The Pullman Company of Chicago, Illinois, employed large numbers of AfRiCAN Americans as porters beginning in the late 19th century. By 1920 the number reached 12,000, making it the largest private employer of blacks in the nation. However, low wages and insistence upon a servile attitude led to formation in 1925 of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), which insisted upon improved working conditions and greater respect for its members. The labor union achieved initial success in New York, where it first formed, but faltered in the Chicago region, where the Pullman Company, however paternalistic in nature, enjoyed deep roots in the black community, and resistance to the BSCP proved surprisingly strong. But the union, headed by A. Philip Randolph, adopted a community-based strategy of winning over leaders such as clergymen, editors, and politicians, and by 1929 the union enjoyed a surging membership. This trend promptly ended with the onset of the Great Depression that year, and membership declined from 7,300 to only 658 in 1933. However, the BSCP was strategically placed to carry the message of unionism within African-American communities, and it began allying itself with the American Federation Of Labor (AFL) to forge interracial alliances during those difficult times. But the union’s fortunes were not revived until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932 and the introduction of labor-friendly New Deal legislation. Foremost among this was the Railway Labor Act as amended in 1934, which guaranteed railroad workers the right of collective bargaining. Randolph also heightened his national visibility in the black community by serving as president of the National Negro Congress in 1936, and he began applying pressure upon Pullman for greater recognition. A year later the company signed a historic agreement with the BSCP, marking the first time an American corporation entered into a labor agreement with an all-black union.
Although concerned with the working conditions of its members, Randolph also agitated for a broad-based social agenda. His threat of a March on Washington Movement and protest in Washington, D. C., induced President Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, which banned discrimination in government and defense-related employment and also led to establishment ofthe Fair Employment Practices Committee. In July 1948, Randolph used the BSCP’s leverage with Democrats to have President Harry S. Truman sign Executive Order 9981, which effectively ended segregation in the U. S. military. Over the ensuing decades airlines largely supplanted railways as the national mode of transportation, and in 1978 the BSCP merged with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks. Prior to this it had performed seminal work in spreading unionism among black workers and committing the government to policies reflecting greater social justice.
See also National Labor Relations Act.
Further reading: Eric Arnessen, ed., The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).
—John C. Fredriksen
Bulge, Battle of the (December 1944-January 1945) In the six months after the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, American and British forces drove the German army from France and began threatening the German border. In December 1944, the Germans launched a counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium in a desperate effort to halt the Allied advance and capture the vital Belgian port of Antwerp. This last German major thrust in the European theater of World War II was named the Battle of the Bulge, because of the wedge that the Germans drove into the Allied lines before American forces repelled the German attack.
Early in the morning of December 16, 1944, the Germans attacked vulnerable American positions in the Ardennes Forest, sending them reeling back in surprise and confusion. But the German army soon encountered fierce American resistance. When the Germans demanded the
American soldiers of the 75th Division in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge (U. S. Army)
Surrender of the key town of Bastogne on December 22, General Anthony McAuliffe, personifying the courage and resiliency of American troops in the battle, replied with his famous single-word message: “Nuts!”
The tide turned for the Allies by December 23. In a remarkable feat of generalship, General George S. Patton, Jr., had wheeled his Third Army northward from the Moselle to attack the German flank from the south. The fog and heavy clouds that grounded Allied air forces lifted, and Allied planes resupplied isolated garrisons and began to attack the German troops and supply lines. The German advance was halted just miles from the Meuse River by the U. S. First Army on December 26. The extent of the “bulge” that the Germans created was some 60 miles deep and 50 miles wide at the base—a considerable salient, but well short of Hitler’s ambitious objectives. By mid-January, the battle had been won, and by end of the month the Allies were ready to press ahead into Germany.
The Battle of the Bulge was the largest engagement on the western front, and the largest that American soldiers— who did almost all of the fighting—had ever been part of.
More than a half-million American troops were involved, and the American casualties of at least 70,000 (virtually the entire Allied total and more than in any other battle of the war) included some 20,000 dead. British prime minister Winston Churchill said that the Battle of the Bulge would “be regarded as an ever-famous American victory.” Turning back this final German offensive and depleting the Germans’ reserves of manpower and equipment, this victory effectively secured the fate of Nazi Germany and led to its surrender in May 1945.
Further reading: Charles B. MacDonald, A Ti-me for Trwmpets: The Unsold Story of the Battle of the Bulge (New York: Morrow, 1985).
—Michael Leonard
World History
