trade in most city neighbourhoods, from the waterfront along the town centre and Pointe-à-Callière, beyond the demolished fortifications in the faubourgs or suburbs, as far south as Ste-Anne and as far north as Côte-à-Baron. Prostitution was ubiquitous on the urban landscape but not uniformly so: it was concentrated in those parts of Montreal where the demand was greater. The city provided, as geographer Philip Howell put it when describing New York and London, “a field of sexual opportunity to men about town.”7 Therefore, a man in search of sex commerce would have had little difficulty in locating sex purveyors who suited his taste and pocketbook. New arrivals and travellers could find out about sex commerce through word of mouth – carters were an important source of information – or simply by ambulating about the city in search of telltale signs. Bachelors of all social classes embraced a way of life predicated on work and pleasure, which included alcohol consumption, public entertainment, visits to neighbourhood brothels, or rambles through public spaces in pursuit of streetwalkers. James Niles and Daniel Daly, who behaved violently at Sarah Noxon’s brothel, epitomized the youthful, self-indulgent, elite bachelor subculture acting with impunity.

20  Mary Anne Poutanen

For the women who sold sex, there was an inexhaustible supply of men in the city. The Quebec Gate Barracks, for example, was an imperial garrison that housed as many as 1,500 men at any one time. Most of these soldiers either were single or had left their wives and children at home in Great Britain. Only 6 per cent of married soldiers were permitted army rations and barrack lodgings for their families; the majority could not afford to transport their families to Canada or to support them here at their own expense.8 In addition to the military presence, a seven-month shipping season meant that sailors who manned British sailing vessels loaded with goods and passengers destined for Montreal sought food, liquor, companionship, and sexual pleasure on while in port. Montreal men – both single and married – also frequented local brothels or engaged in sex commerce with streetwalkers. Violence at Home and at Work Prostitution was more than an exchange of money for sex. It encompassed an assortment of encounters, interactions, and relationships among sex purveyors, clients, husbands and lovers, fathers, kin, neighbours, and police. The male sexual predation prostitutes faced ran the gamut from threats, intimidation, and assault and battery to rape and murder. For the homeless, violence was already embodied in the harsh, illicit, and dangerous world they inhabited; marketing sex made it still more perilous. Even the activities of daily living were hazardous; city residents attacked sex workers while they attended church services, walked along city streets, or frequented urban amusements. Residential prostitution, in which home and workplace were often one and the same, was equally dangerous because it involved alcohol consumption and drunkenness in confined, often cramped spaces. Clients perpetrated violent acts – threats, assaults, and even murder – on one another and on prostitutes. One of the most deadly attacks took place at John Griswold’s “très mauvaise maison,” where a pregnant prostitute died after being assaulted and punched during a brawl.9 There were other key authority figures with whom sex workers had to contend, from the madam operating the establishment to the men hired to ensure security. Sex purveyors also had to endure threats, assaults, and destruction of property carried out by brothel keepers, prostitutes, and clients from other brothels in the neighbourhood, as Sarah Noxon knew only too well. Sarah’s brutal encounter with Niles and Daly reveals that the classic paradigm of violence between a client and a sex worker tells only part of the story. Noxon linked this ruthless act to an incident that had

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  21

taken place three weeks earlier involving Rosalie Beaulieu, a prostitute who worked at Lucie Lenoir dite Rolland’s brothel, located in the same neighbourhood. Beaulieu had smashed a window and threatened Noxon if she ever went near or spoke to George Rea: “C’est moi Rosalie Beaulieu qui a jeté une pierre chez toi, et si tu vas et si tu parles avec mon ami, je te brulerai la cervelle á coup de pistolet.”10 Beaulieu sought to punish Noxon for what may have been a sexual liaison with George Rea. In the investigation that followed, Niles and Daly claimed that it was Rea himself who had pointed out “Chez Sal” to them, suggesting that the accused had never patronized Noxon’s establishment. That Niles and Daly’s final stop was at Lucie Rolland’s house of prostitution on the rue St-Denis, where they spent the night with Rosalie Beaulieu and Adélaide Laliberté, indicates that the experiences of Montreal prostitutes and brothel-keepers were indeed complex.11 That is, it was not just men who made threats and committed violent acts against women associated with sex commerce; so did other prostitutes. Lucie Rolland in fact had a long history of antagonistic relations with brothel-keepers and was a formidable opponent when it came to defending her business interests.12 The marketplace of sex in Montreal, as elsewhere, was competitive, and rivalries and disputes among streetwalkers and between brothelkeepers over prostitutes and clients sometimes resulted in violence.13 Such acts could be triggered by a jealous lover, as we have already observed, or by a coveted sex worker choosing to move to a different brothel. Take the example of Julia Donaghue. When she left Henry Thain and Desolives Gauthier’s brothel for another establishment, Thain accused Agathe Florentine and Guillaume Laverdure of concealing Donaghue in their house. Donaghue countered by denouncing Thain to the authorities for intimidation: “the defendant hath threatened her and actually caused her to be indicted for larceny and to be arrested and treated with personal violence. Upon the bill of indictment being rejected by the grand jury the defendant has threatened revenge.”14 To get Donaghue back, Thain had allegedly hired three men to break into Laverdure’s brothel to abduct her. Donaghue reported overhearing his threats to “do worse tonight, than last night; if possible he added and if he could have no other revenge, he would have the house torn down over our heads on account of Agathe Laverdure keeping me in her house.”15 Thain and Gauthier failed, however, in their efforts to return Donaghue to their house of prostitution. Women who marketed sex committed a variety of aggressive acts in public, including name-calling, threats of physical force, and actual assaults, in addition to denouncing one another to the authorities. This

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sort of violence was symptomatic of the tensions between brothelkeepers and among those who worked the streets. In cases of namecalling, which served to regulate behaviour, prostitutes laid on their rich vernacular, hurling insults at one another that sometimes led to defamation complaints. Ann Joyalle, for example, accused neighbour Modeste Guertin of calling her “a whore and other ill fame names”; to add further offence, Guertin had exposed herself to Joyalle “in a most scandalous manner.16 During an altercation between Mary Burnet and Catherine Morrison, Peter Rossiter overheard the two women calling each other “fat-arsed whores, bitches, and blackguards.”17 Others resorted to physical violence: while intoxicated, Margaret McGinnis and Margaret Carr got into a fight behind the Champs de Mars;18 and Dometilde Filiatreault and Marie Côté punched each other in the Seminary courtyard, causing a crowd to gather.19 Streetwalkers were especially at risk for violence because they spent so much of their lives in public and liminal spaces. They had to contend with aggressive clients, fellow sex producers, and city residents. Even occupying public space during the day could be dangerous, as the following two incidents demonstrate. In the first instance, Cecilia Jackson tore Jane Grames’s (Graham) cap and pulled out “a great quantity of her hair” while Grames was perambulating one of the city streets.20 In the second case, Hélène Angelière denounced butcher Edouard Perrault to a justice of the peace after he assaulted her at a circus she had attended “comme spectatrice.”21 Such violence was not unique to Montreal. It was part and parcel of sex commerce elsewhere, as other studies have shown.22 Brothels were often cramped spaces whose inmates were involved in convoluted and ambiguous relationships. Those inmates, from the women and men who kept them, their spouses and lovers, the prostitutes who serviced the clients, and the servants and male assistants, to children and relatives such as parents, siblings, and cousins, wielded varying degrees of power rooted in gender relations. Women had to find their way through a field of human landmines: the brutality of conjugal violence, parental coercion of daughters, brothel-keepers’ intimidation of prostitutes, and clients’ and other brothel-keepers’ threats and assaults. Overcrowding added to the unpredictability and risk. Brothel-keepers and resident prostitutes had to deal with drunken men who forced their way into the premises. These brothel invasions often resulted in property damage, threats, and assaults. On two separate occasions in 1838, brothel-keeper Euphrosine Auger complained to a magistrate that clients had assaulted her. In the first case, Auger accused tailor James Nicholson of an assault after he threatened to

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  23

break down the door of her house if she did not open it. When she relented and allowed Nicholson to enter, he punched her.23 In the second instance, Auger denounced Antoine Galarneau to authorities after he had allegedly assaulted and threatened to kill her. According to Auger, an intoxicated Galarneau had arrived at her house between four and five o’clock in the morning requesting to stay. When he woke that morning “dans une parfaite état de sobriété,” Galarneau brutally assaulted Auger and threatened to take her life: “si il ne pouvait pas lui ôter la vie qu’il mettrait le feu à la maison.”24 On some occasions, neighbours forced brothels to close by rioting, destroying property, frightening inmates with threats of violence, assaulting brothel-keepers and prostitutes, or publicly accusing women of marketing sex. When James Keenan spotted Ellen Welsh walking past a house, he denounced her as a “damned barrack whore.”25 Neighbours developed an armamentarium of responses to discipline keepers of noisy and dangerous local brothels. They turned to the criminal justice system when all else failed. For example, Robert Wood claimed that the men who frequented one particular bawdy house were subjecting pedestrians to threats and assaults. Wood himself had been assaulted and robbed only the day before he laid a complaint to this effect before a justice of the peace.26 Similarly, neighbours James Seath and Robert Akin complained that fights were breaking out nightly at McFarlane’s establishment, the most recent altercation resulting in five or six men lying “senseless” in the snow.27 Neighbours also instigated forms of rough justice when the criminal justice system failed to regulate bothersome establishments. Take, for example, carter Francis Lapierre, who shared a building with brothel-keeper Louise Horn. He entered her quarters about half past nine in the evening in March 1842 accompanied by nine or ten other carters. Though the intruders did not damage her property, they did offend Horn by calling her “une putien, une garce, qu’elle tenait un bordelle.”28 They clearly wanted to send Horn a message – to modify her brothel practices or they would return. US historian Patricia Cohen has suggested that the authorities’ reluctance to address prostitution encouraged men to intervene in brothel activities in order to uphold community standards of morality, to justify their engagement in campaigns of terror against “bad women,” or to assert male power.29 This is how individuals like Niles and Daly, two “brothel bullies” as US historian Timothy Gilfoyle would have called them, were able to rationalize their booze-fuelled mob behaviour at Sarah Noxon’s bawdy house.30 Clearly, the violence people perpetrated against prostitutes and brothel-keepers contributed to making sex commerce very dangerous indeed.

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Another frequent complaint was that keepers and other men committed violence against brothel prostitutes. Christine Rodier accused brothel-keeper Hélène Fortier along with David Smith and Nathaniel Prowley of attacking her in Fortier’s house, where Rodier worked as a prostitute: they had “cruelly beaten, scratched, bruised and ill treated her without any provocation.”31 Two decades later, a woman residing and working in Helen Ross’s house of prostitution reported similar brutality to constables James Millard and Charles Colombe. She informed them that Ross had “most unmercifully beaten and ill treated” her.32 Brothel-keepers also perpetrated acts of intimidation and physical violence on young women who seemingly had little or no apparent association with their establishments. Fifteen-year-old Eliza Peebles accused Isabelle Blondin and Sarah Singleton of attempting to coerce her into prostitution by thwarting her attempts to leave Blondin’s brothel. She had been visiting her friend Catharine Ryan, who lived and worked in the establishment. That Eliza had used her leisure time to meet someone who was a sex purveyor suggests that she may have been harbouring the idea of becoming a prostitute. Police would arrest her years later for solicitation.33 In what appears as a forerunner to the classic turn-of-thetwentieth-century white slavery narrative, Pierre Doyer deplored Betsey Martin’s unlawful confinement of his daughter Julie in her house of prostitution. According to Doyer, Julie had left the family household in Quebec City for Montreal, where he had arranged for her to live with an aunt. When she arrived in the city, Julie discovered that her aunt no longer resided in Montreal. She had no place to go and no employment. A young man directed her to Betsey Martin’s brothel. Julie told her father and the justice of the peace that Martin had taken away her clothes and held her prisoner for three days; then, on the morning of 19 October 1823, she permitted, indeed even encouraged, a group of soldiers to sexually assault her. Police arrested Betsey Martin on a charge of theft, assault and battery, and assisting an unknown person to rape Julie Doyer.34 Some men’s sense of entitlement to sex commerce had egregious consequences for prostitutes who refused their demands, as Julie Doyer so clearly had learned. So too did others. Having forced his way into Louise Horn’s house by “fit partir le crochet de la dite porte,” Louis Crépeau went to her bedroom, threw her on the bed and attempted to sexually assault her. A male inmate of the establishment intervened when he heard her cries for help and managed to stop Crépeau before he could assault Horn. She laid a complaint before a justice of the peace accusing Crépeau of attempted rape.35 Marie Lussier was not as fortunate. Nobody came to her assistance when, after refusing William

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  25

Collin’s demands for “un commerce charnel,” he sexually assaulted her.36 Lussier turned to the law for restitution. Both Louise Horn and Marie Lussier would have known that the likelihood of a guilty verdict in either case was slim at best. Their non-respectable status would have made it almost impossible to see justice served on Louis Crépeau and on William Collins. Sandy Ramos writes that women in Montreal who pursued alleged rapists at court entered a murky, masculine world where a rigid definition of respectability came together with conflicting ideas about sexual violence: “The criminal court for the District of Montreal becomes a veritable microcosm in which societal ideas about relationships between men and women were articulated, constructed, contested, and imposed – sometimes simultaneously.”37 Ramos’s study reveals that character was critical to outcome: “sexuality was really at the core of the ideal of good womanhood.”38 The complaints filed by Horn and Lussier stood no chance in a court of law, but at the very least their experiences at the hands of Crépeau and Collins were now a matter of public record. Nor could sex workers count on policemen and watchmen for protection from violence. These representatives of the local state carried out their tasks in a culture of male hegemony that conferred incontrovertible authority on their position vis-à-vis some of the least powerful members of the community. They too wielded a wide discretionary power that included forms of rough justice. Sex workers were highly susceptible to exploitation by policemen, yet this did not stop women from denouncing acts of aggression. Two examples are relevant. In the first, the widow Margaret Mitchell accused three constables of breaking into Francis Mullins’s brothel where she lived, disturbing the peace, frightening the inmates with their riotous behaviour, and threatening her life.39 In the second example, Adélaide Dufresne denounced Constable Thomas Webb for violently assaulting her and passing the night at Josephine Raymond’s brothel, where she worked as a prostitute.40 Dufresne’s previous silence about Webb’s penchant for brothel life may have been negotiated as an implicit understanding or agreement, which became null and void when he attacked her. While it is impossible to know what Webb thought about Dufresne’s accusation, two days later they were travelling from Pointe-aux-Trembles to Montréal in a calèche with Josephine Raymond and Abraham Burwell when another violent incident took place, this time between Burwell and Raymond. According to Dufresne, Raymond sustained head injuries after Burwell suddenly grabbed Raymond and threw her out of the calèche. When she tried to re-embark, he stopped her.41 The driver intervened when Constable Webb did nothing. These incidents denote a culture of aggression

26  Mary Anne Poutanen

underpinning the relations between policemen and prostitutes. Policemen could and did take advantage of prostitutes’ vulnerable legal status to extort money, drinks, and sex; they might be involved in the sex trade either directly by keeping disorderly houses or indirectly by leasing property to known madams. Illicit police conduct was born of an ethos of hegemony cultivated by male leisure and drinking customs and predicated on a rapacious model of masculinity.42 There are only a few recorded cases of women defending themselves with violence against male aggression. The most extreme case involved a dispute between Julia Campbell and Antoine Demarais. She stabbed him in the ribs with a knife following an altercation near St-Anne’s Market one early morning in July 1837. Campbell was in the company of Elizabeth Austin and an unidentified man when Demarais approached her; they become embroiled in an argument, shouting and threatening each other. When Campbell threw a stone at him, Demarais retorted that should she do that again he would kick her. This row culminated in Campbell’s knife attack upon Demarais, who told a witness that “a damned whore had stabbed him.”43 Before succumbing to his injuries at the Montreal General Hospital, he identified Campbell as the perpetrator; this was corroborated by the bloodstained knife the high constable found on Campbell after he apprehended her.44 She was eventually found guilty of manslaughter, not murder as originally charged, and sentenced to twelve months in prison.45 Strategies to Prevent Violence These interactions and liaisons were clearly fraught with danger and required extraordinary shrewdness on the part of sex workers if they were to remain safe. As you have already seen, Julia Campbell carried a knife for self-defence. Women developed a patchwork of other strategies to reduce risk. Notwithstanding Sarah Noxon’s hostile encounter with Rosalie Beaulieu, the proximity of sex workers’ lives meant that they derived support and protection through the relationships they fostered with one another. A “subculture of solidarity” existed among prostitutes, brought about by the risks they shared: participating in an illicit marketplace, unwanted pregnancies, venereal disease, arrest and imprisonment, a non-respectable status, and of course potential and real violence.46 Streetwalkers, for example, established mutual bonds with others, forming clusters of friends, kin, and even men, soldiers in particular, in similar situations and soliciting in pairs or in groups. These alliances helped reduce incidents of violence. It was simply safer to work with others, as Tony Henderson’s study of London’s street prostitutes

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  27

shows.47 Neighbourhood surveillance also provided a degree of protection to women who might be caught in dangerous situations; when prostitutes encountered violent men, their cries for help could bring assistance. Likewise, the lighting of certain streets in the town centre contributed to their safety. There was a greater risk of arrest associated with solicitation in this part of Montreal; but at the same time, the presence of street lamps along the rue St-Paul and the preponderance of constables and nightwatchmen who patrolled regularly48 made being on the stroll more secure. Tension management was especially important in other situations.49 Take for example the three sex workers who accompanied thirty soldiers to Mr Brechenridge’s garden and orchard. They must have been especially adept at defusing a potentially violent situation given that police constables sent to the farm to arrest the women refused to do so under the circumstances.50 Needless to say, when these interventions failed, the consequences could be dire. A soldier assaulted a streetwalker so badly that the doorstep of the home of Justice of the Peace Moses Judah Hayes was “saturated with blood.” She and a few companions had been in the company of a group of soldiers in the town when the brutal act occurred.51 Streetwalkers also benefited from the protection men provided against physical abuse by other men. In London, for example, streetwalkers depended upon soldiers for security.52 The same was true in Montreal. These paradoxical liaisons were undoubtedly fraught with danger and required extraordinary judiciousness on the part of the women if they were to stay safe. Soldiers who might have intimidated streetwalkers also used coercion or bullying to prevent their arrests. Subconstable James McGough must have been unnerved by a group of soldiers who rescued a vagrant woman whom he had apprehended. In the melee she lost a shawl, which Subconstable John Kinch brought to the station house when McGough reported the incident.53 Farmer Pierre Parent learned first-hand how menacing soldiers could be when he complained to police that soldiers and vagrant women were regularly stealing apples from his orchard. The large number of soldiers who had gathered on his property repelled the constabulary by their threats and violent acts.54 Constable Jeremie understood just how dangerous it was to intervene in situations involving soldiers. A soldier had stabbed him with a bayonet after he and a group of policemen tried to eject soldiers and vagrant women from a barn on the bank of the Lachine Canal.55 Brothel-keepers introduced various measures to make their establishments more secure. They leased better buildings in safer neighbourhoods, utilized the assistance of family members, friends, and spouses,

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or hired men to protect those who lived and worked in their establishments. The presence of security men or “brothel bullies”56 underscores the level of decorum that was required of visitors and inmates alike in brothels; they were expected to keep rowdy behaviour, which could result in the destruction of property or injury to the person, in check. These security measures had the added feature of sometimes imposing unwanted discipline on the women who worked there. Brothel-keepers had to judge carefully how much authority, and what kind, they could impose on sex workers without engendering vengeance. In Halifax, for instance, brothel-keepers who browbeat, assaulted, or evicted prostitutes risked retribution from women who turned police informers.57 At the very least, when sex purveyors laid complaints of violence against brothel-keepers before justices of the peace, these legal proceedings signalled to criminal justice authorities the presence of houses of prostitution, thus inviting closer scrutiny. In New York City in the 1830s, brothel-keepers had engaged men to protect inmates following a series of attacks on their establishments.58 Similarly, Montreal brothel-keeper Geneviève Patrice counted on Benjamin Sansfaçon to deal with three men who attempted to forcibly enter her house of “bad fame” at two o’clock in the morning. Sansfaçon, who had been asleep in the attic, shot one of them in the stomach and thighs with pigeon pellets.59 Some of the security men were themselves threatening; they acted aggressively in situations that did not warrant their intervention. For example, James Lang fractured Miss Cooney’s leg while preventing her from shutting the door of the brothel where he worked.60 Security men, however, could not keep brothel prostitutes safe in the wider community. Guillaume Baumette attacked Amable Breton while she attended mass at the Notre Dame church – he grabbed her by the hair, then kicked and punched her, and finally ripped her clothing.61 Hiring security men was out of the question for those keepers of disorderly houses who operated very modest establishments. Mary Burk, for instance, did not have a male resident in her brothel to provide protection to the women who resided there when François Derome dit Decareau and Barthelemy Couturier threw stones at her house and made verbal threats against her. She reigned in their behaviour by discharging a warning shot from a firearm.62 Similarly, when three men forced their way into Catherine Minan’s brothel, located in a cellar at the St-Anne Market, it would have been difficult for anyone to stop the destruction they perpetrated. Richard Clarke, armed with an axe, and Martin Cooney and William Woolfe, each carrying sticks, smashed the door and the window and struck a boarder on the head with the axe.63

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Minan had only two options: keep quiet about the incident, or privately prosecute the aggressors through the criminal justice system. The protection the men afforded was complicated by the personal relationships some of them formed with madams. Notwithstanding Eloi Benêche dit Lavictoire and Rosalie Paquet’s lengthy relationship and eventual marriage, one winter evening he forced his way into her brothel against the wishes of the inmates. After pushing the door open, Eloi assaulted prostitute Adélaide Cinqmars, wounding her in the face before evicting her from the house.64 Although we do not hear from Rosalie, it is possible that her relationship with Eloi had soured and he was conveying his anger, even jealousy; he may have, at the behest of Rosalie, set out to discipline Adélaide; or it may be that Eloi was simply asserting his male authority in the brothel. Since households in general could and did harbour violence,65 women’s work in the home also included, as Bettina Bradbury has argued, tension management associated with difficult life situations.66 Kathryn Harvey’s examination of wife battering in Montreal after the mid-nineteenth century shows that conflict around “drink, struggles over money, jealousy, and authority over children” precipitated the assaults.67 The brothel was no different, and men were more likely to initiate acts of aggression. In their respective studies, both Donald Fyson and Ian Pilarczyk have argued that spousal abuse was a significant problem in Montreal.68 Such violence was surely a consequence of men’s legal and social right to physically discipline or admonish their wives in an atmosphere of tensions and strains associated not only with daily living in the brothel but also with alcohol abuse, perhaps the intimidation of wives, who may have been uneasy about operating a brothel, especially if it involved children, and jealousies associated with sex commerce. Neighbours intervened on behalf of battered wives. Roderick Phillips’s study of domestic violence in late eighteenth-century Rouen shows that abused women and their children sought out female neighbours, who comprised a moral community, for support, comfort, refuge, and medical aid.69 The boundaries between the respectable and the non-respectable could be blurred; that said, popular-class women were ambivalent about women who marketed sex. Anna Clark has argued that “when “respectable” women snubbed their fallen sisters, they were expressing their solidarity with injured wives rather than with “unfortunate” women.”70 Nevertheless, there are examples of female neighbours who intervened in cases of conjugal violence involving brothel-keepers. Ann Hartley, who lived next door to Peter Fontaine, denounced him to authorities for keeping a bawdy house, for being a habitual drunkard, and for beating his wife.71

30  Mary Anne Poutanen

Seeking Justice Streetwalkers, brothel-keepers, and residential prostitutes were quite knowledgeable about the workings of the criminal justice system and used it to seek justice. In point of fact, Sarah Noxon’s private prosecution of the perpetrators discloses her agency. It reveals as well the limitations of her agency. At court, James Niles and Daniel Daly brought together a prestigious group of Montreal merchants and newspaper editors, who included none other than David Handlow, Thomas A. Turner, Horatio Gates, and Benjamin Workman, as character witnesses. The Crown’s witnesses, by contrast, consisted of brothel-keepers Sarah Noxon and Lucie Lenoir dite Rolland in addition to sex worker Adélaide Laliberté. Even though Noxon had been the victim of a premeditated violent act, which left her wounded in the arm by an assailant brandishing a handgun, the jury found the defendants not guilty.72 In the case of sex purveyors like Sarah Noxon, the law served as a powerful vehicle for constructing sexual identity, defining deviance, and regulating women. When they sought recourse in the law for wrongs committed against them, women who marketed sex were exercising the same legal rights as other city residents.73 Notwithstanding those rights, Montreal brothelkeepers and prostitutes who pursued aggressors in court faced a hostile criminal justice system. Most of the cases never ended with a guilty verdict, which suggests that court authorities were sceptical about the truthfulness of the complainants’ testimony or viewed disorderly women as having put themselves in harm’s way by the company they kept. Another key factor in this was the high number of plaintiffs who dropped their cases by not appearing at court before the jury had reached a verdict; in this regard, they were acting much like city residents in general, many of whom turned to the courts as a strategy to warn offenders rather than to punish them. In addition to that, seeking justice was an expensive endeavour, because plaintiffs had to hire a clerk of the court to write up a legal document for each step of the procedure. Moreover, they had to take time off from their labours to appear at court, where the outcome was uncertain at best. It is likely that plaintiffs were less interested in a guilty verdict than in cautioning wrongdoers.74 Relations between sex workers, the court, and the community were especially ambiguous. That prostitutes turned to the courts to prosecute others even though they were rarely successful reinforces Susan Lewthwaite’s finding that poor women’s uses of the lower court “indicate[d] a degree of popular legitimacy of the law and its institutions.”75

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  31

The literature concerning the relationship between violence and sex work has often focused on notorious murder trials76 or on statistical data about incidents. These approaches are detached from the lived experience of women; they also tend to focus rather simplistically on acts of violence perpetrated regularly by clients on prostitutes. But as we have already observed, aggressive episodes were far more complicated than those data show and involved a constellation of different actors. Sex purveyors who committed violent acts against others or who were victims of violence were responding to the conditions of their daily lives. On the one hand, they depended on one another for mutual aid and support; on the other, the competition for basic necessities resulted in strained relations and provoked tensions and conflicts not dissimilar from the antagonisms among plebeian women in Montreal neighbourhoods. The close proximity in which they lived their lives allowed them to create local borrowing networks that had obvious material and social benefits, but it also fuelled tensions, which resulted in gossip, threats, name-calling, and assaults. British historian Shani D’Cruse writes that the violent quarrels between labouring women that ended up in the lower courts serve as a barometer for gauging the tensions and strains associated with neighbourly relations. Her study provides an important framework for understanding the aggression between sex workers and others.77 The search for food and shelter, especially for homeless streetwalkers who were hungry, cold, and ill and who lacked hope encouraged antagonisms; so did the conditions associated with brothel life such as alcohol abuse, ever-present danger, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancies. Like their popular-class neighbours, sex purveyors exercised their own militant version of justice. Thus, the everyday world, as depicted by D’Cruze, resonated with that of brothel-keepers and prostitutes. Keeper Louise Corbeille’s long history of abuse, which included emotional as well as physical violence, at the hands of her husband Antoine Delaunay is but one example. He had allegedly threatened to kill her and on several occasions had thrown knives at her head.78 So when her interventions failed to stop the violence, she sought legal remedy to deal with his mistreatment. The act of laying a complaint before a justice of the peace served to limit publicly the right of a husband to discipline his wife, but it was usually a strategy of last resort in a family’s armamentarium. Women may not have wanted the courts to treat their husbands severely. Their goals were straightforward, as Gregory Smith has argued: “aside from seeking to halt the abuse itself, these women were seeking some recognized, authoritative power (in this case that of the state) to add weight to their own personal opposition to harsh

32  Mary Anne Poutanen

physical treatment.”79 Brothel-keeper Marie Bricot dite Lamarche, who had married widower Charles Boisseau dit Sanscartier in November 1832, pursued him at law after several incidents of assault and battery and threats that he had made on her life. A few months before her first arrest for keeping a disorderly house, Lamarche had complained to a magistrate that Sanscartier had beaten her for fifteen days. He resumed his reign of terror even though he was on bail to keep the peace. The justice of the peace responded to his renewed aggression by extending the peace bond to six months. On another occasion, Lamarche accused Sanscartier of defamation, unlawful incarceration in the local prison, and conspiracy to defraud her.80 In the face of Sanscartier’s continued abuse, she fought back by laying a number of complaints about his behaviour before a justice of the peace. The magistrate enforced the law only to the extent of insisting on peace bonds, wherein Sanscartier promised to uphold the peace toward Lamarche and be on good behaviour for a specific period of time;81 he was never incarcerated as a means to stop the domestic violence. Alcohol abuse typically escalated the brutality. Félicité Hirbour dite Mathurin denounced her husband, James Young, who had beaten her while he was drunk: “depuis plusieurs années et particulièrement hier la déposante aurait été assaillie, battue et maltraitée par son mari.”82 Abused wives could expect little from a criminal justice system that was reluctant to intervene in family matters, which were considered a critical thread in the web of societal patriarchy. At best, women were afforded a temporary respite from spousal violence when justices of the peace incarcerated their husbands, bound them to keep the peace, or fined them. Donald Fyson’s study of female complainants makes it clear that magistrates did send brutal husbands to jail.83 At worst, the abuse continued or even escalated, for the legal system was inconsistent in its response to spousal violence and sentences were not devised to serve as deterrents.84 It was expensive to pursue an abuser through the court, besides which, an incarcerated breadwinner would be unable to support his wife and children, and there was no guarantee that a woman who left an abusive husband would be free of his brutality. After Thomas Day forced his brothel-keeping wife Mary Ann Turner out of the family home, thus reinforcing his supremacy in the household, he continued to mistreat her: “she succeeded in escaping from him but he was determined to catch her and blacken her eyes. That he has frequently come to her house with a view to annoy and injure her and hath on some occasions struck her and on others torn some of her clothes as he could lay his hands upon.”85 Day entered into a six-month recognizance to keep the peace in the amount of £40.86 Even

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  33

in the worst cases of spousal abuse, women were more likely to seek temporary refuge with a family member or neighbour rather than abandon the household altogether.87 Others would have initiated informal or formal separations, deserted their households temporarily, or exiled their spouses. As Bettina Bradbury has argued, “permeable and moving boundaries divided non-support, desertion and separation, leading to a situation where the boundaries between male- and female-headed households were not always clear.”88 The violence and alcohol abuse associated with sex work could precipitate very troubled relations between some mothers and their children. Take the case of Mary Burk, whom William Bingham reported to authorities after he witnessed her severely beating her child on the rue Notre Dame. He was convinced that “the child’s life would be endangered by its being restored to the care of its mother who is a prostitute, a drunkard and a woman of great violence of character.”89 Bingham’s deposition was unusual, given that authorities during the period under study rarely became involved in issues concerning children; for that matter, elites never expressed moral outrage about boys and girls inhabiting brothels. This disregard was predicated on the belief that parents had almost total authority over their children. In his study of family violence in Montreal in the same period, legal historian Ian Pilarczyk contends that between paternalism, the primacy given to the privacy of family life, and the legal position of children as chattel, little protection was afforded children.90 Not until the second half of the nineteenth century, after campaigning by a child protection movement, was legislation passed to protect children – in this case, the Industrial Schools Act of 1869. That law allowed justices of the peace to intervene summarily in the lives of so-called refractory, neglected, and abandoned children under fourteen and place them in a Catholic- or Protestant-run industrial school.91 Renée Joyal argues that the act was a response to industrialization that allowed the state and charities an expanded role in the lives of the labouring classes.92 Before 1869, there had been no specific law protecting children from parental excesses, including physical and sexual abuse as well as, in the case of brothels, exposure to sex commerce, excessive alcohol consumption, and violence. A streetwalker seeking justice faced an added complication: her complex relations with police constables and watchmen, whose lives converged with hers in numerous ways. In the course of their daily work, watchmen, constables, and disorderly women encountered one another in the public spaces they shared: sex workers to solicit and policemen to maintain public order. Moreover, they often came from the same social class and lived in the same neighbourhoods. Since

34  Mary Anne Poutanen

policemen exercised significant discretionary power – for the purposes of law enforcement, to provide public assistance, or for personal gain – encounters between sex purveyors and law enforcement took different forms with varying consequences. Prostitution-related laws left women vulnerable to police demands that they pay for “protection” against harassment from arrests. Some police constables and watchmen coerced sex from prostitutes. Brothel-keeper Burland, for example, reported Subconstable Giltman to the authorities after he entered her yard while on duty and “lay hold of her and kissed her.”93 Her complaint had no leverage. Policemen and watchmen were afforded some encouragement to act outside the law because they were never formally disciplined or discharged from the police force on the word of a sex worker alone. Madame Burland did not see justice done. While it is impossible to determine how many peace officers were actually suspended for their involvement in prostitution or with prostitutes, it was likely a small percentage. Conclusion That sex work was dangerous is not new. Sarah Noxon’s encounter with James Niles and Daniel Daly was one of hundreds of cases of violence perpetrated on sex purveyors and demonstrates the complexities and dangers of sex commerce in early nineteenth-century Montreal. Not only did clients, husbands, lovers, kin, neighbours, security men, soldiers, police constables, and watchmen commit aggressive acts on women who marketed sex but so did prostitutes as well. Aggression, ranging from slander and threats to domestic violence, assault and battery, rape, and murder, was part of sex purveyors’ daily experience. Prostitution was plainly dangerous, and authorities largely refused to act. In other words, the criminal justice system offered little security. Because constables and nightwatchmen wielded a great deal of discretionary power, sex workers were vulnerable to demands for protection money and sex. Elites blamed ineffective policing for the violence associated with sex commerce and rarely considered that these popular-class women had a right to the state’s protection. Prostitution was seen in overtly moral terms and therefore sex purveyors were simply not entitled to security or even the impartiality of the lower courts. To deal with danger, women instituted their own measures to make their homes and workplaces as safe as possible: establishing a subculture of solidarity, initiating judicious rapport in risky situations, soliciting in groups, hiring security men, and seeking justice. The two men whom Sarah Noxon accused of maiming her were eventually found not guilty

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after a parade of the city’s elites spoke to their good reputations. Noxon had no chance of seeing justice done; the criminal justice system had failed her. NOTES 1 Information for this chapter was taken from my monograph, Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2015). I dedicate this chapter to Linda Cossoff de Palacios for her generosity and love. 2 Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec à Montréal (hereafter BANQ-M), TL30, S1 SS1, Deposition of Sarah Noxon, 21 January 1830. This case was heard in the Court of King’s Bench owing to the seriousness of the charge. 3 BANQ-M, TL30, S1 SS1, Deposition of Sarah Noxon, 21 January 1830. 4 For more on this subject, see my monograph, Beyond Brutal Passions. 5 Olwen Hufton, “Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Family History 9, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 361. 6 Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 189. 7 Philip Howell, “Sex and the City of Bachelors: Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America,” Ecumene 8, no. 1 (2000): 35. 8 For more on barracks life, see Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montreal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1981). 9 Library and Archives Canada [hereafter LAC], RG 4 A 1, (S Series) Civil and Provincial Secretary, Lower Canada, vol. 95, 7 July 1807. 10 BANQ-M, TL30, S1 SS1, Deposition of Sarah Noxon, 21 January 1830. 11 BANQ-M, TL30, S1 SS1, Deposition of Adelaide Laliberté, 22 January 1830; and Deposition of Lucie Rolland, 22 January 1830. 12 See the following examples. In the summer of 1829, Rolland occupied the same dwelling as Margaret Conroy when she laid a complaint before the justice of the peace accusing Conroy of operating a disorderly house. Rolland’s denunciation forced Conroy to move her brothel elsewhere (BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Lucie Rolland, 29 July 1829). While it is unclear what sparked the events, which unfolded at Rolland’s bawdyhouse on a late winter evening in 1838, brothel keeper Mary Anne Burns was present when Rolland grabbed a pair of iron tongs and threatened her with them. She consequently fled the house, fearful that

36  Mary Anne Poutanen “it will be morally impossible for her with safety to discharge her affairs in the city” (BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Mary Ann Burns, 21 March 1838). 13 Joel Best, Controlling Vice: Regulating Brothel Prostitution in St. Paul, 1865–1883 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998): 30–1, 60–1. 14 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Julia Donaghue, 5 March 1830. 15 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Agathe Florentin; and Deposition of Julia Donaghue, 24 April 1830. 16 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Ann Joyalle, 20 April 1841. 17 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Peter Rossiter, 10 July 1838. 18 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Louis Malo, 16 June 1831. 19 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Samuel Stewart, 22 October 1841. 20 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Jane Grames, 8 April 1835. 21 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Hélène Angelière, 22 June 1826. 22 See for example, Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (New York: Longman, 1999); Best, Controlling Vice; Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992); Jeffrey S. Adler, “Streetwalkers, Degraded Outcasts, and Good-for-Nothing Huzzies: Women and the Dangerous Class in Antebellum St. Louis” Journal of Social History 25, no. 4 (1992): 737–55; Judith Fingard, The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Porter’s Lake: Pottersfield Press, 1989); Marcia Carlisle, “Disorderly City, Disorderly Women: Prostitution in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 110, no. 4 (October 1986): 549–68; and Jill Harsin, Crime, Poverty and Prostitution in Paris, 1815–1848 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). 23 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Euphrosine Auger, 21 August 1838. 24 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Euphrosine Auger, 29 October 1838. 25 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Ellen Welsh, 25 January 1841. 26 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Robert Woods, 17 February 1837. 27 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of James Seath and Robert Akin, 18 December 1835. 28 BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Louise Horn, 15 March 1842. 29 Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998), 73–5. 30 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 79–81. 31 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Christine Rodier, 18 August 1820.

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  37 32 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of James Millard and Charles Colombe, 18 February 1840. 33 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Eliza Peebles, 5 March 1827. Eliza Peebles eventually reconsidered working as a prostitute. By 1839, she had incurred her first arrest for prostitution; then in 1841, police detained her for grand larceny following a complaint by Charles Titus Greece that she had taken a cloak from his office. Peebles insisted that she had told Greece he would get it back when he paid her the $5 he owed her “for acting as a wife to him” over the course of three hours (BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Eliza Peebles, 25 January 1841). 34 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Julie Doyer and Pierre Doyer, 23 October 1823. 35 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Louise Horn, 29 October 1842. 36 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Marie Lussier, 8 February 1833. 37 Sandy Ramos, “‘A Most Detestable Crime’: Gender Identities and Sexual Violence in the District of Montreal, 1803–1843,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 12 (2001): 28. 38 Ibid., 38. 39 BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Margaret Mitchell, 16 June 1838. 40 BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Adélaide Dufresne, 19 October 1839. 41 BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Adélaide Dufresne, 21 October 1839. 42 Gender historians suggest that this bachelor culture – made up of “jolly fellows” and “sporting men” – was misogynist (to greater or lesser degrees) and that it reinforced a sexual double standard. See, for example, Philip Howell, “Sex and the City of Bachelors: Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America,” Ecumene 8, no.1 (2000): 24, 27; Richard Stott, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in NineteenthCentury America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and, Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 86–7. Philip Howell has argued that prostitution was integral to this masculine paradigm: “Accompanied by the increasing commercialization of sex, and its integration into commercial enterprise and entertainment, sex – or more precisely promiscuous heterosexuality – became a crucial marker of urban masculinity.” Howell, “Sex and the City of Bachelors,” 27. 43 LAC, MG 24 B 173, James Reid Papers, vol. 11, 6 September 1837. 44 Montreal Transcript, 1 August 1837. 45 BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Antoine Demarais, 6 September 1837. 46 Best, Controlling Vice, 70. 47 Henderson, Disorderly Women, 36. 48 Policemen typically served as plaintiffs in depositions against streetwalkers. Thus, streetwalkers were most often apprehended within a circumscribed

38  Mary Anne Poutanen area of the city where police patrolled or occasionally elsewhere while police were carrying out other duties. For example, high constable Benjamin Delisle arrested streetwalker Frances Dobbins while he was “on his way from his residence to the court house between the hours of nine and ten.” BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Benjamin Delisle, 9 July 1838. 49 Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993), 178–80. 50 LAC, RG 4 B 14, Police Registers, vol. 33, 27 May 1840. 51 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Moses Judah Hayes, 11 December 1841. 52 Henderson, Disorderly Women, 31. 53 LAC, RG 4 B 14, Police Registers, vol. 64, 8 December 1841. 54 LAC, RG 4 B 14, Police Registers, vol. 58, 19 September 1839. 55 LAC, RG 4 B 14, Police Registers, vol. 58, 29 September 1839. 56 Henderson, Disorderly Women, 30. 57 Fingard, The Dark Side of Life, 103. 58 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 90–1. 59 BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Jean-Baptiste Parriquette, Nicholas Pominville, and Pierre Roseau, 19 September 1826; covered in Montreal Herald, 20 September 1826. 60 La Minerve, 1 June 1829. 61 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Amable Breton, 26 March 1832. 62 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Mary Burk, 8 August 1837. 63 BANQ-M, TL30 S1 SS1, Deposition of Catherine Minan, 30 December 1834. 64 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Adélaide Cinqmars, 12 February 1841. 65 See for example the studies by Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880–1960 (New York: Penguin Books, 1988); and Kathryn Harvey, “‘To Love, Honour and Obey’: Wife-Battering in Working-Class Montreal, 1869–1879,” Urban History Review 10, no. 2 (October 1990): 128–40. 66 Bradbury, Working Families, 178–80. 67 Harvey, “To Love, Honour and Obey,” 129. 68 Between 1800 and 1830, Donald Fyson identified at least three hundred women who prosecuted their abusive husbands by formally complaining to a Montreal justice of the peace. the police took the men into custody, who in turn entered into a recognizance to keep the peace under threat of imprisonment. Battered wives seldom pursued their complaints as far as trial at Quarter Sessions. While the police took these cases seriously, not all justices were willing to prosecute, nor could the police and courts provide the protection these women needed. Donald Fyson, “Criminal Justice,

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  39

69 70 71 72 73

74

Civil Society and the Local State: The Justices of the Peace in the District of Montreal, 1764–1830,” PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 1995, 392–6. Ian Pilarczyk identified 571 complaints of spousal abuse between 1825 and 1850. Pilarczyk, “‘Justice in the Premises’: Family Violence and the Law in Montreal, 1825–1850,” PhD diss., McGill University, 2003, 259. Roderick Phillips, “Women, Neighborhood, and Family in the Late Eighteenth Century,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 3–5. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 50–3. BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Ann Hartley, 5 August 1814. BANQ-M, TL30, S1 SS11, 4 March 1830. Historians elsewhere have noted a similar use of the criminal justice system by prostitutes. In New York City, for example, they resorted to the courts for the same reasons: “Shrewdly bringing legal proceedings against their aggressors, prostitutes utilized the machinery of the state to defend their interests and property rights, firmly entrenching their profession in the social fabric of the metropolis.” Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 82. Both Gilfoyle and Wood Hill point out that New York City prostitutes did not view themselves as “fallen women” and that they defended their interests at court. In this way, they demonstrated that they were not afraid of being highly visible, for they saw themselves as residents, indeed citizens, of the city with the same rights as others. They acted as witnesses at court and at inquests, and the privately prosecuted fellow New Yorkers in cases involving petty larceny, disturbing the peace, rioting, and assault. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 81–2; and Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 159 and 165–7. Legal redress was expensive for most people. After paying the costs of the initial deposition, a plaintiff then had to disburse additional monies at every step as his or her complaint wound its way through the judicial system. All of this was time-consuming, because over the course of each court session, plaintiffs were not told a specific time when their cases would be heard. A complainant had to wait at the courthouse, sometimes for days at a time, before being called to appear; this was largely because the defendants attempted to defer their court cases and therefore verdicts being rendered against them. As a consequence, magistrates would traverse or move the court cases to the sitting of the next session, and the plaintiff would then have to return to the courthouse under the same circumstances and possibly have his or her prosecution of the complaint delayed again. The process was complex since plaintiffs were responsible for gathering the evidence and organizing the arrests of offenders, albeit with the assistance of a justice of the peace; all the while, they risked reprisals from the accused, and the outcome was uncertain. In addition, all of the necessary documents had to be filled out correctly and the

40  Mary Anne Poutanen evidence had to be sufficient or compelling. Be that as it may, plaintiffs still had a great deal of discretionary power, which allowed them to abandon the court procedure at any point before a verdict was handed down by the jury and without penalty. Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17–31. 75 Susan Dawson Lewthwaite, “Law and Authority in Upper Canada: The Justices of the Peace in the Newcastle District, 1803–1840,” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2001, 201. 76 The 1836 murder of Helen Jewett in New York City is one such case. Marilynn Wood Hill explored it in her book Their Sisters’ Keepers; so did Patricia Cline Cohen in The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998). Barbara Meil Hobson examines two murder cases in Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1987). One involved the death of a Boston prostitute, Maria Bickford, at the hands of her lover, and the other the death of a lover at the hands of a New York prostitute, Amelia Norman. 77 Shani D’Cruze, “Sex, Violence, and Local Courts: Working-Class Respectability in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Town,” British Journal of Criminology 39, no. 1 (1999): 40. 78 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Louise Corbeille, 31 October 1836. 79 Smith, “The State and the Culture of Violence,” 163. 80 See, for example, BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Marie Bricot dite Lamarche, 23 June 1835; 23 November 1835; 25 November 1835; and 28 October 1839. 81 The magistrate imposed a recognizance of £20 on Sanscartier in addition to two guarantors for half the amount. Donald Fyson has noted that this was a common practice in the 1820s and 1830s in cases involving assault. Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764–1837 (Toronto: Osgood Society for Canadian Legal History, University of Toronto Press, 2006), 235. 82 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Félicité Hirbour dite Mathurin, 19 November 1823. 83 Donald Fyson, “Women as Complainants before the Justices of the Peace in the District of Montreal, 1779–1830,” paper presented at the CHA Meeting, St Catharines, Ontario, June 1996, 11. 84 Pilarczyk, “‘Justice in the Premises,’” 230. 85 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of Mary Ann Turner, 12 March 1841. 86 In Pilarczyk, “‘Justice in the Premises,’” n607. 87 Ibid., 237. 88 Bradbury, Working Families, 183. 89 BANQ-M, TL32 S1 SS1, Deposition of William Bingham, 29 May 1830.

The Perils of Sex Work in Montreal  41 90 Pilarczyk, “‘Justice in the Premises,’” 127–39. 91 Robert G. McIntosh, Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mining (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2000), 31. 92 Renée Joyal, “L’Acte concernant les écoles d’industrie (1869). Une Mesure de prophylaxie sociale dans un Quebec en voie d’urbanisation,” RHAF 50, no. 2 (1996): 228–30. 93 LAC, RG 4 B 14, Police Register, Vol. 64, 7 February 1842.

