The corporate hierarchy has long tried to diminish labor activism in the United States by insisting that strikes and other workplace agitations have never had broad support or impact because they are fundamentally un-American. The corporatists cluck that, from the get-go, the U.S. cultural zeitgeist has been grounded in a veneration of individualism, an appreciation for the financial blessings of the corporate order, and a rejection of collectivism.
Take a quick trip with me, back some 400 years in the nation’s past, to witness this bold work stoppage organized in the very first permanent English settlement in North America.
In a word: Hogwash! And Horsefeathers! (OK, two words, just for emphasis.) These self-serving fictionalizers seem unaware of a momentous labor event at the nation’s very start: the Jamestown craftsmen strike of 1619. Or they are aware, but don’t want you to be.
Thus—shhhh—you won’t find it mentioned in college textbooks or TV documentaries, or even on any of the many markers at the Jamestown Settlement’s living history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. So, I invite you to take a quick trip with me, back some 400 years in the nation’s past, to witness this bold work stoppage organized in the very first permanent English settlement in North America.
We start in 1606, when King James I awarded a royal charter to a private English corporation to possess the land—and exploit its resources—along a vast swath of Virginia’s coast in “The New World” (which, of course, was the old world to thousands of Powhatan people and other Native Americans). By December of that year, the Virginia Company of London sent 120 men on three ships to establish the Jamestown Settlement—not as a civil society, but as a for-profit commodity extraction and export operation.
In 1607, things went horribly awry, threatening the imminent collapse of the business venture. It turns out that many of the settlers were English gentlemen seeking “adventure,” and had no practical skills and even less willingness to do the work.
Luckily, there was Poland.
Captain John Smith, the English mercenary who wrangled a leadership role in the new settlement, knew that skilled Polish craftsmen could be, as a contemporary writer reported, “fetched . . . for small wages” to work as free men in the colony and so escape near-slavery at home. In 1608 and 1609, Smith recruited eleven of these artisans, skilled in glass blowing, pitch and tar making, turpentine distillation, soap making, timbering, well digging, and shipbuilding. The Poles saved the Virginia Company’s venture. Profits from exporting the necessities they made stabilized Jamestown’s economy.
By 1619, the settlement had grown to a few hundred colonists, and the corporation and the Crown allowed them to form a lawmaking assembly of “freely elected” representatives. The resulting Virginia House of Burgesses was the first elected government in English America.
Democracy! Well, sort of.
To vote or to be elected, one had to be: (1) a landowner, (2) a male, and (3) an Englishman. Numbers 1 and 3 disqualified the Poles. After all, skilled as they were, they were still just landless foreigners, presumed to have no ability or interest in the higher art of governance. One can only imagine then, the open-mouthed astonishment of the English gentlemen when they heard a sharp outcry from these laborers that amounted to: “No Vote, No Work!”
It was no idle threat. While details are scarce, historic records of the Virginia Company confirm that the artisans did indeed go on strike—and the bigwigs in London and Jamestown realized they were in a pinch. The owners’ lust for profits quickly overcame their ideological disdain for worker suffrage.
On July 21, 1619, the corporation declared the Poles to be Englishmen for the purposes of voting, officially decreeing them “enfranchised, and made as free as any inhabitant whatsoever.”
Which is as it should be, even today.