Viewpoint: Help find the lost years of South Bend’s labor history

For over two decades South Bend’s labor movement published a newspaper. Do you have copies in your attic?

During the Great Depression, a new newspaper proclaimed a better path for South Bend’s workers. Established in 1932, The Labor News covered the growing movement for collective bargaining among workers in sprawling west side factories. As automotive and aviation industries flocked to South Bend in the 1920s, the city’s large manufacturing base expanded. With each factory, neighborhoods sprung up around west side industry to accommodate increasing numbers of workers.

Doubling its population from 1900, South Bend boasted over 100,000 residents and became one of the country’s 100 largest cities by 1930. In new, densely populated neighborhoods, workers leveraged their power to organize religious and social institutions, pooling resources to provide insurance and construct opulent churches, such as St. Adalbert and St. Casimir. Yet, soaring corporate success during the Roaring Twenties created greater inequality. In stark contrast to the collective charitable and religious ventures of west side workers, South Bend’s industrialists invested in palatial mansions. While Vincent Bendix bought an eastside manor and the Oliver family renovated their 38-room mansion, workers struggled to find stable and safe employment.

After the stock market crash in 1929, unemployed workers seized the opportunity to transform South Bend into a hive of industrial union organization between the major centers of Chicago and Detroit. Serving as “the voice of labor,” The Labor News supported and connected the burgeoning movement. Unionization appealed immensely to South Bend’s workers. Earning low wages and without guaranteed hours, workers at Bendix and Studebaker founded two of the first locals to join the fledging United Automobile Workers International Union in 1933. Whereas earlier union efforts focused on skilled crafts often excluded immigrants and people of color, during the 1930s organizers reached out to workers of all occupations and races. Corporate management, however, fought worker organization at every turn. Faced with strong resistance, unions struggled for years to gain recognition and government support.

These critical early years of union struggle in South Bend are poorly documented. Before 1938, The Labor News survives only in scattered copies. One such issue preserved at the Walter P. Reuther Library’s Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs in Detroit reveals how locating additional issues would enrich our community’s understanding of South Bend’s nascent industrial labor movement. In the Reuther Library’s 1934 issue, unionists at Bendix protested that “Neither national laws or human rights mean anything to some company officials if through greed and selfishness they can squeeze blood money from the workers and add it to profits.”

Through collective bargaining, Bendix workers longed for the day when “(corporate) chiselers on human rights will be forced to New Deal principles or forced out of American business.” A later article from the paper, reprinted in the Nappanee Advance-News, demonstrates how a labor paper empowered workers to imagine a different political future. The article promotes the congressional candidacy of Albert Bjorass, a Bendix unionist, and his plans for permanently healing financial strife and unemployment.

Empowered by Roosevelt’s sweeping reelection in 1936, Bendix workers led one of the first sit-down strikes in the nation. Occupying the Bendix factory for over a week, workers realized their collective control of production and brought management to the bargaining table. As sit-down strikes spread across the country, Bendix workers helped to usher in an era of unprecedented mass unionization of industrial labor. Despite the unprecedented accomplishments of unions during the Depression, limited historical sources are available that narrate the movement’s growth from a local perspective. As South Bend’s industrial heritage continues to be demolished, most recently vast swathes of the Bendix Factory and the Brewing Association building, the written past is increasingly central to studying and preserving the labor movement in New Deal-era South Bend.

If you have information on copies of The Labor News from 1932-1937, please contact Gavin Moulton at gmoulton@nd.edu.

Gavin Moulton is a PhD student in history at the University of Notre Dame. 

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: The Labor News covered South Bend's growing labor movement