2 The Rules of Discipline: Workers and the Culture of Violence in Progressive-Era Reform Schools james schmidt

Fannie Pace saw herself as an innovator. A matron at the Iowa Industrial School for Girls in Mitchellville, she possessed a lifetime of experience in childrearing, having raised two of her own who had given her twelve grandchildren by 1926. When young people acted up, she knew how to respond. In her own household, she had punished unruly youngsters with “a slipper, sometimes with a stick, sometimes with a little paddle – a little board, and sometimes spanked them.” Before arriving at Mitchellville, she had worked at the Adrian Training School in Adrian, Michigan, and at the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth in Fort Wayne, so she understood how good order and discipline were to be achieved in an institution such as Mitchellville. Still, sometimes you had to get a little creative. When girls broke school rules, Pace had punished them physically with whatever was available, and in several cases, she had adorned the girls in dresses made from gunnysacks (burlap bags), adding insult to injury. Pressed on her creative use of shame, she defended her actions. “The burlap is an idea of my own,” she flatly declared.1 Pace’s inventive spirit reveals a violent world of work and work culture inside state institutions for wayward children and youth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originating before the Civil War, industrial and reform schools grew rapidly in the post-bellum era. Housed in ornate buildings, funded by the best element, and opened with much fanfare, they presented a cheerful picture of youth reformation. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, a shadow hung over these good intentions. Inmates, parents, employees, social workers, and community members told disturbing tales of what actually happened behind the impressive brick façades. Sensational headlines broadcast ugly truths about serial deprivation, degradation, and abuse. State boards dutifully investigated, workers lost their jobs, and the

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story subsided, only to resurface again at the same or other institutions. Scores of such investigations were conducted, starting after the Civil War and continuing into the twentieth century.2 Taken as a whole, these narratives demonstrated that violence in these workplaces was a pattern, not an isolated outrage contained to one or two poor employees. Reform school investigations allow us to address questions that illuminate the nature of violence in Progressive Era workplaces. While violence has been central to the history of labour, it has not been central to labour history, at least in the United States. Most studies of physical and social violence have focused on strikes and strike-breaking,3 but some recent work has looked more closely at violence in the workplace itself, especially in the twentieth century.4 Other inquiries have examined accidents, fleshing out the death and dismemberment that accompanied industrial capitalism.5 Most of these studies have considered violence against workers, or violence between workers, not violence by workers to others.6 Examining the history of reform institutions allows us to consider a setting in which the use of violence was an element of regular job duties, and it focuses that inquiry on the Progressive Era, a time for which the focus has been almost exclusively on violence in the labour movement. Looked at in this light, we can situate abuse in reforming institutions within the longer history of violence, particularly as it relates to corporal punishment.7 Matrons, teachers, and others who worked in reforming institutions are not often seen as workers. Rather, they populate the history and historiography of childhood and youth, particularly the parts related to delinquency. Older studies in this area sought to unearth the origins of institutionalization and child-saving campaigns, often viewing them in the light of social control or as the prehistory of children’s rights.8 Works that are more recent have painted a more complicated picture, one that includes more careful attention to young people themselves.9 Relatively less attention has been devoted to reforming institutions and the role of violence within their walls, but numerous studies have revealed the nature of violence as well as the internal cultures of these spaces.10 Much of this work has rightly focused on the experiences of young people, seeking to recover motivations for what would once have been dismissed as “delinquent” behaviour. In addition, recent work has focused much attention on race and scientific racism, and in the case of Indian schools in Canada and the United States, on colonialism. This literature has established that racism was central to the incidence of violence in these institutions.11 While all of these endeavours have added much to what we know about reform schools, they sometimes omit careful consideration of the other half of the equation – the workers themselves.

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The investigations of abuse that occurred in Progressive Era reform institutions can help us unite both halves of this story. These narratives lead us to ask: Why did a regime of violence continue across institutions and across time, and how did those involved understand it? Understanding the meaning of violence in these settings requires an exploration of how workers experienced or interpreted violent acts toward young people. In this chapter I address these questions by concentrating on an unusually well-documented set of investigations in the state of Iowa between 1903 and 1926.12 I argue that violence persisted within these institutions because of a complex set of ideas and practices concerning violence toward young people in society and culture in general. Adult authority stands at the head of that list. As corporal punishment in the United States became increasingly confined to the young after the Civil War, its nature and severity became hotly debated issues, but the power of adults over young people remained a constant thread across those discussions. Indeed, resistance to authority itself often appeared as the immediate cause of physical correction. Still, workers did not constitute an undifferentiated mass. They differed as to the necessity and utility of violence, and they experienced the institution differently depending on their place in its internal work culture. This multiplicity of views helped sustain a workplace culture in which reformation often took a backseat to punishment. That workplace culture, in turn, was undergirded by larger public debates about the salutary ends of violence. An ongoing formulation and reformulation of the rules of discipline virtually guaranteed that the contests over corporal violence and its meanings would continue well into the twentieth century.13 Violence in reform institutions grew in part from workers’ attitudes about the young people ostensibly being remade within the school walls. Staff echoed a common refrain about the inmates: they were “bad, very bad” children and youth. But why had they been institutionalized? In line with the original purposes of industrial schools and other institutions, some inmates actually had committed offences that would have been crimes for adults. These included theft, arson, rape, and occasionally murder.14 Murder and mayhem made news, but most commitments arose from less dramatic circumstances. Reform schools served as repositories for young people with physical and mental disabilities, or at least that is how employees saw it. The Delaware Industrial School for Girls, for example, estimated that 20 per cent of those committed were “of the ‘moron’ type,” and Iowa staffers agreed with that assessment. Matron Adeline Fugate described a girl at Toledo as “not mentally capable.” While Fugate used the vernacular, Fannie Price used the diagnostic language of early twentieth-century psychology. Assessing

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inmate Lorena Walsh, Price reported that “I think she is mentally deficient, and her facial expression is very similar to the facial expression of a feeble-minded type known as the Mongolian, or cretin.”15 As Price’s verbiage suggests, psychiatric language depended heavily on scientific racism and class-based assumptions about capacity. Reform and industrial schools helped pioneer eugenic science in the early twentieth century, often with tragic results, including a wave of forced sterilizations.16 Sexual activity and heterodoxy could also be the road to commitment. As Mary Odem, Tamara Myers, and others have shown, parents and courts used reform institutions to discipline sexually active girls. Statistics regarding commitments confirm that sexual impropriety often landed girls in industrial and reform schools. For 1890–92, the Kansas Industrial School for Girls admitted ten girls for “immoral practice,” six for prostitution, and three for “gross immorality.” The institution’s superintendent, Franklin R. Wilson, noted in 1914 that a group of girls “come to us almost saturated with vice.” Workers at the Iowa institutions took female sexual indiscretion as a given. May Hanchett estimated that fully one third of the girls admitted to Mitchellville had sexually transmitted diseases.17 By far, the most common reason for commitment lay in an ill-defined set of behavioural problems usually summed up under the catch-all category of “incorrigibility.” Frequently, more than half of all commitments registered as such. Juvenile delinquency statutes opened this umbrella on youthful indiscretion, and judges and other legal authorities used it to cover a wide range of offences. H.W. Charles, superintendent at the Kanas State Industrial School, revealed that “some of these have been guilty of more serious offenses, and to avoid punishment upon those charges have voluntarily plead [sic] guilty, and have thus been committed under this clause of the law.” From the perspective of inmates, the quasi-judicial proceedings that landed them in reform school could seem mystifying. “Well, I don’t know much about it except that the lady who brought me here said that my parents stated that I was incorrigible and I was sent here until I was 21 years old,” relayed Mitchellville inmate Marion Jerauld. The concentration of young people with behavioural disorders inside institutions contributed significantly to the culture of violence within. In daily experience, it meant that workers tasked with carrying out the rules faced large groups of unruly youngsters practised in defying adult control.18 Often feeling embattled by their charges, staff repeatedly turned to punishment, physical and otherwise, even when internal rules barred it. In keeping with schools and carceral institutions, Progressive Era reform institutions ran on order and discipline. Supervisors and staff

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believed that strict adherence to internal rules both instilled proper middle-class values in their charges and prevented outbreaks of collective resistance. At Mitchellville and elsewhere, concern about rioting was no idle fear, for riots at reform schools occurred across the country. In 1899 and again in 1910, the Mitchellville girls erupted in mass resistance. The 1899 outbreak was particularly sustained and destructive, and the threat of mass resistance hung over the staff long after. May Hanchett, the superintendent at Mitchellville, reported in 1926 that she “nearly had a riot in one of the buildings because they disobeyed and could not go to the picture show.”19 Riots and other forms of mass action represented the extreme of resistance, but good order implied daily control of inmate life. To this end, more quotidian punishments prevailed. These ranged along a spectrum of disciplinary actions, from simple denials of pleasures and privileges to sustained applications of violent force. In keeping with middle-class parenting, staff used deprivation on a regular basis.20 A second form of discipline involved work. All inmates worked in some fashion or other for part of the day, but assignment to particularly difficult or onerous tasks appeared as a common form of discipline.21 Work punishments could be carried out in the company of other inmates, but all three Iowa institutions also used solitary confinement on a regular basis. It was the institutional equivalent of being sent to your room, but it had more in common with solitary confinement in prisons than it did with the middle-class timeout. Louzenia B. Riley, a nurse, relayed how this worked at Mitchellville. “The girls are sent to me and shut up in those two little rooms that you see down at the end of the hall across from my kitchen,” she noted.”22 Doing time in a punishment room deprived inmates of physical comforts and social interaction, but they likely preferred it to more painful approaches. While actual corporal punishment prevailed, inmates experienced other forms of physical coercion. A common form involved punishments that stressed the body. Marking time, military style, offered one option, while being forced to stand while holding an object represented another.23 At the heart of the disciplinary experience, however, was outright corporal punishment. Physical force took numerous forms, but three were common: slapping on the face or head, paddling on the hands, and whipping on the body. Lorena Osborne claimed that she was slapped for not being quiet during study period and that her friend, Alma Kyd, was “slapped by the garden lady, the garden lady did not like for us girls to complain so much.”24 Random slapping violated the rules of the institution, but ritualized paddling on the hands was standard operating procedure. Such punishments were meted out with

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what Mitchellville family manager Nellie Hibbard described as “an oldfashioned paddling stick.” Hibbard produced an example, an object “eighteen inches long, two inches wide at the handle, one and one-half inches at the end, tapering, one-fourth of an inch thick at the end, onehalf inch at the handle, tapering to the handle.” Girls stood with hands out and were struck alternatively on each hand. The severity used in these punishments was often a point of contention in the investigations, but witnesses usually agreed that they involved multiple strokes that inflicted real pain.25 Staffers and inmates often distinguished paddling from whipping, a term usually reserved for more severe blows to the head, legs, or torso. Mirroring investigations in other states, charges of whipping or flogging permeated the narrative in Iowa. Eldora inmate Charles Zelter recalled being struck in the head and body. Having been returned from a runaway attempt, Zelter had been placed “on silence.” When he broke it, the family manager, Mr Bird, struck him multiple times with a broom handle. On another occasion, Bird hit Charles in the eye, leaving him “nearly blind.” William Wickersham charged that the tailor at Eldora “had beaten him with a board, struck him with his fist and used a leather strap in punishment of the boys.” Randolph Adams got even worse. As Adams remembered it, “Mr. Humphries took him to the storeroom, closed the door, took down his pants and raised his shirt over his head and threshed him with a leather strap, as he remembered giving him about forty strokes as hard as he could draw over the bare body.” Several days after the beating, the boy’s back “was found to be badly scarred, being red and black from the neck down to his knees. There was one gash on the side of one of his legs even worse than the balance of the back and sides where evidently the flesh had been cut as the scar plainly indicated.”26 The beatings inflicted at Eldora represented extreme cases, but body blows occurred at Mitchellville and Toledo as well. Similar to numerous assault cases in the public schools during the period, narratives of whipping often centred on one particular object: the rubber hose. Dissident staffers at Toledo charged that Superintendent A.E. Kepford stalked the halls with a hose in his hand. Like his contemporaries elsewhere, Kepford saw the hose as progressive. “A hose is rebounding and does not injure the flesh of the child,” he maintained. “Of course, it can if you strike hard enough. You can make a mark but for ordinary punishment it does not make a mark.” Genevieve Henderson, the state agent who regularly visited Toledo, saw it differently, claiming that she had seen Kepford “cruelly beat a boy with a garden hose. It was a terrible punishment.”27

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Superintendents, matrons, teachers, and other staff participated in the culture of violence as both administers and observers. Corporal punishment and other disciplinary measures operated within posted internal rules, but those rules left limits and lines of authority open to interpretation. Long hours and stressful encounters with inmates contributed to staffers allowing themselves considerable latitude with the established regulations on discipline. Moreover, workers came to institutions with widely varying attitudes and experiences with corporal punishment and with the wider labour culture of workplaces that incarcerated young people. As a result, internal conflicts between workers and between workers and management played out in the actual administration of punishment and in the investigations that followed. On an even broader level, workers and managers brought with them varied attitudes about youth and the general state of American society and culture, especially after the First World War. Uneasy feelings about flappers and jazz could easily motivate a spanking or two. If arguments raged about method and means, consensus prevailed about the need for discipline, and someone had to carry it out. Even the harshest of critics, including those who spawned investigations, acknowledged the general need for discipline. After cataloguing the abuses at the Iowa Juvenile Home in Toledo, Mary Miles closed her letter to the Board of Control by affirming her principles. “I wish it understood that I am a firm believer in discipline,” she concluded, “but I consider the methods used at Toledo nothing short of brutal.” Brutal might be in the eye of the beholder, but some of the punishments detailed in the investigations can unequivocally be called that. The earlier investigations at Iowa State Industrial School for Boys in Eldora, in particular, revealed incidents that caused serious injuries. But even normative correction required workers to mete out corporal justice. Experience with punishment might come from previous work experience. Louise Chaulcroft had worked for several years at Glenwood Training School for Boys in Illinois, where staff punished bedwetting and perhaps other offences with cold showers. “I tell you when they punished at Glenwood, they punished,” she recalled. “Sometimes I felt very bad about it.” Hence the superintendent at Toledo “knew I wouldn’t be cruel. He trusted me,” she maintained. Other workers had to learn the institutional ropes as they went. Alice Luce, a matron at Mitchellville, outlined how this worked. “When I first came here I was present when Mr. Fitzgerald punished a few girls that I might learn his methods,” she reported, “and he gave me verbal instruction in regard to these punishments. Then he was present when I punished some of the girls.” Similarly, May Hanchett described a lengthy adjustment process

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at Mitchellville. “I thought for ten years you could manage girls without whipping,” she stated. “I have been opposed to whipping but there seem to be extreme cases where nothing else seemed to answer to the purpose at the time.” One of those cases involved a girl who “was flashing a butcher knife” and saying “she was going to kill somebody.” After talking to the girl “for nearly an hour,” they proceeded to the manager’s office, and the girl “jumped and ran. One of the men went after her and she knocked the steward and the man both down.”28 Corporal correction was supposed to be routinized, with reports lodged in main offices for the review of superiors, but daily working conditions augured against such rationalization. Toledo matron Mary Combe reported that she had “70 boys under my control, morning, noon and night.” Ethel Leise described in detail her working day as a matron at Toledo. On duty by 6 a.m., she worked until 7:30 in the evening, when the older girls retired. Just because they attended classes during the day did not mean a respite for her. “I am not idle the time the children are in school because I have 30 and I take care of their mending,” Leise noted. “I take care of their clothes and inspect the building and the work each child has been doing.” Long hours took a toll on nerves. Fellow staffer Louise Chaulcroft told the board: “It seems I have worked under a strain ever since I have been here.” Being charged with protecting boys from an ongoing construction project on the grounds had taken a toll. “I have had the strain of keeping the children away from the ditches and the horses,” she continued. “Every boy is wound up and wants to jump in the ditches. It has been one awful nervous strain to me.” Similarly, Mitchellville staffer Nora McCormick explained that her slapping children was a result of overwork. “When you work from 5:30 in the morning until eight o’clock at night and have had the responsibility since last June to teach from one to four … [and] then they do not settle down – well, I feel that I am entitled to my time after working and have given them all their privileges.”29 Matrons and other employees toiled in conditions not unlike those of working-class labourers, though their socioeconomic backgrounds tended to be a step up. Most could be described as lower-middle class – as hailing from the cohort of farmers, tradespeople, and shopkeepers that had been at the heart of rationalized, disciplined childrearing and life in general. Ethel Leise, for instance, lived in a farming household with her brother and sister. Mary Combe, widowed and advanced in age, lived in a neighbourhood of middling sorts who followed occupations such as “salesman.” Like many of her peers at institutions across the country, she had served in a juvenile institution previously, noting a year at the Glenwood School for Boys in Illinois. Flora S. Kerr, laundry

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officer at the Indiana State Industrial School for Girls and a central figure in a 1905 investigation there, lived in a neighbourhood crowded with lower-middle-class shopkeepers: butchers, grocers, office workers, travelling salespeople. Since at least the early nineteenth century, members of this social group had organized their lives around discipline, self-imposed or otherwise. When they found themselves in an environment where their own sense of order was threatened on a daily basis, difficult working conditions took their toll.30 Long hours were part of institutional culture; the omnipresence of punishment itself also coloured workers’ experiences. When inmates witnessed physical correction, fellow workers saw or heard the same blows. Their perceptions of pain and severity shaped the meanings of violence within the institution, as well as in the wider society when they carried those stories beyond the fences in the form of complaints to the Board of Control or the press. The night watch employee at Mitchellville recalled that she witnessed the superintendent “go in a colored girl’s room and because she had her window down he rapped her on her head with this knuckles. She was so mad she could have struck him, but she didn’t dare to say a word.” Witnessing was not necessarily direct, however. A Toledo teacher reported that while she could not see punishments, she could “hear them screaming and crying.” Nellie Lind, a kitchen manager at Mitchellville, reported that she routinely overheard punishment. “Of course I was in my room every time I heard it and of course I don’t pay much attention because it frightened me,” she said. “I do not like to hear it.” Fellow employee May Doolittle “heard the whipping and general commotion and wrangling.” Clearly, the incident bothered her: “I heard one of the girls as she seemed to be recovering from a hit of some sort say, ‘O God,’ or ‘My God’ several times. I heard her ask for a drink.”31 Such incidents rattled staffers and generated intense internal debates about the limits and severity of punishment. Reviewing what she had witnessed at Mitchellville, staffer May Doolittle determined that justice had not been served. “I think the girls got a little more than they deserved,” she maintained. Margaret Cahill, the dressmaker, backed her up. “Did the punishment seem unduly severe?,” she was asked. “Well, it sounded severe that night. They pleaded for mercy in the room. We could hear the strokes.” In other cases, staffers might reach a different conclusion. “Well, I would say it was quite severe,” noted Mrs Eugene Gear, “but the case was one that called for severe punishment.” The behaviour of the girls exasperated May Hanchett, and she was willing to try anything, including those gunnysack dresses. “I am perfectly willing to improve [approve] anything as far as anyone can

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offer suggestions and control the girls,” she declared. “I don’t know what you are going to do with these girls. They just run away, and run away.”32 To restrain frustrated staffers from simply abusing inmates, institutions issued rules for discipline and punishment. In practice, these rules often muddied the waters more than they cleared them because they blurred lines of authority. May Hanchett aimed to change the institutional culture at Mitchellville by educating employees about the limits. “When I first came here I sent out a bulletin saying ‘Do not slap or whip a girl. Do not punish her, but bring her to the office if you cannot manage her.’” A.E. Kepford at Toledo promulgated similar regulations. “The rule on discipline is this,” he stated, “that the head matron has charge of the internal ongoing of the Home.” Hence, the head matron was placed at a critical point on the organizational chart. “The matrons have authority to punish,” Kepford continued, “but in all cases of severe discipline the head matron and assistant matron are instructed that these matters must be referred to the Superintendent.” The subtleties of this approach did not always sink in with those required to draw the distinctions. “Who prescribes the rules of discipline?,” Louise Chaulcroft was asked. “I guess I do,” she responded. “Do you get any rules of discipline from the superintendent?” Chaulcroft seemed puzzled. “No, I don’t think so,” she continued. “He has told me that no child must be whipped, but the others, I go along and do simply what I have to do.” Chaulcroft’s response is not surprising: many matrons had no formal training, though they might pursue decades-long careers in helping institutions. Rather, they were drawn from the local community. Thus they were likely to turn to whatever norms of childrearing they had learned or had practised at home. By the 1920s, some university-trained women had begun to apply for jobs, but these were more often in supervisory positions.33 Diffuse authority empowered workers to apply prevailing social norms to interpret youthful indiscretion as they saw fit. Kepford made these benchmarks explicit for Toledo, for both the school and the cottages. “The principal of the school will operate in exactly the same sphere as he would if he were in a public school where he had charge of children from the countryside,” he pointed out. After school, normal life prevailed as well. “The head matron’s instructions are to use what would be the usual method employed in the good American home,” Kepford stated. The problem, of course, was that nobody agreed about the means of domestic bliss, and Kepford had the pleasure of hearing his methods turned into accusations by a belligerent attorney: “You don’t think, Mr. Kepford, that the ordinary American home or even the

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average American home, or you don’t mean to infer, would discipline with corporal punishment?”34 Rhetorical questions from dramatically outraged lawyers did not settle the matter because just what was normal in the “good American home” and in the broader society remained an open question. Staffers frequently used their own experiences to judge their own and fellow workers’ behaviour with regard to violence, but those domestic memories pointed in more than one direction. Mitchellville teacher Alice Dearth acknowledged that she had witnessed punishments but “never in any way that I think my own mother (and she was as good a mother as ever lived) would not have used, had she been dealing with the same kind of girls.” On the other side of the question, Mary Miles, a chief accuser of A.E. Kepford, declared that the man’s problems arose from “the want of knowing how to deal with children.” Children were hurried into their suppers without proper play time, and if they were not quiet, “they were whipped until they were.” That was not how one did things in a home. If one of her boys had done “an unusually naughty thing” such as skinning a rabbit, Miles would talk to them “and tell them fully what these things meant, teaching them a little chorus or a song, and then have them say a little prayer.” No fan of moral suasion, Fannie Pace took a different approach to motherhood. “I never spank them any place but where nature intended they should be spanked and where I spanked my own,” she pointed out.35 In brief, a culture of violence persisted inside reform schools because staffers wielded adult authority but remained unsure about its limits. For workers, violence was a contested arena where ideas about family, school, and society played out via the confinement room, the paddling stick, and the rubber hose. While a minority of workers eschewed punishment and discipline altogether, debate normally centred on the acceptable limits with regard to both nature and severity. How narratives of punishment appeared in the broader community and society mirrored this internal debate, and local and national reactions represent a final element of the culture of violence in reform schools. A century or so earlier, both corporal and capital punishment had formed part of the everyday experience of Americans across the growing nation. At the turn of the nineteenth century, hangings were community affairs and the public whipping post still stood in many town squares. Masters – school, slave, and ship – could chastise their subordinates, not only with impunity but also with community sanction. By 1900, the cultural moorings for this system of violence had frayed. Capital punishment had gone indoors in many locales, and more important, it had been increasingly confined to a smaller list of

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transgressions committed by adults. Campaigns against corporal punishment had led to its abolition in navies and other military settings, and emancipation across the Atlantic world had ended its primary remaining application in the workplace. The personal force of the master with the whip had been replaced by the impersonal face of the modern state, so much so that personal applications of violence engendered strong responses, such as the revolt of sailors in the Brazilian Navy in 1910. These long cultural developments created the context in which discipline inside juvenile reform institutions would be understood.36 The reverberations of these transformations radiated inward toward the small towns of central Iowa and other reform school settings, but the immediate context was the local community. While many workers lived inside the institutions, others went home at the end of the day. When they did, they took what they saw with them. A prime example of this dynamic at Toledo involved Genevieve Henderson. Not rightly an employee, Henderson was described as the “State Agent” by some. She visited the institution for a few days per month, and she eventually wrote a scathing letter to the Board of Control that helped prompt the 1924 investigation. Staffers viewed her as a busybody, prying where she did not belong. As Louise Chaulcroft put it, “when a woman like Mrs. Henderson comes in and interferes and says we don’t know how to do anything – she can upset a whole institution.” The investigations themselves shook relations within local communities, a point evinced by the poison pen letter A.E. Kepford’s wife sent to a former teacher involved in the charges. “Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord,” was all it read. The epistle clearly alarmed its recipient, for as one of the attorneys put it, “apparently Mrs. Kepford has implored the Lord to do the vengeance work but as [is] frequently found, people of that kind of stand [are] perfectly ready to assist the Lord.” Such threats represented the extreme, but a general adversarial relationship with the local community did not help matters. A weary May Hanchett closed her testimony with a forlorn wish for improvement in how local communities dealt with their delinquent daughters. “The people go to a great deal of expense putting girls here,” she noted, “and we really could close the institution if the women would come forward in the communities and take the girls.”37 Neither the women nor the men of local communities came forth, but the sensationalist press did. By the end of the nineteenth century, muckraking journalists had created a genre that regaled readers with the horrors of prisons, reform schools, orphanages, and other places of misfortune. A particularly noteworthy set of examples comes from 1899. The premier case involved Myrtle Eyler, matron at the New Jersey State Industrial School for Girls, who became the centre of an extended

54  James Schmidt

investigation. When the New York Times broke the story in early August, it informed readers that girls were “shackled and beaten,” invoking images of slavery. A later story related that a girl had been “confined to a dungeon” after she allegedly tried to murder Eyler. Eventually the matron was “found guilty of severity and unnecessary punishment,” though she kept her position, since conditions had improved. Similar charges arose in Wisconsin in the summer of 1899, when a group of escapees from the Wisconsin Industrial School for Girls claimed that “the slightest infraction of the rules” landed them in “the ‘tower,’” where they were “fed on bread and water.” The same year saw an investigation in Michigan, where girls claimed that they had been scalded in hot water baths as a method of punishment. As with the Iowa schools, stories featured the rubber hose. Angeline Pendar, the Chicago Tribune reported, “told of being whipped on her bare back with a piece of rubber hose.” Such stories appeared with depressing regularity. Charges of cruelty at Illinois industrial schools, for instance, made the news in 1895, 1900, and 1911.38 The exploitation of violence by the press underscores the fact that “cruelty” had come to the forefront in the public debate about violence by the turn of the twentieth century. It had been cemented in the names of ameliorative organizations that aimed to prevent cruelty to animals, and later, to children. Cruelty reverberated through two other Progressive Era debates that informed the cultural context of violence in juvenile institutions. The first involved corporal punishment in schools in general; the second concerned campaigns to re-establish public whipping in criminal law. Stirrings of public angst about the rod in American classrooms had appeared during the antebellum era, but widespread abolitionist campaigns postdated the Civil War. State governments and local school boards abolished corporal punishment only to reopen the discussion a few years or decades later. New Jersey outlawed the practice statewide in 1867, while other states focused attention locally, often swinging back and forth between policies. For instance, the New York City Board of Education tentatively voted in 1907 to reinstitute corporal punishment in the city’s schools after a regime of moral suasion adopted earlier had proved “utterly inadequate to maintain good order and discipline.” Turning back the clock, the Times predicted, would be “bitterly contested,” for numerous school commissioners saw corporal punishment as barbarous and viewed returning to it as “a dangerous regression.” Lawmakers and local school boards in Illinois also mulled physical correction for decades, starting shortly after the Civil War. A typical debate took place during consideration of a statewide abolition bill by the Illinois House in 1905. Stephen D. Canaday had introduced

The Rules of Discipline  55

the bill by passing around a whip and citing reports of extreme violence in Macoupin County. The cat-o’-nine he exhibited had been used on a boy who would “carry the marks to his grave” for violating an absurd rule that “no pupil should eat onions from Monday until Friday.” Offering moral suasion as an alternative, Canaday met a rebuke from Representative William E. Trautmann. “There isn’t a man in this house,” Trautmann declared, “who wasn’t licked when he was a boy and who will not admit it did him good.”39 Nothing illustrates the Progressive Era love/hate relationship with the whip better than the debate over reviving the public whipping post, which had been abandoned in most locales as a relic of barbarism and slavery. Serious public discussion of a revival peaked during the fin de siècle. In particular, public chastisement aimed to control “wifebeaters.” Delaware became the only state to institute the measure, but discussions occurred widely, sometimes leading to strange positions. In Illinois, the Progressive push for the post was led by none other than John L. Shortall, President of the Illinois Humane Society. The irony did not escape the editors of the Tribune. The “anomaly” of someone “who would prosecute a man for belabouring a horse with a gad, advocating a cat-o’-nine-tails for boys and men, has been the cause of amused comment,” the paper noted. Shortall dismissed criticisms as the work of “a few hyper-sentimentalists,” and indeed, he gained support from some of the best sort. Noted suffragist Julia Holmes Smith affirmed the measure because “the man who beats his wife or child should be made to feel the same punishment on his body and the same injury to his pride as he has inflicted on others.” Jane Addams took the other side. “Brutality begets brutality,” the settlement house leader told the Tribune. “The whipping post is an unnatural return to medievalism.”40 Open public discussions of corporal punishment framed the question of violence in reform institutions. Progressive Era inmates and workers lived in a setting where the value of physical chastisement had been called into question but where it had not been thoroughly delegitimized. This instability in the larger cultural milieu blurred the lines between correction and cruelty. Everyone knew that “bad boys” and “bad girls” needed to be set on the right path, but what happened when they did not acquiesce in their reformation? If respectable members of the community could seriously consider the public whipping post as a possible solution for the transgressions of adult white men, how could violence be all that bad for those with the least amount of power? As a result of the Toledo investigation, Louise Chaulcroft lost her job. In solidarity, three other matrons resigned in protest. A.E. Kepford stayed on, but the Board of Control reserved the right to reopen the

56  James Schmidt

proceedings “at any time it may deem it advisable or for the best interests of the institution.” Two years later, the Mitchellville investigation returned violence against young people to the public eye in Iowa. A new set of workers and inmates became public figures, and the drumbeat of outrage went on. Indeed, while the pace of investigations slowed during the mid-twentieth century, new cases came to light. Eventually the controversies swirling around juvenile reform institutions would reach the United States Supreme Court, resulting in a landmark decision in 1967 that established procedural rights for young people in delinquency cases. But the case on corporal punishment was not closed. Neither court decisions nor public investigations could overcome the basic dynamics that produced the violence in the first place.41 NOTES 1 Iowa Department of Public Instruction, State Archives of Iowa, Des Moines, RG 103, Miscellaneous: Legal Investigations of State Institutions, box 51, Mitchellville Investigation, 1926, 88–9. All of the archival records cited below come from this collection, boxes 51 and 52. They consist mostly of typed transcripts with page numbers. I have cited them with the institution, year, and page number, as in: Mitchellville, 1926. Some loose records also appear in the files, and I have distinguished these where necessary. 2 To date, I have identified eighty-eight such investigations. 3 A prime example is Stephen Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 4 The best recent treatment is Jeremy Milloy, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017). See also Stephen Meyer, Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016); and Joan Sangster, “Just Horseplay?: Masculinity and Workplace Grievances in Fordist Canada, 1947–70s,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 26 (2014): 330–64. 5 John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Jamie L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); James D. Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (New York: Cambridge

The Rules of Discipline  57

6

7

8

9

10

University Press, 2010); Michael K. Rosenow, Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865–1920 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015). A possible exception, if viewed the right way, is Jeff Forret, Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). It is not my intention to debate the continuing relevance of Michel Foucault. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2012). Rather, I am more focused on the motivations and experience of ongoing regimes of corporal punishment in the period after Foucault sees a turn to discipline of the soul. A more recent and more relevant work is G. Geltner, Flogging Others: Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Contra Foucault, Geltner argues that corporal punishment has been a contested subject since the ancient world and that it did not decline with the rise of modern penology. Rather, it has maintained a hold because of its capacity to define otherness. An older work in American history is Philip J. Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1991). Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Joseph M. Hawes, The Children’s Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protection (Twayne, 1991). David S. Tanenhaus’s work on the rise of juvenile courts supplies one of the better recent treatments. See Juvenile Justice in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Julia Grant, The Boy Problem: Educating Boys in Urban America, 1870–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Amanda H. Littauer, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). One of first modern treatments of these institutions is Barbara Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856–1905 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). Brenzel mentions corporal punishment only in passing. A recent monograph that focuses on a single investigation examines the role of juvenile justice in changing conceptions of eugenics. See Karin Lorene Zipf, Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). For examples of more recent work on violence in reform institutions, see Tamara Myers

58  James Schmidt and Joan Sangster, “Retorts, Runaways, and Riots: Patterns of Resistance in Canadian Reform Schools for Girls, 1930–60,” Journal of Social History 34 (Spring 2001): 669–97; Moira J. Maguire and Séamus Ó. Cinnéide, “’A Good Beating Never Hurt Anyone’: The Punishment and Abuse of Children in Twentieth Century Ireland,” Journal of Social History 38 (Spring, 2005): 635–52; Bryan Hogeveen, “Accounting for Violence at the Victoria Industrial School” Histoire sociale / Social history 42 (May 2009): 147–74; Cecilia Green, “Disciplining Boys: Labor, Gender, Generation, and the Penal System in Barbados, 1880–1930,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3 (Fall 2010): 366–90; Kaisa Vehkalahti and Susanna Hoikkala, “Gender and Discipline in the Finnish Reformatories of the 1920s,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 6 (Fall 2013): 457–81. 11 Joan Sangster, “‘She Is Hostile to Our Ways’: First Nations Girls Sentenced to Reform School in Ontario,” Law and History Review (Spring 2002): 59–96; John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999). 12 Investigations of this sort occurred around the United States, peaking between 1890 and 1930. While lengthy archival trails exist in some other states, to date I have found the most extensive records for the Iowa institutions. 13 I use age as an independent category of analysis. For some recent statements that advance this analytical approach, see Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2015); and Syrett, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). The inaugural volume of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth includes an extended discussion: see vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008). 14 Salt Lake Tribune, 30 March 1910. Identical wire stories regarding the Napier case appeared across the nation. For examples, see Evening Journal (Wilmington, DE), 22 October 1906; Bay City Times (Bay City, MI), 17 October 1906; or Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), 14 October 1906; Ottumwa Tri-Weekly Courier (Iowa), 14 December 1905, 25 September 1906; Evening-Times Republican (Marshalltown, IA), 12 December 1905. The initial newspaper accounts state that the Francois Adams had been in the United States less than a year, could not speak English, and had experienced conflict with local boys because of the language barrier. Later accounts put Frank’s age at nine and Oscar’s at seven, and omit these key facts. Only these later versions include “little Bessie Lennie.” I leave it up to social and cultural historians to debate what is the real story of this event. 15 Evening Journal (Wilmington, DE), 5 April 1915; Toledo, 1924, 51, 103, 117, 139; Mitchellville, 1926, 96, 103. On delinquency and psychology, see Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making, ch. 5.

The Rules of Discipline  59 16 See Zipf, Bad Girls; Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Jennifer Stephen, “The ‘Incorrigible,’ the ‘Bad,’ and the ‘Immoral’: Toronto’s ‘Factory Girls’ and the Work of the Toronto Psychiatric Clinic, 1918–1923,” in Law, State and Society: Essays in Modern Legal History, ed. Louis Knafla and Susan Binnie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 405–39. 17 Kansas State Board of Charities, Biennial Report of State Industrial School for Girls, 1890–1892, 127; idem, Thirteenth Biennial Report, 1912–1914, 3; Mitchellville, 1926, 97, 104–5; Odem, Delinquent Daughters, ch. 2; Myers, Caught, chs. 5–6; Zipf, Bad Girls. 18 Eleventh Biennial Report of the Kansas State Industrial School for Boys, 1900–1902, 3; Mitchellville, 1926, 39. 19 The Des Moines Register, 23 October 1899; Evening-Times Republican (Marshalltown, IA), 12 March 1910. It is not clear whether the 1910 event was actually a “riot.” Newspaper accounts called it that, but initial stories make it appear more like a mass escape. On riots in other states, see The Scranton Tribune, 17 March 1898; The Weekly Star (Wilmington, NC), 11 July 1902; Detroit Free Press, 1 January 1924. On fears of collective resistance in Iowa, see Mitchellville, 1926, 110; Eldora, 1903, 4. On riots at a later period, see Myers and Sangster, “Retorts,” 682–7. 20 Toledo, 1924, 101, 134; Mitchellville 1926, 115. 21 Toledo, 1924, 14, 101; Mitchellville, 1926, 43, 58. 22 Mitchellville, 1909, 3, 7–8; Mitchellville, 1926, 9. On the trope of dungeons, see Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 August 1899; Wichita Daily Beacon, 18 August 1902; Baltimore Sun, 4 September 1911; Cincinnati Enquirer, 4 February 1923. 23 Toledo, 1924, 43, 93–4, 123; Eldora, 1903, 1. For another example of stress punishment, see Detroit Free Press, 6 March 1921. Below I have provided examples from other investigations via newspaper sources. In doing so I have indicated the state in parentheses since the stories do not always show up in the same state’s press. 24 Mitchellville, 1926, 18, 28; Mitchellville, 1909, 64, 90. For charges of slapping in other investigations, see Evening Times (Washington, D.C.), 3 August 1899 (New Jersey); Mansfield News (Mansfield, OH) 25 June 1915 (Ohio); Evening State Journal (Lincoln, NE) 20 March 1919 (Illinois). 25 Mitchellville, 1909, 36, 84, 136–8. The distinctions between paddling, spanking, and whipping were not always clear. For other cases of severe beatings, see Indianapolis Morning Star, 5 December 1905 (Indiana); Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram (Richmond, IN) 6 September 1922 (Ohio). 26 Eldora, 1903, 1–3. For other examples of severe beatings, see Detroit Free Press, 6 March 1921 (Michigan); Times-Recorder (Zanesville, OH), 25 January 1929 (Ohio).

60  James Schmidt 27 Toledo, 1924, 12, 188; Genevieve Henderson to Board of Control, undated letter, 4, Toledo, 1924; Mitchellville, 1926, 45, 95. I have written about rubber hoses and other matters relating to corporal punishment in schools in “Willful Disobedience: Young People and School Authority in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in Children and Youth in a Growing Nation: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. James Marten (New York: NYU Press, 2014), ch. 6. For a few examples of the rubber hose, see Detroit Free Press, 28 May 1899; Topeka State Journal, 25 May 1916; Burlington Free Press and Times (New Hampshire), 13 June 1935. 28 Mrs Arthur M. Miles to Mr E.J. Hines, 2 October 1924, 3; Toledo, 1924; Eldora, 1903, 1–5; Toledo, 1924, 113; Mitchellville, 1909, 52; Mitchellville, 1926, 112. 29 Toledo, 1924, 91, 117, 125–6; Mitchellville, 1926, 102. On reporting corporal punishment for record keeping, see Indianapolis News, 13 February 1901. 30 Toledo, 1924, 40; US Federal Census, 1920, Des Moines Ward 2, Polk, Iowa; Roll: T625_508; Page: 7B; Enumeration District: 107; US Federal Census, 1920, Marshall Ward 2, Marshall, Iowa; Roll: T625_502; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 162; US Federal Census, 1930, Liscomb, Marshall, Iowa; Page: 2A; Enumeration District: 0018; FHL microfilm: 2340403; US Federal Census, 1910, Indianapolis Ward 2, Marion, Indiana; Roll: T624_366; Page: 8B; Enumeration District: 0057; FHL microfilm: 1374379. All census records obtained from ancestry.com, accessed 9 September 2019. For the classic treatment of lower-middle-class discipline and rationality, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 31 Toledo, 1924, 27; Mitchellville, 1909, 83, 100, 62. For examples of fellow workers witnessing punishment, see Buffalo Enquirer (Buffalo, NY), 17 June 1910 (Michigan). 32 Mitchellville, 1909, 108, 71; Mitchellville, 1926, 115. 33 Mitchellville, 1926, 107; Toledo, 1924, 175, 101. For another example of rules and reporting, see Indianapolis Journal, 9 February 1901. For an example of job applications, see California Youth Authority, Preston School of Industrial, Superintendent’s Correspondence, 1916, California State Archives, Collection F3738:424. 34 Toledo, 1924, 175. 35 Mitchellville, 1919, 11; Toledo, 1924, 61; Mitchellville, 1926, 83. On the history of punishment inside families, see Greven, Spare the Rod; and Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987), esp. appendix. 36 Myra Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984;

The Rules of Discipline  61 Joseph Love, The Revolt of the Whip (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Steven Wilf, Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 37 Toledo, 1924, 120; George C. Claassen to E.J. Hines, 17 October 1924; Toledo, 1924; Mitchellville, 1926, 116. Apparently Henderson worked for the state board of control in various capacities, including by shepherding inmates to and from institutions. See Daily Times (Davenport, IA) 10 September 1919; Davenport Democrat and Leader (Davenport, IA), 9 January 1924. 38 New York Times, 2 August 1899 and 29 December 1899, 27 June 1900; Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1899; 27 May 1899, 27 August 1895, 6 October 1900, 6 October 1911. 39 Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); New York Times, 26 September 1907; Chicago Tribune, 18 February 1894; 17 June 1868; 6 April 1905. 40 “Whipping the Wife-Beaters,” Leslie’s Weekly, repr. New York Times, 15 August 1897; Chicago Tribune, 2 December 1898. An excellent discussion of contemporary opinion on the matter can be found in The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 11 January 1905. On the campaign in general, see Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, ch. 6; Robert M. Ireland, “The Debate over Whipping Criminals in Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 100, No. 1 (Winter 2002): 5–27; Reva B. Siegel, “’The Rule of Love’: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy,” Yale Law Journal 105, no. 8 (June 1996): 2117–207. 41 Des Moines Register, 15 November 1924; David Tanenhaus, The Constitutional Rights of Children: In re Gault and Juvenile Justice (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011). On later cases, see Chavez-Garcia, States of Delinquency.

3 The “New Solution”: Anti-Labour Kidnapping, D.B. McKay, and the Legacy of the Second Seminole War chad pearson

The National Association of Manufacturers’ monthly publication, American Industries, offered a glowing description of the nighttime raid on Tampa’s union activists in the summer of 1901. The 1903 article noted how a secretive group of around one hundred unidentified men broke into the homes of thirteen leaders of a cigar workers’ strike and kidnapped them. Rather than hold them locally, the disguised organizers – one of whose leaders was D.B. McKay, a newspaper owner, historian, and future mayor – placed the leaders of La Resistencia on a boat, which sailed them to an island near Honduras before returning to Tampa. According to the Tampa Tribune, the men had been “banished by force of arms,” an action “backed by force of public sentiment.”1 In kidnapping and deporting insubordinate people, McKay and his allies had taken their queue from a much earlier event: the forced removal of Seminole Indians from Florida during the late 1830s and early 1840s. Observers did not draw this connection in 1901, but it is possible that it was on McKay’s mind. What, this chapter asks, can that war tell us about the 1901 kidnapping campaign? From the perspective of anti–labour union activists, the 1901 extralegal tactics had led to an entirely satisfactory conclusion. By late fall, cigar-making had resumed at the city’s tobacco factories, including Cuesta, Ray, & Company, Anguelles, Bustillo Bros. & Diaz, Lopez & Brothers, and the American Cigar Company. Delighted businessmen looked forward to a bright future of commercial stability, greater profits, and overall peace of mind. American Industries celebrated the heroism of these “leading citizens of Tampa”: “The kidnapped agitators have not deemed it advisable to make any more trouble in that city.”2 Kidnapping had eliminated the union leaders, demoralized the rank and file, and intimidated others who had been contemplating similar protests.

