Shon Meckfessel > Quotes

“Even in the opening years of the nineteenth century, just as workers refined their strike tactics, coercion was needed to enforce unity and to persuade owners of the legitimacy of the laborers’ demands. That coercion frequently took the form of rioting—whether it was tarring and feathering a recalcitrant shoemaker in Baltimore, or brawling with strikebreakers on New York docks. Force was often garnered to meet force, and riots and violence represent the signposts of American labor history from the 1830s to the twentieth century…much of the history of American labor is written in blood as riots.136”
― Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain't What It Used To Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance