In 1934, during the height of the Depression and one of the largest national strikes in history, 4 unarmed Rhode Island workers were killed by State Police and Militia Men called out by Governor TF Green to protect the Saylesville Bleachery in Lincoln, Rhode Island. It wasn’t a “strike,” he declared, but a “communist insurrection.”
Militia attacking striking workers from behind gravestones in Saylesville, Rhode Island.
Whatever. Four workers were cut down in the street. You can still see the bullet holes in the gravestones from the high powered guns used against the strikers and each labor day some of us gather to remind the powers that be that we are not all dead and buried. This year Maureen Martin, Secretary-Treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO will deliver the address at the memorial to the martyrs created by the Rhode Island Labor History Society to memorialize what is known as The Battle of the Gravestones.
The monument is located in Moshassuck Cemetery, 978 Lonsdale Avenue in Central Falls.
All are invited to a ceremony honoring the event and those who lost their lives.
You can register for the event on Facebook.
If you like, you can see actual newsreel video of the street battle here.
CIVIL WAR AT SAYLESVILLE
This is one of my ‘things.’
People died to bring us the 40 hour week. They had to die because Capital wouldn’t give it to them, and bought all the politicians it needed to make sure that organizing, let alone the right to strike, were made and kept illegal.
Adam Smith decried this in “Wealth of Nations.” He found it outrageous that attempts to organize by workers were ruthlessly put down, while the much, much more common collusion of owners went unnoticed, unremarked, and untouched.
Yes, that Adam Smith. I really wish our RW friends would actually read him sometime. They would be very surprised.