The “New Solution”  63

The national attention this kidnapping received demonstrates that its significance can be measured well beyond Tampa’s borders. Others found inspiration from this method.3 The broad, national fraternity of employers forced to confront labour unrest had learned a valuable lesson from Tampa’s vigilantes: kidnapping worked. One source called the Tampa action a “new solution” to the so-called labour problem. That solution, according to the Florida Star, “has proved more efficacious than many other remedies.” It concluded: “The idea of deporting the leaders of a strike movement is such an original one that it has attracted wide attention in many northern cities, even the press of New York commenting upon its effectiveness while regretting its being unlawful.”4 Those victimized – Cubans, Italians, and one African American – were rendered unable to help lead the strike. The rank and file continued fighting for close to four months after the kidnapping but were ultimately overwhelmed by the combined opposition of employers and public sector authorities. Businessmen and police, seeking to suppress subversive ideas, burned copies of their newspapers and continued to snatch union activists; by the end, they had kidnapped a total of seventeen. Some ended up in New Orleans.5 Leaderless protests – what the Florida Star called “an army without generals or officers” – continued, but the manufacturers, feeling a renewed sense of power, refused to negotiate.6 Police officers responded to the remaining strikers by arresting them for vagrancy and shutting down their soup kitchens. The event’s details appeared nationally in various newspapers, but the local District Attorney, J.N. Stripling, found nothing illegal, and the governor ignored calls to investigate. Yet those assaulted by this “original” technique eventually made it back to Florida, where they told interviewers a remarkable story. After dropping the men off with a modest amount of food and water and $5 each, the kidnappers left on their sailboat. Forced to fend for themselves, the victims spent long, lonely days on the beach, eventually running out of food and water and suffering from blisters on their feet and sunburned faces and hands. They eventually reached the plantation of a Mr Bruno, who provided them with a boat, which they used to get back to the United States.7 Of course, the vigilantes had wanted them to remain in Honduras, far away from Tampa. The Florida Star article was not entirely correct: this management strategy – kidnapping leaders to demoralize and weaken the rank and file – was not new in 1901. We can identify earlier examples. In the second part of the nineteenth century, vigilantes in San Francisco and in parts of the mountain West had also removed “troublemakers” under the banner of promoting “law and order” during conflicts over land,

64  Chad Pearson

gold, and livestock. But according to the leading historian of Tampa’s vigilantes, Robert Ingalls, it was not these examples that had inspired the city’s elites.8 Ingalls believes this action “was a product of southern culture and politics.”9 Indeed, the Tampa kidnapping occurred in an era when southern elites orchestrated numerous violent campaigns. In 1887, planters active in the so-called Peace and Order League succeeded in defeating a Knights of Labor–organized strike on sugar plantations in Thibodaux, Louisiana, by violently removing and killing somewhere between 35 and 300 strikers. And three years before the Tampa kidnapping, a group in North Carolina had staged a coup against the biracial joint Republican and Populist coalition government in Wilmington. This government, elected in 1894, had increased education spending as well as business taxes. Unhappy, the Democratic Party establishment, led by the “Secret Nine,” organized a white supremacist mob of about 2,000 in 1898 that killed at least thirty African Americans, forced the mayor to resign, and removed the fusionist politicians from Wilmington. The Democrats enacted laws that disfranchised sizeable numbers of working-class African Americans and whites – a victory for the Democratic Party.10 The ruling classes in both Thibodaux and Wilmington, architects and beneficiaries of Jim Crow laws, celebrated their victories. Many among the Tampa elite, including McKay, were Democratic Party members. These men, proud descendants of slave-owning families haunted by memories of the Civil War, were likely aware of the Thibodaux strike-breaking campaign and the Wilmington coup. It is impossible today to identify the precise historical events and the personal and familial struggles, achievements, and setbacks that shaped the kidnappers’ consciousness in 1901, given the secrecy surrounding this event, but we can make informed assumptions. We can pinpoint certain historical events that might have motivated these men. And while the elite vigilantes in the brutal Thibodaux and Wilmington campaigns had sought to drive their victims from their respective communities, they had not taken the astonishing step of sending their prisoners outside of the country! These events were, in other words, spatially dissimilar from the Tampa kidnapping. We must go back further to find an example of a campaign that employed kidnapping to accomplish an outcome that served the ruling class’s financial and managerial interests: the Second Seminole War (1835–1842), a seven-year war launched by the US government to retrieve escaped slaves and remove the Seminole Indians from Florida. This conflict, the aims of which were consistent with Andrew Jackson’s

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1830 Indian Removal Act, was similar in important ways to the 1901 strike-breaking campaign. The Seminole War, which stimulated a regional process of primitive accumulation, included efforts to starve the Seminoles and, more importantly, to snatch and remove its leaders.11 This expensive and challenging conflict, like the 1901 strike-breaking campaign, involved dividing followers from leaders with the primary goal of weakening their resistance to the point of surrender. The planners of both campaigns desired to establish capitalist stability and managerial power. Perhaps the Progressive Era vigilantes saw themselves following a tradition pioneered by Florida’s early settlers, individuals who, like the 1901 kidnappers, had used Tampa as the central departure point for their victims. The losers in both 1842 and 1901 resembled “an army without generals or officers.” D.B. McKay, who had learned about the Seminole War in 1898, wrote much about it during his long life.12 I theorize that McKay and his fellow kidnappers had been inspired by this earlier crusade. This chapter focuses on these two conflicts, separated by decades, and explores McKay’s managerial activism and historical thinking. The two are connected by the processes of capitalist accumulation – from primitive accumulation to proletarianization – and by the violence inherent in those processes. McKay defended elite forms of vigilantism, including kidnapping, for decades, providing generations of Floridians with justifications for violence. In both conflicts, the results led to a strengthened regional economy. For McKay, the Second Seminole War’s outcome facilitated Florida’s economic modernization. Prior to the war, according to a book he edited, “Tampa was nothing but a tiny Indian trading post huddled alongside of Fort Brooke.”13 Economic conditions improved after the war, just as they would after the vigilantes destroyed the union behind the 1901 strike. The links between the US military campaigns against Native Americans and managerial-led anti-labour violence have been made by previous historians. Richard Slotkin, for example, explored these connections in the second volume of his trilogy The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. In the 1870s, elite commentators called for the “civilizing” of both Native Americans and Euro-American workers. As Slotkin put it: “Workers are ‘worthy producers,’ models for the Indian; but they are also Indians themselves, savage in their propensity for violence and evasion of toil, using strikes and mobs to block access to businesses and public squares just as the Indians use violence to block railroad access to the West.”14 This chapter complements Slotkin’s insights by exploring elite-led conflicts on the southern frontier. Elites from both periods perceived Native Americans,

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insubordinate African Americans, and rebellious industrial workers as threats to the interests of investors and modernizers as well as those who hoped to spread capitalism and enrich themselves. Organizers in both campaigns arrived at a common solution to this underlying problem. McKay and his colleagues shared the same basic values as their counterparts in the West. But in Florida, they drew on slightly different and older traditions of conquest. Thus, we can benefit from focusing on the legacy of the US military in the Jacksonian period, recognizing its relevance to Progressive Era vigilantes. As we focus on kidnappings that took place in two different periods, I insist that we take seriously the enduring power of managerial violence used against restless populations, including runaway slaves and Native Americans in the 1830s and rebellious immigrant workers in the early twentieth century. By drawing these connections, we will better appreciate how multiple generations of elites used this form of violence to promote capitalism and “civilization.” Tampa’s Cigar Industry, the 1901 Strike and Kidnapping, and the Citizens’ Committee The 1901 strike erupted in most of Tampa’s cigar factories, which comprised the city’s most important economic sector. Tobacco had put the city on the map after Spanish capitalists V. Martinez Ybor and I. Haya began producing Havana cigars there in 1885. That same year, manufacturers and their allies established the Board of Trade, which was tasked with promoting “the commercial, manufacturing, and general interests of the city and locality.”15 Other investors followed, and by the turn of the century, Ybor City, Tampa’s cigar manufacturing district, named after its founder, had become synonymous with the product; more cigars were produced here than anywhere else in the United States, prompting a boosterish publication to report that the industry was “undoubtedly the corner stone upon which the prosperity of Tampa is based.”16 Given the industry’s importance, it is understandable that Tampa’s ruling class, organized publicly as the Board of Trade and the Tampa Cigar Manufacturers’ Association, and secretly as the Citizens’ Committee, was determined to prevent disruptions in production. During the city’s industrial infancy, business leaders had confronted periodic labour disturbances. After strikes in 1887, a number of Tampa businessmen formed the Citizens’ Committee, one of many organizations that stressed the morality of “good citizenship” while drawing attention

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away from the members’ privileged class positions.17 Tampa’s Citizens’ Committee, like others, was committed to defeating strikes, though workers remained stubbornly rebellious: close to a dozen work stoppages broke out between 1887 and 1894.18 The workforce consisted largely of immigrants from Spain, Italy, and Cuba, including sizeable numbers of Afro-Cubans. These skilled workers were interested in the social and political world around them. During shifts, a fellow worker was assigned to read the day’s newspaper, which kept cigar makers informed about local and world events, including instances of labour and political radicalism.19 The workers also joined unions, which compelled employers to negotiate. In Tampa, two unions vied for the workers’ loyalty: the Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU) and La Resistencia. While it achieved successes in many parts of the nation, the CMIU was rather weak in Tampa. Few joined it after it arrived in Tampa in 1892.20 In July 1901, La Resistencia, a larger, more militant, and more racially inclusive union that represented skilled cigar workers as well as bartenders, bakers, clerks, cooks, laundry workers, and porters, demanded wage increases and closed shops; they shut down production in most of the city’s cigar factories to get their way. Besides demanding exclusive bargaining rights and wage increases, the union, led by activists with ties to Cuba’s anti-imperialist movements, insisted that the employers expel its more conservative rival, the CMIU. Armed with a strike fund of $32,000, the leadership planned to help feed its 5,000 members. The local press called the union a “big industrial army,” warning that “it is the most powerful influence in the city today, and, considered numerically, is the strongest organization in the State of Florida.”21 This “big industrial army” shut down production while its leaders delivered fiery speeches and published radical articles in its newspaper, La Federación. A business spokesperson complained that “there is strictly ‘nothing doing’ in any of the big factories.” Meanwhile, merchants expressed frustration about their inability to get goods and engage in commerce.22 Public and private sector elites were prepared for outbreaks of strikerelated violence. Mayor F.L. Wing swore in ten extra policemen and promised to “swear in a hundred if it is necessary.” Wing made a rather ominous threat to protesters contemplating violence: “they will get into very serious trouble.”23 The mayor and the press set the mood. Tampa’s political establishment and its major opinion-making sources perceived the strike though the employers’ eyes. But it was not Wing’s police force that took the lead in the strikebreaking crusade. On 7 August, the local press confirmed that union leaders had been snatched from their Tampa homes, expressing

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appreciation to those responsible for placing the men under “faithful and efficient guard.” While no mainstream sources identified the kidnappers, these same publications described kidnapping as a positive development, one that helped not only the struck businessmen but also the public. The Tampa Tribune called the kidnappers “heroic.”24 Shortly after the kidnapping, the political establishment, consisting of leading business leaders, elected officials, and newspapermen, engaged in series of public relations activities. Newspaper writers declared that the union leaders had made entirely unreasonable demands. A Tampa Weekly Tribune writer complained that “their demands are so utterly absurd, and are so ridiculous that they do not deserve any consideration from a business or thinking man.” The local press, dismissive of the strikers’ grievances, sought to delegitimize the protesters’ actions, declaring that their activities were fundamentally incompatible with the values of Tampa’s “best citizens.” The strikers suffered, the Tribune wrote, from “hallucination of the brain and do not in a large degree reflect the sentiment of the great army of worthy operatives who have made Tampa the great cigar center of the world.”25 Such militaristic language is telling. Rather than treat the strike as a traditional disagreement between labour and management, anti-union writers described it as a confrontation between warring sides. Such language sought to convince readers that the outcome had far-reaching consequences that impacted not just the business community but Tampa’s future as a centre of tobacco manufacturing, the city’s most significant industry. The strikers, meanwhile, vowed to continue, but were nevertheless demoralized. The protesters remained, according to the local press, mostly “sullen and silent.”26 Yet they were also resolute, declaring that “we cannot end this strike until our leaders are restored to us, safe and sound.”27 The kidnappers remained undeterred, and the press reported that they would continue to deport more Resistencia members. Kidnapping and deportation were the most extreme forms of punishment but were not the elites’ only moves. They also attempted to starve the protesters by threatening to destroy strikers’ soup kitchens,28 and in this, they received help from the city’s wholesale butchers, who stopped supplying strikers with meat. Landlords promised to evict those who failed to pay their rent on time. Meanwhile, police officers arrested strikers for the crime of vagrancy, promising freedom to those who ceased protesting. As the strike continued, it became clear that this was a multilayered campaign, one intended to weaken the strikers physically, economically, and emotionally. Yet the protesters continued to stand firm.29

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The strikers’ public bravado concealed their uneasiness. They were on edge, reluctant to talk with visitors or, in some cases, to even show themselves in public. One reporter described a “condition of panic” that plagued “the Resistencia headquarters.”30 The victims’ wives, mothers, and sisters seemed particularly overwhelmed by an atmosphere thick with fear of looming repression; they called on “American Women” to use their influence to prevent further abductions. One can only imagine the family members’ feelings of separation, anxiety, and dread, not knowing whether they would ever be reunited with their husbands, brothers, and sons. They felt the economic sting of income loss and the emotional difficulties of living without loved ones. This immeasurably traumatizing event left large swathes of the city rightly fearful of authority figures.31 The city’s elites, meanwhile, remained emboldened, thankful for public assistance and outwardly confident that victory was imminent. As the strike continued into late August, they began preparing another round of deportations. But they first demanded that the strike leaders leave voluntarily. Many did, including union leader Luz Herrera. According to the press, some did not wait for their kidnappers to arrive and made “hurried preparations for departure.” Others refused to move, provoking the Citizens’ Committee to make further arrests. Unidentified men took union leaders Alejandro Rodriguez and Amacito Valdez, “the author of some off the inflammatory articles which have appeared in La Federación,” into custody. The press used the passive voice to describe their plight. Both men simply “disappeared.”32 This left La Resistencia with a third secretary, someone known only as “Catalansito.” The voluntary and forced departures led to further tensions. As The Morning Tribune explained, “this leaves Resistencia, for the second time, without leaders, and, with large numbers of its members in revolt and declaring that they will resume work.”33 Yet the strike continued, and by late August some of the “disappeared” had begun to resurface. One of the original thirteen, Ramon Piquero, somehow made it to New Orleans and promised to return to Tampa. Citizens’ Committee members opposed this idea, and wrote him, explaining, according to the Morning Tribune, “that his return at this juncture will be an extremely dangerous step.”34 Would they seek to deport him again? Had they considered murdering him? We do not know, but the Citizens’ Committee clearly found nothing immoral about issuing not-so-subtle threats. Yet they faced new problems by mid-September, when the original thirteen returned to Tampa. Disoriented and angered, the victims contacted President William McKinley for justice, who prompted the

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Justice Department to bring the matter to District Attorney J.N. Stripling’s attention. The Jacksonville-based Stripling promised a full and fair investigation. But it is doubtful that Stripling seriously considered punishing the unidentified vigilantes. In September, weeks after news of the kidnapping and deportation had become known nationally, he said he had “received no information of any acts of which the United States can take jurisdiction.”35 The following month, Stripling visited Tampa, where he met with both sides. He spent more time with members of the Board of Trade, a group consisting of unapologetic kidnappers. Stripling, who shared the same class position and pro-business outlook as the terrorists he was tasked with investigating, repeated roughly the same message he had delivered previously: “I was unable to obtain any evidence of violations of the laws of the United States.”36 Instead, he blamed the unionists for staging a strike for “frivolous” reasons.37 Stripling’s message empowered the region’s ruling class, giving them peace of mind that violence was acceptable in the face of ostensibly dangerous strikers motivated by “frivolous” demands. State authorities were hardly neutral actors.38 The ruling class’s regional spokespersons expressed appreciation for Stripling’s support. One writer commended him for reaching “the only sensible conclusion that could be possibly reached – that the strikers are at fault and that they must surrender before peace can be restored.”39 This comment, like others, indicates that the manufacturers and their allies saw the dispute as warlike. They were hopeful that the weaker side would submit for the sake of industrial prosperity and community harmony. The manufacturers ultimately won. By late October, the strikers were tired, broke, and demoralized, recognizing the near-impossibility of triumphing against an unrepentantly brutal opponent backed by state authorities as a steady stream of scabs travelled to Tampa from Cuba. Employers and their friends in law enforcement and the press were thankful and looked forward to the resumption of industrial peace. A Tampa Weekly Tribune writer hoped that “the clash of interests will be forgotten.”40 By November it was over, though it is doubtful that the victims, their families, or their comrades had forgotten this shocking chapter in labour history. The employers, on the other hand, experienced more prosperity after their victory under open-shop conditions, which had been the employers’ core demand.41 By 1902, La Resistencia had little presence in Tampa and business was booming.42 After the strike, the number of cigars produced shot up significantly while wages and workplace conditions declined. Having established control, the employers intensified their exploitation, forcing their workforce to

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sharply increase production. According to one source, “the total number of cigars made and sold during the year 1904 was 196,961,000, a gain over the previous year of 29,330,000, or seventeen percent.”43 Pro-business commentators treasured the vigilantes’ actions. Writing about McKay in 1907, an unnamed writer for Tobacco Leaf saluted him for his sustained defence of the industry, noting that he “has always been a steadfast friend of the cigar manufacturing industry, and has always stood right square behind the manufacturers in time of trouble.”44 Close to a decade after participating in the kidnapping campaign, McKay looked back with pride, claiming that “he was doing the duty of a man and a citizen and, under similar stressful circumstances, with the very existence of this city alike involved, he would do so again.”45 There is no evidence that any of the other kidnappers regretted their actions. Some even contemplated employing this managerial technique in future confrontations. Their confidence must be put in context. Tampa’s employers had prevailed shortly after the Emma Goldman– inspired anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, murdered President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York. While authorities sent Czolgosz to the electric chair, Goldman remained free. Some wanted further revenge, annoyed that authorities had failed to completely muzzle Goldman. An unidentified Weekly Tribune writer, thankful for the Citizens’ Committee’s extralegal actions, had a solution: “Emma Goldman is a good subject for the kidnappers.”46 Tampa’s kidnappers probably never attempted to capture Goldman, but they continued to mobilize against labour activists. In 1910, in response to a six-month strike staged by the CMIU, the Citizens’ Committee re-emerged. McKay was now Tampa’s mayor and closely allied with other union opponents, including Hugh C. Macfarlane, the immensely wealthy real estate developer responsible for establishing West Tampa. McKay swore in more than two hundred of Tampa’s businessmen as policemen to promote “law and order.” These seasoned vigilantes did not forcibly remove union leaders; nevertheless, they showed a willingness to employ violence. Most notoriously, disguised men lynched two Italian immigrants, Angelo Albano and Castenge Ficarrotta, after an unidentified person shot and injured a West Tampa cigar factory bookkeeper. None of the masked murderers – men who were seen in expensive automobiles – were ever identified, and neither McKay nor Florida’s governor expressed interest in finding and punishing those responsible.47 Lynching was not the only form of elite violence unleashed by Tampa’s business community. Armed vigilantes prevented protesters from demonstrating near factories, raided the office of the union’s newspaper,

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and nailed shut the door of the union’s West Tampa headquarters. A sign by the door read “This Place Is Closed For All Time.”48 McKay ordered other union headquarters shut down as well. Mimicking the techniques employed nine years earlier, Citizens’ Committee members visited an outside CMIU organizer, J.C. Johnson, at his hotel room and demanded that he leave Tampa the next day. Johnson, perhaps aware of the seriousness of these veteran kidnappers, complied. The CMIU lost this struggle, overwhelmed by another private/public terror campaign staged by Tampa’s ruling class. The Citizens’ Committee, on which McKay served as vice-president, was pleased with the outcome, hopeful that would-be protesters would internalize the lessons of this and the 1901 strike-breaking campaign. A 1911 Citizens’ Committee document was rather unambiguous: all expressions of labour activism “are detrimental and demoralizing to good citizenship.”49 Local History and the Life of a Privileged Class Warrior Why did Tampa’s elite resort to such extreme actions? Financial and managerial interests are the most obvious reasons. Of course, the men behind these violent attacks could have simply allowed police forces to use standard tactics to suppress labour protests. But the police were less likely to employ strategies such as lynchings and kidnappings. Direct action on the part of the employers and their allies was quicker and more efficient. One participant in the kidnappings was unmasked during his successful run for mayor in 1910. D.B. McKay won this contest as a defender of “white rights” against “corrupt” African Americans despite the anger some voters felt about his participation in the 1901 kidnapping campaign.50 His involvement remained a source of pride for him well into his later years; in 1953 he would write that the 1901 kidnapping drive was necessary because the strike was “a foolish and vicious attack on not only the cigar industry but the general economy.”51 McKay lived a financially comfortable, well-connected, politically powerful, and intellectually stimulating life. Born in 1868, he got his professional start in the newspaper business in 1882. In 1893, he became editor of the Tampa Times, one of the city’s leading newspapers, and quickly rose through the ranks. By 1900, he owned that newspaper, which maintained a pro-business editorial line. He enjoyed the power to shape the views of thousands, influencing how readers understood the region’s dramatic history. As one observer noted in 1919, “the Tampa Times” was “one of the liveliest newspapers in Florida, and has been keenly interested in the development of the entire state.”52 The prominent newspaperman wrote columns during major events, including

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several economic depressions, two world wars, and a series of labour– management conflicts, in some of which he himself was involved.53 McKay also served as mayor from 1910 to 1920 and again from 1928 to 1931. He remained firmly anti-labour as a writer and public official throughout his long life, which ended in 1960. McKay was born into wealth and then enhanced his social position through marriage and an inheritance from his grandfather, a slaveowning seaman and financier. He flourished as a newspaper owner and editor, using his position to act as a booster for cigar manufacturing. As the son-in-law of a prominent businessman, McKay had financial reasons to do that boosting. In fact, his father-in-law had been responsible for convincing Vincent Ybor to move his factory from Key West to Tampa.54 McKay maintained a strong interest in history throughout his adult life and in his later years wrote a regular column called “Pioneer Florida.” In it, he explored some of the key aspects of Florida history, including the growth of tourism and other industries, the state’s involvement in wars, and those men whom he considered the extraordinarily wise planners of these events; he saluted “the first white families to locate in what is now Tampa.”55 Many of his columns – accounts of heroic military leaders, shrewd investors, and political visionaries – were collected in three thick volumes published in 1959. McKay wrote about his ancestors’ struggles and political accomplishments as well as their bouts with defeat and sorrow. His grandfather had been a pioneering entrepreneur in the region. The younger McKay explained that “each and every member of this and adjoining counties has been more or less benefited by Captain McKay’s energy in opening and keeping open this market.”56 During the Civil War, the elder McKay had served as quartermaster for a Florida regiment and had used his ships, which were manned by slaves, to acquire weapons for Confederate troops. In 1864, Union forces arrested him and his son, Donald McKay; they were imprisoned on New York’s Governor’s Island.57 Like their slave crews, the two men had experienced the trauma of capture and imprisonment. McKay remained bitter about the Civil War’s outcome well into the mid-twentieth century. He found the Reconstruction period – a transformative time when former slaves exhibited high levels of courage, independence, and even radicalism – deeply troubling. The former slaves, having helped to destroy the labour system that had controlled them for decades, had charted revolutionary new paths in work, education, and politics. McKay nursed a long-lasting disdain for these independently minded people, viewing them as mere dupes of the Republican Party and conniving carpetbaggers. McKay’s voluminous

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writings offer commentary about corrupt “scalawag” politicians and what he considered the dangers associated with the politically empowered “illiterate Negroes.”58 A lifelong Democrat, McKay did not feel the same way about subordinate and well-mannered African Americans, those unwilling to sever ties with their previous masters. Many African Americans, he insisted, had not been poisoned by the ideology of Radical Republicanism. Reconstruction, he wrote at the end of his life, “was a difficult time for both the white and Negro people of Florida.”59 Indeed, he pointed out that some former slaves showed no interest in challenging the interests of plantation owners: “I knew Negro men and women who paid little heed to President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation and remained with their former owners long after the Civil War ended.”60 Examples of such loyalty offered comfort to McKay – and presumably his rulingclass allies in the region – since it pointed to the enduring presence of an easily exploitable workforce. Floridian elites like McKay did not want to hurt or kill African Americans; they only wanted to ensure that this labour force remained available and quiescent.61 The Second Seminole War and Its Managerial Lessons Although McKay praised some African Americans, his strongest sympathies were with Florida’s leading white men, including his ancestors, who had suffered at the hands of Union soldiers and Republican politicians. In McKay’s mind the end of the Civil War had marked the beginning of a depressing chapter in the state’s history; what likely inspired him in 1901, though, was an earlier conflict, the Second Seminole War (1835–42). McKay had learned its history – one that pitted grieving slaveowners, investors, and the US military against the Seminoles, most of whom were Creek Indians and escaped slaves – shortly before participating in the kidnapping campaign. The United States’ main goal in that war, spelled out in the 1834 Treaty of Payne’s Landing, was to move the Seminoles west of the Mississippi River into present-day Oklahoma. The authorities offered the Seminoles two options: leave voluntarily, or forcibly. As General Thomas Jesup explained, “they must go – if they do not go they will be carried away.”62 This dramatic war, which led to statehood for Florida in 1845, was significant for many reasons. In McKay’s view, it was largely about the glorious activities of a cohort of brave US soldiers and their astute leaders, who succeeded in vanquishing bands of racially mixed savages and insubordinate slaves. McKay, like the war’s planners and fighters, viewed the Seminoles as a threat for two basic reasons. First, they stood

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in the way of commercial progress. Developers wanted the land, and the Seminoles’ presence was preventing them from acquiring it. Second, the Seminoles were giving shelter to runaway slaves. White slaveowners throughout the South remained troubled by the loss of their property, which accounted for a sizeable percentage of Florida’s population. In 1830, slightly less than half of Florida’s 34,730 residents were slaves, and this bonded labour force helped make a small number of Floridians wealthy.63 “The immediate causes of the war,” McKay wrote in the second volume of Pioneer Florida, “revolved around the property interests of the Southeast – land, Negroes, cattle and trade with the Indians.”64 And McKay, like all students of Florida history, understood that one cannot study slavery, or the Second Seminole War, without confronting the question of kidnapping, broadly defined. The relationship between slavery and kidnapping is well-known. Slaves had first arrived on this continent as a result of kidnapping, and the break-up of families, facilitated by forced removal, continued as the United States expanded. As historian Edward Baptist put it, “all of those taken were in some way stolen, for the basic rituals of this emerging, modern market society were absurd disguises for thievery.”65 Naturally, slaves sought to escape this brutal system. In fact, some owners were honest about, and even proud of, their exploitative methods. According to a slaveowner’s account from 1839, “I work my niggers in a hurrying time till 11 or 12 o’clock at night, and have them up by four in the morning.”66 The loss of labour was a serious inconvenience for the region’s wealthiest residents, and war was the best response. As Jesup, a slaveowner himself, explained, “this is a negro war, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the south will feel the effects of it on the slave population before the end of the next season.”67 Elsewhere, Jesup stressed that the war’s primary aim was removal: “I, as well as my predecessors in command in Florida, have failed to catch and remove the Seminoles to Arkansas; but it should be remembered that we are the only commanders who have ever been required to go into an unexplored wilderness, catch Savages, and remove them to another wilderness. Search all history and another instance is not to be found.”68 Writing to Secretary of War Joel Poinsett in November 1837, Jesup explained that “the Indians are already driven from more than fifteen million acres of land, worth twenty millions of dollars.” He concluded that “in less than a month we shall drive them off from five to ten millions of acres more.”69 These statements suggest that removal, not slave recapture, was the war planners’ main goal. Forced removal of restive populations was at the centre of the state’s war aims.

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Decades after his own involvement in the 1901 kidnapping campaign, McKay pointed out that the desires of slaveowners and of those interested in the removal of Native Americans were complementary: “No less important than the white man’s lust for Seminole land was the Negro problem.”70 He outlined both challenges in equal measure. As a 1950 book about Tampa, which McKay edited, explained, “the slave hunters had no intention of permitting all these assembled Negroes to get away – they were worth almost $1000 each.”71 This lifelong racist was especially contemptuous of rebellious “Negroes,” writing that the plantation owners’ “Negro slaves were far more savage and bloodthirsty than their Seminole masters in the wars.”72 McKay recounted the story of Gopher John (1812–1882), an Afro-Seminole leader caught by the US military. After his capture, military fighters debated the best course of action: “The first proposition was to hang him – that came from an Irishman of course; the second to boil him for soap fat – this from one of the camp women; the third to put him through a course of cleaning and fumigation, then throw him to the alligators, but there was some expression of sympathy for the alligators.”73 McKay presumably relished this anecdote’s mix of violent threats, dehumanization, and humour. For him, no form of torture was too much for the rebellious Black Seminoles. And readers were treated to some comedy in the process of learning about Gopher John’s supposed misdeeds. As it turned out, Gopher John escaped these gruesome punishments, but authorities nevertheless forced him to leave Florida for the West. They shipped him off from Tampa Bay shortly after his 1838 capture. In McKay’s mind, the Native Americans were no less dangerous than their Black allies. McKay wrote in a 1954 column that they “roamed over the country, killing stock and murdering women and children, striking at every point that was left undefended, making swift descents upon farm houses where the father, husband or brother was absent, outraging, torturing, and slaughtering the old, the feeble and defenseless.” They were, he reported, “tireless as wolves, crafty as foxes and as cruel as tigers.”74 He believed that the US military’s heavy hand was necessary and that it served a variety of interests – those of slaveowners, Indian-haters, and commercial investors. In eliminating threats to the economic well-being of Tampa’s white settlers, these soldiers were following the logic of Manifest Destiny. Whatever the core motivation, we know that the military engaged in a series of brutal and ultimately effective campaigns. One of its cruellest techniques involved starving the Seminoles by destroying their food supply. Indeed, troops routinely shot the Indians’ cattle and destroyed their crops with that end in mind. Some came close to starvation as

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a result of Jesup’s ruthless campaigns. Several Seminole women even killed their infant children, to spare them from the slow torture of malnourishment. Some US soldiers kidnapped children. We can assume that the victim’s separation anxiety was overwhelming.75 Driving the Seminoles off their land involved hunting and capturing leaders. The most infamous events of this kind included Jesup’s kidnapping of the Seminole leaders Osceola and Micanopy in 1837 and 1838 respectively. McKay called Osceola, a racially mixed person, “the most colorful figure in Florida Indian history.”76 But McKay was no admirer of Osceola, who had gained notoriety for killing Indian agent Wiley Thompson in 1835 after Thompson had complained about “the existence of several unauthorized settlements of Negroes, Indians, and Spaniards (lawless bands).”77 Yet the captures of Osceola and Micanopy were controversial because these leaders had accepted the government’s terms and agreed to move west. Indeed, Osceola and his followers had already made preparations to travel to Tampa Bay, to await transportation to Indian Country.78 These kidnappings did not end the conflict, but the actions left many of the remaining Seminoles leaderless, disoriented, and less powerful. McKay had no qualms, referring to Osceola, who died shortly after his capture, as “the haughty halfbreed.”79 Despite the US military campaign’s ferocity, the Seminoles continued their fight after the capture and death of Osceola. An unnamed Seminole leader warned US authorities in 1839: “Let us alone and we will not molest you – remain at your posts or your homes, and we will not attack you – but if you make war on us, we will fight as long as our ammunition lasts, and when this is gone we will take to the bow and arrow.”80 They remained defiant, holding out for three more years. McKay was aware of the US military’s techniques, spotlighting three critical approaches: “first persuasion, including the payment of money; second forcible capture; third, capture by treachery. Only a few were gotten by persuasion; not many were taken by force, except that many gave up after years of being hounded; but many were taken by treacherous means.”81 In McKay’s analysis, treachery was a perfectly sound method, necessary in the face of a resistant challenger. McKay viewed Native Americans and their black allies as essentially subhuman, whereas he saw their adversaries as worthy of high praise, underscoring what he considered the heroism of many “pioneers.” He had spent years studying their biographies and wrote accounts of their bravery, talent, persistence, virtue, and integrity. “General Bailey,” McKay boosted, was “a trained and experienced gentleman.” Another worthy Floridian, McKay reported, was Lewis Norton, “who will be remembered by all the old Indian fighters in the state as a

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keen, relentless trailer, surpassing the Indians in their own tactics.” And McKay extolled the virtues of Jack Bellamy, a land appraiser and “prominent planter.” Bellamy was also vital to the development of much of the region’s infrastructure. “He built,” McKay explains, “the first stage road between Tallahassee and St. Augustine.”82 McKay was perhaps most impressed by Leroy G. Lesley, a wealthy slaveowner who divided his time between battles and the management of his 150-acre plantation.83 These upstanding and patriotic men had modernized the region and brought prosperity to its white residents. Of course, this progress happened because they had overwhelmed and ultimately expelled their enemies. It was these groundbreaking modernizers who had set the stage for commercial development and a budding tourism industry. Such developments – the construction of roads, rail lines, and bridges – were possible because the military had removed the Seminoles. Above all, McKay wanted readers to appreciate “the heroic deeds of the white men who brought civilization to Florida.”84 Conclusion What can the “heroic deeds of the white men” teach us about Progressive Era union-busting? How can scholars of management connect a conflict led by the federal government during the Jacksonian period with some of the most dramatic strike-breaking and union-fighting activities of the turn of the century? In McKay’s opinion, these early pioneers – individuals proud to unleash violence to achieve economic goals – deserved nothing but admiration for helping to transform Florida into a commercially vibrant centre of industry and tourism. They embraced a set of economic values – most meaningfully, a defence of private property and a willingness to enforce hierarchal class and racial divisions – that subsequent generations of privileged Floridians like McKay found admirable. Elite forces, including the US military and, later, vigilantes, had shown how the principal threats to their financial and managerial interests could be defeated. And private fighters enjoyed backing from the state, including from judges, attorneys, and elected politicians. The men in governmental positions who enabled such violence helped empower fabulists like McKay, whose books and newspaper columns framed these campaigns in simple and easily digestible terms. In his telling, Florida’s history was replete with adventurous stories of good guys prevailing against irredeemable adversaries. The Civil War and Reconstruction periods had been low points, but only temporary ones: the Floridian elites who followed – McKay among them – would help develop Jim Crow racial norms and open-shop labour conditions. For

The “New Solution”  79

more than half a century, McKay told magnificent tales of military and managerial triumphs, teaching multiple generations about how the state’s “best citizens” – the “heroes” – had solved their Indian, “Negro,” and labour problems. Of course, there are obvious differences between the Second Seminole War and the 1901 kidnappings. One was fought primarily by state forces, while the other involved the private sector. One involved national policy-makers; the other, private sector elites. The earlier conflict engaged more than 17,000 troops and volunteers; the other, about a hundred businessmen.85 More than 1,400 American soldiers died in the war; no one perished during the Tampa kidnapping campaign. Furthermore, the Second Seminole War had been fought by mostly workingclass white men enlisted in the armed forces; the turn-of-the-century kidnapping campaign involved elites unafraid of getting their hands dirty in direct combat. The US government forced 3,824 Seminoles to permanently leave Florida; no more than a few dozen left Tampa in 1901, and some returned. The forced removal of Native Americans, part of a process of primitive accumulation, was carried out domestically in an expanding nation; the kidnapped unionists travelled internationally. Finally, the Second Seminole War was the longest and costliest Indian war up to that time; the Tampa kidnapping campaign was a private affair that resulted in few direct costs to the federal government. Nevertheless, the similarities between the Second Seminole War and turn-of-the-century union-fighting in Tampa offer students of management and repression opportunities to identify underexamined connections. Most significantly, exploring the Second Seminole War allows us to consider some of the ways in which Progressive Era elites used history to justify various forms of violence, including kidnapping, banishment, starvation, and murder. Additionally, we can identify similar frustrations. Elites from both periods complained about financial costs and were motivated by economic grievances: the loss of slaves and impediments to capitalist development in the 1830s; idle factories in 1901 and 1910. Also, their adversaries were similar in some ways. The rebellious forces during the Jacksonian Era were a racially mixed group; the strikers in 1901 and 1910 were also ethnically diverse. The manufacturers hit by the strikes suffered financial losses but experienced prosperity in the strikes’ aftermath thanks to the Citizens’ Committee’s work. One can say the same about the Second Seminole War. As historian James Oakes put it, “the white planters emerged victorious and more powerful than ever.”86 The most privileged residents in both campaigns won their respective wars. McKay knew this early history and saw himself as another superior white man engaged in “heroic deeds.”

80  Chad Pearson

Two generations of far-sighted “pioneers” had concocted solutions to their labour problems, broadly defined. These men planned and benefited from settler colonialism and anti-labour violence. Accounts of the 1901 kidnappings applauded “a new solution” to the “labour problem.” These reports repeatedly described the strike as a war and cheered the unidentified businessmen responsible for fighting it and for concluding it in terms favourable to the manufacturers. The historically conscious McKay played a central role in this industrial war and was likely one of the masterminds of this “new solution.” Yet that solution wasn’t entirely new. In his prolific writings, McKay showcased the “pioneers” who had helped solve what elites viewed as the Seminole problem. In both cases, white attackers offered their opponents – roughly 5,000 Seminoles and, more than half a century later, around the same number of La Resistencia members – the options of leaving voluntarily or by force. The Citizens’ Committee deported its opponents from Tampa, one of the locations where authorities had centralized Seminole removal decades earlier. In 1901, Citizens’ Committee members struck first, demonstrating that they were willing to resort to extreme measures. After the kidnappings, several remaining La Resistencia leaders opted to leave on their own, acknowledging that doing so was superior to the alternative. And in both cases, the attackers sought to make their adversaries’ lives miserable, partly by shutting off their respective food supplies and worsening their living conditions. But the most important similarity had to do with one of management’s most time-honoured techniques: divide and conquer. The Second Seminole War’s military leaders sought to divide runaway slaves from Native Americans just as the architects of strike-breaking pitted scabs against union members during Progressive Era labour conflicts. Kidnapping leaders was the most successful divide-and-rule tactic. Whether Osceola’s 1837 abduction was on McKay’s mind in 1901 when he helped round up and remove strike leaders is impossible to know. Did his hatred of La Resistencia’s leaders remind him of his disdain for Osceola, slave runaways, and Native Americans generally? Whatever the case, we need to acknowledge the similarities between these two conflicts, recognizing the deep and diverse roots of anti-labour kidnapping carried out under the timeless justification of promoting “civilization” and “good citizenship.” In both cases, the attackers split the leadership from the rank and file with the goal of demoralizing and undercutting the resistance. These “leading citizens” left the remaining protesters weakened, having been left “without generals or officers.”

The “New Solution”  81

By focusing on these two Florida conflicts, we can better appreciate the relationship between colonialism (including white supremacy) and capitalism. This chapter has illustrated the usefulness of drawing connections between Jacksonian Era settler colonialism, primitive accumulation, and slavery on the one hand, and anti-union kidnapping and workplace exploitation in the Progressive Era, on the other. Powerful and vicious “pioneers” shaped these practices, and this chapter has shed light on McKay as well as on his colleagues, ancestors, and heroes. This regional cohort was similar to others, and future researchers in other parts of North America will inevitably expand our knowledge of the deep origins and violent characteristics of anti-labour activism. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Sandra Mendiola, Jeremy Milloy, Joan Sangster, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. NOTES 1 “Ship Them to Distant Shores,” The Morning Tribune, 7 August 1901, 1. 2 “Idaho Springs, Like Tampa Drives the Agitators Right Out,” American Industries 2 (15 August 1903), 3. 3 During the coal wars in Colorado, copycat members of the Citizens’ Alliance, based in Idaho Springs, Colorado, kidnapped sixteen union activists from jail and marched them to the city’s edge, demanding that they never return. The Denver Post called the kidnappers the region’s “best citizens.” Quoted in George G. Suggs, Jr., Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners [1972] (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 76. 4 The Florida Star, 16 August 1901, 4. 5 Robert P. Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882–1936 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 80. 6 The Florida Star, 16 August 1901, 4. 7 The Florida Star, 16 August 1901, 4. 8 Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes, 231. 9 Ibid., 206. 10 On Thibodaux, see “Riot in Thibodaux,” The Opelousas Courier, 26 November 1887, 8; and Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 84. On the Wilmington coup, see Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights

82  Chad Pearson

11

12

13

14

15

of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-NineteenthCentury South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 202; and Deborah Beckel, Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 210. For the broader context, see David Montgomery, “Violence and the Struggle for Unions in the South, 1880–1930,” in Perspectives on the American South: An Annual Review of Society, Politics, and Culture, vol. 1, ed. Merle Black and John Shelton Reed (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1981), 35–47; and Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 5–90. On Jacksonian Indian policy, see Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975); and Robert V. Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 45–82. The campaign against the Seminoles was consistent with other settler-colonial projects. See Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106 (June 2001): 866–905; and Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Michael Perelman defines primitive accumulation as “the brutal process of separating people from their means of providing for themselves.” See Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 13. My thanks to Joan Sangster for alerting me to Perelman’s book. D. B. McKay, “Buckshot from 26 Shotguns Swept Band of Ferocious, Marauding Seminoles Off Face of the Earth,” Tampa Sunday Tribune, 27 June 1954, 16c. Karl H. Grismer, Tampa: A History of the City of Tampa and the Tampa Bay Region of Florida (St Petersburg: The St Petersburg Printing Company, 1950), 86. McKay edited this book. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 342. Also, note Gerald Ronning’s study, which illustrates the ways northern Minnesota employers and their allies compared striking Finnish immigrants to western Native Americans. Ronning, “Jackpine Savages: Discourses of Conquest in the 1916 Mesabi Iron Range Strike,” Labor History 44 (August 2003): 359–82. I.J. Isaacs, Tampa, Florida: Its Industries and Advantages and a Series of Comprehensive Sketches of Representative Business Enterprises (Tampa: The Tampa Tribune Printers, 1905), 3.

The “New Solution”  83 16 Ibid., 9. See also Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 63–96. 17 For more on Citizens’ Alliances, which fought union activists in both Canada and the United States, see William Millikan, A Union against Unions: The Minneapolis Citizens’ Alliance and Its Fight against Organized Labor, 1903–1947 (St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001); Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); and Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), ch. 2. 18 Durward Long, “Labor Relations in the Tampa Cigar Industry, 1885–1911,” Labor History 12 (Fall 1971): 551. 19 Irvin D.S. Winsboro and Alexander Jordan, “Solidarity Means Inclusion: Race, Class, and Ethnicity within Tampa’s Transnational Cigar Workers Union,” Labor History 55 (July 2014): 279. 20 Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 25. 21 “General Strike Is On Today; Five Thousand Workers Idle,” The Morning Tribune, 27 July 1901, 1. 22 “Rushing Strikers Out of City,” The Morning Tribune, 31 July 1901, 1. 23 Quoted in “Mayor Wing Says There Must Be No Violence,” The Morning Tribune, 28 July 1901, 1. 24 “Ship Them to Distant Shores,” The Morning Tribune, 7 August 1901, 1. 25 “Stop the Strike,” Tampa Weekly Tribune, 8 August 1901, 4. 26 “Strikers Are Sullen and Silent; ‘Never Surrender’ Is All They Say,” The Morning Tribune, 8 August 1901, 1. 27 “Resistencia’s New Secretary Says They’ll Not Surrender,” The Morning Tribune, 11 August 1901, 1. 28 “Strikers Are Sullen and Silent; ‘Never Surrender’ Is All They Say,” The Morning Tribune, August 8, 1901, 1. 29 “Resistencia’s Hold Weakens; Its Plight Is Unpleasant,” The Morning Tribune, 13 August 1901, 1; “Resistencia Meets a Rebuff in Advances to Other Union,” The Morning Tribune, 14 August 1901, 1; “Cutting Off Its Food Supplies, Resistencia’s Finish in Sight,” The Morning Tribune, 15 August 1901, 1; “Evictions Begin Monday,” The Morning Tribune, 18 August 1901, 3; Durward Long, “‘La Resistencia’: Tampa’s Immigrant Labor Union,” Labor History 6 (Fall 1965): 193–213; and Long, “Labor Relations in the Tampa Cigar Industry,” 552.

84  Chad Pearson 30 “Resistencia Meets a Rebuff in Advances to Other Union,” The Morning Tribune, 14 August 1901, 1. 31 Quoted in “Resistencia Has New Secretary,” The Morning Tribune, 29 August 1901, 1. 32 “Two More Strike Leaders Missed,” The Morning Tribune, 23 August 1901, 1. 33 “Resistencia on Its Last Legs; Large Secession from Ranks,” The Morning Tribune, 21 August 1901, 1; “Resistencia Works Bold Bluff; Proclamation of ‘Business Men,’” The Morning Tribune, 23 August 1901, 8; “Resistencia Has New Secretary,” The Morning Tribune, 29 August 1901, 1. 34 “Strike Conditions Still Unsettled,” The Morning Tribune, 28 August 1901, 1. 35 Stripling, qtd in “Result of Return of the Agitators; District Attorney Stripling Talks,” The Morning Tribune, 12 September 1901, 1. 36 Stripling, qtd in “Stripling on Strike,” The Weekly Tribune, 17 October 1901, 1. 37 Stripling. qtd in “Stripling on Strike,” 1. 38 Perhaps Stripling was aware of the 1876 Cruikshank decision, a Supreme Court verdict that said that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to violent acts carried out by individuals; it only applied to actions unleashed by state actors. The Supreme Court issued the United States v. Cruikshank decision after former slaveowner William Cruikshank and his posse killed more than sixty black men in Colfax, Louisiana, where these former slaves had planned to vote, in 1873. The perpetrators, Klan-like terrorists, were arrested for violating the Fourteenth Amendment and the Enforcement Acts, which was meant to prevent two or more people from hindering any citizen’s’ “free exercise of any right or privilege granted or secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Qtd in G. Edward White, Law in American History, vol. 2: From Reconstruction through the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 23. Although none of Tampa’s Citizens’ Committee members killed anyone, they had nevertheless used force against American citizens. Following the logic of Cruikshank, the US government had no obligation to help the victims of this act of repression, given that most of the men behind the kidnapping were private citizens. 39 “Stripling on the Strike,” 4. 40 “Strike Is Now Over; Outlook Inspiring,” Tampa Weekly Tribune, 24 October 1901, 1. 41 Long, “Labor Relations in the Tampa Cigar Industry,” 552. 42 Durward Long, “’La Resistencia,’” 213. 43 Isaacs, Tampa, Florida, 10. 44 “The Week in Tampa,” Tobacco Leaf 44 (10 July 1907), 8. 45 Qtd in Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes, 76.

The “New Solution”  85 46 The Weekly Tribune, 17 October 1901, 2. 47 Albano and Ficarrotta were not part of the strike, but they were workingclass men and friends with strikers, and both had criminal records. Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes, 96–7. 48 Quoted ibid., 104. 49 Citizens’ Committee Constitution, quoted in Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes, 113. 50 Mormino and Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City, 53. McKay was instrumental in forming Florida’s racist White Municipal Party in 1908. See Pam Iorio, “Colorless Primaries: Tampa’s White Municipal Party,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 79 (Winter 2001): 297–318. 51 D.B. McKay, “Frenzied Mobs, Wrecked Buildings Marked Violent Tampa Cigarmarkers Strike, July to November, 1901,” Tampa Sunday Tribune, 27 December 1953, 11c. 52 “New Bond between Tampa and Jacksonville,” The Pensacola Journal, 31 October 1919, 4. 53 No library or archive houses copies of the Tampa Times during the 1901 strike. 54 “McKay ‘Man of the Week’ Broadcast. D.B. McKay Audio Record and Transcript,” 26 October 1952, folder 22, box 1, D.B. McKay personal papers, Donald Brenham McKay Collection, University of Southern Florida, Tampa; and Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 233. 55 D.B. McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 1 (Tampa: Southern Publishing Company, 1959), 14. 56 D.B. McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2 (Tampa: The Southern Publishing Company, 1959), 384–95. 57 Ibid., 386. 58 Ibid., 380. 59 McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 1, 243. 60 D.B. McKay, “Pioneer Florida,” 20 October 1946, folder 2, box 2, D.B. McKay personal papers. 61 McKay’s comments about the Reconstruction period are consistent with the so-called Dunning school, named after historian William Dunning (1857–1922). According to this view – one that gained traction around the time southern authorities were enacting Jim Crow laws – Reconstruction was a mistake since it elevated the position of African Americans while suppressing the rights of southern whites. Like others, McKay recalled this period as a low point. For more, see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

86  Chad Pearson 62 Quoted in McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 1, xxi. 63 George Klos, “Blacks and Seminole Removal Debate, 1821–1835,” Florida Historical Quarterly 68 (July 1989): 57. 64 McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2, 467. 65 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 191. 66 Quoted in Maxine D. Jones and Kevin M. McCarthy, African Americans in Florida (Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1993), 28. See also Matthew J. Clavin, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 60–1. 67 Quoted in Thom Hatch, Osceola and the Great Seminole War: A Struggle for Justice and Freedom (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2004), 179. 68 Jesup, qtd in C.S. Monaco, “Whose War Was It?: African American Heritage Claims and the Second Seminole War,” American Indian Quarterly 41 (Winter 2017): 47. See also Monaco, The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 26–44. 69 Qtd in Monaco, The Second Seminole War, 87. 70 McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2, 468. 71 Karl H. Grismer, Tampa: A History of the City of Tampa and the Tampa Bay Region of Florida (St Petersburg: The St. Petersburg Printing Company, 1950), 82. McKay edited this book. 72 McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2, 538. 73 Ibid., 245. 74 McKay, “Buckshot from 26 Shotguns,” 16c. 75 John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 [1967] (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1985), 243; and Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 157. 76 McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2, 444. 77 Qtd in ibid., 445. 78 Monaco, The Second Seminole War, 90. 79 McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2, 450–8, 497. 80 Qtd in “The Seminole War,” Maumee City Express, 8 June 1839, 2. On the Seminoles’ persistence, see Bruce Vandervort, Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada, and the United States, 1812–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 128. 81 Qtd in McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2, 445–6. 82 McKay, “Buckshot from 26 Shotguns,” 16c. 83 McKay, Pioneer Florida, vol. 2, 352–8. 84 Ibid., 572. McKay’s comments reinforced the point made by Cameron B. Strang. According to Strang, “an obsession with all things military pervaded elite society.” Strang, “Violence, Ethnicity, and Human Remains

The “New Solution”  87 during the Second Seminole War,” Journal of American History (March 2014): 975. 85 On the number of participants in the Second Seminole War, see Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 225, 241. 86 James Oakes, “Reviewed Work: Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation by Larry Eugene Rivers,” Florida Historical Quarterly 80 (Fall 2001): 240; and Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 309–10.

