Is Organized Labor Fighting Mad?
The Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act and the National Labor Relations Act were passed as a part of the New Deal of the 1930s. Prior to their passage, most private-sector labor organizations relied on their muscle to move employers to the negotiation table. During the late 1860s and 1870s, the Molly Maguires burned breakers, blew bridges and beat up mine bosses in the anthracite coal patches of eastern Pennsylvania, until more than 20 of them were tried and hanged at the county seats of Pottsville, Schuylkill County, and Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe), Carbon County (PA). In June 1892, as Barbara Tuchman tells it in The Proud Tower (1966), “in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the steelworkers’ union struck in protest against a reduction of wages by the Carnegie Steel Company. The company had ordered the wage cut in a deliberate attempt to crush the union…. On July 5 the strikebreakers recruited by [the company] were to be brought in to operate the plant. When they were ferried in armored barg
