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Funsten Nut Company nut display in a Woolworth company store, 1941. (Missouri Historical Society)
Ninety years ago this May, eighteen-year-old food worker Carrie Smith marched onto the shop floor of a nut processing factory in St Louis and initiated one of the most successful labor actions of the Great Depression. “The heavy stuff is here,” Smith said, observing the urgency and decisiveness of the moment upon them. “Get your hats and let’s go.”
Over the course of eight days, the Funsten Nut Strike put two thousand predominantly black female industrial workers on picket lines across five factories. The strike was led and organized by radical black working-class women — including Smith, who confronted a foreman to make sure her coworkers would exit safely.
On that first morning, Carrie Smith argued with the boss for two hours before taking to the picket line with a Bible in one hand and a brick in the other. “Girls,” she announced, “we can’t lose!”
The Funsten Nut Strike is little-known, but it deserves to go down in the history of Midwestern labor militancy alongside the 1877 general strike. As Keona Ervin notes in her book, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis:
Newspapers in and outside of the Gateway City [St. Louis] covered the episode, prominent local leaders weighed in or became involved, and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) used the strike as a moment to mark the urban Midwest as a new hotbed for radical labor politics spearheaded by black working women.
During the Great Depression, St Louis’s unemployment shot through the roof. Overall joblessness jumped from 9 to 30 percent. Black workers took the first and most severe cuts, with 70 percent of the black workforce becoming either unemployed or severely underemployed.
But 1930s St Louis was also rich with radicalism. Both the Communist and the Anarchist were nationally circulating newspapers published in St Louis. So was Frank O’Hare’s National Rip-Saw (later Social Revolution), which served as an intellectual clearinghouse for Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party. Globetrotter Publishing House turned out radical pamphlets with titles like “Women Under Capitalism,” “Socialism for the Farmer,” and “Socialism and Faith in Practice.”
“I found Bohemia on the Banks of the Mississippi,” socialist writer Jack Conroy said of the city’s radical culture, informed in large part by the values of Germans who’d immigrated there in the wake of the 1848 revolutions
St Louis in the 1930s was also home to several organizations that served as progenitors to the civil rights movement, as documented in historian Walter Johnson’s book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. For example, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, briefly led by socialist poet Langston Hughes, brought together “women and men, Black and white, communists who sought to join the struggle for racial and economic justice in the United States to the global struggle against capitalism and colonialism.” The League became the first in a series of organizations building toward St Louis’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION).
“In St. Louis,” Johnson writes, “the legal struggle against Jim Crow tapped into a deeper and more radical history of grassroots organizing and direct action led by Black workers, especially Black women, and by communists.”
Economic immiseration intensified St Louis’s radicalism. A year before the Funsten Nut Strike, on the morning of July 8, 1932, those dispossessed during the Depression marched on city hall, demanding to be fed. Singing “Solidarity Forever” to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” more than a thousand gathered with signs that read, “No Evictions of Unemployed” and “We Will Work But We Won’t Starve.” Children carried signs demanding “Free Milk for the Children of the Unemployed.”
Days later, during what came to be known as the July Riot, a dozen demonstrators occupied the mayor’s office while a crowd of thousands gathered outside. The Post-Dispatch reported a black protester’s speech: “There is only one way left for the working class — that’s the militant way. I am speaking for the Negro workers who know how to fight and will fight. We will not continue to starve peacefully.”
‘There is only one way left for the working class — that’s the militant way. I am speaking for the Negro workers who know how to fight and will fight.’
When the crowd was told that the mayor would not meet with Communist Party organizers, fifty black women led the charge up the stairs. The police responded with tear-gas bombs, and a canister was picked up and thrown back — a scene immortalized in Jack Conroy’s novel The Disinherited, and echoed in the 2014 Michael Brown protests in St Louis, when Edward Crawford, clad in an American flag shirt, launched a smoking canister back at riot police.
The July Riot was one in a series of 1930s “hunger marches” in the city. On this occasion, police briefly retreated before drawing guns, swinging billy clubs, and shooting into the crowd. Children were trampled, and four protesters were shot.