4 Billy Gohl: Labour, Violence, and Myth in the Early Twentieth-Century Pacific Northwest aaron goings

When passing through Aberdeen, Washington, it is difficult to miss the ornate exterior of Billy’s Bar and Grill, a two-storey brick structure in the centre of the city’s downtown. Named for William “Billy” Gohl, an early twentieth-century sailors’ union activist, Billy’s is one of the few Aberdeen restaurants to have survived the decline of the wood products industry. From the mannequin dressed as a sex worker featured in its front window to the western decor that adorns its interior, Billy’s Bar and Grill has been crafted to transport customers back to the early twentieth century, a time when, in the words of popular historian Stewart Holbrook, “the city of Aberdeen, on Washington’s west coast, presented a more typical sort of Skidroad than either Spokane or Seattle, or even Portland. Aberdeen was and is a pure sawmill town of classic vintage, nearer to the old Saginaw and older Bangor than anything in the West. Only Aberdeen was tougher, much tougher.”1 In 1903, as both the rich local lumber trade the local labour movement grew in size and prominence, Gohl became agent for the Aberdeen branch of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP).2 Gohl was a dedicated unionist who helped craft a fiercely militant labour movement that relied on direct action at the point of production to contest employer power. Between 1903 and 1910, Gohl was the best-known and most effective union activist in Grays Harbor at the time when that port was one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest urban centres. It was also the world’s most prolific lumber port and Washington State’s most densely unionized area. Gohl’s fellow unionists elected him (twice) president of the local labour council; he was also the founding president of the Grays Harbor Waterfront Federation (GHWF), which represented the region’s most militant unions and had been formed to contest the power of lumber industry employers.3 Gohl’s activism, though, extended well beyond the shop floor: he was also a community activist committed to

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improving the lives of maritime workers and making the local waterfront safer. Billy’s Bar and Grill may well be the only North American restaurant named after a labour leader. However, the restaurant owners’ choice of names had nothing to do with Gohl’s labour or community activism. Instead, “Billy’s” draws its inspiration from Gohl, “the Madman of Aberdeen” and “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” which is how he is represented in the titles of two historical accounts written about him.4 During Billy’s time in Aberdeen, scores of working men were found dead, floating in the Chehalis and Wishkah Rivers. This “Floater Fleet,” as the bodies became known, horrified Grays Harbor residents, who had no idea how these men died. Writers have estimated that between forty and two hundred men were found dead in this manner. Journalist and popular historian Murray Morgan wrote that “these anonymous dead men, culled from the hordes of migrant labourers who had flocked to Grays Harbor to cut trees, came to be known as the Floater Fleet. Billy Gohl was credited with launching most of them. If he was responsible for even half of the floaters found in the harbor during his day, Gohl was America’s most prolific murderer. Over a ten-year period the fleet numbered 124.”5 The restaurant’s owners have made a conscious effort to connect their eatery to the story of Gohl. Along with a selection of drinks and a kid’s menu, Billy’s menus offer a “historical” section that crafts a semi-comical impression of the restaurant’s villainous namesake: “Eventually, mysterious arsons, murders, robberies and shootings were traced to Billy and his overly enthusiastic methods of operation. After a sensational trial, Billy was sent to prison where, we’re happy to report, he was a model prisoner. Well, none of us is perfect, folks, and Billy, in his brief but spectacular career, at least gave it his best shot.”6 Tales of Gohl’s criminal activities have persisted in popular lore for more than a century. In the twenty-first century, knowledge of Gohl’s murder spree is so widespread that Vanity Fair magazine mentioned him alongside such infamous killers as Ted Bundy, while crime reference texts include entries on “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor.”7 But “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor” is a myth. Billy Gohl was no serial killer, but instead a dedicated union activist who practised militant, sometimes violent, forms of labour activism. Violence was common in early twentieth-century American labour relations, and Pacific Coast sailors were some of its most dedicated practitioners. In his official history of the SUP, Stephen Schwartz recounts instances of unionized sailors marching through San Francisco toting rifles, and an 1892 editorial in the union’s newspaper advised that “remedies by lawlessness are not

90  Aaron Goings

always worse than the disease. As a rule that depends upon the extent of the lawlessness and the final result, defeat or victory.”8 Strike violence was common in the early twentieth-century United States. According to the social critic Louis Adamic, well-organized violence was a common feature of trade unionism in that era.9 During periods of intense class conflict, Gohl was a leading proponent and practitioner of direct action as part of a coordinated union strategy to maintain closed shops, win strikes, and improve working conditions. His tactics included harassing scabs and imported strike-breakers; he himself led bands of armed unionists in attacks on scabs who were trying to break picket lines. Gohl’s story speaks volumes about the double-edged sword of working-class violence and the power of employers to shape narratives about class violence. After Gohl’s successful leadership of a maritime strike in 1906, the local press aligned with lumber and shipping companies to cement the connection in the public mind between Gohl and criminality. This long-standing identification of Gohl with violence opened him up to later charges that he was a brute; it also made him a useful scapegoat for the violence that ravaged his home town of Aberdeen. This impression overshadowed all evidence to the contrary, which clearly shows that Gohl was a strong proponent of mitigating the dangers of the region’s waterfront. He advocated for safety improvements aboard ships and along the waterfront. He represented sailors in court and in bitter labour negotiations with employers. He paid his fellow unionists’ fines and spoke at their funerals.10 In February 1910, two men discovered a body in a local waterway. The body would later be identified as that of the sailor Charles Hadberg.11 Three months later, a Chehalis (Grays Harbor) County Superior Court convicted Gohl for Hadberg’s murder and sentenced him to life in prison at the Washington State Penitentiary.12 Following his February 1910 arrest, Gohl became the subject of a massive campaign by local employers and their allies in the press to blame much of the region’s history of crime on him and “his gang.”13 On 5 February, months before his trial began, the Washingtonian published a photograph of Gohl below the words: “Man Suspected of All Crimes from Dog Poisoning to Murder.”14 Stories about the “ghoul” are widely circulated in the Pacific Northwest, and Grays Harbor boosters have long sought to capitalize on Gohl’s memory, as a means to market the region as a tourist destination. This chapter moves beyond the myth of the “ghoul,” reconsidering the importance of Gohl’s labour activism and how that activism led him to be framed, in court and in legend, with murders he did not commit.

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Indeed, in 1909–10 Gohl was the principal target of a well-funded campaign launched by Grays Harbor employers, public officials, labour spies, police, and reporters to defeat the local labour movement. Leading the charge was a group of employers who had come together in a “citizens’ committee” – a common euphemism adopted by anti-union groups. Formed in 1909, the Aberdeen citizens’ committee endeavoured to cast Gohl as a serial killer, with the goal of weakening the local labour movement and blaming him for the region’s violent history. This chapter shows how Grays Harbor employers and politicians joined anti-labour editors and reporters to construct the myth of “Gohl the Ghoul” so as to undercut the credibility of the militant trade union movement. By pinning all number of crimes on a single man, who also happened to be the region’s leading labour activist, employers and their allies removed a threat to their control over the workplace. At the same time, however, attributing dozens of worker deaths to one labour leader and building up the story of an extreme pathology helped a community avoid confronting the structural violence of industrial capitalism. Even a cursory reading of US labour history would make someone suspicious of “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor” myth. Between the American Civil War and the Great Depression, employers and workers routinely committed acts of class violence on picket lines and shop floors and in the wider community. Another site of violence was the legal system: police, prosecutors, and judges aided anti-union employers by jailing labour activists and radicals. Spies sometimes provided much of the evidence necessary to convict American unionists. Indeed, the annals of labour history are full of martyrs – of working-class activists sentenced to death or long prison sentences during a strike or organizing campaign. The names Haymarket, Haywood, Joe Hill, and Sacco and Vanzetti resonate through history, potent reminders of capital’s penchant for removing labour activists by any means necessary. But these represent only the most famous of scores of labour class war prisoners and martyrs. In Gohl’s home state of Washington, police jailed hundreds of union activists between 1900 and 1920. Many of these condemned men served time alongside Gohl in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.15 Gohl was no working-class hero, and the purpose of this chapter is not to romanticize him or his actions. Gohl was a complex individual, a man who desired to secure some of industrial America’s benefits for maritime unionists. He was also undoubtedly a labour militant who used intimidation, threats, and violence to challenge a violent system that regularly saw workers injured and killed in America’s workplaces and on picket lines. Moreover, Gohl was a racist who endeavoured

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to hoard the benefits of union membership for white workers alone. He joined many early twentieth-century unionists in condemning the employment of Asian American labourers and formed an Asian Exclusion League in Grays Harbor.16 But as Billy Gohl was replaced with “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” workers’ daily experiences of class and violence, and of violent forms of anti-unionism, were written out of the historical narrative. This was convenient for those who profited from the violent lumber and maritime industries, for it allowed them to escape scrutiny for their assaults on unionists and radicals. Grays Harbor was a tough assignment for Gohl and other unionists who set out to build labour solidarity and protect union members’ wellbeing. Grays Harbor is in the southwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Aberdeen and Hoquiam, the region’s main cities, emerged in the early twentieth century as important industrial centres. The abundant forests provided the region with its main industries. Logging, lumber, shingles, and the shipping of wood products employed thousands of workers in the early twentieth century. Mills along the harbour regularly cut more lumber than any other place in the United States, while the region’s teamsters, longshoremen, and sailors were responsible for shipping record-breaking amounts of lumber annually, earning the region the title of “Largest Lumber-Shipping Port in the World.”17 Grays Harbor workers produced and shipped lumber on an epic scale. But the industry was dangerous – indeed, deadly – for those who did the work. Maritime workers, whether on the docks or aboard ships, performed dangerous tasks that often led to injury and death. In 1894, sailors began running a feature in their union journal, the Coast Seamen’s Journal, titled the “Red Record,” which publicized the most horrific abuses of maritime labour.18 Designed to attract mass attention to the plight of sailors, the Record provided numerous brutal accounts. An example was the Solitaire case, where the ship’s second mate knocked a sailor down and jumped on his chest until he died.19 Sailors died during shipwrecks, drowned after falling overboard, and received deadly blows from falling cargo and equipment. In August 1901, the SUP’s newspaper carried a brief story detailing the deaths of four sailors who drowned when their vessel was swamped at Grays Harbor.20 The struggle to improve the lives of its members was core to the SUP’s work. By the time Gohl became Aberdeen agent for the SUP, the union was a strong force in the Pacific Coast labour movement. In Aberdeen, the SUP was among the oldest local labour organizations. In return for their dues, sailors received a variety of union benefits. Knowing all too well the dangers of seamen’s work, Gohl resorted to the press to condemn the conditions faced by sailors aboard ship, where they slept in

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tiny, cramped forecastles, “generally three-cornered holes and all hands can not always get out of their bunks and dress at the same time.”21 An articulate spokesman for his trade and for the labour movement, Gohl sometimes penned op-eds for local newspapers and gave interviews to Harbor journalists. The most common subject of his writings was the exploitation of sailors, both at sea and on land, and the need to protect these men against poor treatment through legislation and strong unions. Gohl condemned shipowners and captains for luring destitute workers aboard ships during strikes without informing them of the labour conflict. Contending that these workers were “practically shanghaied as scabs or strike-breakers,” Gohl levelled a strong attack on the collusion practised by employers and state authorities in their efforts to break unions.22 The union agent wrote to the press to expose the viciousness of especially infamous ship captains, including Captain Dedrick of the Kohala. Gohl refused to supply a union crew for the Kohala because those men “may board a ship at times and have no chance to return. The reputation of Captain Dedrick is bad so bad that men who know him will avoid his vessel … Sailors in our day refuse to be sold with body and soul, and the sailors of this port especially have no desire to make any further acquaintance with Captain Dedrick.”23 The union agent’s work did not stop at the end of members’ lives, and tragically, during the early twentieth century, sailors perished with a shocking frequency. Gohl’s most pressing duties included patrolling the docks looking for missing workers, planning funerals (for which he paid the expenses), and hawking deceased sailors’ goods to send the proceeds to their families.24 Gohl claimed to have coordinated and used union funds to pay for thirty-nine funerals for deceased union sailors between 1905 and 1909.25 Gohl also combated the abuses committed by saloon keepers, who, he claimed, drugged, robbed, and murdered unsuspecting patrons. More specifically, he criticized “dive” owners and demanded the removal of “falltraps” from saloons. He contended that saloonkeepers were using the traps to drop drunk or drugged men into the river after stealing their money. In a letter written to the Aberdeen Daily World, Gohl asked if there was a relationship between the “dives,” their “falltraps,” and the many dead men found in local rivers: “Are they [falltraps] there for the purpose of giving the janitor a chance to get rid of the refuse? Are they there in order to evade the officers on Sundays so that booze may be lowered into a skiff through the trap? Or are they there to accommodate some poor sailor or logger by giving him a free ride along the Wishkah?” Going into greater detail, Gohl claimed that “divekeepers” had “beaten” sailors out of their wages and “kicked” them “off the wharf.”26

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In 1907, after becoming increasingly concerned about the number of deceased men found floating in the Chehalis and Wishkah Rivers, Gohl fought to have streetlights installed along the riverbanks, a measure he argued would make the cities safer.27 Gohl’s role in the region’s class struggle took a drastic turn in June 1906 when the SUP declared a coast-wide strike against the United Shipping and Transportation Association (USTA), shortly after an earthquake and fire levelled the city of San Francisco. The need to rebuild San Francisco after these disasters launched a massive reconstruction project, presenting opportunities for shipowners and lumbermen to profit from San Francisco’s loss. To keep up with increased cost of living, sailors demanded a $5 per month wage hike. The USTA ordered its members to resist the SUP’s demand, a move clearly intended to provoke a conflict with the union. Gohl publicly assailed the association, declaring that the “fight [was] provoked by the United Shipping Association of San Francisco” to destroy the union.28 The strike led to violent confrontations between maritime unionists and a combination of employers, scabs, and imported strike-breakers. Armed unionists began partrolling the streets, stopping and searching streetcar passengers for weapons, in this way providing an effective counter-force to the bosses’ company guards as well as the “specials” hired on the city’s dime. The need to defend themselves became plain when in July, John Jones, whom unionists alleged was a hired gunman, shot and killed union longshoreman Alexander Wahlgren before unloading his gun on Grant Wilson, a union bartender, who later died from his wounds.29 To block scabs from loading and sailing ships, and to fight strikebreakers, Gohl organized and led armed groups of unionists on street, streetcar, dock, and riverboat patrols. In a series of affidavits, scabs and bosses swore that Gohl and fellow unionists had stopped streetcars, pulled scabs off the cars, and beaten them.30 He had also led groups of unionists in raids on scab ships. On the night of 2 June, Gohl joined a group of armed unionists aboard a small vessel and ventured out with them to confront the non-union crew of the schooner Fearless as it sailed from Grays Harbor. The unionists demanded that the ship return to shore. After an argument during which neither side was willing to concede, men on each side fired guns toward the other side’s vessel. After the gunfire subsided, the crew of the Fearless, happy to have been spared their lives, abandoned their voyage and returned to shore.31 Later in June, Gohl led nearly two hundred workers in a march on the non-union schooner Centralia docked at the S.E. Slade Lumber Company mill in Aberdeen. Boarding the ship with several other unionists,

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Gohl exchanged gunfire with W.B. Mack, the mill’s manager. Mack later reported that Gohl had turned his gun on him and told him: “If you make a move, you’ll get yours.”32 To stop the unionists from harassing the scab labourers, local employers sought an injunction while the Aberdeen city government hired “special” police to guard the docks and ships. In a July 1906 decision granting employers their injunction against Gohl and his fellow unionists, Chehalis County Superior Court Judge Mason Irwin labelled the sailors’ union agent “a man deliberate in action, energetic, aggressive and courageous,” but who “lacks good judgment and discretion.”33 The strikers’ solidarity paid off, and they won a major victory. On 1 September the union announced it had reached a settlement with coastwise sailing vessels, with employers agreeing to the SUP’s demand for a $5 raise.34 The steam schooner strike persisted for another month until the unionists won their $5 monthly wage increase. Gohl notified Grays Harbor news organs that “all has been settled satisfactorily.”35 Few events in Grays Harbor history were as significant as the 1906 Maritime Strike. It pushed local employers into a unified resistance, taught them the necessity of armed defence of their property, and forced them to enlist the powers of both the state and the press to protect that property and guarantee that its violators were publicly condemned. Over the coming years, local employers found news ways to act collectively to make sure that events like the 1906 Maritime Strike never happened again. For Gohl’s leadership on the Fearless raid, the Chehalis County Superior Court convicted him of “unlawfully maintaining, organizing and employing an armed body of men.”36 The court fined him $1,200, which the SUP paid. Employers and anti-union journalists took lessons from the union’s attacks during the strike, seeing in them the first hints of Gohl’s “criminal tendencies.”37 Indeed, Gohl’s class violence on picket lines became foundational to “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor” myth. Unionists took different lessons from Gohl’s strike militancy. He won great fame among the labour movement for his actions and sacrifices during the strike. Unionists rewarded Gohl for his troubles, which by the end of 1906 included two major trials, a $1,200 fine, and many months of having his name smeared in the press.38 Most importantly, in 1908, local unionists elected him to his second term as president of the Grays Harbor Labour Council, making him the de facto head of one of the Northwest’s best-organized local labour movements.39 Following their victory in the 1906 strike, sailors built upon their solidarity by forming the Grays Harbor Waterfront Federation, an alliance of the region’s militant unions. The new federation’s four hundred

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members elected Gohl their president. The federation was an ambitious project designed to respond to structural changes in American capitalism, an acknowledgment that “individual craft organizations are no longer able … to cope with the growing power of organized capital,” in the words of one Waterfront Federation official.40 Celebrated by his comrades, Gohl used his greater political muscle to do battle with employers. In late 1906, he and other Waterfront Federation leaders became entangled in a major political brawl, and in so doing outraged local power brokers. The controversy revolved around efforts by Aberdeen and Hoquiam businessmen to move the county courthouse from Montesano to a spot along the Aberdeen–Hoquiam boundary line.41 Most Aberdeen and Hoquiam employers and newspapers vigorously supported the move.42 But a goodly portion of the region’s labour vote – headed by Gohl – contended that the courthouse was a wasteful use of public funds coming out of the pockets of “the laboring man.”43 If the 1906 Maritime Strike cemented the view among local employers that Gohl was a dangerous militant, his opposition to the courthouse made him appear to be a corrupt union official, one of the “false leaders [who] have sold out the laboring element,” according to one anti-union newspaper.44 This was the view of E.B. Benn, who in 1909, as the new mayor of Aberdeen, led the Aberdeen citizens’ committee that targeted Gohl. Benn swore in an affidavit published in the Bulletin that he had secretly bribed Gohl with $25 to secure votes in favour of removing the courthouse. Gohl swore out an affidavit of his own, calling Benn’s statement “absolutely without any foundation whatever, and is false and untrue.”45 All four of the major Aberdeen and Hoquiam newspapers attacked Gohl in front-page articles.46 Years later, Gohl remembered this political fight as the turning point of his life in Grays Harbor. He described himself as “the victim of a ring of Aberdeen politicians, who have been pursuing him persistently in an effort to effect his downfall, ever since the county seat fight of three years ago, when he took a firm stand against its removal.”47 These attacks on Gohl’s character coincided with a shocking outbreak of violence as several dead bodies were found floating in the Chehalis and Wishkah Rivers. These were discovered around the same time that a militant group of employers launched a coordinated assault on Grays Harbor unions. The floating bodies had long bothered residents. By early 1907, the front pages of local newspapers were carrying haunting stories of drowning victims, with some reporters referring to the dead men collectively as “The Floater Fleet.”48 According to one estimate, between 15 January and 31 March 1907, ten bodies were found floating in the region’s waterways – roughly one per week.49 The Grays

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Harbor Post noted that when “floater” John Anderson’s body surfaced, it “had been in the water so long that the flesh had entirely disappeared from the skull.” Some newspapers declared that “foul play” had caused the deaths, but public officials charged no one with murder. Instead, in response to several drownings in early May 1907, police carried out a “clean-up,” which drove “questionable characters” out of town.50 In 1910, newspapers rehashed this spate of deaths, and with little more than rumour and hearsay serving as “evidence,” laid them at Gohl’s doorstep. It is useful to note that at the time of the deaths, Gohl went unmentioned in the press as a suspect. Most likely, the deaths were the result of several factors, including workplace accidents, robberies with violence, police brutality, accidental falls into one of the numerous local waterways, and murders by notorious saloon keepers who then dumped the corpses into the water. In May 1907, Coroner A.C. Girard, the man tasked with examining many of these dead bodies, declared: “As long as Aberdeen allows the saloons and dives in which the worthless element carry on their nefarious practices, it may expect to find the bodies of murdered men at any time.”51 Notably, Gohl publicly condemned each of these sources of danger and sought to remedy them. Gohl’s activism during the strike and its aftermath won real victories for working people. But it also earned him a long list of enemies, and for many years he was the target of a concerted campaign by Grays Harbor employers, labour spies, and newspaper editors to drive him out of town. Organized capital focused its gaze on Gohl, whom they rightfully saw as a powerful threat to employer profits and control over the community. Anti-union newspapers portrayed the strike as harmful to the entire community and Gohl as an irresponsible ruffian. Most local editors had little sympathy for unions or their members. The Aberdeen Daily Bulletin lashed out at unionized sailors, writing that “to call them human would be to do an injustice to the rest of the people.”52 The persistent assaults on the local labour movement made a deep impression on Gohl, who complained publicly about the climate in Aberdeen and condemned “the antagonistic spirit displayed toward union men in Aberdeen.”53 Defeated in a bitter labour struggle by union workers, between 1906 and 1910, Harbor employers unified around their class interests and brought in outside support. In 1908, local employers formed the Grays Harbor Stevedore Company to supply non-union longshoremen to work the docks. Shortly after forming the stevedore firm, the mill owners began an eighteen-month lockout of union longshoremen who refused to load alongside scab workers supplied by the new company. The company demanded an “open shop” and refused to sign contracts

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with the union.54 The Stevedore Company decimated the local longshoremen’s unions, forming an ethnic-based company union called the American Brotherhood of Longshoremen, which was open only to native-born Americans and led by the scabs that Gohl had targeted during the 1906 Maritime Strike.55 Angered by these efforts to bust the longshoremen’s unions, in December 1909 Gohl threatened a general strike, hoping to revive the labour solidarity of 1906. The general strike never materialized; even so, it proved a vivid reminder of the potency of maritime solidarity on the Harbor, and of its central proponent, William Gohl.56 A month after Gohl issued the general strike call, local elites made sure this was the last time he threatened lumber industry profits. To remove Gohl, leaders in the Aberdeen municipal government and Chamber of Commerce combined into a “citizens’ committee,” a businessmen’s anti-union group.57 In 1909 the citizens’ committee contracted the services of the Thiel Detective Agency, a labour spy firm. Like its more famous counterpart, the Pinkertons, the Thiels had become infamous for breaking strikes and framing unionists. Harbor employers funnelled thousands of dollars into the Thiel agency. Numerous spies took part in the efforts to remove Gohl. The most important among them was Patrick McHugh, who posed as an Aberdeen saloon owner and befriended Gohl.58 The campaign against Gohl came to a head in January 1910 when two men discovered a body in Indian Creek, a small stream southwest of Aberdeen. The body had two bullet holes in the head and was tied down in the water by a fifty-pound anchor. Earlier, McHugh, the labour spy, had told Dean, the police chief, that Gohl had drunkenly confessed to killing his friend and fellow union sailor, Charles Hadberg.59 With a “floater” matching Hadberg’s description having turned up in Grays Harbor waters, the Aberdeen police had cause to arrest Gohl.60 Employers and labour spies took the lead role in “investigating” Gohl. On 3 February 1910, Aberdeen police arrested Gohl and charged him with Hadberg’s murder.61 Initially, the case hinged on the testimony of the labour spy, McHugh, and the physical evidence – the body – which authorities claimed belonged to Hadberg. Additionally, the Thiel agent claimed that Gohl had also confessed to murdering local cigar store owner John Hoffman, another of the union agent’s friends. Since no one ever located Hoffman’s body, the state never prosecuted Gohl or anyone else for this murder. But a body, supposedly Hadberg’s, lay in the coroner’s office, and in what looks in retrospect like something out of a crime drama, the authorities refused to allow Hadberg’s co-workers to view or identify it. But Hadberg’s fellow sailors – the only men in town likely to be familiar with the itinerant sailor’s appearance – forced their

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way past security, viewed the body, and stated unequivocally that it did not belong to Hadberg. SUP members stood by their belief that the body was not Hadberg’s; they even refused to grant the body a union funeral, the standard practice when a union member died.62 Shortly after Gohl’s arrest, it became clear that the local media were committed to blaming the union agent for the entire bloody history of Grays Harbor. Gohl had long faced the wrath of the Harbor’s mainstream newspapers. During strikes such as the 1906 Maritime Strike, the Harbor’s primary news organs – the Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, Aberdeen Herald, and Grays Harbor Washingtonian – had criticized unions for their role in the conflicts. These newspapers’ editors all belonged to local business organizations and had close connections to Pacific Northwest lumber and shipping companies. Once arrested, Gohl faced an onslaught of sensationalistic reporting that laid all sorts of crimes, real or imagined, at his door. On the day of his arrest the Daily World blamed him for “responsibility for many of the members of the ‘floater fleet,’ comprising more than 40 bodies.”63 He became variously a “fire bug,” a rapist, a thief, a labour racketeer, and the head of a “gang of murderous pilfering pirates.”64 The Washingtonian ran the headline “Red Record of Crime on Grays Harbor Charged to William Gohl,” while several newspapers printed rumours that Gohl had committed murder in Alaska before moving to Aberdeen.65 In an attempt to undermine the union agent’s bona fides, the Daily World reported that “Gohl was a member of a clique of sailors’ agents along the entire Pacific coast, that had for its object the perpetuation of the agents in office … It was his custom to change the ballots whenever [he] need[ed], so as to insure his own position.”66 Large urban dailies reported on the Aberdeen serial killer story. The Seattle Daily Times reported that “evidence against agent of sailors’ union creates belief that he will prove greatest of modern criminals.”67 Private detectives were responsible for many of the rumours printed by the press.68 As the trial progressed, local newspapers declared that this trial was “the most important in the annals of criminal history of Chehalis County,” and indeed it was, for it provided an explanation – no matter how far-fetched – for the tragic amount of violence the region had endured over many years.69 Gohl quickly came to personify all of the violence that had plagued Grays Harbor, enabling the local citizenry to purge themselves of the terror of living with one foot in the grave for many years. The earliest myth-makers took elements from the historical record of Gohl and the Sailors’ Union and artfully rearranged them into a sensationalistic narrative of murder and mayhem. Many parts of the Gohl

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myth had their roots in fact, but in the hands of reporters and their sources, these facts became hopelessly mangled as the union agent’s work in the labour movement was shaped into fiction. Fundamental were claims that Gohl mostly targeted “unsuspecting lone sailors,” the very men he represented in office, who repeatedly elected him head of their union office, and who showed Gohl intense loyalty even after he was arrested for murdering their fellow unionists. The method ostensibly used by Gohl to dispose of his victims’ bodies likewise had its roots in an activist stance taken by the union agent. Throughout 1909, Gohl had waged a campaign against saloon owners who preyed upon drunken workers by drugging, robbing, and killing them and disposing of their bodies through a hole in the saloon floor that emptied into a local river. According to numerous Gohl stories, this was precisely the method he had used to dispose of bodies. “Ushering them into his office, he would open the safe and instruct his intended victim to place his money in the compartment of his choosing,” contended one account. “As the man bent over, Gohl would club him over the head with a belaying pin. This made it easy to lug the body to a trap door – the way they disposed of trash along the waterfront in those days.”70 While his longtime opponents in the press rushed to craft Gohl’s life history of crime, Gohl faced trial for Hadberg’s murder. The case against him hinged mainly on the testimony of two men: Patrick McHugh and John Klingenberg. McHugh, the labour spy, testified that Gohl had drunkenly boasted of his criminal history, including murdering both Hadberg and Hoffman.71 As provocative as McHugh’s story was, it was mild compared to that of Klingenberg, the Danish-born seaman who was working aboard the lumber schooner A.J. West as it sailed to Mexico while Gohl sat in jail awaiting trial. Aberdeen businessmen collaborated in locating and abducting Klingenberg, the only person who ever provided direct evidence linking Gohl to any murder. Gohl’s old nemesis W.B. Mack played a key role in returning Klingenberg to Grays Harbor. He wired to Santa Rosalia, Mexico, requesting that Captain H.H. Smith of the A.J. West prevent Klingenberg from going ashore. Obliging Mack’s request, Smith refused Klingenberg the right to quit, shanghaied him, and forcibly returned him to Grays Harbor on the A.J. West. Upon his arrival, the sailor was taken to the Baldwin Hotel and, according to the Aberdeen Herald, interrogated by a businessman before being given access to an attorney or law enforcement officer. After having his way with the sailor, the unnamed businessman released the small, slight, and frightened sailor to the sheriff, to whom he made his confession. The Grays Harbor Post described Klingenberg’s fearful reaction in vivid

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terms: “Tears streamed down the prisoner’s cheeks and he repeatedly exclaimed to the detective nearest him, ‘This is Hell. Won’t you shoot me and put me out of my misery?’”72 In October 1910, as Klingenberg faced his own trial for these crimes, he condemned the state’s actions against him, declaring that he had been promised immunity in return for cooperating in the prosecution of Gohl, and stating that the murder charges against him were “a put up job.”73 This practically incredible story of criminal abuse against Klingenberg, an itinerant immigrant labourer, raised no suspicions among anyone but Gohl and his lawyers. Hoping to question Klingenberg for the defence, Gohl’s lawyer, W.H. Abel, had forced his way into Klingenberg’s cell on 6 April to conduct his own interrogation. To deter Abel from derailing their case, however, authorities had him forcibly removed from Klingenberg’s cell, then issued very public threats of disbarment should the attorney pursue this matter further.74 After being abducted, forcibly transported several thousand kilometres aboard the A.J. West, and interrogated with no access to legal counsel, Klingenberg confessed to killing Hadberg on Gohl’s orders. In an affidavit and in court testimony, Klingenberg swore that Gohl had also killed John Hoffman.75 As one newspaper stated, this “forged the final link in the chain of evidence that brands William Gohl as a cold-blooded murderer and leader of a gang of murderous thugs.”76 Receiving far less attention was Klingenberg’s belief that Hoffman and Hadberg had wanted to kill him, thereby establishing a motive for Klingenberg’s crime. Indeed, Klingenberg had engaged in a lengthy property dispute with Hadberg and Hoffman, and the two men had pulled guns on him and threatened his life.77 While prosecutors and journalists hammered away at Gohl both inside and outside the courtroom, Gohl’s defence team argued that he was the victim of an anti-union conspiracy. This line of defence became clear during jury selection when Gohl prompted his attorney to question potential jurors about their views on unions and strikes.78 Defence witnesses provided an alibi for Gohl on the night of the murder, while Gohl’s one-time lawyer, A.M. Abel, testified that McHugh, the labour spy, had tried to solicit a bribe from him. McHugh offered to refuse to testify and leave the county in return for a sizeable payment from Gohl’s defence team.79 Although the press remained unimpressed with Gohl’s defence, at least some observers remained convinced of his innocence. The defence strategy, as well as Gohl’s reputation as a union activist, motivated several of his fellow union members to act on his behalf. Not accepting the view that they were targets of Gohl’s machinations, union sailors

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harassed state witnesses during the trial and wrote anonymous letters threatening those responsible for Gohl’s plight.80 During the trial, Gohl’s successor as Sailors’ Union agent, Harry Lundberg, carried a gun into the courtroom to intimidate witnesses. After being expelled from the courtroom, Lundberg started a fight with Captain H. Smith of the A.J. West, the man who had kidnapped Klingenberg and transported him to Grays Harbor.81 Bessie Gohl, Billy’s wife and a prominent member of Aberdeen’s working-class community, also allegedly threatened state witnesses. The Chehalis County sheriff was so worried about Bessie possibly leading a rescue raid on Gohl’s prison transport that he kept details of the transport a closely guarded secret.82 Despite the great deal of time and energy expended during the investigation and trial, the state had difficulty convincing the jury of Gohl’s guilt. In early balloting, two jurors voted to acquit Gohl. After more than nine hours and seven ballots, and after being rebuffed by Judge Sheeks in their request to issue a compromise verdict by declaring Gohl guilty of second degree murder, the jury returned a verdict of “Guilty of murder in the first degree and recommend as much leniency as possible.”83 On May 24, Sheeks sentenced Gohl to “confinement at hard labor in the state penitentiary for life.”84 After seventeen years behind bars, Billy Gohl died on 3 March 1927.85 Gohl’s time behind bars began in February 1910. Thus, more than a century has passed since his removal from public life. What remains of Gohl are memories, myths, and reinterpretations of his life. These “afterlives” have been crafted by a variety of authors serving a host of diverse interests, including employers looking to remove a militant and effective labour leader and journalists pouncing on the opportunity to sell newspapers by running lurid headlines about a serial killer. After Gohl’s imprisonment, the myth’s plot elements remained remarkably consistent, although the actors looking to use the mythical serial killer narrative have changed over time. Gohl stories have long been popular among true crime and western Americana authors looking to sell books, as well as residents attempting to develop local tourism in an area hit hard by the declining timber industry. These afterlives have overtaken the actual substance of Gohl’s life and the lived struggles of his supporters and his times. Removing Gohl from office was the cornerstone of a lengthy antiunion campaign waged by Grays Harbor employers and their allies. The most immediate effect of the Gohl’s arrest was that it led to the condemnation of both the union agent and “his gang of murderers,” as one newspaper labelled his fellow unionists.86 By linking militant unionism – and especially membership in the SUP – to criminality,

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local newspapers and employers provided a pretext for the state to bust unions. Between February and May 1910, police arrested Gohl’s “gang,” the itinerant sailors who spent their time in Grays Harbor in one of the many riverside shacks Gohl had helped them build. In midFebruary, police dragged sailor Lauriz Jensen from his cabin and held him in the Aberdeen jail for eighteen days before charging him with killing a dog. Authorities then kept Jensen in jail until mid-May as they investigated the dog-killing charges.87 Given that its rank and file was in the crosshairs of law enforcement and that its former agent was serving a life sentence, one SUP member was not exaggerating in 1911 when he stated that “the Aberdeen local has been most unfortunate … The Gohl case was a heavy blow to our cause and even now the union is suffering from this source. We are trying to run the union ‘on the square.’”88 After Gohl’s 1910 arrest, the SUP receded from its leading role in the labour movement. The Sailors’ Union did not take a lead role in a single labour conflict in the 1910s, and in 1912, several sailors among its members joined the Marine Transport Industrial Workers’ Union, a radical maritime union.89 Arguably of greater significance, however, the men who led the anti-Gohl campaign gained the public’s esteem and trust, becoming guardians of “law and order” in the face of a violent monster who had used his union office to commit unspeakable crimes. Whether or not Gohl committed any murders, by February 1910, the perception that he was a violent criminal had become cemented in the public mind. This generated support for employers and authorities, whose “citizens’ committee” had taken the lead in the “investigation,” trial, and press campaign against Gohl. The businessmen who led the committee gained credibility with the public. In August 1911, banker W.J. Patterson, the celebrated head of the citizens’ committee, held court at the Aberdeen City Council, where he discussed his altruistic goals for paying labour spies for the Gohl investigation. Patterson “believed it was his duty and of every citizen’s duty who had contributed to this fund to assist in helping the city and the county in bringing this criminal to justice,” noted the region’s largest daily newspaper.90 Impressed with the work of the Thiel detectives, in May 1911, Aberdeen’s municipal government hired Thiel agent Lewis Templeman as its police chief. In a rather obsequious piece, one Aberdeen newspaper paid tribute to Templeman, noting that the Thiel agency had “loaned” him to the city of Aberdeen.91 The praise heaped upon employers, labour spies, and state authorities for their good work protecting law and order provided these groups with a great deal of latitude in their actions against future

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labour activists. In 1911 and 1912, many of the same employers who had opposed Gohl reorganized themselves into a new “citizens’ committee” tasked with crushing the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), a revolutionary industrial union that had developed a large local following in the early 1910s. Efforts by Wobblies to organize in Grays Harbor triggered a six-month coordinated attack on the radicals by local employers, strike-breakers, and state authorities. Employers formed citizens’ committees in Aberdeen and Hoquiam to disrupt and remove the IWW presence in Grays Harbor. The vigilantes joined Templeman in jailing activists, deporting Wobblies from town, dispersing their meetings with fire hoses, shooting and beating them, and raiding their halls.92 William J. Patterson described the group’s actions this way: “We organized that night a vigilante committee – a Citizens’ Committee, I think we called it – to put down the strike by intimidation and force … We got hundreds of heavy clubs of the weight and size of pickhandles, armed our vigilantes with them, and that night raided all the IWW headquarters, rounded up as many of them as we could find, and escorted them out of town.”93 The long-standing public interest in the Wobblies has informed the public about anti-union violence in Grays Harbor and throughout the Pacific Northwest. But the scores of anti-union beatings and deportations have done little to shift the narrative away from the myth of the Ghoul. Those who write about Gohl either omit or downplay the important role of labour spies in his ouster, and few have mentioned that those who led the anti-Gohl campaign – united into a citizens’ committee – were the same men who only a year later formed a new citizens’ committee and led campaigns of anti-labour violence. Tragically, as Gohl had long contended, social conditions in Grays Harbor – its industries, saloons, and unprotected waterfronts – made the region a dangerous place to live and work long after Gohl’s imprisonment. During the 1910s, Aberdeen had by far the highest violent death rate of any major Pacific Northwest city. As Gohl remained locked behind bars, floaters continued to surface in the region’s waterways. Dozens of Grays Harbor residents drowned during the 1910s.94 The absence of class analysis related to Gohl’s life and early twentiethcentury violence cannot be attributed to a lack of writings on the topic. In fact, few subjects in Pacific Northwest history have received as much attention as “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor.” By the time of Gohl’s death, writers had discovered a new use for the Ghoul, in that he helped them cast the region as an important site of historical violence, an exemplar of the Northwest version of the rough and gritty Wild West. A “wide open town,” Aberdeen boasted dozens of saloons and brothels, and accounts

Billy Gohl: Labour, Violence, and Myth   105

of deadly brawls, shoot-outs, and knifings coloured the town’s early history. The Northwest journalist turned Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce secretary Hollis B. Fultz helped popularize “the Ghoul of Grays Harbor” myth. He penned several true crime pieces casting Gohl as the lead character in Grays Harbor’s violent past.95 With titles such as “Grays Harbor Mass Murders” and “The Fleet of Floating Men,” writers joined Fultz in his claims about Gohl.96 Casting Grays Harbor as an important site of historical violence, with Gohl playing a leading part, set the scene for late twentieth-century attempts to turn Grays Harbor into a tourist destination. As a singleindustry region staring at a bleak future of industrial decline and longterm recession, Grays Harbor residents looked for sources of jobs to replace the loss of relatively high-paying jobs in the wood products industries. One potential source of employment was tourism. Grays Harbor is only a short distance from Washington’s beaches, some of the only rainforests in the continental United States, and the majestic Olympic Mountains. But Aberdeen and Hoquiam are not beach towns. They have long been industrial cities in decline, and though tourists might stop at them to buy supplies, few want to stay. To capture tourist dollars, local boosters hoped to follow the lead of well-known Wild West cities like Deadwood, South Dakota, and Tombstone, Arizona, marketing their city as a greener, wetter version of those notorious Old West towns.97 Designed to drum up regional tourism, a 1962 article in the Olympian newspaper explained that those interested in murder tourism needed to look no farther than Aberdeen: “Don’t apologize for living so far from the OK Corral, Tombstone’s Boothill, or the haunts of Billy the Kid. With[in] an easy drive of Olympia you can take your vicariousviolence loving visitor to the original stomping grounds of such legendary desperados as Billy Gohl, who reputedly dropped more than 100 seamen through trap doors in Grays Harbor water front dives.”98 As part of a 1969 local historical commission report, Grays Harbor librarian Anne Cotton wrote that Gohl “is Aberdeen’s only first-rate tourist attraction.” Looking to capitalize on the image of Aberdeen as an important site of violence and vice, Cotton advised the city to develop the neighbourhood that formerly housed the Sailors’ Union hall into an “entertainment and apartment house district,” as had been done “in other American cities with colorful history.”99 Works with titles like Weird Washington and Haunted Washington emphasize Gohl’s importance to local lore.100 Pacific Northwest newspapers have published a steady stream of Gohl articles designed to draw visitors to the Harbor, historic home to “Bloodthirsty Baddies,” where the “butchery of sailors” makes for good headlines.101

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In the twenty-first century, writings chronicling the union agent’s nefarious activities continue to roll off the presses. They all tell slight variations of the same story, one originally crafted in local newspapers and not seriously challenged over the past century. Like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, “Gohl the Ghoul” has achieved mythic status. But Gohl was convicted of a single murder of a man killed by the hand of another – John Klingenberg – who admitted to pulling the trigger. There has never been compelling evidence that Gohl was a serial killer, and the state’s investigation and trial were both too prejudiced to be reliable. It is possible that Gohl killed or ordered the murder of Hadberg, but to accept the version of history created in the imaginations of the union activist’s enemies shows a profound unfamiliarity with the historical context and an unwillingness to look at Gohl’s actual life and labour advocacy. As this chapter has shown, these efforts have had farreaching effects, not the least of which is the caging and silencing of a man who dedicated his life to promoting maritime workers’ interests. By repeating the same old story, these writers have exceeded the wildest expectations of the original myth-makers, for by focusing so much attention on a single man, they have masked much of the region’s violent past behind the legend of the “Ghoul.” NOTES 1 Stewart H. Holbrook, Holy Old Mackinaw: The Natural History of the American Lumberjack, ed. Comstock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 193. 2 See Paul S. Taylor, The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (New York: Arno Press, 1971); Hyman Weintraub, Andrew Furuseth: Emancipator of the Seamen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Stephen Schwartz, Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, 1885–1985 (San Francisco: Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, 1986). 3 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 9 July 1904. 4 Pamela Dean Aho, “The Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” in On the Harbor: From Black Friday to Nirvana, ed. John C. Hughes and Ryan Teague Beckwith (Aberdeen: The Daily World, 2001), 18–31; C.J. Lind, “The Port of Missing Men,” Tacoma News-Tribune, 23 February 1969; Richard J. Goodrich, “The Madman of Aberdeen,” Harborquest 3 (August 1992): 8–9, 23; Jan Holden, “Billy Gohl: The Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” Old West (Fall 1995): 26–30; Hollis B. Fultz, “The Constable of Cosmopolis,” in Famous Northwest

Billy Gohl: Labour, Violence, and Myth   107 Manhunts (Elma: Fulco, 1955), 27–52; Anne Cotton, “History of Aberdeen: 1775–1982,” in Aberdeen Comprehensive Development Plan, Phase I, Profile of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Grays Harbor Regional Planning Commission, 1969), 1–66; and C.J. March, The Ghoul of Grays Harbor: Murder and Mayhem in the Pacific Northwest (Minneapolis: Slingshot Books, 2019). 5 Aho, “The Ghoul of Grays Harbor”; Cotton, “History of Aberdeen,” 40; Murray Morgan, The Last Wilderness (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1955), 124. 6 Billy’s Bar and Grill, “Who Was Billy Anyway?,” http://billysaberdeen .com/history.html (accessed 10 November 2018). 7 “Serial Killers vs. American Icons: A Users’ Guide to Ensure a Gaffe -Free Conversation,” 28 June 2011, https://www.vanityfair.com/news /2011/06/serial-killers-vs-american-icons-a-users-guide-to-ensure-a -gaffe-free-conversation; Michael Newton, The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (New York: Facts On File, 2006), 97. 8 Schwartz, Brotherhood of the Sea, 16; Coast Seamen’s Journal (San Francisco), 14 September 1892, qtd in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Violence and Reform in American History (New York: New Viewpoints, 1978), 45. 9 Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: The Viking Press, 1931), 187–8. 10 For example, see Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 15 July 1906; Aberdeen World, 25 August 1908; Grays Harbor Post, 29 August 1908; Coast Seamen’s Journal, 3 April 1907; Hoquiam Washingtonian, 14 June 1906; Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 16 July 1904, 15 June and 15 July 1906. 11 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 6 May 1910. 12 Grays Harbor County was known as Chehalis County until 1915. “State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, Description of Convict William Gohl,” 3 March 1927, Billy Gohl Documentation, State Penitentiary Records, Southwest Washington State Archives, Olympia, (Hereafter SWA). 13 Aberdeen Herald, 7 February and 7 April 1910. 14 Daily Washingtonian, 5 February 1910. 15 For an introduction to the arrests of union activists in Washington State, see Aaron Goings, Brian Barnes, and Roger Snider, The Red Coast: Radicalism and Anti-Radicalism in Southwest Washington (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2019); and Heather Mayer, Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905–1924 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2018). 16 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 14 June 1906; Grays Harbor Post, 8 and 15 February 1908. 17 Fred Lockley, “Grays Harbor: The Largest Lumber-Shipping Port in the World,” Pacific Monthly 17, no. 6 (June 1907): 721. 18 Schwartz, Brotherhood of the Sea, 24.

108  Aaron Goings 19 Coast Seamen’s Journal, 26 January 1898; Weintraub, Andrew Furuseth, 37–8; Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront, 13. 20 Coast Seamen’s Journal, 7 August 1901. 21 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 9 June 1906; Taylor, The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, 24. 22 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 14 June 1906. 23 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 21 April 1906. 24 Grays Harbor Post, 4 May and 24 and 31 August 1907; 15 May 1909; Ed Van Syckle, The River Pioneers, The Early Days on Grays Harbor (Seattle: Pacific Search Press, 1982), 27. 25 Grays Harbor Post, 4 May, 24 and 31 August 1907; 15 May 1909. 26 Aberdeen World, 16 and 21 September 1908; 7 and 14 February 1909. 27 Grays Harbor Post, 8 June 1907; 15 May 1909. 28 Grays Harbor Post, 9 and 16 June 1906. 29 Grays Harbor Post, 8 September 1906; 23 February 1907; Weintraub, Andrew Furuseth, 77; Aberdeen Herald, 29 October 1906. 30 “Affidavit of Charles R. Sauers,” 14 July 1906, C.F. Drake and H. Van Tassel, Partners, Doing Business as Grays Harbor Stevedore Company vs. Aberdeen Branch Sailors Union of the Pacific, and Wm. Gohl, et al., (hereafter Drake) No. 6431, Billy Gohl Documentation, SWA; “Affidavit of James Beckey,” 14 July 1906, Drake, No. 6431, Billy Gohl Documentation, SWA. 31 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 5 and 6 June and 22 August 1906; “Affidavit of Wm. Gohl,” Nov. 5, 1906, State of Washington vs. William Gohl, No. 6499, Superior Court of the State of Washington, for Chehalis County (1906), SWA. 32 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 13 and 15 June 1906; Grays Harbor Post, 16 June 1906. 33 “Opinion of the Court, Case,” 26 July 1906, Drake, No. 6431, Billy Gohl Documentation, SWA. 34 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 1 September, 1906. 35 Aberdeen Herald, 8 November 1906; Robert Edward Lee Knight, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 171–2. 36 “Verdict,” 10 October 1906, State of Washington vs. William Gohl, No. 6499; “Judgment,” 9 July 1907; State of Washington vs. William Gohl, No. 6696, Supreme Court of the State of Washington, (1907), SWA. 37 Grays Harbor Post, 17 November 1906; Aberdeen Herald, 7 February 1910, 4; Aho, “The Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” 20. 38 Aho, “The Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” 20; Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 27 October 1906. 39 Grays Harbor Post, 15 September 1906. 40 Shingle Weaver, October 1906, February 1907; Chehalis County Vidette, 3 November 1906.

