Today in Labor History January 4, 1933: Angered by increasing farm foreclosures, members of Iowa's Farmers Holiday Association threatened to lynch banking representatives and law officials who instituted foreclosure proceedings for the duration of the Depression. In April, 600 farmers battled the sheriff and his deputies to prevent a foreclosure. A group of farmers dragged a district judge from his chair, put a rope around his neck, and threatened to hang him unless he promised not to issue any more eviction notices. They stripped him naked, beat him, smeared him with grease, and jerked from the ground by the noose until he lost consciousness. Once revived, they told him to pray, and raised him again from the ground by the noose. That same month, state officers in Crawford County were beaten, prompting the Iowa governor to declare martial law in three counties and send in the National Guard. During the farmers’ strike, the refused to sell their products. “We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs. Let them [the bankers] eat their gold.” They called their strike the “farmers holiday” and their movement the Farmers Holiday Association. One of the leaders, Milo Reno, said they were being “robbed by a legalized system of racketeering.” He also said that the farmers might have to “join hands with those who favor the overthrow of government. . . You have the power to take the great corporations. . . shake them into submission.”
This was just one of many violent movements rebelling against capital during the Great Depression. In 1934, there were General Strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, in which workers fought back against police, vigilantes, and National Guards with sticks, clubs, bottles and rocks. Police shot and killed 2 strikers each in the San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis General Strikes. There were bloody strike waves among textile workers all along the Eastern Seaboard, though the overwhelming majority of violence was perpetrated against them by cops and vigilante thugs, with at least 18 workers killed and over 160 injured. But this militancy, solidarity, and willingness of workers to confront the state’s legalized violence against them were major influences on the implementation of New Deal reforms by President Roosevelt, including the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board.
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