While the police commissioner said he was sympathetic to the unemployed, in the following days uniformed and armed policemen arrested suspected members of the St Louis Communist Party for their role in the protests. But despite the crackdown, the July Riot yielded results. St Louis’s Board of Aldermen passed an emergency motion to appropriate $25,000 in food distribution centers throughout the city.
The next summer, in 1933, the struggle spilled into the workplace. Nut pickers at several processing facilities began holding secret meetings. The rendezvous were led by black women, several of whom were veterans of the July Riot.
“The scene outside the plants during the nine days of the strike was by turns (and depending on one’s perspective) inspiring, chaotic, and violent,” Johnson writes in Broken Heart. The Funsten walkout was an action long in the making, organized across various locations, in clandestine get-togethers of six, then twenty, then fifty. The organizers were aided by the St Louis Communist Party, in particular a labor activist named William Sentner.
On the first day, one white worker, Nora Diamond, was quoted in the labor press explaining that the wages and working conditions of the black workers “don’t affect me.” Diamond was staying on the job because the strike was “led by the wrong kind of people, Russians, foreigners.”
As Myrna Fichtenbaum notes in her book The Funsten Nut Strike, “Women represented around 30% of the workforce” in 1930s Missouri. The occupations open to black women were hairdresser, waitress, cafeteria help, seamstress, houseworker, laundry worker, tobacco factory worker, and nut factory worker. Almost all of these workplaces maintained Jim Crow policies physically separating workers in different facilities.
At the time, St Louis had zero black officials in locally elected office. The city was the “last stop on the railroad before entering the South,” Fichtenbaum writes. “It was here that the cars were changed to designations of ‘Colored’ and ‘White.’”
Nut pickers at several processing facilities began holding secret meetings. The rendezvous were led by black women, several of whom were veterans of the July Riot.
Black women’s prestrike wages at Funsten Nut amounted to about $6 a week. “Compared to their fellow workers,” Keona Ervin told the Post-Dispatch,
primarily women of Polish descent, black women earned 3 to 4 cents per pound of shelled nuts, not the 4 to 6 cents the immigrant workers earned. Black women did work that caused physical strain, picking nutmeats from their shells, while the Polish women had the preferred assignment of sorting and weighing the pieces.
This was a time when St Louis was the center of the pecan industry, up current from the Mississippi River Valley that had proved ideal for growing large groves of natural pecan trees. In the Gateway City, sixteen factories, seven owned by the R. E. Funsten Company, employed about three thousand women in grueling food processing jobs.
At Funsten, black women worked nine hours a day, five and a half days a week, starting at 6:45 a.m. and stopping at 4:45 p.m. with forty-five minutes for lunch. White women worked shorter days, starting at 7 a.m., stopping at 4:30 p.m., and receiving a whole hour for lunch.
From The Funsten Nut Strike by Myrna Fichtenbaum
Indignities small and large abounded at Funsten Nut. Nutmeat produced permanent stains, and the cost for aprons was deducted out of workers’ weekly pay. The bathrooms were unsanitary despite the workers handling food. Additionally, writes Fichtenbaum, “working with the nuts emitted a dust which precipitated coughing.” She writes:
Seated at a table, after obtaining a 25 lb. bag of nuts, the women separated the meats from the shells with a knife. Halves were placed in one pile, broken pieces in another. The shells were also kept, so that upon completion all of it could be weighed once more, making sure that it all added up to the original 25 lbs.
White women worked on the first floor, while black women worked in the basement of some buildings and on the second floor of others. “It wasn’t clean,” a worker named Josie Moore told Fichtenbaum. “They didn’t have no windows. They had big doors that just come open.” When it was cold,
they fastened the doors and they’d have a little heat in there, very little. They kept the lights on all the time. Oh, it was terrible. I remember a couple of women taking sick and they told the man, the boss, that they would have to go home. He said, “Well if you start that going home, you just stay there.”