Billy Gohl: Labour, Violence, and Myth   109 41 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 13 September 1905; 5 November 1906. 42 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 18 and 29 October 1906. 43 Chehalis County Vidette, 26 October 1906. 44 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 3 November 1906. 45 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 30 October and 3 November 1906. 46 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 27 October 1906. 47 Chehalis County Vidette, 11 February 1906. 48 Grays Harbor Post, 11 May and 1 June 1907. 49 Cotton, “History of Aberdeen,” 40. 50 Grays Harbor Post, 11 and 25 May 1907. 51 Grays Harbor Post, 11 May 1907. 52 Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 22 June 1906. 53 Aberdeen Herald, 24 June 1909. 54 Aberdeen Herald, 12 October 1908; 27 September 1909; 27 June 1910. 55 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 10 April 1910; Aberdeen Herald, 2 August 1906. 56 Aberdeen Daily World, 30 December 1909. 57 Aberdeen Daily World, 10 August 1911; Aho, “The Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” 22. 58 Grays Harbor Post, 9 April 1910; Aho, “The Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” 23–4; Aberdeen Daily Bulletin, 16 June 1904; R.L. Polk & Company’s Grays Harbor Cities and Chehalis County Directory (1910), 170, 608; Aberdeen Herald, 9 May 1910. 59 Tacoma Daily-Ledger, 6 February 1910; Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 6 February 1910; Grays Harbor Post, 7 May 1910. 60 Grays Harbor Post, 15 October 1910; Aberdeen Daily World, 3 February 1910. 61 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 4 February 1910. 62 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 6 February 1910. 63 Aberdeen Daily World, 3 February 1910. 64 Aberdeen Daily World, 5 February 1910; Chehalis County Vidette, 11 February 1910; Aberdeen Herald, 16 May 1910. 65 Aberdeen Daily World, 4 February 1910 66 Aberdeen Daily World, 4 February 1910. 67 Seattle Daily Times, 6 February 1910. 68 Seattle Daily Times, 6 February 1910; Portland Oregonian, 8 February 1910. 69 Grays Harbor Post, 14 May 1910. 70 Aho, “The Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” 21. 71 Aberdeen Herald, 9 May 1910. 72 Grays Harbor Post, 9 April 1910; Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 9 April 1910. 73 Grays Harbor Post, 15 and 22 October 1910. 74 Aberdeen Herald, 11 April 1910.

110  Aaron Goings 75 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 6 April 1910; Aberdeen Herald, 9 May 1910; Grays Harbor Post, 9 April 1910. 76 Aberdeen Herald, 7 April 1910. 77 Grays Harbor Post, 9 April 1910. 78 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 3 May 1910. 79 Chehalis County Superior Court, Case No. 8505, “Order for Subpoena Issue,” 3 May 1910, SWA; Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 10 May 1910, 1; Aberdeen Herald, 12 May 1910. 80 Aberdeen Daily World, 7 February 1910. 81 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 10 May 1910. 82 Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 4 May 1910; Sheriff Ed Payette to C.S. Reed, Warden, 1 June 1910, Billy Gohl Documentation, SWA. 83 “Minute Book, Washington State Superior Court for Chehalis County,” 11 May 1910, State of Washington vs. William Gohl, No. 8505, Superior Court of the State of Washington, for Chehalis County (1910), Billy Gohl Documentation, SWA; “Verdict,” 12 May 1910, State of Washington vs. William Gohl, No. 8505, Superior Court of the State of Washington, for Chehalis County (1910), Billy Gohl Documentation, SWA; Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 13 May 1910. 84 Aberdeen Herald, 26 May 1910. 85 “Description of Convict, William Gohl,” Washington State Penitentiary Records, Billy Gohl Documentation, Southwest Regional Branch, WSA. 86 Aberdeen Herald, 7 April 1910. 87 Grays Harbor Post, 9 and 14 May 1910; Aberdeen Herald, 19 May 1910; Grays Harbor Washingtonian, 12 May 1910. 88 Aberdeen Daily World, 14 August 1911. 89 Industrial Worker, 29 February 1912. 90 Aberdeen Daily World, 10 August 1911. 91 Aberdeen Daily World, 17 and 18 May 1911; Aberdeen Herald, 18 May 1911; Grays Harbor Post, 16 November 1912. 92 For a detailed study of the IWW’s history in Grays Harbor, see Aaron Goings, “Red Harbor: Class, Violence, and Community in Grays Harbor, Washington,” PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, 2011. 93 Cited in Robert Walter Bruere, Following the Trail of the IWW: A Firsthand Investigation into Labor Troubles in the West, a Trip into the Copper and Lumber Camps of the Inland Empire with the Views of the Men on the Job (New York: New York Evening Post, 1918), 19. 94 Whiteside Funeral Home Records – Death Certificates, Washington State Library, Olympia, Washington. The Whiteside records provide a detailed analysis of the scores of drowning deaths in Grays Harbor during the 1910s; US Bureau of the Census, Mortality Statistics 1910, Eleventh Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), 274–5.

Billy Gohl: Labour, Violence, and Myth   111 95 Holbrook, Holy Old Mackinaw, 192. 96 Tacoma News-Tribune, 23 August 1929; 9 September 1994; Olympian (Olympia), 19 and 20 April 1956. 97 See Steven Lewis Yaffee, The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl: Policy Lessons for a New Century (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994), 160; “10,000 Are Expected to Lose Jobs to Spotted Owl,” New York Times, 28 April 1990. 98 Olympian, 24 April 1962. 99 Cotton, “History of Aberdeen,” 40. 100 Jeff Davis and Al Eufrasio, Weird Washington: Your Travel Guide to Washington’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets (New York: Sterling, 2008), 111–12; Adam Woog, Haunted Washington: Uncanny Tales and Spooky Spots from the Upper Left-Hand Corner of the United States (Guilford: Morris, 2013), 118–21. 101 Olympian, 24 April 1962; Tacoma News-Tribune, 6 June 1971.

5 Slow Violence and Hidden Injuries: The Work of Strip Mining in the American West ryan driskell tate

Jim Shrimplin, thirty-two, operated a front-end loader when the strike began. Now he spent each morning in a mud-splattered pickup parked near the mine entrance. He joined some two dozen bandit-faced workers who patrolled the gates of the Belle Ayr strip mine in the coalfields outside of Gillette, Wyoming. The picketers flagged down and cursed any strike-breakers who crossed their path. “I’m standing up for what I think is right,” said Shrimplin in the opening months of 1975. The miners bulged under their Carhartt jackets, like burly shoplifters, and hunkered into their cabs to escape the winter cold. They chain-smoked Lucky Strikes and listened to the barbed twang of country-and-western on the radio. The eyes of company security guards swerved on them whenever the workers rolled down their windows or got out to stretch their legs. “I’m going to see it through to the end,” said Shrimplin, in his months-long refrain, “no matter how long it takes.”1 The miners for the Amax Coal Company – Jim Shrimplin was one of them – worked in some of the largest coal mines in the world. The Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming stretched over four hundred miles, just south of the Canadian border, and accounted for about 20 per cent of the world’s coal reserves. During the Industrial Revolution, these western coalfields powered front-range homes and transcontinental railways but never amounted to a large share of national production. The mines stood too far from the major markets to supply them with sufficient fuel at an affordable price. Western coal was important mainly because it reduced the need to import eastern coal.2 The coalbeds of the western plains remained relatively unskimmed until the late 1960s, when energy companies, in an attempt to escape new social regulations and labour unrest in Appalachia, invested their capital in new ventures. Many energy executives stepped up the trend, already under way across the manufacturing sector, toward shifting production

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to more business-friendly enclaves – those areas with cheaper labour and weaker unions.3 The coal companies hired predominately inexperienced and non-union workers in the western states in order to foster the “union-free” environment that so eluded them in the rest of the country. The United Mine Workers of America represented some 125,000 miners around the nation but fewer than 4,900 west of the Mississippi. Arnold Miller, the union’s president, complained that non-union workers were now digging one-fifth of the nation’s coal – most of it from the Powder River Basin. “I find it hard,” he said, “to live with this statistic.” He added: “We have no intention of giving up the West.”4 In 1974 the union launched its “western campaign” to organize these non-union mines and stave off competing unions. The union picketed five strip mines in Montana and Wyoming that it believed harboured labour sympathies. Jim Shrimplin walked off the job at the Amax Coal Company with fifty-two co-workers and in solidarity with some five hundred striking miners scattered throughout the basin. The strikers met fierce resistance from the coal companies and local governments, which blanched at such uprisings in these “right to work” states. The company won a court injunction that barred miners from assembling near the property. The governors of Montana and Wyoming, both Democrats, then summoned the state police and the National Guard to clear the pickets from the mines.5 This flare-up of violence in the 1970s, sparked by the collision between striking coal miners and lawmen, hearkened back to the titanic coal wars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. A century earlier, the explosive and immediate hazards of coal mining had stoked fierce confrontations between workers and capitalists. The miners endured frequent accidents and capricious environments, not just in northern and southern Appalachia but wherever they scratched the earth. The coal miners in the Rocky Mountain states, like those in the East, struck for higher wages and fought to protect themselves from the plague of mine disasters. The boom-and-bust economy and fantasy of rugged individualism in the western mines fuelled what some contemporaries, and historians later on, considered an exceptionally fierce and violent class struggle between Capital and Labour on the “wageworker’s frontier.”6 Companies and workers confronted each other in sometimes violent displays of class conflict. The violence receded from public view once the spectacles ended and the workers returned to their jobs.7 The surface mines seemed to have eliminated the grisliest threats posed by coal-mining work. The blasting crews had ripped the roof off the mines in a colossal display of brute force, and the open-face design eliminated much of the violence that coal miners encountered

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underground: roof cave-ins, subterranean explosions, toxic fumes.8 Fatalities and severe injuries in coal country both plummeted after the increase in surface mining in the 1960s. Reports tracked the number of maimed limbs and dead bodies and other health effects easily ascertained. But they failed to account for other kinds of violence on the job – for people and for the environment. In truth, the surface mines had only inverted the violence of coal mining. The switch from underground to surface operations in the late 1960s reduced the hair-raising threats to miners but created a new set of incremental hazards. The environmental havoc of the big machines, which peeled back the surface of the earth, metastasized over the years as the coal mines and power plants of the Powder River Basin grew to become some of the largest carbon polluters on the planet.9 The “mass destruction” wrought by strip mining captured popular concern about environmental catastrophe, but ironically blinded watchdogs to the violence that miners continued to face in the “empty, eerie perfection” of the labour process.10 Many social commentators viewed these strip mines as an “industry without labourers or caretakers,” a “vast machine” that “will go on running when we are gone.”11 Yet as this chapter shows, the strip mines inflicted subtle, but less no significant, violence on the workers themselves. These men and women bore the brunt of the extractive transformation of the western plains, even if the violence and long-term harm of coal extraction remained hidden at the human scale, at the level of individual people. Literature professor Rob Nixon has called these elusive types of afflictions “slow violence” – a “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”12 The “slow violence” of strip mining was rooted in its immense and mechanized labour process. The coal managers maintained slim profits in the highly capitalized mines and hurried the pace of production in the name of dollars and cents. To keep the machines operating around the clock, supervisors browbeat workers into punishing shiftwork schedules and blamed them for any accidents that ensued. The workers complained to their supervisors about their conditions, but management framed collective gripes as “personal problems” and, in doing so, individualized the risk and violence of the coalfields. The coalfields had once symbolized the spectacular class war of the early twentieth century that erupted into violent contests against powerful forces. By contrast, the strip miners of the late twentieth century were battling “hidden injuries” that touched them in more internal and psychologically malignant ways.

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Close examination of the strip mines of the American West has contributed to historians’ ongoing efforts to rethink the nature of workplace “violence” under neoliberal capitalism. Many scholars now acknowledge the truism that the study of work is by definition the study of violence.13 In this regard, the “slow violence” of strip mining has captured what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb once termed the “internalizing of class conflict” – the ulcers, the shouting matches, the breakdowns. The real violence for coal miners like Jim Shrimplin began not when they went on strike and faced the National Guard but when they climbed back in their machines, gouged the earth, and faced the “hidden injuries” of the job.14 Shiftwork and Burnout The nation’s largest coal operators moved into the Powder River Basin in the late 1960s and early 1970s in an effort to establish non-union operations. The rank and file of the United Mine Workers of America had begun to demand more than the “pork-chop solidarity” that had characterized the mid-twentieth-century labour–management accord. They wanted a host of changes in workplaces to protect “health and safety,” as well as a greater say in the production process. These workers joined the 1960s movement for occupational health and safety that had formalized earlier calls for state and federal governments to protect workers from the hazards of unregulated workplaces – calls that had been going out since the late nineteenth century. When the UMWA failed to respond to its rank and file, a reform movement called the Miners For Democracy muscled for control.15 The MFD wanted to oust the existing leadership and replace it with spokesmen who would better represent their concerns. The coal executives recognized this emerging crisis of industrial democracy in the coalfields and looked for an escape hatch. They moved into the northern plains to make what one coal executive called a “fresh start.”16 The coal companies, as one journalist put it, intended to “best” the unions at their own “game” in the northern plains. The corporate officials kept work schedules and job protections comparable to those established by existing union contracts in order to undermine the pitch of UMWA organizers. Work schedules for non-union miners in the western plains, for instance, initially matched those for union miners. The strip miners worked eight-hour days, and some weekends, on crews of fifteen. Robert Wright, a local union organizer from Wyoming, worried that he couldn’t “promise the people better wages and benefits because they already have better wages and benefits.” The strategy worked so

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well that workers, like Jim Shrimplin at Amax, who favoured union representation joked that they had become the smallest minority group in the region.17 The coal companies wanted to keep the new workers happy, and the first generation of miners in the Powder River Basin enjoyed tolerable work lives. “There would be half-hour coffee breaks,” remembered Vic Jungers, an ironworker near the Big Sky mine in Colstrip, Montana, “long conversations, and delays to force overtime.”18 The coal managers, though, kept close watch on the production schedule and calculated their earnings by applying the laws of income versus operating costs. The big machines were the most expensive capital investments in the mines, and the managers worried about losses from “dead capital” if the machines idled for too long. “If I’m supposed to move five thousand cubic feet of dirt an hour, if that’s what the machine’s rated at,” said one miner, “you know damn well they [management] know it.”19 The companies tightened these production procedures through timesaving, trouble-saving devices. They figured that the big machines needed to run around the clock to eke every penny out of production process. By the mid- to late 1970s, the major firms in the basin had introduced new shiftwork schedules that kept the machines operating seven days a week, 360 days a year. The coal companies switched the western miners from eight-hour days to ten hours,20 and in exchange, reduced the length of the workweek. The workers welcomed the policy change and called it “the perfect schedule.” They liked the trade-off between longer days and longer weekends. “You still had time for a life after work,” explained one miner, “but you weren’t going in all the time like you did with the eights.” “Ten hours is just right,” another miner agreed. “You’re not too tired, but feel ready to go home, like you did a good day’s work.” The ten-hour day still provided the strip miners plenty of time to cut loose and socialize with their families and coworkers before and after work.21 Yet the ten-hour day failed to solve the main productivity problem in the mines. The workers needed to “tag up and lock out” their machines for every shift change. That put the machines out of commission for a half hour or more. The executives considered any delay a serious obstacle to steady production. “From the time you go to work, at eight o’clock in the morning,” one miner explained, “there’s not a piece that’s not moving on that equipment all day long.” The executives wanted to reduce the number of downtimes each day by getting rid of the midday “swing shift” and relying instead on two shifts to cover a full twentyfour-hour stretch.22

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Over the next several years, the major coal companies in the Powder River Basin implemented gruelling twelve-hour workdays. The coal miners, who had once fought and died for an eight-hour workday, found themselves facing some of the longest work hours in the country. To make matters worse, the companies now rotated the workers between days and nights. This rotating shiftwork schedule required the miners work a series of “blocs” every twenty-eight days: four nights on, three days off, three days on, one day off, three nights on, three days off, four days on, seven days off. The companies told the workers that twelve-hour days and rotating shifts would improve their work–life balance. They bragged that the new policy would give miners more days off, longer breaks, fewer commutes, more time for recuperation, and better family and social lives.23 Most miners struggled to adjust to the culture shock of the new shift schedule. They complained that the new hours, contrary to the company’s boasts, increased their fatigue, created more inflexible schedules, reduced their pay frequency, and cut short their time with family and friends. The workers in some mines speculated that the company had designed the long hours and rotating shifts just to burn them out and keep them complacent toward management. The feelings of exhaustion began to structure individual lives and cultures in the mines. Many workers felt so pressured to maintain the load count that they skipped lunch breaks and delayed bathroom stops. Some of the women who drove trucks in the mines even admitted that they changed their tampons on-the-go to avoid confrontations with supervisors over long bathroom breaks.24 “There is no break,” one coal miner explained, “they don’t pay you for that.” These twelve-hour days and constant rotations wrought a slow-paced violence on coal miners. They suffered from severe sleep deprivation. The constant flux between day shifts and night shifts taxed their physical and psychological well-being. Many workers complained about “hell week” – the stretch every month where they worked three-day shifts, followed by three-night shifts, with one day to recover. The block fooled their circadian rhythms; as one miner put it dryly, “you’re gonna get a certain amount of fatigue.”25 These excessive work schedules had detrimental health effects for workers – many of them unrecognized and unaccounted for. But there was ample evidence that long hours and shift work increased coronary heart disease, anxiety, depressive disorders, and other physical and mental health problems. A fifteenyear longitudinal study of paper mill workers, who worked shift-work schedules less intense than those of strip miners in the Powder River Basin, found that the incidence of heart disease doubled for people who worked these shifts for more than ten years.26

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The strip miners grew “mentally slow” on nights shifts as they hauled truck under the glare of the white lights instead of the sun. These working hours clashed with normal bodily rhythms. The foremen knew to watch their workers between the eighth and ninth hour of these hitches – the “witching hour” – when the crews showed poor concentration and sometimes fell asleep behind the wheel. “Nobody talks because they’re so tired” said one miner. “You’re like a zombie.” The workers spoke of their “permanent jet lag” from the lack of sleep and often relied on muscle memory to get them through their blocs. As one haul truck driver explained, “I’ll blink my eyes and it will be two hours later and my load count is still going, but I’m thinking, ‘Where have I been?’”27 The companies recommended that workers rest up before the big shifts but nevertheless kept tired miners on the roster and at the wheel. Rotating shifts interfered with regular eating habits, and many workers gained weight from carb-heavy fast food. “The whole state is a food desert,” said one miner from Gillette. “You’re going to be buying pre-packaged meals with lots of sodium.” The workers felt little motivation to exercise once they returned home from their sedentary shifts. Sleep deprivation compounded these effects by weakening immune systems, thus increasing rates of illness and weight gain. One study of sleep-deprived workers in the province of Quebec, Canada, noted that short sleep cycles caused greater instances of obesity than high lipid intake or lack of exercise. Another study found that sleep deprivation increased the risk of diabetes by elevating the stress hormone cortisol and impairing carbohydrate tolerance. The miners who took medications for these and other aliments reported that the shift rotations confused their nervous systems and made it difficult to keep track of their prescriptions. The miners, like many workingclass Americans, often worked sick and injured because they could not afford to lose twelve hours’ pay.28 The routine use of heavy equipment imprinted the afflictions of technology onto the worker’s bodies. “People,” as one miner put it, “their bodies hurt from working these jobs.” The sedentary nature of the work created further health concerns because the companies confined the workers to small spaces inside the machines that limited their physical movement. The workers bore the traces of the machinery: the carpal tunnel in their wrists, the twinge in their spines, the knots in their shoulders, the sprains in their elbows, the soreness in their knees, the aches in their kidneys, the paunch on their stomachs. The truck drivers jostled in the cabs on the industrial roads and suffered from back and kidney pains. The plant technicians received the most exposure to thick coal

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dust and reported frequent respiratory issues.29 These health impacts remained frustratingly obscure, at least compared to the mass devastation inflicted on the high-plains prairies, yet they posed real day-to-day consequences for working people. The long days and rotating shiftwork thinned personalities and tested everyone’s psychological limits. The anthropologist Jessica Smith interviewed dozens of coal miners for an ethnographic study of labour in Wyoming’s strip mines in the early 2000s. The workers, many of whom had worked in the mines since they opened in the 1970s, told her about their ongoing struggles to balance their “human” needs with the challenges and stresses of their work life, or as one miner put it, “how to work this schedule and not turn into a horrible person.”30 The exhausted workers lost their patience, snapped and snarled at one another, and survived only from the kinship ties that emerged from close day-today interactions. “These twelve-hour shifts” one miner told her, “bring out the worst in everyone.” The Australian researchers Georgina Murray and David Peetz recorded similar findings at the strip mines in the Bowen Basin, Queensland, where workers brought the psychic scars of the job home with them. Their short tempers, neglect, abuse, and addictions “spilled over” onto their families, taking the form of domestic turmoil and divorce.31 The scientific research backs these reports with long-term studies of what psychologists call “role overload” and “role conflict” (or what is popularly known as the elusive “work–life balance”). The scientific findings are almost intuitive: people report worse marriages, relationships, and physical and mental health when they’re chronically stressed and tired from work. Across the region, women bore the brunt of the inherent conflict between twelve-hour workdays and home life. The western companies had hired a large number of “lady miners” to crew the machines, in part to counter the bad publicity they faced back in Appalachia. During the 1960s and early 1970s, women had fought to claim their place in the underground mine workforce. The companies, keen to promote a post-Appalachia image, hired women as soon as the mines opened. The women miners had often exhausted their working-class job prospects in the service sector before entering the coal business. Most of them were either young and single, and intended to make mining a career, or in their mid-thirties and divorced, with children to support. They worked the twelve-hour shifts at the mine and then more hours when they came home to care for the children (studies found that women in the 1970s worked, on average, fifteen more hours a week than men). These women relied on the backstage support of child care from relatives and neighbours to get them through the “double day” and “second shift,”

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but as Arlie Hochschild has shown, working women often reported even more sicknesses and even less sleep than male co-workers.32 Especially in the first years of the new schedule, some men and women relied on illicit drugs to self-medicate. “There was definitely some going on,” remembered one miner. The companies in the late 1980s tested their workers for drugs at random, but during the heyday of the 1970s, before the intensification of the federal “War on Drugs,” they screened applicants only before employment, or after an accident, if at all. Many strip miners smoked, snorted, and popped amphetamines to enhance their performance. “It used to be meth people used to do,” one miner said, referring to the cheap “biker’s crank” of the 1980s. “Meth to stay up, like I said, these twelve-hour shifts, with sometimes four-hour commute there and back.” Some workers resorted to alcohol, marijuana, and painkillers to take the “edge” off their exhaustion and numb their aches. “Out in the plant, during the days of peak construction,” said Vic Jungers, at the Big Sky Mine in Colstrip, “the air would be sweet with the smell of smoked marijuana, and the mood would be mellow and easygoing.” “Now they’re seeing the Oxi abuse” another miner told me. “Other places have already been devastated by it, it took a little longer to get here.” The problem, it turns out, was all too common in professions with long hours.33 The incremental threat from twelve-hour days and rotating shiftwork took years to accrete in the bodies and minds of workers. The workers and their families, though, recognized the untenable effects right away. They talked about how fast the workers aged. “Men used to work until they were sixty-five,” said one miner’s wife, but she didn’t imagine her young husband lasting that much longer. “I have seen him deteriorate.” The miners never could trace the shouting matches, the heart attacks, the diabetes, the addictions, or any other illnesses back to the coal companies, at least not in the way eastern miners drew a direct connection between their jobs and black lung disease or roof cave-ins. The strip mines, nonetheless, promoted unhealthy habits that plagued these workers, and in their later years, sometimes killed them,. The miners often spoke as if the companies were exposing them to inhumane conditions. “I’m not covered in hair,” one miner protested of the night shift, “and I’m not nocturnal.”34 They recognized the inherent violence in their long hours that caused them to sacrifice vacations and time with their families. Nevertheless, they often went out of their way to justify putting in long hours. For both employees and their bosses, the shiftwork schedules demonstrated commitment and loyalty to the employer and the job. The miners viewed their work as important – they “powered” the nation. The companies framed their long hours as

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a marker of the miners’ indispensability and importance. Some of the miners thought that hacking it signalled their toughness and strength. They claimed to work harder and longer than other blue-collar workers in the region; in their minds at least, this elevated their social status. “Working Safely” During the first years of the coal rush, public pressure to improve safety records made the coal companies much more conscious of existing hazards. The federal government had been scrutinizing the safety hazards of underground coal mining ever since the early twentieth century, establishing the Bureau of Mines in 1910, but had only begun to regulate operating conditions in a systematic way after passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969. The bill created the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which enhanced the inspection and enforcement powers of the Bureau of Mines and tightened safety regulations, much like its better-known cousin, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), created two years later. Privately, the companies still viewed safety procedures as an impediment to production. Bob James, the supervisor of Jim Shrimplin at the Belle Ayr strip mine, said that most of the new mine legislation applied to underground mines, yet he needed to enforce the same regulations on the surface, which created burdensome bureaucratic “red tape.”35 The UMWA gave “health and safety” a prominent place in its organizing campaigns in the postwar years. By the 1960s, the union’s National Agreement listed health and safety before all other provisions of employment. The rank-and-file miners in Appalachia soon adopted “Safety – or Else” as a battle cry for the union. The union reformers in the MFD criticized the union’s leadership for not going far enough to protect workers from the most capricious environments underground. The union’s safety department soon expanded to forty-two people, and the new union president Arnold Miller, who rose to prominence on a campaign against black lung disease, put safety at the centre of his agenda.36 The coal companies established their first mines in the Powder River Basin as part of an experiment to improve the industry’s tattered image. The strip miners faced far fewer disabling injuries or fatalities than underground workers, who endured explosions, entrapments, and black lung.37 The coal companies capitalized on the presumed safety of the open-pit workscape. They claimed that surface mines lessened the dangers to miners on the job and that their workers no longer bore the brunt of mining’s impacts in the form of severe injury and death.38 They

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launched an extensive public relations campaign in the 1970s and 1980s to educate the public on their “forward-thinking” safety procedures. Local newspapers featured full-page advertisements with straplines like “We are committed to producing Wyoming Coal SAFELY.” But the new regulations for health and safety never made capitalism as safe as the companies or the government agencies claimed. The strip miners called the two weeks on the job “death week” because their training involved so many grisly videos of industrial accidents. New recruits learned in safety seminars that the wheels of the large haul trucks could crush a pickup truck. The managers and mobile mechanics manoeuvred around the mines in these road-sized vehicles, and the drivers of the big machines couldn’t always see them. The operators drove on the left rather than the right side of the road, which meant, as one manager put it, that small cars sometimes “get tangled up with 170-ton haul trucks.” The backup beep of a truck was hard to hear over the grinds and clanks of the operation, and machines ran over smaller equipment in the field. As one manager put it, “you’ve got such large equipment and such limited visibility out of the large equipment that it still is quite dangerous if a person is unfamiliar with the equipment.” “That was always the most nerve-wracking,” remembered one miner from Gillette. “You could easily run over one of those little four-by-four work trucks and just think you kicked up a piece of coal or something in the road.”39 The coal companies put the onus on workers to ensure compliance with countless safety problems in the mines. The floor of the coalfield was tangled in electrical wires that threatened to electrocute workers if trucks ran over them. The workers needed to wear “hot gloves” that had been tested for holes before they touched the cables, but few carried them in the cabs. The blasting crews faced the constant danger of malfunctioning explosives since the failure to tamp a hole could “kick out” the blast. The roads broke up over time under the weight of the multi-ton machinery and, without upkeep, wore down the equipment and human bodies. The cabs in the 1970s had none of frills of more contemporary sports-utility interiors, and operators talked about getting “beat up” by their equipment. At the same time, the walls of the mines rose anywhere from 20 to 200 feet, and not even the big machines could save a worker from an avalanche of the loose rock, not to mention the more everyday risk of a rollover on a sharp corner or steep grade.40 The plant and silo workers weaved their way through tight quarters, surrounded by industrial conveyor belts powerful enough to rip arms from their sockets. “I mean it’s just a really dangerous place to work,” one miner said. “The lady that I worked with on my shift, I remember

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when she was training us one of the things she did was she took off one of her work gloves and threw it into one of the rollers and chewed it up and spit it back out onto the belt line. She said, ‘That’s what happens.’” After a few months later, that miner found herself working in the silo and almost losing a limb in the pulley system. “I unhooked my hose and started washing everything down,” she remembered, “it got caught on something and I kind of jerked it a little bit to untangle it and came within inches of getting snagged by the belt line.”41 The coal companies instituted formal safety programs to reduce workscape accidents. The new teams of safety managers monitored the areas for potential hazards. They kept a sprinkler truck nearby to hose down the coal dust and lit the mines to improve visibility at night. The supervisors required miners to wear hardhats, coveralls, steel-toed boots, safety googles, earplugs, gloves, and even respirators. Many miners suspected that the companies were implementing these safety measures to protect their profits rather than their workforce. “They never framed it as an issue like ‘oh hey guys, we’re looking out for you,’” one miner said. “Honestly, I don’t think anybody’s that naive.” The companies, she said, “they’re basically covering their own ass” because “it had nothing to do with being benevolent – no ‘we really care about our employees’ – they didn’t want the extraneous cost of health care or some of the things like that.”42 Actually, the pure exhaustion from the twelve hours of repetitive haul truck driving and shovel work posed one of the severest safety challenges at the mines. The miners talked about how they reached their physiological limits and struggled to function. The workers waned in vigilance and precision. Some studies suggest that miners lost so much of their “situational awareness” that they became functionally intoxicated, like drunk drivers. Other studies have shown that twelve hourshifts increased hazard rates on the job by almost 40 per cent. “The worst night I ever had working there,” one Gillette miner told me, “was on my shift, and somebody had backed their dump trunk too far into the trunk dump, where it goes into the crusher, took off a whole wall of aluminium siding, didn’t even notice. It went through the crusher, it went up the belt line, and got stuck at the top of the silo. It’s just one of those things, like I said, the guy didn’t even notice. It was night shift, he was tired.”43 There’s no single word in English that captures the negative health consequences of working long hours. The concept of “burnout” comes close, at least in recognizing that human beings have natural limits. The Japanese and Chinese, though, have words that capture the high stakes of long hours – karoshi and guolaosi, which roughly translate to “death from overwork.”44

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The corporate safety program transformed workers from potential victims of the work process into offenders.45 The notion of the “careless worker” provided employers with an easy scapegoat in the wake of workplace disasters. These strategies stemmed from earlier corporate schemes that blamed unsafe workers for injuries and deaths on the job. During the 1920s, industrial giants like DuPont, General Motors, and Standard Oil claimed that accident-prone workers (or racial groups of workers) created hazards in the workplace. The labour relations scholar Bob Barnetson has shown, though, that the very concept of “workplace accident” was a social construction designed to absolve the employer. The causes of most accidents are well-known to a company beforehand, and by treating every incident as an unintentional mishap, employers obscure the risks their employees take for the sake of corporate profits.46 Meanwhile, in the western plains, the coal managers took advantage of their good rapport with state safety inspectors to receive notice of impending site inspections. The managers then brought the worksite up to code and tried to absolve the company from blame by making the workers responsible for making good “choices.”47 Most coal safety procedures collected information on behaviour without providing any real improvements in practice. The mine supervisors in the Powder River Basin, for instance, encouraged workers to selfreport the details of “near misses” and “freak accidents.” They tracked the names of the people involved, and managers tried to identify “risk patterns,” which more often than not boiled down to rooting out repeat offenders. The workers found to be the most “unsafe” received warnings, expulsions, and firings. The coal companies required supervisors to collect safety reports from each worker and provided monetary incentives to complete them on time. These reports heightened the tension between workers and the mine supervisors because those supervisors expected the workers to snitch on their co-workers. The miners preferred to handle things informally and socialize the risk of the job. They tried to overcome the problems they faced, taking charge of their own safety, if necessary. “If somebody did something they shouldn’t be doing,” one miner said, “you didn’t tell the foreman, you’d tell them.” “I’ll guarantee that we’ll never see them make any big changes,” one miner said, “because it’d be too expensive.”48 The coal companies turned pleas for safety into justifications for intensified surveillance. Mine work once hidden underground had been exposed at the surface. The increased visibility of miner’s work ratcheted up the pressure on workers to produce and sped up the “velocity of throughput.” The managers could observe workers from great distances, and whenever necessary, they used closed-circuit

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television cameras and crude computer software systems to keep an eye on their progress. These networks monitored truck activity and could even report the exact angle at which a bulldozer was working. These systems recorded the precise moves of the equipment against the time clock. One dragline operator noted that the machines measured “how long it takes you to swing, how long it takes you to grease, how long it takes you to load your bucket and go to the bank, how long it takes you to dump it, and how long this and that.”49 The managers issued every machine a citizens’ band radio, as well as handhelds for the mechanics and other mobile employees. The main channel, where only one person could speak at a time, covered the entire workplace. The line-of-sight channels allowed workers in close range to communicate separately but were easily monitored by anyone in dispatch who tuned in. The tasks were so integrated that to be unreachable – unresponsive to the radio or missing from the truck queue – not only slowed or even halted operations but also raised questions about a worker’s loyalty to the mine’s success. The workers had little time to talk without management’s surveillance, even if they wanted to share their collective grievances. During the closing months of 1974, the UMWA made health and safety a spearhead of its western campaign. Strikes in the Powder River Basin remained infrequent. The union needed to organize the workers on a company-by-company basis after its effort to form a regional multiemployer bargaining group (similar to the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, or BCOA, back in Appalachia) unravelled in 1975. Some miners, like Jim Shrimplin, nevertheless found it necessary to protest workplace conditions. They pointed out that the safety provisions of the companies and rival unions gave the managers too much leeway and control. The union representatives turned safety into a key issue in their organizing drive among the rank and file. Jim Shrimplin and his co-workers fought for a better contract and safety precautions in 1975 in the longest non-BCOA strike since 1950. The strikes lasted two months, but safety complaints struggled to gain traction in the region. The coal miners in the western plains experienced the threats of strip mining without being able to prove that they suffered any immediate damages from them. They suspected that the management of their workplace was the cause of new physical and mental health afflictions, but the clinical reports on health and safety showed otherwise (few deaths, few major accidents). The miners themselves often viewed their circumstances through the lens of the mythic “frontier.” The companies made a point of hiring operators with rural farm backgrounds and with no connections to industrial unionism.

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They then promoted the trope of the “cowboy” to encourage the miners to embrace a hardened exterior in the face of economic strictures and exploitive conditions. Many workers subscribed to these tropes, not because of false consciousness, but because it valued their rural identities in the urban and “post-industrial” society. The risk of precarity taught them to bury their fears, or as the miners liked to say on the job, to “cowboy up.” Amax’s success in circumventing the union’s demands foreshadowed the future of the UMWA in the region. The coal companies in this way cleaved the western miners from their eastern counterparts and established what they had sought ever since the late 1960s: the industry’s first non-union stronghold. The strip mines of the Powder River Basin provide insight into the individualization of violence over the course of the late twentieth century. The workers faced countless problems on the job: the long days and rotating shiftwork hammered them into sleep-deprived operators with short tempers, countless aches and pains, and newfound addictions. These individual forms of “slow violence” posed serious externalities in the mines, including unsafe conditions and frazzled workers, but the miners failed to overcome the corporate power of Amax, by then one of the largest coal suppliers in the nation. The lack of ritualized or direct violence and strike activity at the mines over the course of the late twentieth century promoted the mistaken belief that workers were content with the status quo. Many watchdogs and public commentators neglected the plight of workers altogether. They lumped the workers and coal companies together and then blamed them for enabling the environmental catastrophe that was bringing about global climate change. These commentators neglected, in other words, the silent “me” expression of class conflict in the late twentieth century. The real class war in the United States since the 1970s, as the historian Jefferson Cowie has argued, faces inward, focused on “hidden injuries.”50 The miners fought to protect themselves from the cumulative physical and psychological impacts that had emerged out of corporate strategies and labour processes. The coal companies structured a work routine in the 1970s that broke apart the occupational togetherness of coal miners. The region’s weak unions and expendable labour force meant that coal miners who complained about their long hours or dangerous conditions found themselves out of work or, worse in their minds, ringing up customers at the local fast food chain. The miners endured the incremental “slow violence” of the job and kept their “hidden injuries” within the workplace to protect their livelihoods from the capricious politics of neoliberal capitalism.

Slow Violence and Hidden Injuries  127 NOTES 1 “Belle Ayr Miners Call Strike,” Gillette News Record, 16 January 1975, 1; Robert Dorkin, “Companies in West Thwart United Mine Workers,” High Point Enterprise, 19 June 1975, 12. 2 There was almost no coal production in the West before 1870, and productive mines accounted for only about 10 per cent of US coal by 1910. By 1965, only 4 per cent of US coal came from Western mines. The earliest efforts to strip-mine the region date back to the 1920s, though those small gas- and electric-powered shovels appear quaint today compared to the storied machines that were ripping up these ecosystems a half-century later. On early Western mines, see Robert A. Chadwick, “Coal: Montana’s Prosaic Treasure,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1973): 18–31; William S. Bryans, “A History of Transcontinental Railroads and Coal Mining on the Northern Plains to 1920,” PhD diss., University of Wyoming, 1987; Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 256–7. For more data on coal, see US Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Coal Data: A Reference (Washington, D.C.: Energy Information Administration, 1989), 15; Robert A. Wright, “Revival of Coal Mining in Energy Crisis Divides West,” New York Times, 2 April 1973, 55; James S. Cannon, Mine Control: Western Coal Leasing and Development (New York: Council on Economic Priorities, 1978), 109; National Academy of Sciences, Coal as an Energy Resource: Conflict and Consensus, Academy Forum (Washington, D.C.: 1977), 35. 3 This was a long-standing tactic of capitalists, and one they accelerated in the 1970s. The best work on this remains Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 4 “UMW Boost Picketing Drive,” Billings Gazette, 18 January 1975, 6; “Amax Starts New Hiring in Continuing Union Dispute,” Gillette News Record, 3 April 1975; Warren Brown, “Powder River Basin Mines Try to Best Unions at Benefits Game,” Washington Post, 1 July 1981; Roger Clawson, “UMW Drives to Organize Crow,” Billings Gazette, 25 March 1978. 5 “Guard on Alert after Mine Clash,” The Missoulian, 23 January 1975, 1. 6 See for instance Carlos A. Schwantes, “The Concept of the Wageworkers Frontier: A Framework for Future Research,” Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 1 (January 1987): 39–55; James Whiteside, Regulating Danger: The Struggle for Mine Safety in the Rocky Mountain Coal Industry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); A. Dudley Gardner and Verla R. Flores, Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mining (Bouler: Westview Press, 1989); Yuji Ichioka, “Asian Immigrant Coal Miners and

128  Ryan Driskell Tate the United Mine Workers of America: Race and Class at Rock Springs, Wyoming, 1907,” Amerasia 6 (1979): 1–23; Jonathan H. Rees Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914–1942 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2010); Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 7 On the upsurge in labour in the 1970s, see Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s (New York: Verso Books, 2010); and Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 8 On the switch from underground to surface mines in the region’s copper mines, see Brian Leech, The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana, and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018); and Timothy LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009). For the argument that workers fought at the surface over what they experienced underground, see Andrews, Killing for Coal. 9 James Hansen, “Coal-fired Power Stations Are Death Factories. Close Them,” The Guardian, 14 February 2009. See Jared Diamond’s coverage of Montana in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2006). 10 There is a large literature by scholars and journalists on strip mining (mostly focused on Appalachia) that pays attention to the environment but not workers. See Wendell Berry, “The Landscaping of Hell: StripMine Morality in East Kentucky,” in Long-Legged House [1965] (New York: Counterpoint, 2012); Richard Cartwright Austin and Peter Borrelli, eds., “The Strip Mining of America: An Analysis of Surface Coal Mining and the Environment” (New York: Sierra Club, July 1971); Erik Reese, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006); and Jedediah Purdy, “The Violent Remaking of Appalachia,” The Atlantic, 21 March 2016. For an excellent exception, see Jessica Smith Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 11 Richard Martin, Coal Wars: The Future of Energy and the Fate of the Planet (Boston: St Martin’s Press, 2015), 95. 12 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2; see also James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996).

Slow Violence and Hidden Injuries  129 13 Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking, 1931); Andrews, Killing for Coal; Paul F. Lipold and Larry Isaac, “‘Striking Deaths’ at Their Roots: Assaying the Social Determinants of Extreme Labor–Management Violence in US Labor History, 1877–1947,” Social Science History 38, nos. 3–4 (2014): 541–75; Stephen Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in TwentiethCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 14 On how violence “mutated” to became more individualized in the second half of the twentieth century, see Jeremy Milloy, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017); and Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005). For “hidden injuries” see the classic examination of how class becomes internalized: Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); and Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974). 15 On occupational health and safety, see, for instance, Michelle Follette Turk, A History of Occupational Health and Safety: From 1905 to the Present (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018); Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Nicholar Askounes Ashford, Crisis in the Workplace: Occupational Disease and Injury: A Report to the Ford Foundation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). 16 See Robert A. Wright, “Revival of Coal Mining in Energy Crisis Divides West,” New York Times, 2 April 1973, 55. The “labor–management accord” has come under scrutiny by labour historians, but the leadership of the United Mine Workers did broker a deal with the major coal companies to ensure productivity in the 1950s and 1960s. The cosy ties between the union and the companies encouraged many rank-and-file miners to protest at the end of the decade. See Paul F. Clark, The Miners’ Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). On the “labor–management accord,” see Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), ch. 3: “A Labor-Management Accord?” 17 Jack K. Nisselius, “Labor, Industry – New to Wyoming,” Gillette News Record, 10 April 1975); Brown, “Powder River Basin Mines.” 18 Michael Parfit, Last Stand at Rosebud Creek: Coal, Power, and People (New York: Dutton, 1980), 219. 19 Terkel, Working, interview with Bob Sanders, strip miner, 20.

130  Ryan Driskell Tate 20 Carl Rexroad, “Four Contention Points Continue in Strike,” Gillette News Record, 17 April 1975; “Amax Expansion to Triple Output,” Gillette News Record, 20 September 1973. 21 Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, 70–1. 22 Megan Knight Kerns, strip miner, interview with author 17 November 2017 (transcript and tapes in author’s possession); Bob Sanders in Terkel, Working, 19–21. 23 See Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, 22. 24 Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, 82. 25 Bob Sanders in Terkel, Working, 19–21. 26 The epidemiological studies include Anders Knutsson, Bjorn G. Jonsson, Torbjom Akerstedt, and Kristina Orth-Gomer, “Increased Risk of Ischaemic Heart Disease in Shift Workers,” The Lancet 338 (1986): 89–92; and Mark. L. Bryan, “Workers, Workplaces, and Working Hours,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 45 (December 2007): 735–59. See also Jeffrey Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance – and What We Can Do about It (New York: Harper Business, 2018), 125. Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, 22, 82, 197. 27 For research on twelve-hour shifts and fatigue, see R.R. Rosa, “Extended Workdays and Excessive Fatigue,” Journal of Sleep Research 4 [supplement] (1995): 51–6. For miner’s perspectives on fatigue, see Terkel, Working, 20; Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, 76; and Megan Knight Kerns, interview with author. 28 For scientific research, see A.E. Dembe et al., “The Impact of Overtime and Long Work Hours on Occupational Injuries and Illnesses: New Evidence from the United States,” Occupational and Environmental Medicine 62 (2005): 588–97; Drew Dawson and Kathryn Reid, “Fatigue, Alcohol, and Performance Impairment,” Nature 388 (1997): 1–3; J.-P. Chaput, A.M. Sjodin, A. Astrup, J-P. Despres, C. Bouchard, and A. Tremblay, “Risk Factors for Adult Overweight and Obesity: The Importance of Looking beyond the ‘Big Two,’” Obesity Facts 3 (2010): 320–7; G. Copinschi, “Metabolic and Endocrine Effects of Sleep Deprivation,” Essential Pharmacology 6 (2005): 341–7; and Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck, 133–4. For miner quotes, see Megan Knight Kerns interview with author, and Bob Sanders in Terkel, Working, 19–21. 29 Jessica Smith Rolston, “The Politics of Pits and the Materiality of Mine Labor: Making Natural Resources in the American West,” American Anthropologist 115, no. 4 (2013): 586. 30 Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, 76. 31 Georgina Murray and David Peetz, “‘You Get Really Old, Really Quick’: Involuntary Long Hours in the Mining Industry,” Journal of Industrial

Slow Violence and Hidden Injuries  131 Relations (2001); and, with Olav Muurlink, “Work-Related Influences on Martial Satisfaction amongst Shiftworkers and Their Partners: A Large, Matched-Pair Study,” Community, Work, and Family 17, no. 3 (2015): 288–307. 32 President’s Commission on Coal, The American Coal Miner: A Report on Community and Living Conditions in the Coalfields (Washington, D.C.: US GPO, 1980), 198; Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (New York: Viking, 1989). 33 For the Vic Jungers quote, see Parfit, Last Stand at Rosebud Creek, 219; for the rise in abuse of prescription painkillers in coal country, see Megan Knight Kerns interview with author. See also Haeyoun Park and Matthew Block, “How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Rippled across America,” New York Times, 19 January 2016. See also Rolston, Mining Coal, Undermining Gender; and Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck. 34 For similar observations about aging in the strip mines in Australia, see Murray and Peetz, “‘You Get Really Old, Really Quick’”; and Georgina Murray and David Peetz, Women of the Coal Rushes (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 205–6, 209. 35 “Amax Could Double Production,” Gillette News Record, 3 January 1974, 1; US Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor, Legislative History, Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (Washington D.C.: US GPO, 1970). 36 Charles Perry, Collective Bargaining and the Decline of the United Mine Workers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Industrial Research Unit, 1984), 34; Curtis Seltzer, Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985), 131. 37 President’s Commission on Coal, Coal Data Book (Washington D.C.: US GPO, 1980), 141; US Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, Injury Experience in Coal Mining 1980, Information Report IR 1133, 1981, 13; Bureau of Mines Annual, “Bituminous Coal and Lignite Production,” data for 1975–1980. 38 Brown, “Powder River Basin Mines”; Seltzer, Fire in the Hole, 131. 39 “Coal Mine Accident Classification Sheet,” Herbert N. Northrup Industrial Research Records, box 2, file: “Coal Industry Assorted Data, 1968–1981,” Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware. Megan Knight Kerns interview with author; Dave Bennett interview with Mary Eileen Bookhout, Fort Casper Museum Archives, Casper, Wyoming, Box 49, 84.85.1, 6 February 1984. 40 “Coal Mine Accident Classification Sheet,” Herbert N. Northrup Industrial Research Records, box 2, file: “Coal Industry Assorted Data, 1968–1981,” Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware; Jessica Smith Rolston, “The Politics of Pits,” 587; Rolston, “Risky Business: Neoliberalism and Workplace Safety

132  Ryan Driskell Tate in Wyoming Coal Mines,” Human Organization 69, no. 4 (2010): 331–42; Beverly Sauer, The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003). 41 Lucy Roberts interview with Eileen Bookhout, Fort Casper Museum Archives, Casper, Wyoming, box 49, 84.85.1, 24 October 1983; Megan Knight Kerns interview with author. 42 Gail Mansfield, Tour Guide, Amax Coal Company interview with Eileen Bookhout, in Gillette, Wyoming, Fort Casper Museum Archives, Casper, Wyoming, box 49, 84.85.1, 16 July 1984; Megan Knight Kerns interview with author. 43 Megan Knights Kern interview with author; Murray and Peetz, Women of the Coal Rushes, 205–6. 44 Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck. 45 For more on this strategy, more broadly, see Garry C. Gray, “The Responsibilization Strategy of Health and Safety: Neoliberalism and the Reconfiguration of Individual Responsibility for Risk,” British Journal of Criminology 49, no. 3 (2009): 326–42. 46 Bob Barnetson, The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada (Athabasca: Athabasca University Press, 2010). 47 Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender, 49, 54. 48 Ibid. 49 Bob Sanders in Terkel, Working, 20. 50 Jefferson Cowie, Staying Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2010).

