ABSTRACT
Critical conflicts relate to American labor's central historic problem: its inability until the 1930s to sustain mass industrial unionism. The defeat, John Blackman says, "adversely affected for many years the rise of the great railroad brotherhoods". In the Midwest—Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, St. Louis, Chicago—and Canada, some strikes were settled by rescinding wage cuts, but most were broken by force. The Russian revolution, Milton Nadworny writes, "enabled labor's enemies to characterize almost every important strike as a Communist uprising, thus obscuring the issues at stake in most of the disputes". In some industrial states, labor was also shielded by officials such as Michigan Governor Frank Murphy, who protected strikers in the critical sit-downs in Flint and elsewhere and refused to use the state militia to break strikes. Even American Federation of Labor strikers were sitting down, but the tactic was most widely used in the automobile sector and proved indispensable to its unionization.