Two years prior to the strike, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that the Funsten women had suffered five wage cuts. Then there was the most common complaint: being cheated at the final weighing.
Picking demanded speed, dexterity, and endless patience. Sorting did as well. Black women pickers were paid three cents per pound of halves, and two cents for pieces — in other words, three and two. Coined by Carrie Smith, “We demand ten and four!” became the strike motto. Ten cents for halves, four for pieces.
“Animals in the Zoo Are Fed While We Starve” read one picket sign outside of a Funsten plant. Strikers carried Bibles and interrupted the line now and then to pray. Husbands and children joined the march from plant to plant, calling for the women who remained inside to come out.
On the first day of the strike, only black women stood on the picket lines. By the second, the lines were multiracial. One woman interviewed recalled, “They came they hollered for us to ‘Come out, the strike is on!’ and most of the women dropped their work and went out and joined in.”
On the first day of the strike, only black women stood on the picket lines. By the second, the lines were multiracial.
Each shop elected its own strike committee and captains, and planned to meet with the mayor. “Imagine the vulnerability these women faced,” historian Walter Johnson told Jacobin. “They had to reassure that number of people who are really one step away from being out of work. They are really at the bottom of the class order.”
Work at Funsten Nut was an exercise in racial discrimination, but the multiracial picket lines were representative of the realities of working-class life in St Louis, where working-class neighborhoods were often populated by black and immigrant communities. In those intermingled bohemian neighborhoods, working-class solidarity could be built organically, neighbor to neighbor.
“We believe we are entitled to live as well as other folks live,” Carrie Smith told newly elected Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann at a meeting. “And should be entitled to a wage that will provide us with ample food and clothing.” Ervin writes that a worker named Caroline Lewis spoke at the same meeting and “shared that her three-dollar average weekly wage kept her household, comprising her mother and her four children, mired in poverty.” In negotiations, Lewis told Mayor Dickmann that working women’s low wages, not paid labor itself, made mothering difficult.
Over the course of eight days, city police escorted strikebreakers through angry crowds, and at least ninety strikers were arrested for disturbing the peace. Many women made their court appearances bruised and bandaged from what Johnson calls the “curbside justice to which the arresting officers had subjected them.”
On the ninth day, May 24, the Funsten owners and Mayor Dickmann folded. Eighteen-year-old Carrie Smith emerged from city hall with an offer from the company to double their wages — close to the demanded “ten and four” quota. Smith and the mayor drove to the Communist Party headquarters where seven hundred strikers had assembled and presented them with the company’s proposal. It was unanimously approved.
The Funsten Nut strikers had shown the labor movement and the civil rights movement the way forward. “They fiercely resisted red-baiting,” Ervin writes, “persuasively criticized liberal reformism, creatively bridge local struggles for economic justice and black freedom, and broke new ground for working-class women’s leadership.”
“You must follow these steps of these nutpickers,” the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) urged in a subsequent pamphlet. “You must organize yourselves and strike!” According to the journal Working Women, the nutpickers had “aroused the masses of St. Louis like no other strike in years,” gaining the “full sympathy and solidarity of the St. Louis working class. . . . One would think that the Negro woman had been for years trained in the working-class movement.”
The Funsten Nut Strike “set the stage for a wave of struggle over the following two decades,” Ervin writes. “Women merged feminist, labor, black freedom, and antipoverty agendas to construct broad visions of community empowerment and democratically controlled urban landscapes.”
Many women made their court appearances bruised and bandaged from what Johnson calls the ‘curbside justice to which the arresting officers had subjected them.’
The strike had a major impact on the political landscape in St Louis. For example, notes Johnson, “The St Louis Urban League had been founded in 1918 to assist southern migrants in their transition to life in the city.” For some League members, it was difficult to make common cause with black women of the working poor who couldn’t abide by health requirements and had “open sores on their arms and their hands,” which was the reason given for the League’s formal refusal to get involved with the strike. After the strike, a different story took hold. “The Urban League’s Women’s Division became particularly attuned to the needs of black women,” Ervin told Jacobin. “They wanted to find out where they were working, and what they needed.”