6 The Murder of Lori Dupont: Violence, Harassment, and Occupational Health and Safety in Ontario sarah jessup

The twelfth of November 2005 was the last day that Lori Dupont arrived at her job as a recovery room nurse in Windsor, Ontario. Shortly after starting her shift at Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital that day, Lori was stabbed to death by a fellow hospital employee, anaesthesiologist Marc Daniel, with whom she had a previous domestic relationship. Police later found Daniel unconscious in his car; he had injected himself with a lethal dose of a narcotic known to be used in the hospital. Three days later, he died. Hospital officials immediately treated the murder-suicide as a sad case of domestic violence that just happened to occur in the workplace. But as news coverage revealed more and more information, the question was increasingly raised as to whether Lori’s employers could have done more to ensure her safety and prevent her death. Lori’s family, friends, co-workers, and labour union felt the answer was yes. This chapter traces how the murder of Lori Dupont, as one of a series of violent acts against women in the workplace, ultimately came to catalyse a shift in understandings of domestic violence, also referred to as intimate partner violence, as a workplace safety issue in Ontario. Lori’s murder continues to be remembered as a critical impetus for the passing of Bill 168 in 2009, which amended the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) to officially designate domestic violence a potential risk to health and safety in the workplace. Drawing on coroner reports, newspaper coverage, legislation, legislative debates, and union publications, all placed in the context of existing scholarly research, I demonstrate that responses to Lori’s murder by family, activist groups, the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA), and the public boosted awareness of and engagement around the issue of violence against women, the duty of employers to provide a safe workplace, and the significance of harassment as a precursor to violence.

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Media coverage in the local newspaper, the Windsor Star (the Star) played a key role in this process by calling out employer negligence as complicit in domestic violence; helping to facilitate dialogue between Lori’s family, activist groups, and the ONA with the public; and supporting and contributing to the efforts of these groups, particularly through demands for a public inquest into Lori’s death. The Star revealed to readers that Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital (the Hospital) ignored warning signs and missed several opportunities to create a safer work environment for Lori. In contrast to typical representations in the media that can work to minimize violence against women – or even blame victims of violence1 – coverage of the murder-suicide provided an opportunity for open discussions around worker rights to safety in the workplace, ongoing risks of violence in health care, the problem of physician privilege, and the contributing role of gender expectations and power imbalances in workplace safety concerns. However, as legislative debates and ongoing discussions reveal, what constitutes a workplace health and safety issue, and the degree to which an employer is or should be responsible for the “personal” threats faced by workers, was and is contested terrain, changes to legislation notwithstanding. Questions remain whether amendments to the OHSA are sufficient, and whether they have made any real difference in terms of affording protection to workers. For reasons that are explored in this chapter, Lori Dupont’s death galvanized support from groups seeking to improve women’s lives, both at home and at work. Though it is frequently mentioned in relation to broader discussions of workplace violence and often cited as an example to highlight the role of specific cases in motiving changes in policy and legislation,2 this case has been given little focused attention in academic writing. The lessons that were learned, and that can continue to be learned, from the murder of Lori Dupont render this case an important one to examine more deeply. Ongoing efforts to raise awareness of the continuum of violence that often starts with harassing behaviours still hold Lori’s case as a heartbreaking example to learn from. This chapter places the death of Lori Dupont within a larger discussion of gendered violence and workplace safety for women – a burgeoning discussion that is increasingly recognizing that domestic violence is often a workplace issue. Violence against Women and the Murder of Lori Dupont Violence against women is not a new phenomenon, and historians and researchers on contemporary issues for women have revealed the long-standing attitudes and assumptions that have rendered women

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vulnerable to violence throughout history and in the present moment. This chapter builds on such literature. Scholarship on workplace sexual harassment, including early works such as by Backhouse and Cohen in 1978, demonstrate how gendered power relations were and are reflected in policy, law, and social norms.3 This case study contributes to examinations of violence against women that look at the way gendered norms and patriarchy naturalize men’s dominance over women, particularly in the legal and social context of Canada.4 I draw on work that examines how both law and policy normalize, reinforce, and perpetuate men’s violence against their female partners.5 Joan Sangster shows that historically, men’s violence has been normalized through policy and legal practices, in both the domestic setting6 and the masculine work setting.7 As David Petersen del Mar asserts, it is important to consider the broader social context when looking at domestic violence and men’s violence against women: “The social, economic, and physical advantages that society has disproportionately awarded to men has made husband abuse rare and wife abuse commonplace.”8 I therefore apply a feminist perspective analysis that recognizes gendered imbalances of power, and I draw on scholarship that connects violence, care work, and gendered labour with the expectation that women should anticipate and manage violence.9 Importantly, this chapter adds to the growing area of research that specifically considers domestic violence in the workplace, particularly in the Canadian context.10 Lori’s death can be situated within a series of events and processes that led to changes to the OHSA and shifts in ways of thinking about risk and violence in the workplace. These shifts began before Lori’s death and are ongoing today. I focus my discussion on the events surrounding that tragic day in 2005 and on the significance of those events as represented in the media and in wider social discussion from 2005 to 2016. Calls for an Inquest In Ontario, the Office of the Chief Coroner automatically calls an inquest if a death occurs in specific circumstances. In the context of workplace deaths, the coroner initiates an inquest when such deaths occur in particular worksites (i.e., a construction site, mine, pit or quarry).11 In other situations, the coroner can use his or her discretion to call an inquest, particularly in cases where the coroner believes it is in the public’s interest to hold an inquest into the circumstances of a death and where the jury can make recommendations from the inquest that might help

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prevent similar deaths. The Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services notes that an inquest is not adversarial, nor is it a trial or process motivated by personal or political agendas: “An inquest is an inquisitorial process designed to focus public attention on the circumstances of a death. It is to be a dispassionate public examination into the facts.”12 The process, therefore, is not about finding fault or guilt, but rather about preventing similar incidents. When no inquest was called into the deaths of Lori Dupont and Marc Daniel, Lori’s family (including her mother, Barbara Dupont) requested a discretionary hearing, but this request was not immediately granted. Supporting this call were those interested in drawing attention to workplace safety, as well as those who viewed Lori’s murder as another example of violence against women. Like previous inquests into fatal domestic violence in Ontario, Lori Dupont’s case involved numerous warning signs that ultimately culminated in a murder-suicide. Inquests into the 1996 murder of Theresa Vince, the 1998 murder of Arlene May, and the 2002 murder of Gillian Hadley (all murder-suicides perpetrated by male partners or known harassers) were still fresh in the public’s mind. From her analysis of Arlene May’s inquest, Fiona Sampson concludes that inquests have been used in efforts for equality rights and to raise awareness around specific social issues, where recommendations are geared toward reform and recognition of systemic issues.13 She notes that involvement in a coroner’s inquest provides the opportunity for “potential reform on a broad and systemic basis, with the opportunity to address a wide range of legal and social issues.”14 Less than a week after Lori Dupont’s murder, the Star printed an editorial demanding a public inquest into her death.15 While acknowledging the tragedy of Lori’s murder, the Star presented several key points that directed attention to the Hospital’s role in her death and argued that, if nothing else, Lori’s murder should be investigated in order to spare others the same fate: “It’s hard to fathom any good coming from the murder of Lori Dupont. The 36-year-old nurse’s death has left an eight-year-old girl motherless, hospital staff devastated, and a city shaken. Yet if Dupont’s case is mined fully and openly, a few jewels of wisdom might be discovered that could prevent her fate from befalling others.”16 This article, and several others in the weeks and months after Lori’s death, highlighted the Hospital’s negligence in all but ignoring complaints of Daniel’s harassing, inappropriate, and at times threatening behaviour toward Lori as well as other nurses in the years, months, and weeks leading up to the murder. Demands for a public inquest were also made by the Chatham Sexual Assault Crisis Centre, the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA), and

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members of the public. These groups (and individuals) often made their demands through the media, including by speaking out through the Star. On 3 December 2005, Michelle Schryer, director of the ChathamKent Sexual Assault Crisis Centre, noted that the OHSA automatically demands an inquest in the case of a workplace death and that failing to call one in this case “made it abundantly and painfully clear that it does not recognize sexual harassment as a dangerous circumstance in the workplace.”17 While calling attention to the workplace safety issues surrounding the murder, Schryer also highlighted the gendered nature of the crime, specifically referring to it as gendered violence and making women’s experiences of sexual harassment as well as domestic violence in the workplace an issue of health and safety. The fact that an inquest was not initially called highlighted that workplaces typically acknowledged by the Ministry to be “dangerous” are often those in male-dominated sectors. Demands for an inquest naturally led to questions around what constitutes a dangerous work setting and the links between work, danger, and gender. Increasingly, health care is being recognized as a dangerous work environment with high levels of violence and harassment.18 Sources of aggression include not only patients and family members of patients but also fellow workers, especially physicians, who wield a great deal of authority in the hierarchical work setting. That Marc Daniel was a physician and Lori a nurse was one key point made by advocates for an inquest. In the case of Lori Dupont, advocates sought to draw attention to the intersection of domestic violence and workplace health and safety. Demonstrating that Lori Dupont’s death was both a case of domestic violence and one of workplace violence seemed an uphill battle. Lori’s union (the ONA) was particularly vocal about the Ministry’s failure to investigate the murder-suicide. In its Spring newsletter of 2006, the ONA highlighted the ongoing threat of violence that nurses face, connecting this threat to the system’s failure to protect Lori and to the Ministry of Labour’s hesitation to investigate the circumstances of her death: “In our view, by choosing to wait until a police and coroner’s inquest was complete, the Ministry of Labour is spending too much time deciding to investigate Lori Dupont’s murder to determine whether measures should have been taken to protect her in the workplace.”19 The newsletter further stated that “timely action must be taken, and efforts need to be coordinated with the police to ensure a complete investigation is undertaken in any event like this.”20 In November of that same year, the ONA again called out the Ministry of Labour for failing to conduct an investigation: “Unfortunately, the Ministry of Labour has still failed to call a workplace fatality investigation into Lori Dupont’s murder,

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despite repeated calls for one, and despite a wealth of evidence that the hospital has a long history of ignoring ministry orders, and that Dr. Daniel’s presence in the hospital put staff and patients at risk.”21 The ONA repeatedly noted that there was an outstanding order from the Ministry of Labour with respect to violence in the workplace at the Hospital – an order that was to be met by 28 October, two weeks prior to Lori’s death. Advocates for an inquest drew parallels between Lori’s murder and that of another woman – Theresa Vince, whose tragic workplace murder almost a decade earlier had been a drastic illustration of how harassment can escalate to fatal violence. In 1996, Theresa Vince had decided to take an early, though not financially advisable, retirement from her job at Sears Canada Inc., in Chatham, Ontario. She wanted to avoid the relentless sexual harassment perpetrated by her supervisor (Russell Davis).22 Despite the fact that Theresa had made complaints to her employers about the escalating harassment for more than one year prior to her death, her employer failed to intervene, and on 2 June 1996, Davis shot and murdered her in her workplace, then shot and killed himself.23 Editorials, opinion pieces, and news coverage in the Star highlighted the similarities between these cases, namely the connection between harassment and violence against women coupled with employer responsibility to ensure safety in the workplace. Findings and recommendations of the jury arising from the public inquest into the workplace death of Theresa Vince had opened a discussion on harassment and violence in the workplace, though the recommendations of that inquest had not yet been implemented. As Jacquie Carr (daughter of Theresa Vince and co-author of the Workplace Harassment and Violence Report) observes, a great deal of what is currently known about the circumstances leading up to her mother’s murder came from testimony and evidence gleaned from the inquest.24 After all, the purpose of a coroner’s inquest is to understand how a death occurred and what can be done to prevent a similar future incident; as noted, an inquest is not about finding blame or liability, but rather about prevention,25 and this is what many called for in response to Lori’s murder. A key recommendation flowing from the Vince inquest was that full consideration be given to amending the OHSA to incorporate sexual harassment as a health and safety issue. Since feminist activists in the 1970s first established the term “sexual harassment” to describe the unwelcome behaviour, sexual harassment has been recognized as a form of workplace discrimination that particularly impacts women.26 Constance Backhouse contends that efforts to shed light on and eliminate sexual harassment on the job were “rooted in the movement to

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eradicate sexism in the labour market” and that sexual harassment “was also defined as violence against women.”27 By the time of Lori Dupont’s death, such changes had not been made to the OHSA, and articles printed in the Star hinted that had more been done to implement the recommendations following the Vince inquest, Lori might still be alive. Many believed that Lori’s murder merited its own inquest to uncover the specific details around her death and how it might have been prevented: “Only a coroner’s inquest, with its relaxed evidentiary rules and its noble purpose of finding the truth rather than guilt, can provide the answers that Dupont’s family and this community deserve.”28 In response to the Coroner’s delay in calling an inquest, the Chatham-Kent Sexual Assault Crisis Centre, with the involvement of Barbara Dupont and several community members, initiated a petition, which ultimately garnered almost 10,000 signatures supporting a public inquest into Lori’s murder. The Star, which advertised and endorsed the petition, encouraged the involvement of readers; meanwhile, the ONA continued to publicly press for an inquest. An Inquest Is Called In March 2006, the Coroner’s office finally announced that it had ordered an inquest into the deaths of Lori Dupont and Marc Daniel. Shortly after the inquest was announced, the Star published an opinion piece by Linda Haslam-Stroud, president of the ONA, in which she acknowledged the role of the editors and reporters at the Star, “who have been so supportive of our calls for appropriate and thorough investigations into Lori’s death. The Star has kept this case in the public eye for months.”29 Indeed, the Star had continuously printed information that pointed to the Hospital’s undeniable awareness that Daniel posed a risk to those with whom he worked, particularly Lori. The public learned, among other important details, that Daniel, who was fifty years old at the time of his death, and married with two children, had a history of negative behaviours in the workplace, including making sexual comments and refusing to work with particular nurses. He had attempted suicide in the months prior to the murder but had been resuscitated by Lori and her mother, who was also a nurse. Even while on probation following his attempted suicide, Daniel had kept his security clearance at the Hospital, which he had used to harass Lori; he checked up on her work schedule and put a sensitive photograph of Lori on her car, demanding that she repay money he felt she owed him. Additionally, the Hospital was aware that Lori was in the process of obtaining a peace

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bond against Daniel and that Lori and others (including co-workers and her family) expressed fears that Daniel could become violent. Crucially, the Hospital was aware that Daniel posed a risk in the workplace, especially to Lori, yet it had scheduled the two to work together that Saturday – on a “skeleton shift” when staff and services were scaled back and very few workers would be on duty. In the run-up to the inquest, which started in September 2007, Doug Schmidt, reporter for the Star, wrote a series of articles that set out the facts of the case and offered insight into who Lori, the person, was. Star editor Marty Beneteau said the series represented “an attempt to bring depth and clarity to the slaying, to answer the questions that the authorities, for a variety of reasons, were unable to reconcile, and to ensure through our editorials that this tragedy not be consigned to a bureaucrat’s dust bin.”30 The series revealed that Lori was at a vulnerable point in her life, having recently gone through a divorce, when she finally gave in to Daniel’s incessant pursuit of her (which some co-workers referred to as sexual harassment) and agreed to date him. Readers learned that Lori loved the outdoors and her pet dog; that she was a devoted mother, daughter, friend, and nurse; that she was pregnant, engaged to be married, and in the process of planning a cruise at the time of her death; and that she had worked hard to complete the additional courses necessary to qualify as a recovery room nurse – a sought-after position. Lori loved her job, yet she had requested a transfer to avoid working with Daniel. She was an extremely private person who did not share with those close to her how much she had suffered as a result of Daniel’s increasingly hostile harassment. All of this would come out later in the inquest. In the meantime, the Hospital was conducting its own inquiry into the deaths of Dupont and Daniel, while reportedly being uncooperative with a criminal investigation and avoiding suggestions of liability in the face of a $13 million lawsuit initiated by Lori’s parents.31 When the Hospital’s report came out, not surprisingly, it called the Dupont murder an unforeseen event, and when the criminal investigation concluded without charges, hospital officials cited this as confirmation that the Hospital had responded appropriately. The Hospital maintained that the murder-suicide had been an incident of domestic violence and not a result of carelessness on its part. As mentioned by the ONA numerous times, the Ministry of Labour’s failure to call a mandatory inquest (because the death had happened in a workplace) was sending the message that the Hopsital’s position was the correct one. The call for a discretionary inquest was welcome news to many. While the inquest was not supposed to be about blame, the fact-finding process was highly

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anticipated, the hope being that it would finally shed light on why Lori Dupont’s life had been taken from her on that day in 2005 and how such a tragic event could be prevented from happening to other women in workplaces across Ontario. The Inquest Between 24 September and 11 December 2007, the coroner’s jury listened to 51 witnesses over 34 days of testimony and considered 176 exhibits that were entered into evidence. On 25 September 2007, Schmidt described in the Star the frantic 911 call made shortly after Lori was stabbed, highlighting the shock, confusion, and fear that hospital staff experienced.32 Detective Scott Richie of the Windsor police testified at the inquest that Daniel’s wife (whom Daniel was briefly separated from while he dated, lived with, and proposed to Lori Dupont) notified the police of her husband’s location after he stabbed Lori to death. Daniel had called his wife and told her he had killed someone and that he was going to kill himself. After stating that Daniel used a “powerful drug” to end his own life, and that police couldn’t determine whether the drug had come from the Hospital, Schmidt reminded readers that Lori and her mother had resuscitated Daniel after a previous suicide attempt just months before the murder and that the Hospital failed to investigate the source of the narcotic used in that attempt – the same narcotic he used in his ultimate suicide. Witnesses testified that Daniel had frequently used the threat of suicide to obligate Lori to stay in a relationship with him but that she had finally decided to end the relationship after this dramatic event. This was but one example of his controlling, manipulative, and unpredictable behaviour. One expert witness, a psychologist who had applied psychotherapy efforts to treat Daniel, testified that she viewed his suicide attempt as an act of aggression. Marc Daniel’s actions toward Lori, including his threats and attempted suicide, can be viewed as “coercive control,” a term that has been applied to explain the range of behaviours men use in order to maintain control over their partners; physical violence is only one of these.33 Elizabeth Sheehy notes that this theory, which was developed by feminists, points to a number of abusive behaviours that culminate in a deep psychological impact on the target.34 These manipulative and abusive behaviours often presage physical (including lethal) violence, especially when other risk factors are present (e.g., the break-up of a relationship and depression). The inquest revealed that Daniel’s hospital privileges had been briefly suspended but that he had been permitted to return to the

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operating room to practise without a proper review and despite his ongoing hostile behaviour toward Lori and other nurses with whom he worked. Police, nurses, and the lawyer representing the ONA put the issue down to physician privilege, though representatives of the Hospital denied this was the case. Through questioning and testimony, a picture emerged of the hierarchy in hospitals. That hierarchy, which places doctors at the top, makes it difficult for nurses to address harassment or hostile behaviours by doctors with whom they work, especially when those doctors are specialists. Discussions, which touched on the role of gender in expected and accepted behaviour, spoke to the increasing recognition that physician dominance in health care is problematic. The Star reported: “The Inquest also heard Tuesday that disruptive workplace behaviour by doctors has become such a problem that both Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Ontario Medical Association’s physician health program are addressing the issue with proposed guidelines and procedures for hospitals.”35 Health care in general is a feminized work setting (most health care workers are women), yet it is mostly men, including specialist doctors, who fill the high-status positions.36 The imbalance of power in the strictly hierarchical health care setting privileges doctors, enabling what is referred to as “disruptive physician behaviour.”37 In this context, many nurses say they are hesitant to report abuse and hostility perpetrated by doctors; they fear repercussions, and those who say they have reported abuse and hostility feel that their complaints are often ignored.38 Doctor privilege, in connection with the devaluing of care work as women’s labour, hinders nurses’ ability to express their concerns in a setting where hostility is normalized as part of the job.39 Cutbacks in Ontario health care that have resulted in understaffing and increased workloads for nurses have contributed to this normalization by fostering high-stress and potentially hostile work settings for health care providers.40 Several of Lori’s co-workers as well as her fiancé testified at the inquest that Lori was hesitant to make a written complaint of Daniel’s behaviour, for she was only a nurse, and he was a physician – she was worried this might negatively impact her position. The inquest heard that there is a culture in the hospital setting that accepts physicians’ disruptive behaviour by promoting silence as well as a tolerance of its negative impacts.41 This points to the barriers that women face when making complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace: “intimidation, potential or actual hostility, fears for job security, humiliation, embarrassment, or wanting to fit in.”42 Daniel had a long history of complaints, which included sexual harassment and verbal abuse; on

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one occasion, he broke a nurse’s finger when he yanked a pillow out of her hand during a disagreement. Hospital executives acknowledged during the inquest that Daniel’s behaviour was difficult to manage: “Nurse complaints about Daniel appeared to fall on deaf ears until the fall of 2004, when a meeting was arranged to confront Daniel. When he entered the room, he saw who was there, accused them of engaging in a ‘witch hunt’ and walked away, said [Patricia] Somers [chief nursing executive].”43 Clearly Daniel was not being held accountable for his actions. The final witness to testify during the inquest was Dr Peter Jaffe, an expert on domestic violence. Jaffe noted that there had been almost forty “critical events” that indicated Lori Dupont was in danger but that these were not acted upon.44 He found fault with the Hospital’s lack of response to Daniel’s aggressive behaviour.45 On 30 November 2007, Schmidt wrote in the Star: “Top Hotel-Dieu managers have testified at the inquest that they focused on rehabilitating a doctor they deemed mentally ill rather than disciplining him for his much-documented disruptive and disturbing behaviour. Jaffe criticized that hospital response, arguing that both aspects should have been dealt with. ‘Depression is no excuse for sexual harassment, it’s no excuse for abuse.’”46 The chief coroner’s report stated that Jaffe “testified that there are a number of factors associated with the risk of lethal domestic violence. In hindsight, Dr. Daniel exhibited the majority of these, most notably, clinical depression, suicide attempt and recent separation from his domestic partner.”47 The Ontario Domestic Violence Death Review Committee (Ontario DVDRC) was established in 2002 largely in response to the inquests conducted for Arlene May and Gillian Hadley, each of whom was murdered by a former partner (each in a murder-suicide).48 The Ontario DVDRC tables an annual report about the warning signs and risk factors – physical and non-physical – related to domestic violence homicide, such as those described by Jaffe.49 If domestic violence were recognized as a workplace issue, the results of such reports could be incorporated into training to combat violence and harassment in the workplace. Following the Inquest After the inquest concluded, the coroner’s jury set out sixty-five recommendations to help prevent similar incidents in Ontario workplaces. Many were specific to Ontario’s health care settings. Recommendations were made to the Ontario legislature as well as to the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, the Ontario Hospital Association,

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Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, Public Hospitals of Ontario, the Ontario Medical Association, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), the Ontario Women’s Directorate, the faculties of medicine in Ontario universities, the College of Nurses, the College of Psychologists, the Ontario Psychiatric Association, the Attorney General, and the Ontario Ministry of Labour (MOL). The jury recommended that the MOL review the OHSA and consider including domestic violence and forms of psychological harassment and abuse: “Specifically, the review should consider whether safety from emotional or psychological harm, rather than merely physical harm, ought to be part of the mandate of the Ministry.”50 Walter and colleagues explain that discretionary inquests affect perceptions of what constitutes risk and thus influence understandings of public health and safety.51 While providing an opportunity to better understand and prevent similar fatalities, inquests provide answers to loved ones left behind: “inquests can provide families with the opportunity to receive explanations for what happened and may be seen as an act of closure.”52 On hearing the results of the inquest, Barbara Dupont was reportedly pleased, but to her it represented more of an opening than a closure. She told the Star this was “not the end but the beginning.”53 She, like the Vince family before her, vowed to work toward improving workplace safety in Ontario. In particular, she wanted to see amendments to the OHSA in line with the jury’s recommendations. She and others formed the Inquest Action Group (the Action Group) to ensure that recommendations from the Dupont inquest were implemented. The group consisted of Pat Cunningham, Sandra Dominato, Barbara Dupont, Joy Hamilton, Beth Haynes, Carol Libby, Pat Noonan, Michelle Schryer, Charlene Senn, Lois Smedick, and Lynn Watts. Many of these women were already strong advocates for women’s issues, including in the workplace. In This Is What a Feminist Sounds Like, a documentary of the life and work of member Pat Noonan (a well-known activist in Windsor), Noonan states that the work of the Action Group actually started with the recommendations that came out of the Theresa Vince inquest.54 In other words, this newly formed women’s group wanted long overdue changes to protect women in the workplace. The Action Group put pressure on Hotel-Dieu following the inquest, determined to see changes to prevent future violence. The Hospital did not immediately publicly endorse the recommendations, likely to avoid liability, though later it expressed its intention to implement all recommendations specifically directed at Hotel-Dieu. The Star continued to report on the progress of the hospital’s policy changes and efforts to implement the recommendations. It was reported that on 4 December

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2008, Hotel-Dieu submitted a final report to the coroner’s office, having implemented all recommendations specifically directed at the Hospital.55 Barbara Dupont and the ONA praised these changes, though they also expressed their desire to see changes on a larger scale, namely through amendments to the OHSA and through raising awareness of the significance of harassment as a precursor to violence in the workplace.56 Although the Hospital had maintained that Lori Dupont’s murder was simply a case of domestic violence, testimony and evidence heard at the inquest suggested that domestic violence had spilled over into the workplace and that Lori’s employers had failed to provide her with a safe and healthy workplace free from harassment and violence. Recommendations from the inquest confirmed that in this case the coroner’s jury saw the issue of domestic violence as a workplace issue. Awareness of intimate partner violence had risen during the 1970s57 along with that of sexual harassment as a form of discrimination in the workplace; by the 1990s, literature on the impact of domestic violence on women’s work was increasingly visible, particularly in the United States. Thus far, research on the connection between domestic violence and the workplace has focused mainly on human resources concerns, such as potential legal and financial issues for employers;58 the importance of awareness and reporting;59 and employer and management responses.60 Women’s work is disrupted when domestic violence carries over into the workplace (e.g., harassment on the job), and this disruption has personal and professional consequences for victims.61 Despite growing recognition that domestic violence invades and influences the workplace, much of the research has failed to fully explore the issue as a systemic social one; there is a persistent need for more research, both historical and contemporary, that considers the impact of domestic violence in the workplace from this perspective, and such scholarship is now emerging in both Canada and the United States.62 High-profile cases such as Lori Dupont’s have likely contributed to this. A Workplace Violence Prevention Think Tank was convened in 2008 in London, Ontario, when the Ministry of Labour began a workplace violence “consultation process” in response to cases such as Lori Dupont’s murder. Presenters at the think tank pointed to the need to consider violence in the workplace as being on a continuum that includes physical and psychological forms.63 Presenters in the group, who included Michelle Schryer and Peter Jaffe, and participants (among them Barbara Dupont and Jacquie Carr), emphasized the role of gender and power in the perpetration and experience of workplace violence: “Legislation and its implementation must be gender sensitive. Gender based harassment and domestic violence are major concerns for female employees.”64 The

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report stated that the definition of workplace violence should include various forms of violence, namely “bullying, harassment, threats or intimidation and domestic violence.”65 In 2009, almost one year later, Bill 168 was introduced to amend sections of the OHSA specifically with respect to workplace violence and harassment. Bill 168 amended the OHSA to include a definition of harassment as follows: “engaging in a course of vexatious comment or conduct against a worker in a workplace that is known or ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome.”66 The same bill added new responsibilities for employers to prepare a workplace harassment policy, and, significantly, to take every reasonable precaution to protect employees from domestic violence that the employer is, or ought to be, aware of. During consideration of Bill 168, individuals and groups delivered presentations to the Standing Committee on Social Policy and expressed their opinions/concerns with respect to the proposed amendments to the OHSA.67 Barbara Dupont was among those who spoke. She told the story of her daughter’s murder and explained her subsequent involvement in the Action Group, which, she noted, had been dedicated to both ensuring that the recommendations of the inquest were implemented and to raising awareness of workplace violence and harassment more generally. When asked if she felt Bill 168 did a good job of raising awareness about workplace harassment, Barbara responded that more could be done to recognize that physical violence is often preceded by harassment: I feel it continues to focus more on physical injury and does not focus enough on the psychological and emotional areas of harassment that lead up to and can lead into physical violence. In Lori’s case, there were many signs and signals, and they gradually escalated over an eightmonth period. Harassment needs to be caught when it first starts, so that it doesn’t continue to escalate, and I don’t think the bill reflects enough the continuum of violence where it starts and gradually seems to escalate.68

This sentiment was strongly shared by other presenters. For example, the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, represented by Michelle Schryer, held a similar view of the proposed bill, and presented this view in strong and specific language that is worth setting out here: It is our view that Bill 168 does not adequately recognize the continuum of violence that can occur and that can most certainly result in physical harm and injury, compromised emotional health and well-being, physical stress-related illness and other stress-related symptoms caused by

The Murder of Lori Dupont  147 workplace harassment or the presence of domestic violence that spills over into the workplace. We believe that the definition of “workplace violence” needs to be broadened to effectively address not only physical violence, but the continuum of violence. It is important that the language in health and safety legislation recognizes that some acts of violence are easily interpreted as violent, while others are less clear and not necessarily overt. Nonetheless, these acts can lead to more physically destructive, violent behaviours and can have significant consequences for workers.69

The Ontario Human Rights Commission, which similarly argued that “preventing violence starts with preventing and addressing harassment and discrimination,”70 as well as the Bullying Education and Awareness Centre for Ontario and Employment Dispute Resolutions, all expressed concern that the OHSA as revised would have one section for violence and one for harassment and that the section for violence was stronger.71 All called for a broadened definition of violence that would incorporate the entire spectrum by including forms of harassment such as bullying. Only in this way, they argued, could the severity of harassment be fully recognized and considered. Bill 168 received Royal Assent in December 2009 and took effect on 15 June 2010 (it is now known as Section 32 of the OHSA). Despite the concerns raised, clear distinctions between violence and harassment in the legislation remained. The OHSA continued to emphasize the significance of violence (physical or threat of physical harm), to require that employers conduct a risk assessment, and to provide employees the opportunity to refuse to work if they were the target of violence.72 Such was not the case, however, for harassment. While many lauded the incorporation of domestic violence into employer responsibilities, many others felt that previous proposals to amend the OHSA better recognized the severity of harassment in the workplace and the escalating nature of harassing behaviours. For example, Bill 70, introduced in 2001, had proposed amending the OHSA to add a definition of workplace violence that included psychological as well as physical violence: “‘workplace violence’ means acts of violence that persons commit in a workplace and includes acts of physical or psychological violence, including bullying, mobbing, teasing, ridicule and any other acts or use of words that can reasonably be interpreted as designed to hurt or isolate a person in the workplace.”73 Bill 45 (2005)74 and Bill 29 (2007) had proposed that violence and harassment be included in the OHSA (including violence and harassment by individuals outside of the workplace) and had further proposed that the employee be given the right to refuse work “where he or she has reason to believe that workplace

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related harassment or violence is likely to endanger himself, herself or another worker.”75 These bills did not succeed, likely due to a hesitancy to place additional responsibilities on employers and a belief that the OHSA already provided such protections through a general duty of employers. The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB) argued in the debates that, while Bill 168 represented good intentions, such motivations were not matched by practicality. The obligations placed on employers, noted the CFIB, were not tenable for all employers, including small businesses: “the sum of all regulations is a bad thing if it exceeds government’s capacity to administer it or it also exceeds the capacity of small and medium-sized businesses to cope with the requirements that are being placed upon them.”76 In other words, without adequate resources, even the best-intended legislation would fail.77 Legal scholars and businesses continued to make this argument following the passage of the bill. While the ONA and other supporters of the bill praised the amendments as a step in the right direction, others argued that changes to the OHSA effected by Bill 168 merely worked to appease advocates in the face of intense pressure and that there had been no meaningful changes to the law in terms of protecting workers or giving adequate information to employers on how to do that. In all jurisdictions in Canada, employers have a duty under the relevant occupational health and safety act to take “every reasonable precaution to ensure that a workplace is safe, including training workers and providing safety equipment.”78 Some lawyers, like Norm Keith, argue that the government has not indicated that it knows what employers should do to protect workers from violence; simply stating that employers should prevent it in new legislation is not all that helpful in a practical sense.79 Just how employers can protect workers is not sufficiently set out in the OHSA. For example, the OHSA does not outline how such policies should be enforced, how perpetrators should be managed, or whether targets should be compensated. As there is no standard for enforcement, employers are left to determine what prevention and response strategies are appropriate for a given workplace. In its most current guide to health and safety in Ontario for workplace violence and harassment, the Ministry of Labour explains that violence and harassment represent a continuum of harmful and unwanted actions in the workplace, “from offensive remarks to violence,” and that these actions do not necessarily have to be perpetrated by fellow employees; when, for example, clients, customers, patients, or domestic partners subject a worker to violence and harassment in the workplace, it is considered a workplace health and safety issue.80 But this is still

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not reflected in the OHSA itself. Violence and harassment are separate categories in the OHSA – behaviour is considered either harassment or violence – and there are important differences in employee rights and employer responsibilities regarding the two categories of harmful behaviour, as previously noted and briefly discussed below. Recently, the OHSA was amended to incorporate a definition of sexual harassment. Many have referred to this as a legacy of Theresa Vince – a long overdue amendment that had been recommended following the Vince inquest. Bill 132, An Act to Amend Various Statutes with Respect to Sexual Violence, Sexual Harassment, Domestic Violence and Related Matters, came into effect on 18 September 2016, and thus sexual harassment is now recognized as a threat to worker health and safety in Ontario.81 But it must also be noted that though significant changes have been made, the continuum of violence is still not adequately addressed. It is questionable whether merely adding sexual harassment to the OHSA will counter misperceptions that harassment in the workplace is less serious than violence. Doing so may even contribute to those misperceptions. The ONA argues that the legislation does not go far enough and that separating the forms of harassment has the potential to minimize the fact that violence exists on a continuum.82 Behaviours on this continuum, the ONA contends, stem from deeply held and reinforced ideas about gender and the roles of men and women in society. Currently under the OHSA, employers are not required to assess the risk of harassment (including sexual harassment) in the workplace or to develop programs and policies to address that risk, as they are required to do for violence. Additionally, workers do not have the right to refuse to work if they fear they will be harassed, as they can for violence. Daniel’s harassment (including sexual) of Lori and other nurses did not seem to cross the line to violence until the day he stabbed Lori several times as she prepared for her shift. This was also the case for Theresa Vince, where violence was the final step in a long series of harassing behaviours. Of additional concern is that violence and harassment are not adequately defined in the legislation, nor is it clear what is meant by “domestic violence.” Harassment and violence represent separate categories of behaviour (with differing rights and obligations for employees and employers), yet it remains unclear where the line between them is drawn. As violence is treated as the more serious behaviour, it may be difficult for employees to validate their fear due to harassment. With Bill 132, there is hope, however, that a broader understanding of the connection between violence and harassment will continue to shift toward acknowledging the potential severity of harassment. Sexual

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harassment is now recognized as a threat to worker health and safety, and Ministry of Labour inspectors can now order an employer to initiate an independent, third-party investigation of sexual harassment. Lessons from Lori’s murder have not been ignored. Women from the Action Group have written of their approval of legislative changes to improve workplace safety, while acknowledging that the fight is not yet over. In response to Bill 168, Lynne Watts wrote the following in a Star article published on 27 July 2009: “It has taken a lot of work and persistence and two inquests, but something positive has come from two terrible tragedies. This is a tribute to the memories of Theresa and Lori and others who have died before them through violence in the workplace. We give credit to courageous and persevering families, responsive and compassionate politicians, and community actions.”83 On 15 June 2010, Carol Libby quoted Barbara Dupont responding to changes in the OHSA as a result of Bill 168: “Two women had to die in order for these changes to take place. These changes are a result of the combined efforts of individuals, agencies, organizations and groups who cared enough to become involved, and now can take pride in knowing that together, we have made a difference.”84 So while recognizing that more can be done to improve workplace health and safety with respect to violence and harassment, we must also acknowledge that, for many, gains have been made at great personal cost. Most recently, in response to the changes in the OHSA to recognize sexual harassment as a health and safety issue, Jacquie Carr (daughter of Theresa Vince) was quoted in the Star as saying that while the law is not perfect, it provides “a better foundation to move forward from.”85 In 2011, members of the Vince and Dupont families were honoured with the Attorney General’s Victim Services Awards of Distinction – awards that “honour victims of crime, as well as victim services professionals and volunteers, whose efforts have made a difference in their communities.”86 Fairburn and Dawson contend that news coverage “fails to encourage social and political responses to violence against women in intimate partner relationships that emphasize the need for social structural changes focusing on gender inequality.”87 They note that news coverage is influential in shaping understandings of violence against women and that it is thus critical that such violence not be individualized but rather represented as part of a systemic social issue. Key to this is incorporating the voices of “violence against women organizations.”88 I argue that the Star contributed to recognizing domestic violence in the workplace as both a systemic issue and as a workplace issue for women in Ontario by indeed incorporating those voices. Star reporter Doug Schmidt was

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nominated for both a provincial and an international award for his series on the murder of Lori Dupont, which was praised for its thoughtful and sympathetic yet “comprehensive” coverage of the case.89 As noted in this chapter, the lessons from Lori Dupont’s tragic death have not been forgotten by the ONA either. In its newly revised Occupational Health and Safety: A Guide for ONA Members, the ONA promises ongoing efforts to fight for improved conditions for its members: “The Coroner’s Inquest into the tragic workplace murder of ONA member Lori Dupont also confirmed that health and safety problems continue in our workplaces requiring changes and attention by employers and governments. ONA has been working diligently to change this state of affairs and entrench health and Safety cultures in the health-care sector.”90 Regarding the recent changes to the OHSA resulting from Bill 132, the ONA states: “The violence and harassment provisions are still not perfect and ONA continues its efforts to ensure there is adequate law to protect our members, and that it is appropriately enforced.”91 Clearly, a fight to recognize the violence continuum is ongoing. The ONA’s Workplace Violence and Harassment: A Guide for ONA Members sets out the union’s position on violence and harassment in the workplace by first telling the story of Lori Dupont’s murder, explaining that Lori “paid the price for a culture of indifference and inattention to violence in health-care workplaces across the province.”92 The statement goes on to emphasize the ONA’s belief that current approaches need to be reviewed.93 Conclusion This chapter has shown how the murder of Lori Dupont has contributed to, and continues to influence, shifts in how we look at harassment in the workplace. The passing of Bill 168 in 2009 amended the OHSA to include domestic violence as a potential risk to worker health and safety, and efforts to recognize the significance of harassment as a precursor to deadly violence are enduring. By drawing on newspaper articles, legislation, legislative debates, coroner’s reports, union publications, and scholarship, this chapter has demonstrated that in response to Lori’s murder, families, activist groups, the ONA, and public engagement have helped broaden conversations about violence against women and the right for all workers in Ontario to be free of harassment and violence in the workplace. But this is an ongoing conversation. MacGregor, Wathen, and MacQuarrie, researchers at the University of Western Ontario, recently joined forces with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) to better understand workers’ experiences of domestic

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violence in Canadian workplaces.94 Collaborating with the CLC, the researchers conducted the first ever pan-Canadian survey asking respondents to reflect on their experiences, awareness, and perceptions of domestic violence, either as targets or as co-workers of targets of domestic violence.95 They found that over 33 per cent had experienced domestic violence during their lives, 35 per cent felt that a co-worker was currently experiencing or had in the past experienced domestic violence, and almost 40 per cent felt they had recognized that a fellow worker was a target of domestic violence.96 This suggests that signs of domestic violence in the workplace are observable. Expanding employers’ and workers’ knowledge of indicators could only serve to improve this recognition. The CLC has cited domestic violence in the workplace as a union issue and, during bargaining, is calling for clear language to address it.97 Referring to these research findings, the CLC offers ways of approaching domestic violence, including acknowledging the importance of providing paid leave for victims.98 In November 2017 the CLC commended amendments to workplace legislation around paid domestic leave. Bill 148, the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, was passed on 22 November 2017. Among other changes benefiting Ontario workers, the act has amended the Employment Standards Act to entitle employees to paid leave, and additional leave without fear of losing their position, if threatened with or experiencing domestic violence.99 Marking the ten years since Lori Dupont’s murder, the ONA issued a statement calling for more change, noting the vulnerability that workers continue to encounter in the health care sector.100 Lauding important advances, the ONA vowed to persist in efforts to improve safety conditions for all workers by focusing on preventative measures.101 In the ONA’s continued efforts to change the law to better protect workers (particularly regarding recognizing the significance of psychological harm, and not just physical harm, due to both violence and harassment), the union has worked for change around, among other things, the employer’s responsibility to assess the risk of harassment in the workplace and to take precautions to protect workers from it. The ONA’s most recent guide to workplace violence and harassment stipulates the union’s position on developing workplace policies: “ONA believes all employers should develop a workplace violence policy that extends beyond the minimum requirements of the OHSA. Workplace policies should address all forms of aggression and should also have a goal of protecting workers from psychological harm/illness as well as from physical injury.”102 The guide cites Lori’s murder as the catalyst for these efforts.

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Throughout, ONA has not shied away from linking the threat of violence and harassment in health care to the gendered nature of the workplace. During a round table on violence against women, in response to proposed amendments to the OHSA in 2015, the ONA asked whether the fact that most health care workers are women is the reason that more has not been done to protect health care workers: “One is left to wonder whether we might have seen more aggressive actions to stop ongoing exposure to violence and harassment in a sector where 82 per cent of the workers were men.”103 Domestic violence in the workplace is also a gendered issue. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to assess the effectiveness of the legislation – to determine absolutely that amendments to the OHSA have indeed worked to protect workers – but it could certainly be said that such amendments have provided workers with the ability to seek protection. It has also provided employers with the opportunity to become more knowledgeable about various forms of violence and the opportunity to clearly indicate their intolerance of violence in the workplace. Having said that, questions remain: What are the issues facing workers who are experiencing domestic violence? And how might such workers be better supported and protected in Canada? These questions have yet to be fully answered. It is cause for hope that unions are engaging in research to ensure that their members are better protected and supported. But more needs to be done to advance our understanding of domestic violence as a workplace issue. NOTES 1 Jordan Fairbairn and Myrna Dawson, “Canadian News Coverage of Intimate Partner Homicide: Analyzing Changes over Time,” Feminist Criminology 8, no. 3 (2013): 147. 2 For example, see Derek Chechak and Rick Csiernik, “Canadian Perspectives on Conceptualizing and Responding to Workplace Violence,” Journal of Workplace Behavioural Health 29 (2014): 60; Elaine Newman, Preventing Violence and Harassment in the Workplace: A Practical Guide to Ontario’s Bill 168 for Employers, Unions, and Employees (Toronto: Lancaster House, 2012), xxxiv, xxv, 188–200. 3 Constance Backhouse and Leah Cohen, The Secret Oppression: Sexual Harassment of Working Women (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978). See also Catherine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

154  Sarah Jessup 4 For example, see Elizabeth A. Sheehy, ed., Sexual Assault in Canada: Law, Legal Practice, and Women’s Activism (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2012); Lesley Erickson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 11. 5 For example, see Elizabeth A. Sheehy, Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons from the Transcripts (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016). 6 Joan Sangster, “Rhetoric of Shame, Reality of Leniency: Wife Assault and the Law,” in Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920–1960 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001), 47–84. 7 Joan Sangster, “Just Horseplay?: Masculinity and Workplace Grievances in Fordist Canada, 1947–70s,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 26, no. 2 (2014): 330–64. See also Jeremy Milloy, “’Chrysler Pulled the Trigger’: Competing Understandings of Workplace Violence during the 1970s and Radical Legal Practice,” Labour/Le Travail 74 (Fall 2004): 51–88. 8 David Peterson del Mar, What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence against Wives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7. 9 For example, see Tuija Virkki, “The Art of Pacifying an Aggressive Client: ‘Feminine’ Skills and Preventing Violence in Caring Work,” Gender, Work, and Organizations 15, no. 1 (2008): 72–87; Virkki, “Gender, Care, and the Normalization of Violence: Similarities between Occupational Violence and Intimate Partner Violence in Finland,” NORA – Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 15, no. 4 (2007): 220–32; Donna Baines, “Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender, Juggling Responsibilities, and Violence in Paid (and Unpaid) Care Work,” Gender, Work, and Organization 13, no. 2 (2006): 129–51; Baines, “‘White Knuckle Care Work’: Violence, Gender, and New Public Management in the Voluntary Sector,” Work, Employment and Society 25, no. 4 (2011): 760–76. 10 For example, Jennifer C.D. MacGregor, C. Nadine Wathen, and Barbara J. MacQuarrie, “Domestic Violence in the Canadian Workplace: Are Coworkers Aware?” Safety and Health at Work 7 (2016): 244–50. 11 Coroners Act, R.S.O 1990, c. C37. 12 Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, “Death Investigations,” https://www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/english /DeathInvestigations/Inquests/AidToInquests.html. 13 Fiona Sampson, “The Coroner’s Inquest as an Equality Rights Mechanism: A Case Study of the May-Iles Coroner’s Inquest into Domestic Violence in Ontario,” Journal of Law and Social Policy 18 (2003): 75–97. 14 Ibid., 77. 15 [Editorial], Windsor Star, 18 November 2005. 16 Ibid. 17 Michelle Schryer, “Inquest a Must in Dupont Murder,” Windsor Star, 3 December 2008.

