Puerto Rican New Yorkers: Cigar Workers Strike, 1919
Cigarmaking and related tobacco work were very important to Puerto Rican workers and their families in New York before the Depression, but their overall importance declined significantly by the mid-1920s. With the growing Puerto Rican presence, union politics among cigar workers became even more important. Most cigar work was hardly the romanticized trade of high wages, autonomy, and intellectual life that is sometimes found in accounts, including Bernardo Vega’s. Most cigar workers worked long days in bad conditions under intense employer pressure that sought “to make slaves out of them.”[1] But the culture of militancy, solidarity and the cigar worker’s openness towards anarchist, socialist and communist ideas made for a cosmopolitan world in which their distinct Hispanic identity mingled with many others.
Men in the industry were organized through one of the AFL’s core unions, the Cigar Makers International Union, forged in the fire of a two-month-long strike in 1877.[2] The CMIU had a commitment to fight racial and ethnic discrimination and a long history of organizing male Spanish-speaking workers in Florida even before Puerto Rico was brought into the US empire.[3] But this commitment was compromised by the CMIU’s limited size and their exclusion of women, which Cooper called “self-destructive.”[4] It also followed a careful policy in which strikes were discouraged, and militant impulses from the shop floors kept under control.
The trouble in New York City began in early 1918 with conflicts between CMIU leaders and large sectors of the rank and file. A growing number of insurgents demanded a change in the rules and the establishment of grievance committees in the shops. In addition, they wanted support to go on strike whenever they found that shop conditions justified it. Most of the 6000 Hispanic cigar workers, mostly Cubans and Spaniards (and a few hundred Puerto Ricans), supported this faction.
In the summer and fall of 1919, workers at dozens of workshops and factories went on strike, creating a “tidal wave” of mobilizations unsanctioned by the CMIU.[5] By July, seven thousand cigarmakers were on strike, and eventually 25,000 tobacco-related workers, in a rare united show of force. Strikers included women machine operators, and union and nonunion members. They demanded a shorter work week, a 50% increase in wages, a citywide pay scale, and the withdrawal of US troops from Russia.[6] Mass meetings and support actions were organized by the multiethnic, multilingual workers in New York City, which was then the center of the general strike, which had spread to the Tri-State area. After the strike began, organizers held two days of meetings at their headquarters at the Labor Temple on 241 East 84th Street, right next to the Socialist Hall. From the Labor Temple, organizers dispatched activists to shops that had not yet joined the strike.[7] Pickets, celebrations and political meetings accompanied the strike with speeches in English, Spanish, bohemian, Yiddish and Italian.
Strike organizers were “antagonistic” to the CMIU, something that greatly worried employers as they saw the movement as “closer to those of the IWW”—a national militant union organization that had been suppressed by government agents and employer violence earlier in the decade.[8]
The Spanish-speaking “Auxiliary,” composed of 6,000 members, experienced a strong radical turn after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Formerly known as “La Resistencia,” this loosely organized coalition of “Latin” workers began in Tampa in the 1890s and extended its organizing to New York City. The Spanish Auxiliary helped organize an ad-hoc parallel union at various shops after leading various unsanctioned strikes. The work of the Spanish Auxiliary was at the core of the 1919 General Strike. The Spanish-speaking section of the strike council became known as its most militant component, unaffiliated with any organization.