Black workers in St Louis continued to strike through the years of the Depression and World War II. Notable civil rights figures cut their teeth in that period of militancy, including Marian Oldham, Frankie Freeman, DeVerne Lee Calloway, and Ora Lee Malone. As Johnson notes:
Because Blacks had long voted in St. Louis, the city’s freedom movement, from the beginning to the end, emphasized economic equality in addition to issues of access to public accommodations, parks, and pools. The critique of economic injustice that historians identify as having come to characterize the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement only in 1968, with Martin Luther King Jr.’s support of the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, had a much longer history in St. Louis.
After the strike, C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones visited Missouri to find out what working-class black people in the Midwest were doing and learn from them. We can do the same today. “I think it’s so critical to draw this genealogy of black women’s working-class radicalism,” Ervin told Jacobin, “and to demonstrate this larger history that is a living one. The Ferguson liberation movement, the Fight for 15, the radical tenant organizing in Kansas City — this is all deeply connected.”
Australian foreign minister Penny Wong speaking at the Pacific Island Forum on May 26, 2022 in Suva, Fiji. (Pita Simpson / Getty Images)
Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, gave a speech at the National Press Club on Monday. Its title was “Australian Interests in a Regional Balance of Power.” The address was largely understood to be a response to recent attacks on her stewardship of Australia’s foreign policy and committing to the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal this year.
The speech didn’t contain any groundbreaking revelations, or spark the intraparty fight many media commentators seemed to be hoping for. It did, however, highlight the increasing doublespeak of Australian foreign policy in this era of looming conflict.
Wong argued that the US security guarantee in the Indo-Pacific is what has allowed the region a long stint of peace and wealth. Australia, she maintained, was committed to this status quo. But this “balance,” as she labeled it, and the prosperity of countries in the Asia-Pacific region, are now threatened by a regional power with dominating ambitions: China. Wong argued that the very nature of the region is being redefined. While warning against commentators who “love a binary,” she nonetheless insisted that only two options exist for the region’s future:
A region where no country dominates and no country is dominated . . . [or] a closed, hierarchical region where the rules are dictated by a single major power to suit its own interests.
She argued that continued US engagement in the Indo-Pacific will help achieve the former, and implied that, if left unchecked, China’s natural drive to “maximize its advantage” will lead to the latter.
Wong’s speech, which was not really at odds with most mainstream commentary, obscures two aspects of this looming crisis: the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, and Australia’s role in it.
Wong’s speech contained a strange, repeating oscillation about the nature of the US-China conflict in the Asia-Pacific. In one moment she argued that “guardrails,” to use Joe Biden’s language, were essential to manage this great power rivalry; in the next she claimed the prism of great power competition was reductive, unhelpful, and inaccurate. On the latter point, she noted that “today’s circumstances have prompted comparisons with 1914,” but she cautioned that those comparisons should serve as warnings — “but nothing more.”
The historical parallel, however, is more than just allusion to a violent conflagration. This is because comparing today’s situation to 1914 — and more specifically, the inter-imperial conflict between the United Kingdom and Germany — means acknowledging that the conflict is not just between two hegemons but between two capitalist powers. Germany in the early twentieth century faced a crisis of profitability; the domestic working class didn’t have high enough incomes to buy back what it made. To deal with this excess capacity, Germany exported capital (mostly through loans) to try to create overseas markets. But this urgent economic imperative to increase its sphere of influence put German capitalism on a collision course with the United Kingdom and its already-established overseas markets.
This dynamic is remarkably similar to what is happening today: simply replace “Germany” with “China” and the “United Kingdom” with “the United States.”
If this just sounds like a fatalistic Thucydides Trap with some economic jargon thrown in, it isn’t. The point is that there are no tools to fix a problem concerning destiny, but plenty to address one that relates to distribution. One possibility, as sociologist Ho-fung Hung has consistently argued in relation to both Chinese and US economies, is that
reviving profits through redistribution instead of intensifying zero-sum intercapitalist competition could contain the deterioration into interstate conflict . . . to be sure, such a rebalancing act, which hinges on breaking the corporate oligarchies’ resistance to redistribution, is easier said than done.
