The March 12th Funeral for the Ford Martyrs had 60,000 to 80,000 marchers
March 12, 1932 – Detroit, Michigan – People began lining the streets early on this cold March morning to show their support for the four men who were killed five days before in what was already being called the Ford Hunger March Massacre. By 10 am there were at least 25,000 people lining Michigan Ave. Michigan Ave was chosen because it was the main industrial artery of the city and was where the four were shot five days before. The funeral was the end of one event but marked the beginning of the major push to unionize auto workers, especially those who remained at Ford.
The Great Depression devastated the American auto industry. It was a catastrophic disaster for all automakers and the city. Detroit had become dependent on assembly line workers for their large labor force and the concurrent tax revenue and spending; Detroit was facing desperate times without that. As an example of how bad things were, the Ford Motor Company had gone from a 1929 high of 128,000 to 37,000 jobs in 1932. This was even with the roll out of Model A. Such an incredible drop was due to the ongoing effects of the Great Depression and the elite rich protecting their own income and status. Across America manufacturing jobs were virtually non-existent, but Detroit could make a claim for the worst with an unemployment rate between 50 and 60 percent.
As was the general situation of the times everywhere there was no form of unemployment insurance or Social Security in Detroit, in the state of Michigan, in the USA, so by 1932 nearly 75 percent of the unemployed in the Detroit area were already deeply in debt or destitute. Homelessness was affecting thousands of people. Yet Henry Ford found no compassion for his ex-workers, blaming them for their own condition. “These are really good times, but only if you know it,” he had said. “The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it,” Ford announced in March 1931. With this attitude, Ford was entirely against any welfare program for the people of Detroit.
Regardless of Ford’s irrational opinion, things were bad, and there was no argument Henry Ford, or anyone could make that conditions were getting better. Everyone was suffering, and a revolution in public thought had begun to happen as the out of work people started voicing their resentment towards the Rich of the nation, many of whom shared Ford’s opinion on some level that the poor in soup lines were their own enemy. “Just grin, keep on working, stop worrying about the future, and go ahead as best you can,” had said Charles W. Schwab the head of U. S. Steel.
Ford and his contemporaries appeared to have decided that they owed nothing to the common good of the United States. As a class the ultra-rich like Henry and Edsel ford were refusing to provide public aid. So, when even the Hoover administration was bending and pulling away from laisses faire economics and trickle-down economics as the solution to the depression and setting up block grants to fund public work projects and use public spending for the public benefit. However, men like George Eastman (Founder of Kodak) and the Du Pont Family just started refusing to pay taxes.
In many cities a quiet revolution was going on as the lines of unemployed men were joined by communists but also by union organizers, in both cases the message was the same, “everything happening was due to the men who owned the plants who weren’t rich enough.” To this end many cities had “Unemployed Councils” that were a combination of Communists, trade union organizers, religious social workers and racial progressives. Unemployment Councils fought against evictions, did mutual aid to feed people, and tried to get cities to provide poverty assistance.
The Ford Hunger March was organized by volunteers from the unemployment councils. On a bitterly cold morning in Detroit, 3,000 to 5,000 men lined up to march on the Ford Rogue Plant. They had a list of 14 demands for Henry Ford which included rehiring the unemployed, ending racial discrimination, and granting workers the right to unionize. In Detroit, the police consented to allow a large group of protestors to the march. One might inquire if they had an idea of what laid ahead in Dearborn where police and Ford security guards were tightly wound together. Dearborn was a company town for the most part; the chief of police was the former head of Ford security. The head of the Dearborn Independent was a former Ford company man who saw communism as the last refuge of scoundrels.
When the marchers reached the gates of the Ford Rogue Plant, they were not prepared for how far Ford, and the town of Dearborn were willing to go to prevent them from presenting their demands or getting any potentially positive press. The marchers got to the gates and started rattling them, demanding to be allowed to present their demands. Harry Bennett arrived at this time but rather than agreeing to meet with the demands committee they were met with fire hoses that froze some in their clothes. Tear gas was employed by the Dearborn police and Ford Company security.
Still at the gate and fenced area the marchers met with former co-workers and teamsters who bombarded them with rocks and debris. When the marchers returned in kind, Bennett ordered live fire and killed four on the spot and mortally wounded another. The Ford security and Dearborn police wounded another 19 and injured at least 60 more with a second round of gun fire and then a physical assault with batons and bricks.
