National Guard protecting Hormel profits, 1985 meatpackers strike, Austin, MN
In the buildup to a jury decision in the Derek Chauvin murder trial, Minneapolis residents found themselves living under National Guard military occupation. Based on social media posts during the trial, many city residents, seeing the Guard through an uber patriotic lens, insisted that the soldiers were a force for good, here to protect residents from possible unrest in the event of an unexpected verdict. In fact, as is true throughout its history, the Guard was called in to protect property and commercial interests. And, as typically happens, the Guard joined forces with the police to suppress protestors when, in the middle of the Chauvin trial, police killed another unarmed black man. Many connect the Guard to so-called humanitarian efforts in natural disasters (although that effort is checkered as well). In reality, the Guard has a dark, 150-year history of protecting property and business interests at the behest of the ruling class. The business class, then and now, relies on the power of the state and state violence to enforce its will.
Today’s National Guard evolved from colonial era militias. Prior to the Civil War, politicians and business interests used militias to suppress slaves and annihilate Native Americans. Militias began morphing into officially titled state National Guard forces after a wave of strikes that started with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Immediately, the business community recognized the threat and united in calling for military suppression of strikes. At the business community’s behest, the Guard took on a new suppressive role—that of a military trained and equipped industrial police force for the business class. Business owners and the politicians in their pockets called up the Guard for a single purpose: to break strikes and quash the US’s emerging labor movement. So blatant was this class warfare that business and government officials actually debated whether the National Guard or the US Army would take on the role of industrial police force. Further cementing the Guard’s mission, businessmen often served as officers in state militias/Guard units and provided much of the units’ financing.
Starting with the Civil Rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s, the Guard got another assignment from the business and political classes: quell protests and guard business interests from racial justice and antiwar civilian unrest.
The following list of the Guard’s military attacks on workers and protestors isn’t exhaustive but just a flavor of the Guard’s dark 150-year history
The Guard as industrial police force
State violence, threatened and actual, has been used for hundreds of years to protect corporate profits and private property. The Guard, itself composed of working class enlistees, has become a militarized corporate police force that state governments can unleash on the rest of the working class. Directed by government bodies that are controlled by business interests, the Guard has shot and killed workers and their families, arrested strike leaders, threatened striking workers with state-sanctioned violence, and served as strike-breaking scabs. During World War I, the military was used to spy on workers and labor organizers. In 1920-21, the government used the Army Air Service to bomb striking mineworkers in the West Virginia coal files. In World War II, the government discussed seizing defense plants to avert or break threatened strikes. And the government used federal troops as replacement workers in the 1977 New York City postal workers strike and both Guard and federal troops as replacement controllers in the 1981 PATCO strike, which broke the air traffic controllers union.
Workers will never learn this history in school, but here’s a brief, incomplete list of Guard being used against unions, workers, and the working class.
1877 Great Railroad Strike. Workers wages were cut, and workers struck from Baltimore to St. Louis; state governors called their state militias to break the strike. 46,000 soldiers were called out, and 100 workers were killed
1886 Wisconsin Iron Works and Rolling Mill and the 8-hour day. Wisconsin’s governor ordered its state militia to fire on striking workers marching to the mill in support of the 8-hour workday; 7 workers were killed
1892 Homestead Steel strike, Homestead, PA. Mill owner Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. The state militia was called in to lock out the striking workers, protect scabs, and break the workers’ strike.
1912 Lawrence, MA, textile mills. Militias used for strikebreaking in the Lawrence mills.
1914 Ludlow Massacre, Colorado. Guard troops, called out by the governor at the request of John D, Rockefeller, burned down a strikers’ tent colony killing 26 people including 2 women and 11 children. A number of the Guardsmen worked as plant guards and so were employees of Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.
1934 Teamsters strike Minneapolis. Unarmed workers were fired on by local police, and 2 workers were killed. The governor declared martial law and called out the Guard, who raided union headquarters, arrested union leaders, and held them in a stockade at the fairgrounds.
1937 auto plant sit-down strike, Flint, MI. The governor called out soldiers to surround the plants but wouldn’t order them to attack. By then, many politicians were elected with labor union support and were more reluctant to use the military against striking workers.
1974 independent truckers strike. Soldiers were called up in 11 states including Minnesota to break an independent truckers strike
1985 Hormel strike, Austin, MN. The Minnesota Guard was called out to protect scabs and break the strike at the Hormel meatpacking plant. (The Guard was used multiple times, over 50+ years, against striking meatpackers at multiple plants in Minnesota and other states).