In other words, if it’s capitalism’s economic imperatives that bring us to the brink of war, its class-rule characteristics then become the biggest barrier to any alternative course of action.
In her Press Club speech, Wong emphasized Australia’s desire for “strategic equilibrium” in the Asia-Pacific region so that “all countries” can exercise “their agency to achieve peace and prosperity.” At the same time, she stressed that “America is central to balancing a multipolar region.” AUKUS, and any increase in defense spending or military cooperation with the United States, she said, are part and parcel of this “regional balance that keeps the peace.”
But far from Wong’s expressed commitment to peace, all the signs indicate a keenness for conflict. There is the AUD$368 billion AUKUS procurement of nuclear-powered submarines. The Quad meeting in Sydney next month will occur against the backdrop of calls to turn the nonbinding group into a more formal military alliance. And the Talisman Sabre war games are scheduled for July in Northern Australia. This military exercise is a symbolic endorsement of the US-Australia alliance, and the thirty thousand troops participating this year is double what it was in 2021.
Despite Wong’s claimed commitment to a multipolar region, Australia has historically demonstrated a blind dedication to a unipolar world and US domination of the Asia-Pacific. Its efforts have involved extreme violence, direct or outsourced, and been aimed at containing China.
For example, Australia, the UK, and the United States backed the 1965 mass murder of communist sympathizers in Indonesia in order to achieve this goal. At the time, the Australian prime minister Harold Holt glibly boasted to the Murdoch family’s Australian-American Association in New York that “with 500,000 to one million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”
There is not enough space here to do justice to Australia’s real historical and ongoing role in the Pacific. Commentators like David Brophy and Clinton Fernandes, however, have done fantastic work documenting Australia’s exploited and exploitative foreign policy in the region. While the United States demands Australian subservience economically and militarily, every Australian government then demands that all Pacific nations submit and open their economies to Australian big business.
Wong’s insistence that all Pacific nations share the same interests and vision for the region — despite that clearly not being the case — hid a message. Despite decrying ultimatums, her speech in fact seemed to offer Pacific nations a veiled one: join China or join our effort to contain it.
For its part, the Chinese state has offered Wong its own ultimatum: develop Australia as the mediating bridge between East and West it has sometimes claimed to be or continue to play US deputy sheriff and face the consequences. In this increasingly dangerous “hoedown,” as one commentator dubbed the twenty-first-century US fight for strategic hegemony, Wong’s “war is peace” rhetoric won’t stand.
The US state has a substantial network operating to ensure the Australian political elite toes the line of containment. With working Australians largely unorganized and with little direct influence, it’s worth considering who else has Wong and her government’s ear.
Australia’s most prominent capitalists have a recent record of making and breaking Australian governments in cahoots with the United States. But they are, at least for now, less bruised than their US counterparts by China’s squeeze on foreign companies. Perhaps because of this, they have been politely encouraging about the prospect of dialogue.
Mining (and now shipping) magnate Andrew Forrest is a nice example of this. Forrest visited Beijing in March, and decried “political power plays at home leading to non-collaboration between massive economies [that] will be seen as vacuous, shortsighted, visionless, selfish leadership in the 2020s.” He urged the United States and China to avoid this legacy and to collaborate on (and create profits from) the climate crisis. But Forrest is also planning to profit from the AUKUS deal and is setting up independent shipping interests that might do quite well during a war in the region. This suggests big business is rather flexible on questions of war and peace. Put simply, Australia’s billionaires are keen to make hay while the sun shines, but have an insurance policy in case it stops.
There are alternatives to war. But as Penny Wong’s and Australian big business’s comments and actions demonstrate, our political establishment might not have the stomach for peace.
Saudi Arabia’s cabinet approved a decision to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), cementing the increasingly close ties between the Middle East oil producer and China. The move is also another brick in the emerging closer ties between what can be called the BRICS bloc of leading emerging markets
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