The marchers circled their own and loaded the wounded into cars and onto a bus, a them up in cars and rushed them to the hospital. Before the marchers even made it back to their area William J. Cammeron had the Dearborn Independent blasting the marchers as Communist infiltrators trying to destabilize the factories. The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News also launched a campaign declaring the marchers as Communists and “Red”. These newspapers were decisively already on the side of the auto makers over labor. This was primarily because of advertising revenue, but they were established as well and didn’t want to upset what they thought was the normal way of operating, and the editorial philosophy had been to name labor organizers Communists, so to the workers this was familiar and expected.
These papers and dozens all over the United States reported that an unruly Communist mob had attacked the Ford Plant. This was almost all speculation treated as fact and reports from Ford security and Dearborn police However, the UPI and a few of the Worker papers across America reported that the marchers were singing union and patriotic songs and standing in orderly lines as they marched from Detroit. As they passed over the bridge at Baby Creek organizer and head of the Detroit Unemployment Council had jumped on the back of a truck and reminded the men to stay peaceful, “remember to stay orderly, we are going to the employment office, we’re asking for jobs,” Goetz said at the time.
There was bias in nearly every report and for the Free Press and the Daily news it was a constant contradiction as they painted the marchers and union organizers as Communists and that the Ford company was going to be the foundation of a prosperous future, but they also had front page stories reflecting the actual disaster in Detroit.
At the end of the day Detroit police took 48 men into custody and held the four bodies in their morgue. Henry Ford and Edsel Ford both refused comments. The only statement made by anyone connected to Ford was an anonymous comment that there were no Ford men on the other side in the March on the Rogue Plant, “the company feels no responsibility because none of its men was involved.”
While William J. Cammeron used the Dearborn Independent daily to batter the Hunger Marchers, as did the Free Press, they couldn’t control every aspect of the story. Workers talked to one another; family members talked to other families. The normally cautious and conservative Detroit Federation of Labor condemned the murders outright, “The outrageous murdering of workers at the Ford Motor plant in Dearborn has cast a stain on this community that will remain a disgrace for many years.” This was a little unusual because the Federation of Labor was under the umbrella of the American Federation of Labor who often tried to stay out of the press, especially stories that could cast them in the radical light.
Another reason that the Federation of Labor statement was unusual, but showed the true feelings of the average person in Detroit was that Detroit and Michigan State police made raids on the Unemployment Council, the Trade Union Unity League and the United Auto Workers offices were raided and arrest warrants were out for Albert Goetz, William Z. Foster
It’s extremely hard to control the narrative when 50 to 100 thousand people (about the seating capacity of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum) in Detroit were destitute and potentially starving. Independent progressive lawyer Maurice Sugar took on the case of defending those who were arrested and ACLU president Roger Baldwin stated that the ACLU had 17 attorneys on standby for the organizers like Willian Z. Foster and Albert Goetz. So, while the pro-Ford Dearborn paper stayed the course, and the tabloid Detroit Times painted all marchers as radical socialists the Free Press and Daily news started noticing the public numbers were not as supportive of business as usual and that the depression was a different sort of challenger and that as of March 1932 no one was stepping up.
Belief systems and political tones were shifting because of the conditions created by the Depression. Few Americans had ever experienced the level of poverty now hitting nearly every part of the country. Frank Murphy was a liberal mayor and had promised unemployment relief. He worked hard at it but found almost nothing but obstacles, the primary one being a 6.9-million-dollar deficit for the city’s budget in 1932, and he wasn’t getting any help from the auto makers who were the primary employers in the city. Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company refused to listen to any proposal to help fund welfare; Ford dogmatically believed it would create dependency.
Murphy wasn’t by any stretch a communist either, in fact the Daily Worker described Murphy as Ford’s Gangster because while Murphy condemned several arrests of wounded men, he didn’t order their release immediately. These were ridiculous and unfair criticisms of Murphy who was working hard to raise money, deliver food and clothes to the unemployed in the city. On the day of the shooting Murphy called Harry Bennett a brute and Ford a, “terrible person.”