The Murder of Lori Dupont  155 18 David Holmes, Trudy Rudge, and Amélie Perron, eds., (Re)Thinking Violence in Health Care Settings: A Critical Approach (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012). 19 Ontario Nurses Association (ONA), “Health and Safety Legislation Requires Immediate Changes to Protect Workers from Violence,” Vision (Spring 2006): 11. 20 Ibid. 21 Linda Haslam-Stroud, “The Dupont Report: Opinion/Editorial, ONA Vision (November 2006): 5. This editorial was reprinted from the Windsor Star, 6 September 2006. 22 Jacquie Carr et al., Workplace Harassment and Violence Report (London: Centre for Research on Violence against Women, Western University, 2004), 3. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Coroners Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. C. 37. 26 Margaret A. Crouch, Thinking about Sexual Harassment: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 31; David J. Doorey, The Law of Work: Common Law and the Regulation of Work (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2016), 331, 359. 27 Ibid., 293. 28 [Editorial], Windsor Star, 8 December 2005. 29 Linda Haslam-Stroud, “Star Kept Case in the Public Eye,” Windsor Star, 28 March 2006. 30 “Star Team in Hunt for National Award,” Windsor Star, 10 March 2007. 31 The lawsuit initiated by the Duponts ultimately resulted in an agreement, the details of which were never made public. 32 Doug Schmidt, “911 Tape Reveals Panic as RN Slain,” Windsor Star, 25 September 2007. 33 Elizabeth A. Sheehy, Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons from the Transcripts (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 235. 34 Ibid. 35 Doug Schmidt, “Dieu CEO Rips Cop’s ‘Insult’: McEvoy Denies Hospital Put Money Ahead of Safety,” Windsor Star, 7 November 2007. 36 Tracy L. Adams, “Gender and Feminization in Health Care Professions,” Sociology Compass 4, no. 7 (2010): 461. 37 Amy Kimes et al., “’I’m Not Calling Him!’: Disruptive Physician Behaviour in the Acute Care Setting,” CNE Series 24, no. 4 (2015): 223–7. 38 B.L. Higgins and J. MacIntosh, “Operating Room Nurses’ Perceptions of the Effects of Physician-Perpetrated Abuse,” International Nursing Review 57 (2010): 322–3. 39 Donna Baines, “Criminalizing the Care Work Zone?: The Gendered Dynamics of Using Legal and Administrative Strategies to Confront Workplace Violence,” Social Justice 32, no. 1 (2005): 132–50.

156  Sarah Jessup 40 Salimah Valiani, The Cycle of Sacrifice: Nurses’ Health and the Ontario Health System (Toronto: ONA, 2013), 3: Donna Baines, “Losing the ‘Eyes in the Back of Our Heads’: Social Service Skills, Lean Caring, and Violence,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 31, no. 3 (2004): 31–50. 41 Office of the Chief Coroner, Report on the Inquest into the Deaths of Lori Dupont and Marc Daniel, January 2009; see also Doug Schmidt, “Secrecy Protects Bad Doctors, Inquest Told,” Windsor Star, 16 November 2007. 42 Sue Hart, “Labour Arbitrations and Coworker Sexual Harassment: Looking at the Assessment of Mitigating Factors through a Feminist Lens,” Journal of Workplace Rights 15, no. 1 (2010–11): 105. 43 Report on the Inquest; see also Doug Schmidt, “Abuse by MD Long Noted, Jurors Told,” Windsor Star, 22 November 2007. 44 Report on the Inquest; see also Doug Schmidt, “Diew Failed Nurse, Jury Told; Hospital Managers Failed to Address ‘Critical Events,’” Windsor Star, 30 November 2007. 45 Ibid. 46 Schmidt, “Diew Failed Nurse.’” 47 Ontario, Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario, Coroner’s Report, Dupont, Lori Arline; Daniel, Marc, Inquest, 2007 CanLII 82659 (ON OCCO), 14. 48 Peter G. Jaffe, Myrna Dawson, and Marcie Campbell, “Developing a National Collaborative Approach to Prevent Domestic Homicides: Domestic Homicide Review Committees,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Jusitice 55, no. 1 (2013): 139. 49 Ontario, Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario, Domestic Violence Death Review Committee 2013–2014 Annual Report (Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2015). 50 See note 42. Coroner’s Report, 21. 51 Simon J. Walter et al., “Factors Predicting Coroners’ Decision to Hold Discretionary Inquests,” CMAJ 185, no. 5 (2012): 521–6. 52 Ibid., 527. 53 Doug Schmidt, “Lori’s Legacy: Dupont Jury Makes 26 Recommendations: ‘Other Women Will Be Saved,’” Windsor Star, 12 December 2007. 54 This Is What a Feminist Sounds Like, directed by Audra MacIntyre and Kim Nelson (2012). 55 Sonja Puzic, “Hotel-Dieu’s Response to Inquest Praised,” Windsor Star, 4 December 2008. 56 Ibid.; Craig Pearson, “Dupont’s Mom Presses for Workplace Changes,” Windsor Star, 12 January 2008. 57 Diane Crocker, “Regulating Intimacy: Judicial Discourse in Cases of Wife Assault (1970 to 2000),” Violence against Women 11, no. 2 (2005): 198.

The Murder of Lori Dupont  157 58 Tamra Gormley and Bill Rambicure, “Domestic Violence: A Workplace Issue,” Kentucky Bench & Bar (Winter 1998): 24–6; Janet Gemignani, “Domestic Abuse Follows Women to Work,” Business and Health (December 1999): 9–15; Carol Reeves and Anne M. O’Leary-Kelly, “The Effects and Costs of Intimate Partner Violence for Work Organizations,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 22, no. 3 (2007): 327–44. 59 Victoria Carroll, “Health and Safety: When Domestic Violence Leaves Home,” American Journal of Nursing 100, no. 11 (2000): 92. 60 Jenifer Swanberg, Caroline Macke, and T.K. Logan, “Working Women Making It Work: Intimate Partner Violence, Employment, and Workplace Support,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 22, no. 3 (2007): 292–311; Anne O’Leary-Kelly, “Coming into the Light: Intimate Partner Violence and Its Effects at Work,” Academy of Management Perspectives 22, no. 2 (2008): 57–72; Carol Milano, “Unhappy Home, Unhappy Workplace: When Domestic Violence Follows an Employee to the Office, Private Horror Becomes a Workplace Problem,” Risk Management (November 2008): 42–6; Nancy A. Perrin et al., “Patterns of Workplace Supervisor Support Desired by Abused Women,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 26, no. 11 (2011): 2264–84. 61 Swarnberg, Macke, and Logan, “Working Women,” 292. 62 Nadine Wathen, Jennifer C.D. MacGregor, and Barbara J. MacQuarrie, “The Impact of Domestic Violence in the Workplace: Results from a Pan-Canadian Survey,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM) 57, no. 7 (2015): e65–e71; C. Nadine Wathen, Jennifer C.D. MacGregor, and Barbara J. MacQuarrie, “Relationships among Intimate Partner Violence, Work, and Health,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence (2016): 1–23; Jennifer E. Swanberg, Mamta U. Ojha, and Caroline Macke, “State Employment Protection Statures for Victims of Domestic Violence: Public Policy’s Response to Domestic Violence as an Employment Matter,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 27, no. 3 (2012): 587–619. 63 Joan Riggs, Centre for Research and Education on Violence against Women and Children, Workplace Violence Prevention Think Tank, 29–30 October 2008, London, Ontario, 4. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 6. 66 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, “An Act to Amend the Occupational Health and Safety Act with Respect to Violence and Harassment in the Workplace and Other Matters,” Bill 168, 39th Legislature, 1st Session, 2009, [Toronto]: The Assembly, 2009, (Assented to 15 December 2009). 67 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Standing Committee on Social Policy, Official Report of Debates “Occupational Health and Safety Amendment Act (Violence and Harassment in the Workplace),” 39th Legislature, 1st Session, 2009, [Toronto]: The Assembly, 2009.

158  Sarah Jessup 68 Ibid., SP-939. 69 Ibid., SP-941–SP-942. 70 Ibid., SP-943. 71 Ibid. 72 Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act. R.S.O. 1990, c. O. 1. 73 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, “An Act to Amend the Occupational Health and Safety Act with Respect to Acts of Workplace Violence,” Bill 70, 37th Legislature, 2nd Session, 2001, [Toronto]: The Assembly, 2001, 1. 74 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, “An Act to Amend the Occupational Health and Safety Act to Protect Workers from Harassment,” Bill 45, 38th Legislature, 2nd Session, 2005, [Toronto]: The Assembly, 2005. 75 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, “An Act to Amend the Occupational Health and Safety Act to Protect Workers from Harassment and Violence,” Bill 29, 39th Legislature, 1st Session, 2007, [Toronto]: The Assembly, 2007, 3. 76 Bill 168 legislative debates, p. SP-939. 77 Ibid. 78 Bob Barneston, “Regulating Worker Safety and Injuries,” in The Law of Work: Common Law and the Regulation of Work, ed. David J. Doorey (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2016), 319. 79 Norm Keith, as quoted in 2010 interview by Canadian Lawyer magazine; Kelly Harris, “The Lori Dupont Provision: Legislating Domestic Violence as a Workplace Hazard Presents Hazards in Itself,” Canadian Lawyer, March 2010, 56. 80 Ontario, Ministry of Labour, Occupational Health and Safety Branch, Workplace Violence and Harassment: Understanding the Law (Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2016), 5. 81 Ontario, Legislative Assembly, “An Act to Amend Various Statutes with Respect to Sexual Violence, Sexual Harassment, Domestic Violence and Related Matters,” Bill 132, 41st Legislature, 1st Session, 2016, [Toronto]: The Assembly, 2016, (Assented to 8 March 2016). 82 Ontario Nurses’ Association, Submission to the Standing Committee on Social Policy on Bill 132, An Act to Amend Various Statues with Respect to Violence, Sexual Harassment, Domestic Violence and Related Matters (Toronto: ONA, 2016): 3. 83 Lynne Watts, “Progress for OHSA at Last,” Windsor Star, 27 July 2009. 84 Carol Libby, “The Story behind Bill 168,” Windsor Star, 15 June 2010. 85 Jane Sims, “Workplace Act Now Protects against Sexual Harassment; Inquest Launched Following Murder of Vince Results in New Law,” Windsor Star, 23 March 2016. 86 Ontario, Ministry of the Attorney General, “Victim Services Awards of Distinction,” Ontario Newsroom, Ontario, 14 April 2011.

The Murder of Lori Dupont  159 87 Jordan Fairburn and Myrna Dawson, “Canadian News Coverage of Intimate Partner Homicide: Analyzing Changes over Time,” Feminist Criminology 8, no. 3 (2013): 147. 88 Ibid. 89 “Star Series a Runner-Up for National Award,” Windsor Star, 12 May 2007; “Star Team in Hunt for National Award,” Windsor Star, 10 March 2007. 90 Ontario Nurses’ Association, Occupational Health and Safety: A Guide for ONA Members (Toronto: Ontario Nurses’ Association, 2016), 3. 91 Ibid., 7. 92 Ontario Nurses’ Association, Workplace Violence and Harassment: A Guide for ONA Menbers (Toronto: Ontario Nurses Association, 2016), 1. 93 Ibid. 94 MacGregor, Wathen, and MacQuarrie, “Domestic Violence”; C. Nadine Wathen, Jennifer C.D. MacGregor, and Barbara J. MacQuarrie, “Relationships among Intimate Partner Violence, Work, and Health,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 57, no. 7 (2016): 1–23. 95 MacGregor, Wathen, and MacQuarrie, “Domestic Violence,” 245. This was a pan-Canadian survey with a sample of 8,429 participants (6,608 identified as female, 1,723 as male, 37 as transgender or other, and 61 as no response). 96 Ibid., 247. 97 Canadian Labour Congress, How Does Domestic Violence Impact People at Work?, 2015. 98 Ibid., 3. 99 Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, 2017, S.O. 2017, c. 22 – Bill 148, An Act to Amend the Employment Standards Act, 2000, the Labour Relations Act, 1995, and the Occupational Health and Safety Act and to Make Related Amendments to the Other Acts. Assented November 27, 2017. Currently, under the leadership of Premier Doug Ford, talks are in place to scrap much of Bill 148; however, the Ontario government has assured the public that domestic leave will not be impacted by the newly proposed changes in Bill 47, Making Ontario Open for Business Act, 2018, though this remains to be seen. 100 Ontario Nurses Association, “Ontario Nurses Association Marks 10 Years Since Lori Dupont, RN Murder: ONA Continues to Advocate for an End to Workplace Violence,” November 2015, Toronto. 101 Ibid. 102 ONA, Guide, 4. 103 ONA, Submission to Ontario Roundtable on Violence against Women and the Select Committee on Sexual Harassment and Violence (Toronto: ONA, May 2015), 3.

7 “By the Numbers”: Workers’ Compensation and the (Further) Conventionalization of Workplace Violence robert storey

As Richard Hudon tells it, “I had my accident in 1969 when I turned 17.”1 The Ottawa road construction company he was working for, Concrete Column Clamps, “had two contracts on the same street. There was only one bench saw, run from four blocks. They took a portable saw and took the guard off and put a hole in a sheet of plywood.” It was near the end of his shift and he was somewhat preoccupied with the fact that he was going to take a girl out on a first date with his first paycheque. “I’m young,” he states. “Imagine. We have a rule the last guy on the job pays the beers for the workers. So, I forgot to put aside the tools for the weekend in the shed.” I get to where the saw was. I picked up the saw. You’ve got about five feet of cord … It was still plugged. I just, the saw was here. I start rolling the cord. Supposedly, I was told, we were on an uneven ground. He tripped and when he fell forward he hit my hand and the saw … it went into the groin. It cut the main artery to the heart. Fifty-two years ago. There wasn’t any ambulance. It was the hearse from the funeral home. Twenty minutes upon arrival I was pronounced clinically dead. Here I am 52 years later talking to you.

For just over half of a century Richard Hudon has been living with the consequences of that moment when his workmate tripped into him and caused the saw to tear into his leg. The most significant immediate consequence was that he “lost” his leg to the surgeon’s knife when the bottom of it “died” and it had to be removed or Hudon himself would have perished. The long-term consequences follow both directly and indirectly from that moment, from that accident. That is, minus one leg, Richard had to find his way in a world that was largely indifferent to and all too frequently decidedly uncaring for men and women

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with physical disabilities. Moreover, an uninviting public was matched somewhat by employers who found myriad reasons not to hire disabled workers and by a workers’ compensation system that, while arguably at its best when it came to handling workers with work-based injuries that resulted in amputations, was nevertheless a system that had never been wholeheartedly at the service of injured workers.2 In Hudon’s case, the legislative and regulatory limitations of the workers’ compensation system precipitated his lifelong entanglements and struggles with that system as well as his long-term activism within the Ontario injured workers’ movement.3 In my research involving injured workers I have listened to a great many “accident”4 stories. My orientation, however, has always been forward-looking – to the highly conflicted relationship between injured workers and the workers’ compensation system. As such, I have become keenly aware that the processes involved in getting claims recognized, appeals held, and so on, far too often result in lives being put on indefinite hold; in marriages, intimate relationships, and friendships dissolving; and in descent into poverty and premature death, sometimes by suicide. In this chapter, though, I seek, first, to elucidate the structural violence that is the systematic cause of these things, and, second, to explore how that violence gets normalized and/or, to use a phrase penned by Kit Carson, “conventionalized” by and within the long-standing toxic bureaucratic shuffle – infused now with neoliberal rationalities – that is the modus operandi of the contemporary workers’ compensation system.5 As I hope to show, the injuries, illnesses, diseases, and fatalities that are the direct and latent results of capitalist labour processes are minimized and diminished by abstract injury categories even as they are buried beneath the “avalanche of printed numbers”6 found in the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s (WSIB) premier summary of annual statistics By the Numbers.7 What is “lost” in these processes is the painful understanding that these injuries, illnesses, diseases, and fatalities happen to real – flesh-and-blood – working women and men, who pay with their bodies the price of everyday hazardous working conditions and exploitative social relations of production. Violence in Work With regard to understanding violence at work, my starting point is David Harvey’s signalling that under capitalist labour processes “the body [is] an accumulation strategy”8 – that is, the working body is put to use in any and all ways conducive to capital accumulation. The

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corollary to this point is that whether we are seeking to understand the basic organization of work under capitalism or assessing the impact of some form of mechanization or automation or reorganization of any given work process whether in a machine shop or hospital setting, the impacts of such changes – arguably the most important – are on workers’ bodies. In making these arguments, Harvey is, of course, drawing heavily on Marx, who is very clear in his depictions of the role and plight of workers’ bodies under capitalist labour processes. Indeed, in the tenth chapter in Capital, Volume 1, “The Working Day,” Marx thunders: [I]t is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital … In its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development and health maintenance of the body.9

Writing in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century class conflict over the length of the working day, Marx is adamant in his view – one largely shared in this chapter – that it is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power.10 Even if one would want to mitigate Marx’s words and substitute “much” or “little” for “nothing” in the last sentence above, it remains clear that for Marx, labour processes under capitalism are inherently violent as they have at their roots the diminution, at times the outright destruction, of workers’ bodies and lives. This is a view plausibly shared by Jamil Salvi, who has advanced a typology of violence within democratic societies that includes what he terms “direct,” “indirect,” ”repressive” and “alienating” violence. In his discussion of these forms of violence, Salvi makes reference to work and workers only in the “indirect” and “alienating” categories – for example, under “indirect” violence he includes “lack of protection against accidents,” while under “alienating” violence he notes “the inhuman nature of work in certain industrial settings (routine tasks, coercive hierarchical relationships.”11 That said, one could, I think, rather easily make a case that each of these forms or types of violence applies to work and workers. For example, Salvi defines “direct violence” as “acts of deliberate

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violence resulting in direct attack on a person’s physical or psychological integrity” and gives as examples “genocide, war crimes, massacres of civilians, murders … as well as all types of coercive or brutal actions involving kidnapping or psychological suffering.”12 However, what about corporations that knowingly exposed their workers for years, even decades, to the “slow violence”13 of substances known to be toxic if not lethal – lead and asbestos, to name only two?14 Furthermore, Salvi’s “repressive violence” category encompasses the “deprivation of fundamental rights,” one of these being “trade unionism.” If this is the case, then it is a short and quick step to filling out his category to include the relationships between the presence of trade unions and better health and safety protections and outcome for workers.15 There is, thus, much to write about when it comes to workplace violence. However, much of what has been written does not take Marx’s structuralist view of workplace violence, or Salvi’s. Rather, the mountain of publications on contemporary workplace violence focuses on the actions and reactions of individual workers, finding both causes and solutions in their solitary and pathological psyches. A recent and refreshing departure from this perspective comes in the form of a study of workplace violence among autoworkers in Windsor and Detroit in the late 1960s and 1970s. The author of that study, Jeremy Milloy, while acknowledging the independent agency of individual workers, nevertheless points to the dynamics of capitalist workplaces and the larger socioeconomic, racialized context to explain the outbursts of violence in those two companies. Milloy writes: Taking individual violence seriously and assessing it regionally not only enhances our understanding of place but also allows us to better understand time, specifically the historical shift from Fordist production to what we now think of as neoliberal production. That violence spiked in Detroit plants in the late 1960s and early 1970s is not solely a reflection of resistance to the degradation of work due to the exploitation or racial inequalities and union weakness. Nor is it indicative of some kind of violent pathology among the city’s autoworkers. If we widen our gaze, we see that it that also demonstrates how the death of Fordism and the birth of … neoliberalism was a violent process.

In the same passage, Milloy highlights the research and analyses carried out by journalist Mark Ames into, among other events, the killings that took place in American postal facilities a decade or so later. In contrast to virtually all of the other analyses offered of those events, which took an individualistic/pathological approach, Ames’s “path-breaking

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research on workplace shootings,” Milloy states, “demonstrated that when neoliberal work arrangements became widespread in the 1980s and 1990s, workplace massacres became common.”16 By the Numbers I turn my attention now to the primary focus of this chapter: how workers’ compensation systems mask workplace violence by turning injured workers into numbers. Before proceeding, I do not wish to be misconstrued. I am no modern-day numbers Luddite – in any event, I would have little or no chance at being admitted into that lofty and heroic group. And, after all, working in the Marxist tradition I am very aware that Marx used a great many numbers in Capital, as did Engels in his classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Numbers/ statistics have their place in research. They have been important, as with Marx and Engels, in identifying and highlighting economic and social problems and thereby spurring efforts to address them.17 But they do not have this purpose when generated and applied by those in charge of Ontario’s WSIB, a neoliberal institution par excellence. By that I mean its administrative policies, programs, and organizational structure are right out of the new public management manuals with their thrust toward efficiency, effectiveness, and financial accountability, often caught and promoted in the supremely corporate phrase “best practices.”18 And those practices supersede all other organizational objectives. I mean as well that that the joined-at-the-hip neoliberal ethos of individualism/responsiblization is integral to its disciplinary rationality with regard to its “clients” – injured workers. What this characterization, what this mode of operation means is that the WSIB uses numbers to inform its “customers ” – principally Ontario’s employers – and their political overseer the Ontario government that they control not just their own system but workplace health and safety as a whole.19 How does all of this play out with workers’ compensation? How do numbers help separate the violence of capitalist workplaces from its human consequences? One way is by lying – or, to put it more politely, by not telling the whole story. Here I am referring to the marked propensity of the WSIB – and other WCBs – to neglect to inform readers of their various publications, including By the Numbers (BTN), that the numbers found in certain categories fail, dramatically, to depict the actual health and safety situation for workers. One prime example in this regard is the numbers used by the WSIB to back up its claim that, as a result of “relentless execution”20 by new and determined managers of a series of organizational,

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policy, and program changes over the past six to eight years, Ontario workplaces have become healthier and safer. As evidence to back this claim, the WSIB points to how the number of “registered claims”21 has declined from 281,676 in 2007 to 193,214 in 201622 for Schedule 1 workplaces and from 44,430 to 37,719 registered claims for Schedule 2 workplaces.23 To buttress its point, in the same two charts it draws our attention to how this decline has taken place despite the twin facts that more workers are now covered by the regulatory arm of the WSIB and that a greater percentage of the Ontario workforce had come under the WSIB coverage legislation. As a good number of analysts have shown, it is clear that there is no connection, causal or otherwise, between these declines in “registered claims” and WSIB boasts that its preventative measures are improving health and safety conditions in Ontario’s workplaces. Indeed, the major instruments utilized in this regard are experience-rating employer incentive systems that a fairly large body of research has shown to have essentially no relationship to employers attending more assiduously to the safety of their workplaces or the health of their employees.24 More importantly, as researchers have shown to be the case in a number of countries, the numbers churned out by the WSIB and other workers’ compensation bureaucracies to illustrate improving health and safety conditions – and it is hard to believe these omissions are not conscious – do not include in any accompanying narrative of how hundreds of thousands of workers slip through a plethora of cracks when it comes to registering claims with workers’ compensation boards. In the Canadian instance, according to Rachel Cox and Katherine Lippel, workers in precarious forms of employment are surely missing in this count. “Studies on health and safety concerns associated with the growth of precarious employment,” they write, “reveal compelling evidence that precarious work arrangements are associated with higher injury rates, as well as greater exposure to hazards, diseases and work-related stress … [Furthermore,] certain groups of workers – such as women, racialized workers, immigrants and young workers – may be particularly at risk.”25 To the question of how these numbers underrepresent the actual numbers of injured workers, Cox and Lippel argue that because of a host of factors and processes – including how full-time workers are calculated, the fact that large swaths of workers (in Ontario it is 38 per cent) are not covered by workers’ compensation legislation, how some workers are excluded from coverage because of legal loopholes, how some problems such as mental health are not covered by legislation, and how employers “manage” claims – between 40 to 50 per cent of work-related injuries

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and illnesses are conspicuously absent from statistics on workers’ compensation claims.26 So the WSIB cannot, and should not, take credit for such numbers or for the improvements they claim are associated with them. Nor can it take credit for what their numbers tell us is a decade-long decline in the number of lost-time injuries27 – unless they want to publicly acknowledge that the administrative and policy changes they instituted starting in 2010 – including the recruiting of I. David Marshall from the privatesector banking/auditing milieu to the positions of CEO and president with a secret contract clause containing bonuses if he could bring costs down – have resulted in more such clams being rejected at the outset and/or during the appeal process.28 When it comes to workplace violence, official WSIB numbers thus seriously delimit the true extent and nature of injury, illness, disease, and fatalities in Ontario’s workplaces. The same holds true for fatalities, whether by trauma or via occupational disease. With regard to traumatic workplace fatalities, for example, WSIB numbers tell us that if Schedules 1 and 2 are taken together the average number of traumatic workplace fatalities over the past decade is in the mid to high sixties. If you add to his figure the deaths from occupational disease, workplace fatalities for all years reach into the three hundreds.29 Everyone involved in health and safety would state, rightly, that these numbers are unacceptably high. Indeed, given that the WSIB believes, at least publicly, that all “accidents” are preventable,30 any death on the job would seem to be beyond the pale. One wonders, then, how WSIB administrators square their degree of angst and sorrow, which there is no reason to suspect they actually do not feel, with research that indicates that such numbers are, again, seriously short of true. Quite apart from the fact that the WSIB’s data collection processes do not cover all Ontario workplaces, and thus miss traumatic fatalities in those workplaces, there is the obvious, long-standing, and incontestable charge that deaths due to occupational diseases go unreported and therefore uncompensated on a massive scale. The experience of hundreds of workers at a General Electric plant in Peterborough, Ontario, is a keen illustration of such an omission and its unjust and sorrowful consequences. Over the last five decades of the twentieth century, workers in the plant were regularly “exposed to more than 3,000 toxic chemicals, including at least 40 known or suspected to cause cancer.” Over these years many workers contracted life-altering illnesses or died from diseases thought to result from their exposure.31 Yet only a precious few were compensated for their illnesses, diseases, and death. The deaths of these workers – and potentially their family members

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as well, who likewise came into contact with the residues of these toxic substances through living close to the plant or, mainly in the case of women, through washing the work clothes of their male family members – are not to found in the WSIB’s fatality numbers. There are a number of other ways that WSIB data minimize the human carnage of workplaces even as they turn injured workers into numbers. Of more than passing interest in this regard is the WSIB webpage that introduces the By the Numbers report. In a blue box with graphic depictions of a mobile phone, a tablet, and a desktop computer, and with an arrow that can be clicked to enter a YouTube video wherein a lighthearted male voice describes how simple it is to access and use the By the Numbers report, there are the following words: “By the Numbers has the information you need – all in one place. It’s a one-stop shop for information on injury and illness trends in Ontario’s workplaces.” The point of objection here is, or should be, patently obvious: the WSIB is here referring to injured, ill, and dead bodies as one might refer to shopping at Shoppers Drug Mart, where you can pick up your milk, deoderant, toilet paper, chocolate bars, aspirin, and the like. As such, at the very outset the contents of By the Numbers is trivialized and made mundane – of little or no consequence. Moving into the Schedule 1 Report, we come to a “Highlights” page.32 Here we see a series of graphics presented in a bright, upbeat, even uplifting colour scheme that are being used to inform readers that 193,000 claims were registered, that the average number of workdays lost due to injury was just over a week, that “high impact” claims (injuries to low back or shoulders, as well as fractures) represented 32 per cent of all Schedule 1 claims and 42 per cent of all lost time benefit payments, that “sprains and strains” were the leading source (38 per cent) of all lost time claims, that the leading “event” related to the injury (18 per cent) was “overexertion,” and that the leading injured body part was the low back,” which accounted for 17 per cent of all lost time accidents.33 The issue here, I believe, is that the above-mentioned upbeat colour scheme of bright blues, greens, yellows, and purples serves to distract readers from the serious meaning of the numbers. More problematically, there is the concern with how this mode of communication depicts injured workers. That is, the only graphic of an injured worker comes in the form of a highly atypical injured worker with an arm in a sling in the high impact section. There are no tombstones to mark the three-hundred-plus deaths. There are no skull and crossbone labels to signify workers injured through exposure to toxic chemicals, or X-rays that show the scarred lungs of asbestos workers who came down with asbestosis and/or who died from mesothelioma.34 Or graphics of

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injured workers and their families who live in poverty as a result of a workplace injury, illness, or fatality.35 I turn next to more serious concerns with these numbers and address the processes by which the pains and other life-altering injuries, illnesses, and diseases – in short, the human manifestations of instances of workplace violence – are “explained” in By the Numbers. Turning first to the Schedule 1 and 2 charts on “Leading Injury Characteristics” (for allowed lost time claims),36 we see a few important similarities and differences between the two schedules. In terms of similarities, the category “Sprains and Strains” tops both lists with regard to what the WSIB – and other workers’ compensation boards – term “Nature of Injury.” The other similarity pertains to the part of the body injured most frequently via sprains and strains. Not surprisingly, it is the “low back.” I say not surprisingly because if we look back at Ontario Worker’s Compensation Board reports from the 1960s forward, we see that low back injuries have invariably headed the lists – and, even more critically for the WSIB, the costs in terms of injured workers’ benefits.37 The differences in the two schedules lie in what the WSIB terms the “source” and the “event” related to the injury, illness, or fatality. For workers under Schedule 1 the leading “source” of injury is “structures,” defined as “the object, exposure or bodily motion that directly produced or inflicted the injury/disease identified under Nature of Injury.” Again for workers under Schedule 1, the leading “event” was “overexertion,” with “event” being defined as “the event or exposure … in which the injury/disease was produced/inflicted.”38 For Schedule 2 workers the leading “source” of injury was “Persons” or “Bodily motion or condition,” while the leading “event” was “Fall on Same Level.”39 Additional charts delve bit deeper into these “events” and “sources.” As this further explication has direct relevance to my argument that the numbers serve to obscure both the sources and the manifestations of workplace violence, it is worthwhile to follow this pathway a bit farther. In terms of explaining “allowed lost time claims by leading injury “source” the WSIB states: Over the past ten years, structures (including walkways, floors, and buildings and persons (bodily motion or condition) have consistently been the leading source of injury for allowed lost time claims. In 2016, these two sources of injury accounted for 21 per cent and 20 per cent of lost time claims respectively. Where persons was the source of injury, female workers and workers in the health care sector represented the highest percentage of these lost time claims in 2016. Three of the five leading injury sources [Structures including walkways, floors, and buildings; Persons

“By the Numbers”  169 (bodily motion or condition); Containers (boxes, barrels, packages pressurized and non-pressurized; Building materials; Furniture and fixtures)] were highest among those aged 50 to 54 and 55 to 59 years, in various occupations. Sprains and strains were the leading nature of injury for all five leasing injury sources and the part of the body most often injured was the low back.40

And, with regard to explaining “allowed lost time claims by leading injury event,” the WSIB states: Over the past 10 years, overexertion has consistently represented the leading injury event and in 2016 accounted for 18 per cent of allowed lost time claims, down from 23 per cent in 2007. A further 16 per cent were the result of a worker being struck by objects/equipment and 14 per cent resulted from a fall on the same level … In 2016, workers in the services sector (the sector with the largest number of workers covered) were most prone to experiencing one of the five leading injury events [Overexertion, Struct by objects or equipment, Fall on same level, Bodily reaction, Bodily reaction and exertion (combined), including unspecified] While male workers represented the majority of lost time claims for these injury events overall, female workers represented the highest percentage of lost time claims that resulted from a fall on the same level. These leading injury events also tended to be highest among the older age groups (50 to 54 and 55 to 59 years old), in various occupations.41

Before setting out my analysis of these numbers and categories, it is important to note significant differences in “Events” and “Sources” between Schedules 1 and 2. In terms of leading sources of injury under Schedule 2, the top two were “Persons (bodily motion or condition)” and then “Structures,” while women workers were the “leading gender” in three of the five leading sources. And with regard to leading injury “Event,” female “Secondary and elementary school teachers & counselors” between the ages of 50 and 54 were the most likely to experience strains and sprains via their interactions with “Structures.” Women workers were also the most likely to receive lost time benefits as a result of assaults and other violent attacks.42 To summarize these differences, women workers are getting injured at ever-higher rates, and their numbers are growing; and, perhaps more importantly, women workers in health care and education occupations are being subjected to forms of violence (e.g., assaults and other forms of attacks) that heretofore have been restricted to other occupations such as police officer. As is clear from a growing number of studies of Ontario’s health care

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sector,43 while it seems to be the case that workers suffering from such assaults are registering claims with the WSIB, it is likewise clear that the scale of violence in the health care sector – and, it appears, in the educational sector – is far higher than the levels caught by the WSIB’s registered claims files. Turning to my analysis, I begin by recasting the WSIB’s categories of “Source” and “Event” into terminology I can understand. Thus, “source” refers to the means of production, while “event” refers to how the workers incurred the lost time injury while interacting (i.e., doing their jobs) with the means of production. That said, I contend that there are four fundamental problems with these quite colourful pie charts. First, to take “Structures (including Walkways, Floors & Buildings)” as the leading industry source for Schedule 1 lost time injuries, there is, for example, no information conveyed – either in the chart or in any of the accompanying narratives – of the state of repair of said walkways, floors, and buildings, which could well have played a major role in the leading industry event “falls on same level.” In one way or another, the same inchoate relationship exists between the other “Source” and “Event” categories. The second problem relates to the social relations of production. While the Ontario workers’ compensation system is “no fault,”44 what is missing in these charts and categories is acknowledgment of the unequal power relations between workers and their employers – these days almost regardless of their union status. This means, of course, that a possible explanation for a worker slipping and falling on a floor may well have been a supervisor telling that worker to carry on with his or her job even though both are aware that the condition of the floor – be it oily or overcrowded with materials and wires, for example – makes it dangerous to do so. The missing understandings and explanations – both of which would have been clear to see had the social relations of production under capitalist labour processes been included – point us to our third concern, which is that the “Event” categories skate over that astonishingly still present, ever-so-thin ice of that tried-and-true occupational health and safety bit of baseless wisdom of blaming the victim. For, without having an understanding of power relationships in the workplace, and how those unequal power relationships have become strengthened and entrenched in the era of neoliberalism, one might reasonably think/believe that an injury due to “Overexertion” was the injured workers’ fault. After all, machines cannot overexert – that is fully within the purview of humans as they exert their labour power.

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The fourth issue with these categories – and with all of the numbers and their associated categories – is the beating heart of the matter. This “avalanche of printed numbers” and their associated categories separate the systemic violence of workplaces from injured workers even as they anaesthetize the resulting carnage. In some ways this is the most important point/conclusion of this chapter, and, as such, it needs some added attention. When the WSIB, either in its annual reports or in its now annual By the Numbers statistical reports, puts up the numbers in the rows and columns, what is missing, although in plain sight, is the hard times and sorrow that workplace injury, illness, disease and death can, and do, inflict on injured workers and their families, friends, and communities. I have formally interviewed well over one hundred injured workers over the course of fifteen or more years; most recently, with a colleague, I was involved in a process where just over one hundred other injured workers gave “testimony” to what was termed a “Revived Meredith Commission.”45 Their stories help lay bare the bureaucratic/political intent of these seemingly innocuous categories. For example, if we were compile the injury stories of the workers who recounted their “accidents,” “overexertion” would head the list of causes – or “Events,” to use the WSIB’s terminology.46 This would be followed by “fall on same level” and then “moving objects.” “Violence” and “explosions” were also among the causes or sources of the injury. Interestingly, this pattern follows closely the one found in the WSIB’s statistical report for 2016, at least for the first three. With respect to “overexertion,” many of the women injured workers we heard from – mainly personal service workers – told us of spraining or straining (“the leading nature of injury”) their backs (“the leading part of body injured” followed by “legs” and “multiple body parts”) in situations where they had to, by themselves, lift very heavy patients without the aid of lifting devices. These workers told of feeling sudden, sharp pains that stopped them in their tracks. In some of these cases the pain subsided and they continued to work until the end of shift. The next day, or the next day, or a week later, however, the pain came back when they tried, and failed, to get out of bed. This is “overexertion,” and this is “sprains and strains.” They can come on suddenly, and they can come on suddenly from overexertion over time. In 2009, Tim Steinke, a transport truck driver, felt a “pop” in his bicep when he was throwing a restraining strap over his truck – a motion, a task he performed countless times over his thirty-nine years as a trucker. He can no longer be a trucker. He lost a part-time job last October when he had a heart attack. “I can’t do anything, anymore,”

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he told us. He liked hunting and fishing. He cannot do either of them anymore. Nor can Jerry DeSantis do many of the things he once enjoyed. Also a truck driver, Jerry routinely worked alone watering public parks and landscapes. Doing this job entailed carrying watering hoses across long stretches of land. One day, in 2007, Jerry felt an intense pain in his right shoulder. Now unable to do this work, his employer gave him modified work that involving strapping and taping trees. One day the pain was so great that he collapsed in the cab of his vehicle. When he was able, he drove the truck back, took his tools, and went on sick leave. Later, Jerry filed a compensation claim, which was “denied,” he said, “because the company gave me modified work.” Here the plot thickens. His claim was denied by the WSIB because the adjudicators, or whomever, did not believe that his work could have caused his shoulder injury. The WSIB report stated that this man “has a casual relationship with a hose.” The “hoses” with which Jerry was working in fact weighed 80 pounds each, and he would sometimes pull three or four at the same time. In a state of some desperation, Mr DeSantis took photos of these hoses to the WSIB so that his adjudicator would understand that they were not garden hoses. Beryl Brown, a young Jamaican woman when she arrived in Toronto in 1992, got hired as a drill press operator. “I inserted, we made … electrical fittings, junction boxes, so I had to use the screws, and insert, and my major job was operating a drill press machine.” After a few years she began to experience severe pains in her arms and neck. Her doctor diagnosed her as having repetitive strain injury and recommended that she be given time off work. After six weeks, she came back to work and her job changed. They took me off that. What they gave me was maybe even harder than what I was doing, because I had to use pliers to cut and I had to pack this production pieces. It was very fast coming out of the machine, I have to lift, I have to bend … Sometimes we made thousands and thousands of pieces. If you go for break, then when you come back, the machine is all piled up, you’re talking about working four or five machines, could be four to one person. And it continued until I started having discomfort in my neck, my right side of my neck. The whole neck as a matter of fact. But the right side was worse and my lower back. It gradually spread through [my] entire body. I was in so much pain, and, the thing got worse in October. It was a short week as we worked some weeks five days, some weeks two … So the week when it was my short week. We just finished off five nights, twelve hours, so we would be off like Monday, Tuesday and we would go

“By the Numbers”  173 back Wednesday, Thursday. So it was alternate weekends. And so when I should go in Wednesday night I realized that I just couldn’t move, I was in so much pain so I called my employer, said I just couldn’t … My body was in so much pain. I had to seek medical help … Oh gosh, I just couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t get out of bed, nothing. It was so much pain, I couldn’t turn my neck. It’s awful to describe, unless you’re going through it.47

During the Revived Meredith Commission, Sylvia Clarke told of her injury, which fell under the ostensibly mundane category “Struck by objects or equipment,” the second “leading injury event.” For her, this meant having a wheelchair crush her foot while she was working at Sunnyside Hospital. For Darby Sanderston, a railway worker in Thunder Bay, it meant being knocked down by a moving train in 1977. All these years later he is still fighting for his claim. For Charmaine Fink, also of Thunder Bay, it meant getting hit in the head by a planter while she was working in a flower and garden shop almost ten years ago. When she went back to work her manager put her in a cashier’s position that “was a disaster because he left her compensation file open on a desk and the other employees read it.” She was humiliated. She feels that her children have suffered. “I was a strong mom,” she told us. “I was a good mom.” Her brain injury, caused by the planter falling on her head, changed all of that for her.48 In another story, told to me by Mike Ladouceur in 2009, he recounts how being “struck by objects or equipment” altered the course and the content of his life forever. I was in a bad accident at a factory I was working in, it’s called Border Steel Inc., in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I was working midnights, and I went to work on January 5, 1994. When I had gone to work I found out that a fellow employee had called in sick, and I needed his job done to have my job done. So I had to do both jobs. It was about 2 a.m. when I was doing the other job, I was lifting a 10 ton steel plate with the overhead crane, using L-shaped clamps. I lifted the plate up about waist level, when one of the clamps shot out and hit me right between the eyes, and went about a half an inch into my skull. It knocked me back a couple of steps, and I banged [the] back of my head against a concrete block wall, then I fell forward and banged the front of my head against a cement floor. After that had happened, it put me into a coma … I was in a coma for 32 days after the accident had happened.

In the months following his injury, Mike’s girlfriend left him while other friends drifted away. He became very depressed, took an overdose of

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pills, and ended up in the hospital for therapy. He remembers that when his workplace was inspected after his injury, the inspectors found no violations because his employer “had changed the clamps. I think the owner got charged $6,000 for having no evidence, because he got rid of the steel clamps right after the accident. Got away with no evidence. Me, I got a changed life. It’s not right.”49 Both of these “accident” categories, then, fundamentally underplay their consequences. This holds as true for our third category of “slips and falls.” Under this heading we can find Wes Montgomery, a window cleaner who fell twenty stories, the impact forcing his ankles into his knees. And Mingxiu Xie, a personal service worker, who slipped and fell on snow that her client had not shovelled and hit her head and injured her back. And Hong Zhang, who fell down a flight of stairs on her first day of work at Coffee Time because of the darkness and injured her neck and back and has since has surgery on her right shoulder, has appealed, and won the claims for her neck and back injury but who suffers from depression because the injury, and the claims and appeals processes, have put her into a state of depression – which the WSIB is denying is related to her injury, saying, rather, that it is due to her husband moving back to China and her son moving to the United States. Or, Elena, a postal worker who slipped on ice and incurred a spinal injury, and who, six months later, in her words, was forced back to work only to reinjure herself. Or Mike Golder, who on 11 December 2002 was on a call as a volunteer firefighter and slipped on ice. He does not remember the accident except that he was told by his boss “to go home and you will be all right.” Ten years later he is not all right. He has a brain injury from the “fall.” He has lost his family. Under this heading we should also find the names of four workers – Aleksey Blumberg, Vladimir Korostin, Fayzullo Fazilov, and Aleksanders Bondarev – who on 24 December 2009 fell to their deaths when the scaffolding they were standing on to restore the balconies of a Toronto highrise apartment building collapsed.50 We should find their names, but, of course, we do not. Conclusion For many of the injured workers I interviewed, the moment of their injury became the story of their lives. However, this sometimes tragic conflation of injury story and life story simply cannot be found in any WSIB documents claiming to report on the board’s state of affairs. One recent document, titled This Is the Story of an Historic Transformation, is particularly notable in this regard. In six pages, the WSIB lays out how

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“relentless execution” of management policies and programs has rescued the Ontario worker’s compensation system from almost certain financial ruin. What, though, was the situation from which the workers’ compensation system needed to be rescued? It was not, for example, the dire poverty suffered by growing numbers of injured workers and their families.51 Rather, what was viewed as the most critical challenge was to somehow pay down and eliminate an unfunded liability of more than $10 billion (i.e., the difference between ongoing revenues from employer assessments and investments and the committed yearly and future benefit costs to injured workers). After investigating the issue, the WSIB concluded that it had an expense problem and not a revenue problem; thus, “if the WSIB was going to be saved, it would have to be done the old-fashioned way – through fundamental changes to the business, a diligent understanding of what our strategy needed to be, and relentless execution.”52 Key to their subsequent actions was the adoption of a 2006 report by the American College of Occupational Medicine (ACOM) stating that “strong evidence” existed that “suggests that activity hastens occupational recovery, while inactivity delays it.”53 According to the historic transformation story, trading passivity for action in this realm (i.e., getting injured workers back to work more quickly) had “greatly improved the health outcomes for injured workers,” the proof of which lay in the numbers: Today, 92 percent of eligibility decisions are made within two weeks … many within 24 hours – giving us a head start on that 90-day clock to minimize the risk of permanent impairment.54 As a result, health outcomes for injured workers have improved, and the number of injured workers requiring wage loss benefits has declined … Standards were set for recovery times based on research results … Today the WSIB contracts with hospitals, enabling back surgery in as few as five days in requesting it. Previously outsourced services for injured workers who were looking for work netted about a 35 per cent success rate and cost $165 million a year. So 300 return-to-work specialists were in-sourced to go right to employer premises and negotiate return to work for injured workers. In 2014, staff made 25,000 visits to employers, for a success rate of 80.5 per cent at a cost of $72 million a year.55

There are a great many numbers in play here, none of which have gone uncontested by injured workers and their advocacy organizations.56 Our point here is that even when the WSIB actually brings injured workers into the discussion, it surrounds and invades their bodies with a deeply flawed narrative that has its ultimate recourse/

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justification/legitimation in the form of numbers. What percentage of their bodies are permanently impaired? How much money should they get in benefits? How many weeks/months should they receive benefits? How much is a lung worth? Or a finger or an eye? How much is a life worth?57 The ultimate point here is that the compendium of adverse governance techniques and rationalities as represented in an “avalanche of numbers” are serving in an ever-increasing multiplicity of ways to further divorce the normalized violence of workplaces from the resultant human carnage. I write and emphasize “further” here in reference to the work of Kit Carson noted earlier in this chapter. In his seminal article “The Conventionalization of Early Factory Crime,” Carson analysed how when concerns began to be raised during the Industrial Revolution about the level and the nature of injury to workers in England’s factories, and when laws were passed to address patently unsafe and unhealthy conditions, these laws were inscribed with the potential for criminal charges against employers who violated their provisions. Yet as events unfolded, this criminal potential was never systematically acted upon because, as Carson writes, “early nineteenth century employers successfully retained a ‘right,’ if not to totally uncontrolled violation [of clauses restricting the hours of labour performed by children and young persons] … at least to substantial immunity from the penal and other adverse implications of their criminal conduct.”58 To the point of “conventionalization,” as Steve Tombs and John Moores observe in their summary comments on Carson’s analysis, through a series of material and ideological struggles … what might have been marked out as an area of “real” crime by law and its enforcement in fact came to form the classic instance of what Edwin Sutherland later referred to as offences considered only to be mala prohibita – technical violations rather than immoral acts for real crimes. Thus factory crime came to be represented and seen as “conventional” – subject to widely accepted “rationalizations and justifications” and “routinely integrated with otherwise reputable activity.”59

Whether it be in nineteenth-century moulding shops or in twentyfirst-century hospitals, workers who are injured, diseased, or killed from the labours they perform are the victims of factory crimes. As Carson outlines it, Britain’s early industrial bourgeoisie were able to navigate their way out of criminal law’s harm’s way. Employers in Canada are able to do the same today, even in the face of such workplace disasters at the killing of twenty-six miners at Westray in Nova Scotia, the

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killing of eighty-four oil rig workers on the Ocean Ranger off the coast of Newfoundland, or in the killing of forty-seven workers and citizens in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, where a train derailed due to the wilful negligence of a company that had received from the Canadian government the “right” to self-regulate its operations.60 And, as referenced earlier, apart from concerns about potential workers’ compensation assessment costs, GE ownership remains separate from, and seemingly indifferent to, the plight of hundreds of workers at its Peterborough plant who were subject to the “slow violence” of exposure to toxic solvents and untold carcinogens. In the end these workers – and their families – are treated like numbers. Far different from the “historic transformation” story told so loudly and proudly by the “relentless” leadership of the WSIB, is the transformation of a public institution entrusted at its inception with caring for the victims of industrial and societal “progress,” indeed whose masthead carried the message “Justice humanely and speedily rendered,” into an insurance company where neoliberal governments and their senior WSIB executives and managers knowingly allow actuaries to rule the roost and inject even deeper into the system numbers that further conventionalize workplace violence. Marx wrote that “the owner of labour power is mortal.”61 He wrote those words because he could see that, as they merged, capitalist social relations of production and means of production created labour processes that were violent. In his critique of political economy he employed a vast array of numbers to assist him in revealing the hidden workings and the bloody outcomes of this ominous marriage – the settings of which were England’s dark, satanic mills. Little did he know that 150 years on, numbers would be integral to the processes for anaesthetizing these very connections and injured “labour power” would become a number. NOTES 1 Richard Hudon, Revived Meredith Commission, Toronto, 12 August 2103. 2 For an excellent history/analysis of disabled workers’ struggles with employers, see, Dustin Galer, Working Towards Equity: Disability Rights Activism and Employment in Late Twentieth Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 3 For a history/analysis of the injured workers’ movement, see, Robert Storey, “Their Only Power Was Moral: The Injured Workers’ Movement in Toronto, 1970–1985,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 41, no. 81 (May 2008): 99–131.

