Read Online Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes - Free Book Online

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    Blacks continued to be used as strikebreakers across the country, as in the bitter longshoremen’s strike in Seattle that began in 1916 and lasted well into the following year. For most blacks, there was little or no stigma attached to crossing a white picket line. The prevalent view among influential black leaders, such as
Chicago Defender
publisher Robert Abbott, was that the late Booker T. Washington had been right in saying said that blacks crossing white picket lines were simply exercising “their right to labor as free men.” Even W. E. B. Du Bois—while insisting that “the
Crisis
believes in organized labor”—had said in 1912 that if unions whose policy was to “beat or starve the Negro out of his job” went on strike, there was nothing wrong with blacks crossing their picket lines, because the displaced whites deserved “the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows.” (Ironically, in Seattle, although the waterfront strike had been marked by bloody street fighting between blacks and whites, once the strike was over, the black replacement workers were invited to join thelongshoremen’s union, and many did. Such poststrike interracial solidarity was rare.) 13
    After the United States entered the war, Missouri Malleable Iron in East St. Louis, like industrial firms across America, anticipated a rapid growth in its armament contracts. The ironworks again advertised for black workers in the South. Once again, over the next few months, the Free Employment office shipped thousands of men, black and white, to other cities. The streets of downtown became crowded with homeless men and women, with panhandlers and muggers. Disease broke out in the close, filthy quarters. Tuberculosis spread rapidly, and health authorities were concerned that a major cholera epidemic was just waiting to break out. The diseases struck poor people without regard to race, but once again blacks were blamed.
    Opponents of Mayor Fred Mollman’s campaign for reelection began spreading the rumor that Mollman’s black supporters all had smallpox. In fact, there was a minor outbreak of smallpox that spring, and some blacks got it, but so did some whites, particularly men who worked in the meatpacking houses in the private fiefdom of National City. 14
    Blacks, in particular, were forced by exorbitant rents in slum properties to crowd together into shacks and tenement flats south and east of downtown, some of them on the dark sandy grit of the remnants of Bloody Island.Most of the slum properties, including the brothels and unlicensed saloons—called “blind tigers” by East St. Louisans—were owned or managed by the politically powerful real estate firm of Tarlton and Canavan.

    George Locke Tarlton

    Thomas Canavan
    George Locke Tarlton was the thirty-five-year-old political boss of East St. Louis, the power behind Mayor Fred Mollman. His partner was fifty-eight-year-old Thomas Canavan, a politically savvy former alderman, a member of the board of election commissioners, and Mollman’s commissioner of public works. Tarlton publicly bragged that he controlled the mayor, a political hack and glad-hander whose family was in the harness business. According to reformer George W. Allison, a Baptist minister, Tarlton “owned” Mollman “boots and baggage.” 15
    Tarlton was president of the East Side Levee and Sanitation District, which deposited millions of dollars in public funds in interest-free accounts in favored banks. The banks in return maintained a secret political slush fund Tarlton could use for bribery in political campaigns. A ruthless politician, he rewarded cronies with lucrative jobs and punished those who opposed him, as when he ensured the defeat at the polls of a state’s attorney—a fellow Democrat—who had prosecuted a corrupt Republican mayor allied with Tarlton. Tarlton became wealthy in part through crooked