Murphy did reach out to the police and the prosecutor and got all the men who had been arrested; released. Then police released the four bodies to family members on the 11th and the Federation of Labor and Unemployment and some of the churches helped the families by arranging for burial at the Woodmere Cemetery. This was a cemetery used by the working people of Detroit, and as it was older and established, it had graves for many nationalities.
The funeral procession started in the neighborhoods of the unemployed victims and was to go along the streets for the five miles over to the cemetery. The organizers were able to make sure that everyone in these neighborhoods knew the names of the dead and how they marched to the Ford plant legally with demands to help the community.
The four men who were killed had families and friends and were responsible members of society. Ford and Cameron tried hard to turn that narrative to the expansion of communism but in the neighborhoods those family and friends learned about propaganda themselves and had begun talking only about, “Martyrs of the unemployed workers’ struggle.”
Those four men were
Joe York
Joe DeBlasio
Joe Bussell
Joe Pascuzzi
Since these men were from the immigrant neighborhoods of Detroit the larger funeral looked like a funeral from an Eastern European country. The organizers were also helpful in keeping the mourners and marchers organized. They walked slowly but silently through the streets with four coffins in the lead. Even though this was in a large American city cultural memory enforced much of the procession. There were arm bands, both red and black. Knowing how hard the press wanted to present them as Communist agitators, the families and organizers wanted there to be much more black and traditional mourning dress.
There was a fifth man who had been mortally wounded, but he had not yet died it would still be three days. However, Curtis Williams was an African American, and segregation was still a thing even in the north where the auto makers had recruited Negros during the early years of the great migration the was still segregation, even in cemeteries. Later as a gesture of unity with other workers, Williams's ashes were spread from a plane over the Ford Rogue Plant.
The funeral march changed tone slightly when it left the ethnic neighborhoods and began stretching along Michigan Avenue. While still solemn and silent, more signs and banners began showing, but these shared the message of Ford choosing bullets over bread. Early estimates were that 15,000 people joined the funeral march, which would be considered impressive but soon the real numbers from the Detroit Police Department and the newspapers that projected the funeral numbers over 50,000 to 80,000.
These numbers overwhelmed the narrative of Henry Ford and the Ford Corporation. Multiple unions such as the Bricklayers and Mason's Local came out and stated that, “humane consideration and common sense should have been used to prevent the killing of four marchers on March 7th.” The families of the victims had traveled from other parts of the country and spoke at the funeral, setting a tone for justice. Ben Bussell the older brother of Joe Bussell told everyone listening to, “organize, organize and fight, don’t let these men die in vain!”
This was the message that began to roll forward even against the Ford machine. It led to a major sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan in 1936. Ford and corporate interests found they had no message to combat it as the messages were from union organizers and not the Communist Party arms, the Young Worker or Workers of the World. Also, the Roosevelt administration had passed more pro-workers and union recruiting laws. The murder of five men who were trying to survive the worst of the depression began a change that would soon sweep over America leading into World War II. The United Auto Workers slowly took over every shop in Detroit starting with Chrysler to Ford in 1941. It wasn’t just the unionization of American workers though. Henry Ford’s own legend had taken several hard hits. The myth of him paying higher than anyone went first, but also his plan to end the Depression with a massive new factory never came to pass.
That cold March Saturday in 1932 ended five lives but it lit a fuse with Autoworkers and Americans that workers could not depend on “The Workers Tycoon” who identified with them but only other workers. The city of Detroit would soon face even greater challenges as the racial balance of the city would change with the war, and the mass manufacturing needed to win it. Workers fought and won safety measures and health plans. Yet as allied as Black workers and White workers could be in these fights, they would easily shift to fight each other over housing and schools.
The families of the murder victims at the cemetery
Sources:
Folsom, Franklin. America Before Welfare. United Kingdom: NYU Press, 1996. 284-310. https://tinyurl.com/3eyzuz2f
Sugar, Maurice. The Ford Hunger March. United States: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1980.
Schlesinger, Arthur Meier. The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933. United States: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
“Recent Articles.” The Journal of American History 59, no. 3 (1972): 814–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1900766.
Bimba, Anthony. The History of the American Working Class. United States: International Publishers, 1927. 362-372,
Manley, John F. “Marx in America: The New Deal.” Science & Society 67, no. 1 (2003): 9–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40404049.