178  Robert Storey 4 There is some debate over the use of the word “accident.” In this chapter I substitute “injury” for “accident” at all times except in direct quotes. In doing so, I am following British researcher Theo Nichols, who, with others, believes that industrial injuries are not a matter of “misfortune or bad luck.” Rather, I agree with Nichols when he writes “that industrial injuries vary in accord with determinate conditions and that they are not random events.” Thus, like Nichols, I hold “that, as far as injuries at work are concerned, the term ‘accident’ obscures that ‘luck’ is a class issue. Such luck is itself a matter of socially structured regularity. It is not simply a matter of specific, individual, events. On a case by case basis, an industrial injury may well be regarded as bad luck and be unforeseen, but where you stand in the class structure (more precisely in the occupational structure) systematically affects your chances of getting injured.” Theo Nichols, The Sociology of Industrial Injury (London: Mansell, 1997), 3. 5 I will develop this concept and its application to the current Ontario workers’ compensation system in the final section of this chapter. W.G. Carson, “The Conventionalization of Early Factory Crime,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 7 (1979): 37–60. 6 For this phrase and its meanings, see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 7 As will be discussed in the next section, the Ontario workers’ compensation system has always employed numbers – right from its first Annual Report in 1916. Over the years and decades, and especially since the 1990s, the use of numbers has become both more exhaustive – in the sense of ground covered – and politically more pointed. The title “Statistical Supplement” in the board’s annual reports was changed to By the Numbers in 2011. Again, as I will outline below, this change was very much in tandem with, and in support of, the decisive neoliberal shift in the Ontario workers’ compensation system. 8 David Harvey, “The Body as an Accumulation Strategy,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 401–21. 9 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 291. 10 Ibid. 11 Jamil Salvi, Violence and Democratic Society (London: Zed Books, 1993), 21. 12 Ibid., 27. 13 This term is taken from Rob Nixon’s book on the violence brought on by “climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills and the environmental aftermath of war.” I believe the term is more than apt at catching the slow processes associated with the incubation of occupational diseases such as cancer. See Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

“By the Numbers”  179 14 Gerard Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Lloyd Tatayrn, Dying for a Living: The Politics of Industrial Death (Toronto: Deneau and Greenberg, 1979); Jessica Van Horssen, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016); Paul Brodeur, Expendable Americans: The Incredible Story of How Tens of Thousands of American Men and Women Die Each Year of Preventable Industrial Disease (New York: Viking, 1974); Geoffrey Tweedale, Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner and Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 15 LOARC, Health and Safety Representation: Writing the Workers Back In (Toronto: Ontario Public Services Employees Union, 2014); Robert Storey and Eric Tucker, “‘All That’s Solid Melts into Air’: Worker Participation and Occupational Health and Safety Regulation in Ontario, 1970–2000,” in Worker Safety under Seige: Labor, Capital, and the Politics of Workplace Safety in a Deregulated World, ed. Vernon Mogensen (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2006), 157–86. 16 Jeremy Milloy, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), 12. See also Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005). 17 Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 18 For a critique of best practices, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015). For the application of new public management ideology, policy, and practice, particularly “benchmarking,” see Suzan Ilcan, “Privatizing Responsibility: Public Sector Reform under Neoliberal Government,” Canadian Review of Sociology 46, no. 3 (August 2009): 207–34; John Shields and B. Mitchell Evans, Shrinking the State: Globalization and Public Administration “Reform” (Halifax: Fernwood, 1998); Bryan Evans, “How the State Changed Its Mind: A Gramscian Account of Ontario’s Managerial Culture Change,” Philosophy of Management 5, no. 2 (2005): 25–46. 19 The context for this statement lies in the so-called crisis of the unfunded liability of the worker’s compensation system in Ontario. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the unfunded liability – that is, the difference between WSIB revenues and expenses (both current and projected to cover for all future benefit costs of workers with long-term and/or permanent

180  Robert Storey impairments) – stood at more than $10 billion. Government and contracted private sector audits argued that the size of the unfunded liability was threatening the system’s financial viability, thus drastic action was required to bring it down and eliminate it. 20 WSIB, This Is the Story of an Historic Transformation (Toronto: 2016), 3. 21 Registered claims are: “Registered claims for injuries, illnesses or fatalities reported to the WSIB in the year … and includes all allowed, denied, abandoned and pending claims.” WSIB, By the Numbers: 2016 Statistical Report, Schedule 1: 33. At this point it is important to clarify the distinction between Schedule 1 and Schedule 2 within the WSIB. Dating back to the inception of the “workmen’s” compensation system in 1915, Ontario employers have been divided in terms of their mode of liability. Employers under Schedule 1 are “collectively liable” by virtue of their annual assessments being placed in “pooled” insurance funds, from which are taken all costs associated with injuries to their employees; while employers under Schedule 2 are individually liable in the sense that they self-insure and are individually responsible for paying all costs associated with injuries to their employees, although, as with Schedule 1, it is the WSIB that administers the claims. Although somewhat rough at the edges, this division aligns with private sector employers falling under Schedule 1 and public sector employers – as well as banking, insurance, and federal employers – falling under Schedule 2. 22 WSIB, This Is the Story, 7. 23 WSIB, By the Numbers, 2016 Statistical Report, Schedule 2: 7. 24 The classic critique of experience-rating plans and their supposed positive impacts on worker health and safety remains that of Terence Ison, “The Significance of Experience Rating,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 24, no. 4 (1986), 723–4. For more recent critiques, see Harry Arthurs, Funding Fairness: A Report on Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Program (Toronto: Queen’s Printer, 2012). See also the special issue on experiencerating plans in a number of countries in Policy and Practice in Health and Safety 10(1) (2012). 25 Rachel Cox and Katherine Lippel, “Falling through the Legal Cracks: The Pitfalls of Using Workers’ Compensation Data as Indicators of WorkRelated Injuries and Illnesses,” Policy and Practice in Health and Safety 6, no. 2 (2008): 9; Lenore S. Azaroff et al., “Wounding the Messenger: The New Economy Makes Occupational Health Indicators Too Good to Be True,” International Journal of Health Services 34, no. 2 (2004), 271–303. 26 Cox and Lippel, “Falling through the Legal Cracks,” 10. 27 Lost time claims for both Schedules are defined by the WSIB as being “created when a worker suffers a work-related injury/disease which

“By the Numbers”  181 results in … being off work past the day of the accident, loss of wages/ earnings, or a permanent disability/impairment.” By the Numbers 2016: 51. The “Allowed Claims and Injury Rates by Injury/Illness Year” are reported for Schedule 1 and 2 respectively, as 64,531 to 43,386 (2007/2016) and 16,339 to 13,982 (2007/2016). 28 Industrial Accident Victims’ Group of Ontario, Bad Medicine: A Report on the WSIB’s Transformation of Its Health Care Spending (Toronto: 2017). 29 WSIB, By the Numbers 2016: Schedule 1, “Allowed Traumatic Fatalities by Year of Death”; “Allowed Occupational Disease Fatalities by Entitlement Year,” 35–6; Schedule 2: 30–1. 30 WSIB, Road To Zero: A Prevention Strategy for Workplace Health and Safety in Ontario, 2008–2012 (Toronto). 31 Robert DeMatteo and Dale DeMatteo, Report of the Advisory Committee on Retrospective Exposure Profiling of the Production Processes at the General Electric Production Facility in Peterborough, Ontario, 1945–2000 (Toronto: UNIFOR, 2017). 32 WSIB, By the Numbers 2016, Schedule 1: 6. 33 Ibid. The parallel figures for Schedule 2 are found on page 6. 34 Ann Del Bianco, “Trends for Compensation for Death from Occupational Cancer in Canada: A Descriptive Study,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 1, no. 3 (2013): E91–E95. 35 Peri Ballantyne, Rebecca Casey, Fergal T. O’Hagan, and Pat Vienneau, “Poverty Status of Workers’ Compensation Claimants with Permanent Impairments,” Critical Public Health 26, no. 2 (2016): 173–90. 36 WSIB, By the Numbers 2016, Schedule 1: 25; Schedule 2: 20. 37 Ontario Workmen’s Compensation Board, Annual Report 1966 (Toronto: Queen’s Printer, 1966). 38 WSIB, By the Numbers 2016, Schedule 1: 25. 39 There are a number of additional charts that delve a bit deeper into each of these categories, which are of some interest. 40 WSIB, By the Numbers 2016, Schedule 1: 28. 41 WSIB, By the Numbers 2016, Schedule 1: 27. 42 WSIB, By the Numbers 2016, Schedule 1: 22. 43 James Brophy, Margaret Keith, and Michael Hurley, “Assaulted and Unheard: Violence against Healthcare Staff,” New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 27, no. 4 (2018): 581–606. 44 During his Royal Commission on then-existing workmen’s compensation laws, Sir William Meredith stated that getting rid of “this nuisance of litigation” was almost reason enough to enact new laws. In the event, workers gave up their right to sue their employers in return for guaranteed compensation provided that they could show that their injury/illness arose “in or out of the conditions of employment.” This is

182  Robert Storey known as the “historic compromise.” This was never foolproof as far as injured workers – and their employers – were concerned, and over the past decade the WSIB and employers have found ways to reintroduce “fault” into the adjudication and appeal processes. Most troubling is the early 2010s insertion of “pre-existing conditions” into determinations of entitlement and benefits. Simply, the WSIB introduced policy changes that held that any pre-existing medical condition – even and especially those unknown to the injured worker – could and would be factored into entitlement and benefits decision-making. In this way, workers with spinal deterioration stemming from an earlier injury or from the normal course of aging could have their claims rejected and/or receive less in benefits because this pre-existing condition contributed to their present state of ill health. Workers are thus “faulted” for having bodies that become physically more tenuous as they age. 45 The “Revived Meredith Commission” was the name given to a sevencity tour in 2013 by the author and his colleague, Carol Elston, in the course of which they listened to the testimonies of injured workers. The year 2013 was the hndredth anniversary of the publication of Sir William Meredith’s Final Report on Laws Relating to the Liability of Employers to Make Compensation to Their Employees for Injuries Received in the Course of Their Employment which Are in Force in Other Countries, and as to How Far Such Law Are Found to Work Satisfactorily (Toronto: Queen’s Printer, 1913). The “findings” of the Revived Meredith Commission are summarized in Robert Storey and Carol Elston, “My Compensation Will End on My 65th Birthday When My Brain Injury Goes Away”: Final Report of the Revived Meredith Royal Commission (Hamilton: 2015). 46 Unless otherwise noted, the following narratives are taken from the testimonies given at the Revived Meredith Commission. 47 Author interview with Beryl Brown, 11 February 2005. 48 Storey and Elston, “My Compensation Will End.” 49 Author interview with Mike Ladouceur, 8 August 2009. 50 Criminal charges were laid in this case. In the event, the project manager was found guilty by the Ontario Superior Court and sentenced to three and one half years in prison. At the time of this writing, his appeal is pending. 51 Ballantyne et al., “Poverty Status.” 52 Ibid., 3. 53 American College of Occupational Medicine, “Preventing Needless Work Disability by Helping People Stay Employed,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, September 2006: 5. 54 WSIB. The Story, 4. 55 Ibid., 4.

“By the Numbers”  183 56 Ontario Network of Injured Workers’ Groups, WSIB’s Principles of “Better at Work” Contravenes “Time to Heal and WSIB Legislation” (Toronto: 2016). 57 Injured workers and their organizations have always sought to replace these numbers with voices and faces. For an insightful analysis of how a different/opposing body/worker/health cosmology played out between miners in Saint Lawrence and Lawn, Newfoundland, and that province’s Workers’ Compensation Board, see Elliot Leyton, “The Bureaucratization of Anguish: The Workmen’s Compensation Board in an Industrial Disaster,” in Bureaucracy and World View: Studies in the Logic of Official Interpretation, ed. Don Handleman and Elliot Leyton, Social and Economic Studies No. 22 (St John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland), 70–134. 58 Carson, “The conventionalization,” 107. 59 Steve Tombs and John Moores, “Commentary: The Conventionalization of Early Factory Crime,” Policy and Practice in Health and Safety 3, no. 2 (2005): 103. 60 John L. McMullan and Melissa McLung, “The Media, The Politics of Truth, and the Coverage of Corporate Violence: The Westray Disaster and the Public Inquiry,” Critical Criminology 14 (2006): 67–86; Susan Dodd, Ocean Ranger: Remaking The Promise of Oil (Halifax: Fernwood Books, 2012); David Tylor Dunford, “The Lac-Megantic Derailment, Corporate Regulation, and Neoliberal Sovereignty,” Canadian Review of Sociology 54, no. 1 (2017): 88. For a critical review of laws passed since and because of Westray, see Steven Bittle, Still Dying for a Living: Corporate Criminal Liability after the Westray Disaster (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012). 61 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 190.

8 Gender Violence in the Hospitality Industry: Panic Buttons, Pants, and Protest emily e . lb . twarog

In July 2016, UNITE HERE Local 1, the oldest hospitality union in the United States, published a scathing study detailing “disturbingly common” accounts of sexual harassment in Chicago’s hotel and casino industries, thus launching the Hands Off, Pants On campaign (HOPO).1 That launch came on the heels of a public brawl between Illinois State Representative Martin Moylan, a Democrat who had long represented a district in north suburban Chicago, and UNITE HERE Local 1. During a union organizing drive at Rivers Casino, a waitress who worked there visited Moylan’s office to recount the sexual harassment she had experienced at the hands of a casino guest. The waitress turned to Moylan after her complaints had gone unanswered by the casino’s management. According to the union, Moylan “laughed” off the waitress and her complaint. In response, the union produced a television advertisement to draw attention to sexual harassment in the industry and working conditions at Rivers Casino, a non-union casino in Rosemont, Illinois, a small suburb close to O’Hare airport. The #comeforward ad generated additional protests when a CBS affiliate refused to air the ad. Carla Smith, a banquet server at a Marriott hotel in downtown Chicago and a member of UNITE HERE Local 1, told the media during a 2016 protest outside the CBS offices, “Rep. Moylan condoned sexual harassment when he laughed after that waitress shared her story.” Smith went on to point out that CBS was “condoning” sexual harassment by refusing to air the ad.2 This chapter examines examples of union efforts to fight back against sexual violence in the workplace, looking at the main actors, the strategies adopted, and their varying successes in different political contexts. While the campaign launched by UNITE HERE helped give sexual harassment and sexual violence new visibility and urgency as a workplace issue, resulting in local ordinances to increase protection

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for women, the economic, social, and cultural conditions that make violence so pervasive in the hospitality industry persist. It remains to be seen what role these and future ordinances will have in breaking down the barriers to violence-free workplaces for women. The hospitality industry is an unambiguously female industry. From dirty hotel rooms to swanky hotel lobbies to casino lounges, women toil, often for minimum wage and with few benefits or none. For those women lucky enough to work in unionized hotels and casinos, the wages and benefits help provide a higher standard of living, but that does not shield them from sexual harassment by guests. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 50 per cent of the workers in the accommodations and food service industry are women. In the leisure and hospitality industry, non-supervisory workers earn an average of $13.99 hourly and struggle to secure full-time employment, working an average of twenty-five hours per week. Nationally, only 3.4 per cent of leisure and hospitality workers are unionized. In large urban areas with strong tourism and convention businesses such as Chicago, this percentage grows exponentially – 60 per cent of hotel workers in such cities are unionized.3 With the #comeforward campaign under their belt, UNITE HERE Local 1 decided to take on sexual harassment in their industry. When Sarah Lyons, a researcher at UNITE HERE Local 1, went on the hunt for data, she found that few data were available. She decided to launch their own internal study. At the time, Lyons could not imagine the international impact their study would have among women workers. Her goal was to gather data and mount a local campaign to draw attention to sexual harassment. At the time, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s career was still on the ascendant and his penchant for sexual violence was an entertainment industry “secret.” American voters were still debating the merits of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton versus Republican nominee Donald Trump. And, Tarana Burke’s #metoo movement had not yet been reborn as a national call to action. In short, the Chicago hotel workers were in the vanguard as they tried to address violence and make their jobs safer and their lives better. The survey was a detailed questionnaire that asked women probing questions about the types of sexual violence that they witnessed and experienced on a daily basis. Instead of taking a simple quantitative approach to gather the facts, the union conducted one-on-one conversations with its members. The union leadership identified several women members from hotels and casinos, who took paid leave from their jobs to conduct the survey among their female colleagues in the city’s unionized hotels and casinos, which are concentrated in

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northwestern Indiana in the shadow of Gary’s steel mills. Over a period of months, these women gathered more than five hundred completed surveys. This qualitative approach was likely a major reason why the survey had such an impact, because during conversations about what sexual violence entails, women’s stories came pouring out. Tina Graham and Kasey Nalls, two of the survey takers, had been working in their jobs the longest. Together, they had more than fifty years of experience in their respective industries. Both had started as young women and both brought to the survey an acute and direct knowledge of class and racial marginalization. Tina Graham began cleaning hotel rooms in her twenties. In 1973, she was a youth activist and leader at Chicago’s American Indian Center. Without her parents’ knowledge, she left town to participate in the occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which had captured the nation’s attention that winter. After arriving at the Pine Ridge Reservation, she eventually found herself huddled next to an elderly woman in a ditch with bullets flying over their heads. In her words, “I’ve always been a brave person … I’m not afraid to lose my job for anything that is right.” A member of the Sioux and Blackfoot tribes, Tina grew up knowing what it was to struggle, and that struggle propelled her into a life of community activism. Born in Iowa and relocated to Chicago through the Indian Relocation Act of 1952, she and her family experienced first-hand the negative impact of government policies on American Indian communities. “There has always been a problem with the government taking and taking.”4 So when her union came to her and asked her to fight sexual harassment in the hotel where she was a room attendant, she did not think twice about getting involved. Kasey Nalls was a young Black single mother when she began working as a cocktail server. Her activist roots, like Tina’s, had been planted early: as a young girl, she had protested high energy prices and racism alongside her parents in Gary. By the time she was eight years old, she was walking picket lines with her family, helping them organize fundraising efforts such as selling fried fish dinners to picketers, and supporting Jesse Jackson’s historic run for president in 1984. Unlike Graham and Nalls, Roushanda Williams, a Black bartender, did not start off her activist career at a young age. She got involved in the union after she began bartending on weekends and holidays. When she realized she could make more money bartending at a union hotel than in her white-collar public sector office job, she quit her job to work full-time at a historic downtown hotel. Esthela Gracia’s story is an immigrant story of border crossings, sexual violence, and poverty: she left her teaching job in Mexico to provide a better life for her children in the United States. However

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different their personal stories, all of these working-class women of colour found ways to help their union take on a multibillion-dollar industry – and win. The benefits of an interview survey immediately became apparent. Tina Graham found that many women at first denied experiencing any sexual harassment, yet once they got deeper into discussion, they would realize the opposite. “Some of the women had put it so far back in their minds that they seemed to think it was an everyday thing, that it was okay until it was brought to their attention,” Graham commented. “They would say during the interview, ‘Oh yeah, this happened to me. I really didn’t think anything was wrong with it.’”5 This is a common phenomenon, especially in the service industry, where the relationship between worker and guest is fraught with a power imbalance born of social, racial, and economic inequality. The HOPO study found that 58 per cent of hotel workers and 77 per cent of casino workers surveyed had been sexually harassed by a guest. Clearly, hospitality workers are at higher risk of sexual harassment that women in other industries.6 According to a 2015 study conducted by Cosmopolitan magazine, one third of women have experienced sexual harassment at work and women workers in the food and service industry experience the highest rates of harassment.7 These numbers are startling, and the personal narratives given by the survey participants shed a stark light on the emotional and physical strain women workers face each day when they go to work. One room attendant recalled, “I do not feel safe because of the things that I have encountered. One guest was masturbating. I felt very afraid.” Another knocked on a door to announce herself, and when she opened it, “he was naked. It was horrible.” Waitresses had different working conditions, but the power dynamic was similarly skewed in favour of the customer and management. Cocktail waitresses depend on customer tips for much of their income, so this power dynamic is ripe for abuse. As one server reported, “He kept asking for my number. I kept telling him I had a boyfriend and he didn’t care. He kept following me from floor to floor.”8 Moreover, when it comes to sexual violence, the social norm is to fall into a “he said, she said” contest, something exhibited in the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings.9 Women in the hospitality industry were likely well aware how hard it would be to make a complaint. The Historiographical Lacuna of Sexual Harassment Sexual violence in the workplace is not a new phenomenon. In fact, as the interviews indicated, it is so common that workers have come to expect it. Yet historians of gender and work have barely studied the

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topic, perhaps in part because feminists’ discussions of it were less open and visible before the 1970s. Indeed, the word sexual harassment made its public debut only in 1975, when journalist Lin Farley testified before New York City’s Commission on Human Rights. While Farley was teaching a course on women and work at Cornell University, it became clear to her that her female students “had already had an experience of having either been forced to quit a job or been fired because they had rejected the sexual overtures of a boss.”10 A few years later, in 1979, the term entered the legal lexicon with the publication of legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon’s book Sexual Harassment of Working Women.11 In this section I provide a brief synopsis of the historical scholarship related to sexual violence in the workplace. I believe the work that has been done so far deserves recognition as well as consideration when historians decide which steps to take next in the field. Ava Baron and Joan Scott have called on historians to treat gender as “a useful category” worth investigating, and Baron and the feminist historian Eileen Boris challenge us “to advance a conversation between labour history and a bodily turn” within the study of the working class, noting that the default historical body has long been “a white male, represented by bulging biceps and prodigious strength” and, by default, someone who produces goods instead of providing services.12 Some labour historians such as Stephen Meyer and Miriam Glucksman have examined the role of the body, but their theoretical framework does not challenge this default narrative, relying instead on a definition of work that links it to the manufacturing of goods. As the US economy moves away from a production model toward a service model, scholarship of the body must shift its framework in tandem. So far, there has been little examination of the body of the service worker.13 For service workers, the narrative is about more than the exertion of production – it is also about the requirement to toil in proximity to others and indeed, in many cases, to physically touch another to do one’s job. As Carol Wolkowitz notes, “services in today’s workplaces … also include the much expanded marketization of intimacy … We should recognize … that the embodied experience of many workers, especially women, is now embroiled in a politics of touch in the workplace, with touch between people – and attempts to control it.”14 Similarly, historian Joan Sangster reminds us that “in our productive dialogue with feminist theory, we need to be wary of the persistent ‘dilution of the material.’” When studying the service sector, scholars must resist the tendency to detach material understandings of the body from the social, cultural, and sexual body, for in this context all of these constructions are integral to understanding the work experience. Sangster goes on to note that “a

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feminist and materialist approach also keeps the analytical door open to the possibility of the unfinished body, to intentionality, agency, and a notion of the bodily resistance to the ‘maps’ of cultural and social life.”15 In the hospitality industry, the success of these interactions is what drives the success of the industry as a whole. In an industry that depends on the intimacy of labour – labour that mimics domesticity – in order to thrive, the gendered nature of that labour is a critical factor in understanding that the complexities of power go beyond the employer– employee relationship and extend to a third party – the guest. In a workplace ménage à trois of sorts, employer, employee, and guest are inextricably linked, but not as equals. The direct provider of services – the employee – must anticipate the needs of the guest. That is the centrepiece of the industry’s philosophy as well as its employee training regimen. This dynamic, though it has some similarities to the retail sector – a triangle of customer, employer, and consumer, as described by historian Susan Porter Benson – sets the hospitality sector apart from other industries.16 In 1991, historian Dorothy Sue Cobble’s now classic 1991 book Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century revealed tensions within the hospitality industry: women workers were able to secure an improved standard of living but were also subject to the persistence of the industry’s dependence on the allure of the ménage a trios relationship. For example, the early-twentieth-century movement against tipping was supported by union leaders like Elizabeth Maloney, a Chicago waitress and an elected leader of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union. Maloney noted that tipping “made it pretty hard for a [waitress] to draw the line – where the line of propriety should be. She knows that the man is going to leave her dime or a quarter, and, … while she resents things that are said to her … she hesitates about it because she wants the money.”17 One century later, Maloney’s union surveyed hospitality workers, who expressed the same sentiments. Aside from Cobble’s work, there has been little historical scholarship on sexual violence in the hospitality industry. Among industrial relations scholars, journalists, and activists, there has been a recent wave of attention that offers contemporary references.18 Absent a significant historical body of scholarship, the history of domestic labour, including domestic slave labour, offers some context to the power dynamic present in the industry today. While the experiences of enslaved women such as Harriet Jacobs are markedly different from those of wage workers today, there are similarities to be noted. Jacobs recalled that her owner, Dr Flint, “began to whisper foul words in my ear … He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such

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as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred.”19 As Sharon Block notes, in early America, the progression of sexual violence from “coercion” to rape “reveals that social and economic relations underwrote sexual power, both through the act and through a community’s reaction.”20 Women workers in the Chicago hospitality industry also encounter unwelcome sexual advances. In the survey, 78 per cent of the women who served guests directly had had “guests make an unwelcome comment, joke or question to or about them.”21 Obviously, Chicago hospitality workers are not enslaved workers like Jacobs, but over the course of the survey process, they reported experiencing very little power in their situation due to a variety of realities such as immigration status, being the sole provider for their family, language barriers, shame, and fear of retaliation by their employer and/or the guest. The day-to-day impact of this sort of powerlessness boxes many women workers into a very small reality, seemingly without options, from which it can be almost impossible to emerge. Tina Graham recalled this process as a form of “brainwashing.” When she first began interviewing women for the survey, many women denied any experiences of sexual violence at work. Yet when Graham began to mention specific behaviours by guests, the women would recall incidents. According to Graham and others, women workers felt it was “useless” to report these incidents to management. “They cared more about the mighty dollar than they did about our safety. That’s the honest truth,” Graham asserted.22 “Claiming Our Space”: The Battle for HOPO Laws On 1 July 2018, Chicago hotel workers added a new accessory to their uniform – a panic button. At the news conference celebrating this achievement, Roushaunda Williams declared: “Today’s the day we say no more. Today’s the day we claim our space … We will feel protected.”23 The passage of a Hands Off Pants On (HOPO) law in Chicago, and of a similar law in Seattle, has the potential to prioritize workplace safety for women workers, who constitute the public image of the hospitality industry. The threat and reality of sexual violence reinforces the power of both the employer who pays wages and the guest who generates the billions of dollars in sales. Furthermore, as we have seen repeatedly, the “community’s reaction” trends in favour of the perpetrator rather than the survivor; as legal scholars have indicated, even in the criminal justice system it is difficult to get past the myths about violence in order to induce women to make complaints, let alone secure justice. Hospitality workers are well aware of this ideological context. A Filipina hotel

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worker in Seattle works two jobs to support her children, often missing time with them because of her schedule. Her tolerance for abuse has been raised to the point that as long as a hotel guest does not “beat me up … I just take it, whatever they say. I’m used to it.” She believes that the “ethos of the hospitality industry – particularly high-end, luxury hotels – is to side with the paying guest.”24 The provision of “panic button” devices is not a new idea in the industry. One Chicago hotel worker told Kasey Nalls during the survey that her hotel had equipped her with a “squeaky toy” to deter any advances by guests.25 For room attendants who typically work alone on the upper floors of a hotel, the sound of a squeaky toy is highly unlikely to alert hotel security in the hotel’s lobby. In most hotels, hotel security staff do not conduct walk-throughs of the guest room hallways. The panic buttons distributed to Chicago hotel workers are small devices that workers can tuck away in their pockets or on their carts; when pressed, they silently alert hotel security to a dangerous or threatening situation. The first panic-button ordinance was passed in Seattle, Washington, in 2016 in the wake of a ballot measure. Seattle voters approved Initiative 124 (I-124) on 8 November 2016, and the bill was slated to go into effect on 30 November 2016. However, I-124 remained “in limbo” for more than a year. It finally went into effect in summer 2018. UNITE HERE Local 8 researcher Abby Lawlor says that the impact of the new ordinance is hard to see because the law has no teeth and there is no system for workers to file complaints. The Seattle ordinance became the focus of hostile litigation by employers. The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) called I-124 harmful. It described panic buttons a “fig leaf” and contended that the ordinance had opened the door for further provisions such as workload caps and higher wages. These comments were made during discussions about the parts of the ordinance related to panic buttons and the “tracking” of hotel guests who sexually harassed workers. The hotel industry claimed that the regulations had paved the way for I-124’s other provisions such as “obligating hotels to help pay for workers’ health insurance.”26 The AHLA in its social media campaign claimed that this “illustrate[s] the underhanded union tactics being deployed.” Meanwhile, UNITE HERE spokeswoman Rachel Gumpert says that the hotel industry should apologize for “denying the prevalence of sexual harassment of hotel workers as well as insulting the intentions of women who are fighting back against it.” The AHLA went on to contend that its members want to protect their workers but that the ordinance went beyond what was necessary to achieve that. The King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick ultimately struck down

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the hotel industry’s appeal of the ordinance; the case is now making its way to the Washington State Supreme Court, the plaintiff’s argument being that panic buttons are “deemed by many experts and hoteliers to be a solution in search of a problem.”27 Yet if this is “a solution in search of a problem,” as the AHLA claims, why do Chicago hotel workers report being given squeaky toys as safety devices to deter sexual violence by “creepy guests”?28 In Chicago, UNITE HERE Local 1 took a different approach. After a public campaign to release the results of the HOPO study, the union began to work with Chicago’s aldermen to introduce an ordinance at City Council. Chicago is a vast and highly segregated city, and its fifty elected aldermen, many of whom continue to operate according to Democratic machine politics, must be seriously courted to sign onto any ordinance. The union’s strategy involved a pragmatic engagement with the realities of the local political culture. Local 1 spent several years building important political relationships and then sought support for passage of the ordinance, which would raise the hackles of the powerful hotel and convention industry. It found an ally in Alderman Michelle Harris of Chicago’s 8th Ward, a predominantly Black ward on Chicago’s south side. Harris is a lifelong Chicagoan who attended Bryn Mawr Elementary, now famous as the alma mater of former First Lady Michelle Obama, and received her bachelor’s degree from Chicago State University. Harris had spent her adult life within the Democratic machine as chief of staff to the ward’s previous alderperson, Superintendent of Streets and Sanitation for Ward 8, and Secretary to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. In Harris, the union found a solid “machine” alderman who could help shepherd the ordinance through the often contentious process. Recognizing the importance of having a diverse set of stakeholders invested in the campaign, the union reached out to the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) and its affiliated unions. Illinois’s union leaders are disproportionately white and male. Between 2016 and 2018, only a handful of the state’s unions were led by women, including UNITE HERE Local 1 under the newly elected president Karen Kent, the local’s first female president. The Chicago Teachers’ Union was led by onetime mayoral candidate Karen Lewis until her retirement in 2018, and several public sector unions have been led by women. Kent recognized that it would be highly beneficial to have the men of the Chicago-area labour movement speak out against sexual harassment in the workplace; their doing so would resonate with the political leaders of both the labour movement and the city. The union produced a three-minute video highlighting the staggering statistics revealed by the HOPO survey. In that video, male leaders of the CFL and local

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union leaders representing the National Association of Letter Carriers, the International Association of Iron Workers, Plumbers Local 130, the Service Employees International Union, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, and the International Association of Sheet Metalworkers read on camera quotes from women workers culled from the survey: “He was completely naked, standing between the bed and the desk. He asked me for shampoo. I had to jump over the beds in order to get to the door and leave the room.” “A guest wrapped his arm around my waist and across my buttocks and said, ‘You know I would be cheating on my wife for you, but I think you will be worth it.’” “I delivered a round of drinks to a table of middle-aged business men. One of them asked me my name. When I answered, he slapped me on my behind and said ‘Thank you.’” “I was bending over to set drinks on a table. He came up behind me and slapped me between my legs, hitting me in my private area. I couldn’t believe he did it in front of all the other guests. I was so embarrassed and shocked. I broke down in tears.” “I approached a table of four guys and asked ‘Hi, what can I get for you today?’ They asked for milk. I asked ‘How many cups would you like?’ They said ‘Two,’ as they pointed to my breasts and laughed. I was seven months pregnant. I felt so disgusted and embarrassed.”

This clever gender reversal – having men speak words they usually don’t encounter at work – was remarkably effective, among both the union men and the viewing public. It also provided a sheen of legitimacy to the HOPO campaign within Illinois’s labour movement. The shock, disgust, and anger expressed by each of the men in the video was palpable: they groaned, rolled their eyes, and shook their heads. The video was used as part of a sophisticated social media campaign to keep pressure on the Chicago City Council to move the HOPO ordinance through the necessary committees so that it could come to the floor for a vote. On 11 October 2017, as the many women who had shared their painful experiences, lobbied political leaders, and organized support within their union and the broader community watched from the audience, the ordinance was passed unanimously. The cheers were deafening. David had slain Goliath. Unlike in Seattle, the HOPO ordinance has not been subject to legal wrangling. However, at the eleventh hour and without notifying the union, Alderman Harris caved under pressure from the very powerful

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hotel industry and amended the ordinance so that it covered fewer job classifications within hotels. With this last-minute change, the ordinance went into effect on 1 July 2018. It requires all hotels (union and non-union) to provide “‘panic buttons’ to hotel workers assigned to clean or restock guest rooms or restrooms alone, including hotel housekeepers.” In addition to this, the HOPO ordinance seems to have more “teeth” than Seattle’s I-124. All hotels are required to “develop, maintain, and comply with a written anti-sexual harassment policy” that encourages hotel workers to report incidents without fear of penalty and “afford[s] hotel workers the right to stop work and leave the immediate area where danger is perceived … and prohibits hotel employers from retaliating against the hotel worker.” Perhaps the most significant social and cultural impact of this law is that it has replaced the “he said/she said” conundrum with an implicit belief in the reporting hotel worker. Another critical part of this ordinance that sets it apart from Seattle’s is that it has involved the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, which, besides enforcing the law, is meant to function as a neutral third party to which workers can appeal. A hotel that receives two or more adjudged violations of the law within a twelve-month period risks losing its licence for up to one year.29 It is still too early to measure the impact of this law on hotel workers’ working conditions. But the story does not end here. While the Chicago ordinance was making its way through the process, Hollywood imploded as reports of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s extensive sexual abuses were came into the open. Women throughout Hollywood began to peel back the layers of abuse perpetuated by Weinstein and others in an industry that thrives on sexual intrigue. Tarana Burke’s “Me Too” call to action was resurrected as the #metoo movement, with Hollywood actresses leading the charge. Many organizations were quick to note that working-class women – primarily working-class women of colour – had been organizing against sexual harassment for decades with little fanfare. Hollywood A-listers agreed and began to shine light on a broader cross-section of organizations working to end workplace sexual violence. Using their popularity and taking advantage of the moment, female actors draped themselves in black for the 2018 Golden Globe awards. As their plus-ones to the ceremony and the after-parties, top Hollywood stars brought organizers such as Tarana Burke; the 2008 Green Party vice-presidential candidate Rosa Clemente; co-founder and former co-director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and author Saru Jayaraman; tennis legend and women’s rights pioneer Billie Jean King; the executive director of Imkaan, a network of British organizations that fight violence against women of colour; Marai

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Larasi, director of the national Domestic Workers Alliance; co-director of Caring Across Generations and MacArthur Genius Award recipient Ai-Jen Poo; and co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas Monica Ramirez. All of this shined more light on the issue of sexual violence and kept the public conversation going.30 In a culture with the attention span of a gnat, the #metoo movement has been able to sustain something of a national conversation. Time’s 2017 Persons of the Year were the Silence Breakers – an assortment of celebrities, entertainment industry folks, hotel and farm workers, local politicians, and others – mostly women, a few men – who have been fighting to bring attention to the issue of sexual harassment. One of them was Esthela Gracia, a hotel room attendant and UNITE HERE Local 1 member.31 Gracia’s journey from her rural hometown in Mexico to the pages of Time magazine was a harrowing one, but she is now among the leaders in her union demanding a safer work environment. Gracia and her colleagues have been invited to speak at the International Trade Union Conference in Costa Rica, the International Labor Organization in Switzerland, and numerous conferences. They have testified before congressional committees and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Women workers around the world are learning from the HOPO campaign and figuring out ways to implement it in their own countries. While Chicago and Seattle hotel workers measure the effectiveness of their new panic buttons, hotel workers across the United States and around the world have been reaching out to the union to find out how they can launch similar legislative campaigns. The benefit of the legislative approach is that the law encompasses all workers, not only unionized workers. This is particularly urgent as only 10 per cent of workers in the United States are currently unionized. Campaigns such as HOPO have the potential to raise the profile of the labour movement for the 90 per cent of workers who may be unfamiliar with unions in the present day. HOPO also demonstrates that unions are effective organizations that can make change happen, which may be appealing to non-unionized hotels – a fear articulated by the AHLA in their lawsuit against Seattle’s I-124. But this raises a question – does this type of legislation threaten to weaken the role of collective bargaining agreements? Even so, there is historical precedent for labour unions, especially after the Great Depression, engaging in multipronged approaches to building power that include legislative action. The HOPO campaign is a twenty-first-century version of these campaigns. Unions like UNITE HERE that represent diverse workforces that are often at the bottom of the social and economic ladder are using all of the tools in their toolbox to make long-lasting systemic change possible.

196  Emily E. LB. Twarog NOTES 1 UNITE HERE Local 1, “Hands Off, Pants On: Sexual Harassment in Chicago’s Hotel Industry,” July 2016. 2 Stephanie Golden, “A Laugh Ignites Tensions between Labor Union and State Representative,” Medill Reports Chicago, 25 February 2016. 3 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Industries at a Glance: Leisure and Hospitality,” 19 October 2018, https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag70.htm (accessed 26 October 2018); Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” 19 January 2018, https://www.bls.gov/cps /cpsaat18.htm (accessed on October 26, 2018). 4 Tina Graham, interview with author, 19 June 2018, Chicago. 5 Tina Graham interview. 6 Y. Guerrier, Y. and A.S. Adib, “’No, We Don’t Provide That Service’: The Sexual Harassment of Hotel Employees by Customers,” Work, Employment, and Society 14, no. 4 (2000): 689–705. 7 HuffPost, “1 in 3 Women Has Been Sexually Harassed at Work, According to Study,” 6 December 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/1 -in-3-women-sexually-harassed-work-cosmopolitan_n_6713814.html (accessed on 26 October 2018). 8 UNITE HERE Local 1, “Hands Off, Pants On.” 9 In the fall of 2018, President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the United States Supreme Court. During his nomination process, Dr Christine Blasey Ford came forward with a claim that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her while they were both teenagers. Ultimately, Kavanaugh’s nomination was confirmed and he now holds a lifetime seat on the US Supreme Court. This link provides an overview of the case, Demetri Sevastopulo, Kadhim Shubber, and Mark Odell, “Brett Kavanaugh Hearing: Key Moments,” Financial Times, 27 September 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/b3b4f3ae-c24d-11e8-8d55 -54197280d3f7 (accessed 17 December 2018). 10 Lin Farley told Brooke Gladstone during an interview for the radio show “On the Media.” Qtd in Kyle Swenson, “Who Came Up with the Term ‘Sexual Harassment’?,” Washington Post, 22 November 2017. 11 Catherine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 12 Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, “’The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working Class History,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History 4, no. 2 (2007): 23–4; Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28–50. 13 Miriam Gluckmann, Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain (London: Routledge, 1990); Stephen Meyer,

Gender Violence in the Hospitality Industry  197 “Workplace Predators: Sex and Sexuality on the US Automotive Shop Floor, 1930–1960,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 1 (Spring 2014): 77–93. 14 Carol Wolkowitz, “Embodying Labor, Then and Now,” International Labor and Working-Class History 81 (Spring 2012), 184–5. 15 Joan Sangster, “Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-Class History,” International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 248. 16 For more on the retail industry see, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Donica Belisle, Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011). 17 Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), Kindle edition, Location 1035. 18 B. Boon, “Working within the Front-of-House / Back-of-House Boundary: Room Attendants in the Hotel Guest Room Space,” Journal of Management and Organization 13, no. 2 (2007): 160–74. Martha E. Eller, “Sexual Harassment in the Hotel Industry: The Need to Focus on Prevention,” Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research 14, no. 2: 431–40; D. Gilbert, Y. Guerrier, and J. Guy, “Sexual Harassment Issues in the Hospitality Industry,” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 10, no. 2 (1998): 48–53; Sandra Kensbock, Janis Bailey, Gayle Jennings, and Anoop Patiar, “Sexual Harassment of Women Working as Room Attendants within 5-Star Hotels,” Gender, Work, and Organization 22, no. 1 (2015): 36–50; Saru Jayaraman, Behind the Kitchen Door (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013); and Bernice Yeung, In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers (New York: The New Press, 2018). 19 Quoted in Kerry Segrave, The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace, 1600–1993 (Jefferson: McFarland, 1994), 18. 20 Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 2. 21 UNITE HERE Local 1, “Hands Off, Pants On,” 6. 22 Tina Graham interview. 23 Yvonne Kim, “Hotel Workers ‘Claim Our Space’ as Panic Button Ordinance Takes Effect,” Chicago Sun-Times, 2 July 2018. 24 Sarah Bernard, “The Fight to Bring Hotel Housekeepers Out of the Shadows,” Seattle Weekly, 15 June 2016 (accessed online, 5 December 2018).

198  Emily E. LB. Twarog 25 Kasey Nalls, interview with the author, 29 June 2018, Chicago. Interview in possession of the author. 26 Dave Jamieson, “Why the Hotel Industry Is Fighting Proposals to Give Housekeepers Panic Buttons,” Huffpost, 22 November 2017, https://www .huffpost.com/entry/hotel-lobby-pushes-back-against-panic-buttons-for -housekeepers_n_5a15e227e4b064948072b920 (accessed on 17 December 2018). 27 Melissa Hellman, “The Office of Labor Standards Sets Plan for Implementation of the Hotel Workers Law,” Seattle Weekly, 4 January 2018; Hellman, “What Has Changed in the Year Since the Passage of Seattle’s Hotel Worker Law?,” Seattle Weekly, 17 December 2017; Bloomberg, “Hotels Add ‘Panic Buttons’ to Protect Housekeepers from Creepy Guests,” Fortune, 14 December 2017. 28 Kasey Nalls, interview with the author, 29 June 2018, Chicago. Interview in possession of the author. 29 www.handsoffpantson.org, accessed on 5 December 2018; Chicago City Council, “SO2017-3260 – Amendment of Municipal Code Section 4-6-180 by Requiring Hotel Employees Assigned to Work in Guest Rooms or Restrooms to Be Equipped with Portable Emergency Contact Devices,” 11 October 2017. 30 Eliza Berman, “Meet the Activists Who Accompanied Celebrities on the Golden Globes Red Carpet,” Time, 8 January 2018, http://time.com/5091772 /golden-globes-red-carpet-activists (accessed on 5 December 2018). 31 Stephanie Zacharek, Eliana Dockterman, and Haley Sweetland Edwards, “The Silence Breakers,” Time, 18 December 2017, http://time.com/time -person-of-the-year-2017-silence-breakers-choice (accessed 5 December 2018).

Contributors

Aaron Goings teaches history at Saint Martin’s University. Portions of this chapter appeared in his book The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest. Copyright 2020 by the University of Washington Press. Used by permission. Sarah Jessup is currently a PhD student at Trent University. Her doctoral research focuses on workplace bullying within the broader scope of workplace aggression and considers the connection between bullying and other forms of hostility in the workplace, including physical violence, domestic violence, and sexual harrassment. Jeremy Milloy is W.P. Bell Post-Doctoral Fellow, Mount Allison University. His book Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 was published in 2017. Chad Pearson teaches history at Collin College in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Organizing against Labor: Controversies in the History of Employers (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Mary Anne Poutanen teaches interdisciplinary studies at McGill University in the Programme d’études sur le Québec and at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and part-time in the Department of History at Concordia University, where she is an affiliate professor. She is the author of the book Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal (2015), for which she received the Prix Lionel-Groulx by L’Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française in 2016.

200 Contributors

Joan Sangster has written articles and monographs on working women and the labour movement, the history of the left, feminist theory and historiography, the criminalization of women and girls, and Aboriginal women and the law. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has held a Killam fellowship as well as visiting professorships at Duke, Princeton, and McGill. Her books include Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada (2010) and One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada (2018). James Schmidt is in the history department at Northern Illinois University. His book Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (2010) won the 2011 Philip Taft Labor History Prize. Robert Storey is a member of the School of Labour Studies at McMaster University. He has published numerous books and articles in the area of labour history and law. Ryan Driskell Tate is a PhD candidate in United States History at Rutgers University. He specializes in the labour, environmental, and political history of the American West. Emily E. LB. Twarog is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the School of Labor and Employment Relations. She recently published Politics in the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in 20th Century America (2017).