Military turns on civilians in civil rights and antiwar protests and uprisings
After World War II, when unions became more politically powerful, and later when the union movement declined due to US deindustrialization and the success of military strike breaking, the rate of labor interventions slowed but didn’t stop. But the Guard got a new target and a new mission beginning with the 1960s civil rights movement. States and business interests tapped the Guard yet again to protect business interests and private property by quelling urban unrest over racial injustice and US wars. From 1960 to 1971, the Guard was used 260 times to quell urban civil rights and antiwar protests and disturbances. The underlying problems being protested are, of course, never addressed since that would require systemic, anti-business change. A few examples.
1965 Los Angeles. More than 13,000 Guard troops were called in to quell urban unrest in the Watts section of Los Angeles after a black man was arrested by a white police officer in a DUI traffic stop.
1967 Detroit and Newark. Inexperienced national Guard soldiers (with as little as 6 hours of training) and US army divisions were deployed to both Detroit and Newark after uprisings of black citizens. Soldiers killed 9 people in Detroit including a 4-year-old girl.
1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike. 3800 National Guard soldiers were called out after civil rights leader Martin Luther King agreed to come to Memphis to support striking black sanitation workers. (King was assassinated there.) Now famous pictures show striking black workers marching down Memphis streets wearing I Am A Man signs surrounded by Guard tanks and lines of Guard troops pointing weapons at the marchers.
1968 Assassination of Martin Luther King. Guard units were called out for widespread urban unrest in more than 100 US cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Wilmington, Delaware, one of those cities, experienced only minor incidents after the assassination. Nevertheless, Delaware’s governor asked the Guard to stay on. It did, for a full year, the longest military occupation of any American city in history.
1970 antiwar protest, Kent State University. National Guard fired on antiwar protestors at Kent State University in Ohio, killing 4 students and injuring 9.
1992 Los Angeles, acquittal of police in Rodney King beating. The Guard was called in to protect corporate property and curb urban riots after four police officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the arrest and beating of a black man, Rodney King. This beating, like the killing of George Floyd, was also videotaped.
1999 WTO Seattle. The Guard was called in to deal with the US’s first ever massive anti-globalization street protests. An estimated 40,000 protestors included labor unions, students, citizens of developing countries, anarchists, environmentalists, and members of and local, national, and international religious and nongovernmental organizations all protested against the World Trade Organization at its international meeting in Seattle. The protestors’ sheer number prevented delegates from getting to the meeting, and a number of WTO events had to be canceled. Police were overwhelmed, and the governor called out two battalions of the Guard. Even so, the WTO conference ended with no agreements thanks to the massive protests. The Seattle police chief resigned, and arrested protestors eventually received a settlement from the city of Seattle after the city was found to have violated protestors’ 4th amendment rights.
2005 Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans. The Democratic governor of Louisiana called in the Guard and threatened a shoot-to-kill order for alleged looters—mostly desperate people trying to get food and water—in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane that killed more than 1800 people.
2014 Ferguson, MO, police killing of Michael Brown. Heavily militarized police and Guard units were called in to quell protests in the aftermath of the police murder of an unarmed black man.
2016 Standing Rock. Guard soldiers were called up to protect Dakota Access Pipeline investors in a militarized standoff with unarmed indigenous water protectors
2021 George Floyd murder trial. The Guard was called out in multiple cities including Minneapolis to protect corporate property and quell expected protests.
Today, as always, the Guard is composed of thousands of working class young people who are themselves frontline workers. That said, the Guard itself is a state military force deployed against the working class. Working class soldiers, many who join for college money, to learn skills, to prepare for jobs in law enforcement, to help in natural disasters, are being ordered to engage in dangerous, violent, often lethal, anti-democratic, anti-worker, anti-civil rights, pro-war, pro-business missions against their own fellow workers. The business and political forces directing the soldiers are far removed from and uninfluenced by the needs and desires of local communities. The underlying problems of racism, poverty, deindustrialization, injustice, corporatism, imperialism, and oppression are never resolved and never intended to be. Instead, the ruling class, with the complicity of politicians, supports and directs a military force of the working class to suppress other working class people and communities.
Guard in tanks following striking sanitation workers, Memphis 1968.