Shop owners claimed they were willing to negotiate wages but opposed the establishment of local grievance committees. They thought the Council did not have sufficient funds to hold a long strike. CMIU organizers also watched the strike carefully. They recognized that a four-month strike was unprecedented. They interpreted the strike as a massive attempt by the Council and the Resistencia to disrupt the CMIU completely. CMIU leaders even collaborated with US military intelligence, giving them names of suspected “communists” in their ranks. Local 90, perceived as the most radical, was spied on by government agents.[9]
It was unclear how much hostility strike leaders held towards union leaders who were willing to collaborate with the CMIU. The CMIU leaders were themselves no strangers to militant unionism.[11] CMIU organizers had a vague sense of the insurgent leadership of the strike but they were still at a loss in explaining how the Council and radicalized leaders of the Hispanic and “Latin” groups could have successfully led such a long walkout.[12] Gompers, the national Vice-President of the CMIU, finally endorsed the strike in September, causing a protracted conflict within the organization. The crisis within the CMIU was so extreme that in 1920, Gompers’ old local (141) rejected electing him as a delegate to the national convention, deeming him too conservative.[13]
Employers throughout the strike were adamant about not yielding [14] and monitored the spirit and commitment of the workers, noting in early August (perhaps as propaganda rather than journalism) the “little harmony in the ranks of the 15,000 cigarmakers who are now on strike.”[15] Trade journal reps even visited the strike headquarters and came out convinced that the strike leaders were steadfast, but most workers were anxious for a compromise. Well before the strike ended employers were discussing a renewed commitment to mechanizing the industry to respond to ”strikes and unreasonable demands.”[16]
In mid-August, workers in Tampa ended their strike, settling for a 15% increase. New York, by contrast, held out through September. Meetings continued at the Astoria hotel as small factories started making their own agreements, for example, accepting pay raises but not shop committees. In mid-September, twelve weeks into the strike, workers, exhausted from weeks of living without a steady income, voted to end the strike on the 20th with the acceptance of minimal concessions. But plant closings and holdouts kept many shops closed through October as “the wild-eyed element of the strikers controlled, and by rough-neck tactics.” Most factories opened in October with the 15% increase that had been accepted in Tampa. The goals of greater shop control had been adamantly and successfully rejected by the owners. By November, most shops were at capacity, fulfilling pent-up demand for cigars, especially the high-quality lines that the Hispanic cigar makers were so good at making.[17]
Employers thought there had been “concessions on both sides.” American Cigar, General Cigar, Benito Rovira Co., Central Cigar, Merriam and co, Schwarz and co, Davis, Tunis, Sachs, and Uron opened in sequence in the days after the settlement. In many plants, workers made agreements without Council agents or union committees. The strike had been lost, but not without many lessons for both the CMIU and the radical wing that had organized the strike.
Many workers followed the shops as owners had already begun moving production outside Manhattan, shifting especially the cheaper cigar lines to Pennsylvania.[18] “Killing New York’s Industry” was the Tobacco Journal headline that described the immediate emigration of workers and factories from the city as the beginning of the end for the industry.[19] The strike had merely accelerated a trend that was already in place as factory owners moved their shops and replaced male workers with women-operated machines. This trend led to the decline of CMIU membership in New York from the prosperity of the WWI years of 10,000 to 4,000. In 1924, only 25% of cigar workers were in the CMIU, with membership down to 2403 (of 9639).[20]
The CMIU worked to coordinate the final meeting, and a vote was accepted in the end by 6 to 1. After the strike, the CMIU declared a period of reconstruction that would last the entire decade. One organizer’s analysis of the strike placed him back at the starting point of CMIU tactics: “The experience gained in this strike should influence the makers in or out of the union toward temperate action. When Collective Bargaining is introduced, rough tactics should not be permitted. Wild strikes only lead to want and suffering; a general benefit has never been produced through strikes of that character.”[21]
Despite its continued importance of remaining cigar shops to a few thousand Puerto Rican and other Latino workers in New York, the CMIU was almost dead by 1931. A national membership of 40,000 had been reduced to 15,000 in 1933 and would weaken further by the 1940s.
Next: Cigarmaker Organizing 1920s
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[1] Cigar Makers Official Journal, 15 July 1922.
[2] Schneider, Dorothee. Labor History. Summer 1985, Vol. 26 Issue 3 325-352.
[3] King, Shannon. “Home to Harlem: Community, Gender, and Working Class Politics in Harlem, 1916–1928.” Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2006.
[4] Cooper, Patricia A. Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
[5] Cooper, Patricia A. Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. University of Illinois Press, 1987, 286.
[6] Cooper, Patricia A. Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. University of Illinois Press, 1987, 280:
[7] Tobacco Journal, 2 August 1919.
[8] Tobacco Journal, 5 July 1919; 12 July 1919.
[9] Cooper, Patricia A. Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. University of Illinois Press, 1987, 286-7.
[11] They supported an eight-month strike of thousands in Tampa. They spent 900,000 in union funds to support it, so they were no strangers to militant unionism, Cigar Workers Official Journal, 15 December 1920.
[12] Campbell. Report of Organizer, Cigar Workers Official Journal, 15 November 1919.
[13] The New York Times, 27 January 1920.
[14] Tobacco Journal, 16 August 1919.
[15] Tobacco Journal, 2 Agust 1919.
[16] Tobacco Journal, 5 July 1919.
[17] Tobacco Journal, 25 October 1919; 20 September 1919; 13 September 1919; 6 September 1919.
[18] Tobacco Journal, 4 October 1919.
[19] Tobacco Journal 11 October 1919.
[20] Killough, Lucy Winsor b. The Tobacco Products Industry in New York and Its Environs; Present Trends and Probable Future Developments. New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1924, 27-28.
[21] Campbell. report of organizer, Cigar Workers Official Journal, 15 November 1919.