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calsfoundation@cals.org
Snapshots of Struggle: Documenting the Arkansas Labor Movement
As an intern with the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies this summer, I combed through the Small Manuscript and Arkansas Labor collections for any materials that dealt with labor organizing in the state. I found, among other things, strike songs penned by railroad workers, frantic telegrams dictated by union officials, and descriptions of blackened eyes and terminal illness from the children of coal miners. Many of the materials I digitized can be found in this new Story Map project, Labor and Industry in Arkansas, which traces forty years of Arkansas labor history through a mixture of newspaper clippings and archival materials.
I often felt terrified of misrepresenting these people, most of whom I had only just begun to know. Their struggles were long, bitter, and without any easy resolutions. In a political climate dominated by boosterism, racism, and anti-communism, at the outskirts of an underdeveloped economy dominated by cotton monoculture well into the 1940s, their small victories seemed provisional at best. But class struggle has a way of reentering the political conversation, even after the rudest interruptions.
Take this newspaper, published during the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad strike of 1921-1923. (click here or on the image to see the full issue)
At a time when most workers in the South were paid a fraction of their northern counterparts, some union members won a decent living during World War I, when the government temporarily nationalized railroads and established new wage scales to guarantee the efficient distribution of munitions and other essential supplies. The efforts of cash-strapped employers to reverse these gains led to a wave of militant strike action, including the two-year strike on the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad (M&NA).
As the flow of goods along the M&NA ground to a halt, local resistance mounted against the strikers, encouraged by frustrated business leaders and a hostile press. But sympathetic coverage was widespread in the union press. The newspaper above, published by the women’s auxiliary of the railway union in Little Rock, mobilized every voice it could in support of the strikers. In its pages, preachers and housewives appear alongside union officials, ads pledge the support of political candidates, and amateur poets decry the evils of the open shop. Members of the union write with the fighting spirit of those who have survived years of poverty and seen the possibility of a better life. For many of these men, that better life died with Ed Gregor, a striking engineer whose comfortable and spacious home was riddled with bullet holes on the afternoon of January 15, 1923, and who was hanged by a lynch mob later that night.
Perhaps the most powerful account from the time of the strike and Gregor’s lynching comes from the Reverend J. K. Farris, whose book The Harrison Riot: or, The Reign of the Mob on the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad is available in full here.
As historian Kenneth Barnes reveals in his excellent book Mob Rule in the Ozarks, the crushing of the M&NA strike also provided the Arkansas Ku Klux Klan with an easy vector for expansion: up and down the line, at stop after stop, mob rule prevailed; the flow of commerce was restored; and race and nation trumped class consciousness.
Sometimes a familiar face would appear in the middle of my digging. One came out of that maelstrom of horrifying Depression-era statistics, the Arkansas coal industry. In a history course last year, I had the pleasure of reading G. Gregory Kiser’s article on the Arkansas Socialist Party. As an Oklahoman by birth, I was well aware of Eugene Debs’s moment of widespread popularity in the upper South. Before the rallying behind the flag that came with World War I, his star was on the rise in the prairie. This was true in the Ozarks too, although Debs was not alone. In the gubernatorial election of 1912, G. E. Mikel, a socialist and United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) organizer from Jenny Lind in Sebastian County racked up five thousand more votes than Debs did in the presidential election of that year, uniting urban trade unionists with a sizable rural minority.
I found Mikel’s name on a folder in the Small Manuscripts Collection and felt a sense of recognition, although I couldn’t place it for a while. It wasn’t until I was deep into describing the materials I had digitized, and chasing down birth and death dates, that I remembered him. Pieces of ephemera that once belonged to him felt heavier in my hand. I stared at his business card as if it could answer some pressing question for me. Even without any clear political statements from Mikel during the Depression years, the fact that this old man was still organizing struck me as a form of survival—long after the Socialist Party’s political hopes had dimmed, here he was, continuing the fight among the miners who had once put him on the ballot.
But organizers need people to organize—and the words of those workers are more likely to be housed in an attic’s cardboard box than an archive’s acid-free container. In the back of one folder, I found a noteworthy exception to this trend: a letter scrawled in uneven cursive on a half-sheet of lined paper by a worker in Warren, Arkansas. The note is addressed to W. D. Moore, who was then area director of the CIO Organizing Committee and would later become a state senator, the first union official to hold that office in thirty years. “We want a CIO union,” the worker writes. “Come at once.” The writer remains anonymous: out of fear of losing his job, he refused to sign his name.
The rest of the folder consists of forms and typewritten letters that chronicle the struggle between the AFL’s Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and the CIO’s International Woodworkers of America (IWA) for the right to represent Arkansas lumber workers. The National Labor Relations Board, still reeling from a round of budget cuts, struggled to respond to developments on the ground. Workers in nearby Crossett threatened to strike, sending union leaders into a panic. In a letter to the national office of the union, CIO director Walter Harris wrote: “If you cannot get them to pull the Crossett Lumber case…out of the fire, then for God’s sake, try and get them to pull the Crossett chemical case…and order an election immediately.”
Even without the materials that would allow for greater insight into the grassroots organizing of the IWA, here is a brief suggestion of just how badly workers at the Crossett Lumber Company wanted a union that could represent chain pullers and machinists alike—all the more impressive given the racialization of “skilled” work in the Southern lumber industry and the IWA’s relatively progressive approach to organizing Black southerners. In the end, organized action on the shop floor forced the federal government to act, and won the IWA recognition from the Crossett Lumber Company, despite the company’s trademark paternalism and anti-union stance.
This brings me, in a roundabout way, to one of my favorite finds. It didn’t come from Arkansas, nor did it have any direct connection to the materials that surrounded it. It was a United Rubber Workers pamphlet entitled Mebbe You’re One of Those Birds. “Are you like the silly ostrich who buries his head in the sand to avoid facing issues? Or, perhaps,” suggests the pamphlet, “you’re like the parrot…who, without realizing what he says, repeats what he has heard others say…” Are we meant to laugh or feel a rush of anger at this? Maybe it’s worth it to get angry.
Read about the labor movement on the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas here. And explore the full Story Map here.
By Liam Carey, graduate student in the UA Little Rock Public History program and 2025 summer intern at the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies
