The 1919 General Strike

In February 1919, scarcely three months after the armistice ending the First World War, the workers at Barcelona's Canadian-owned Ebro Irrigation and Power Company went on strike to win recognition of their new industrial union and to fight against wage cuts the company was making in the wake of the war. Lasting through April, the strike ultimately affected all the people of Barcelona because it cut off the electrical power in the city. Now that public life had become dependent on electricity—required to run the city's factories and illuminate its streets—Barcelona's citizens were hostage to disruptions in service, which could easily force everyday life to a standstill. By undermining public services, the general strike threatened civic order. There could be no agnostics: everyone in the city had to choose sides, either to resort to any means necessary to restore services or to meet the demands of those withholding them. Thus the strike welded the working population of men and women into a self-conscious community, even despite differences in language and experiences of immigration.

With the firing of eight union organizers at the Ebro Irrigation and Power Company on February 2, 1919, the Industrial Union of Water, Gas, and Electrical Workers decided to strike. Three days later, 144 electrical workers staged a sit-in, calling on the civil governor to adjudicate the dispute—a moderate act for syndicalists.^[4] When workers in the city's other two electric companies went out in solidarity with the employees of the Canadian-owned company, all trolleys stopped and public transportation came to a halt.

By 4:00 P.M. on February 5, abandoned trolleys lined the streets throughout the city. Workers had to walk home, as did women stranded in markets. Those women employed by the textile factories joined the other strikers and demanded union recognition, the eight-hour day, the English week (with a half-day on Saturday), total abolition of piece-work, worker's compensation, prohibition of child labor under the age of fourteen, and a full week's wages once employment began, even if the plant had decided to stop or reduce production.^[5]

What became the forty-four-day-long "Canadian strike" was only one part of the international revolutionary upsurge in the winter and spring of 1919, though the strike was by far the most dramatic action in Spain. An attempt to carry out a Communist revolution in Germany had been defeated in January, and another revolution had failed in Hungary. Still, it was obvious to both leftists and conservatives in Barcelona that a revolution such as the ones that overthrew the German and Russian autocracies could topple the Spanish monarchy as well.

Whether revolutionary or not, people all over Barcelona joined the ranks of striking electrical workers in staying off the job: after all, there was no electricity to drive the plants. On February 21, troops began to run the trolleys and the electric companies. This action, however, brought on unintended consequences. Even those workers who had not gone on strike were outraged that military force would be used against those who had. Water and gas company workers walked out of their plants. Newspapers refused to publish government threats, imposing what became known as "red censorship." By mid-February, 70 percent of all the factories and shops in the city and its outlying districts had closed.

The captain general of the province, welcoming an opportunity to repress the labor movement before it grew even stronger, drafted all gas, water, and electrical workers between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one. This move subjected them to military law, which meant they could be court-martialed if they ignored orders to return to work. Three thou-

sand resisted and wound up in Montjuich Prison. From Madrid, the prime minister decided to intervene in the dispute; he sent an aide to Barcelona to negotiate between the union and the employers, thus officially recognizing the union. Representatives of both sides arrived at a proposed settlement: employers reluctantly agreed to grant amnesty to jailed workers and to rehire them with wage increases, strike pay, and the eight-hour day. But the negotiators had yet to win the agreement of their constituents.^[6]

Responding to the proposed settlement, some workers met on March 19 and demanded the immediate release of all labor militants who had been arrested since the general strike of 1917. The next day, twenty thousand syndicalists and their supporters gathered in the Arenas bullring, where their leaders urged moderation. Salvador Seguí, at age thirty-two at the height of his powers, made the most difficult speech of his career. An eyewitness described the scene:

It was interesting to listen to the oratory of the worker [Seguí] that night. Free of demagogic vanity, without affectation, his arms moving with natural gestures and a conciliatory air, his head held high, with a strong gaze, and with a spirited voice, he confronted an antagonistic multitude. . . . [They were opposed] to the peaceful solutions the orator was proposing to the huge assembly, the most crucial of which was the immediate return to work instead of fighting to obtain the release of all the strikers held prisoner.^[7]

Seguí presented two options to the crowd: they could accept the proposed settlement, or they could march on Montjuich Prison to free the prisoners and begin a revolution to overthrow the state. At the bullring, the audience agreed that since they were not ready to launch a revolution, they would return to their jobs and wait for the remaining prisoners to be freed quickly.

If Seguí and other CNT leaders had wanted to begin a revolution, they would have had to have been better prepared and better armed than they were. Although some revolutionary fliers had circulated among the troops occupying Barcelona, the CNT had failed to carry on any systematic organization among the soldiers. It was unlikely that conscript troops from outside the region would have mutinied and come over to support the masses in Barcelona.^[8]

Despite Seguí's skills in negotiating a settlement, the general strike resumed owing to the captain general's intransigence on behalf of the employers. Fearful that a union victory would lead to new demands, the captain general, supported by the employers, rejected the settlement

the prime minister's aide had worked out, refusing to free the three thousand workers still in jail from the 1917 strike and refusing to negotiate further about their release.^[9] Thus the general strike resumed on March 24, 1919, and lasted until April 14. One hundred thousand people walked off the job, and everything closed down because the electrical workers went out again. Even banks and shops refused to open.

Repression often works. The strike was defeated when the police and army arrested workers, including the two-hundred-member strike committee. Intimidated by the use of force and faced with the absence of their leaders, the cenetistas returned to work on April 7. The metallurgical and construction workers managed to hold out until April 14, the official end of the strike. Thousands were arrested and given long sentences. The prime minister, who had secured a royal decree on April 2 which mandated that the eight-hour-day was to begin on October 1, was forced to resign. His conservative successor lasted from April to July, during which time Barcelona remained under martial law. Between May and August 1919, more than forty-three thousand members of the CNT in Catalunya wound up in jail. Countless other organized workers were fired from their jobs and blacklisted. Most historians seem to agree that the captain general had led the army, with the support of the industrialists, into "a virtual war of extermination designed to liquidate the unions in their formative stages."^[10]

The narrative of the strike does not begin to explain what happened to the people in Barcelona who suffered through it. Women again stood in lines as supplies of flour, meat, vegetables, and chickpeas dwindled. No one ever knew when transports would get through to the markets. Bakers periodically struck to end night work; at other times they simply lacked flour to make the bread that was the staple of working-class diets. As a result of women's scuffles with vendors at the Saint Joseph and Saint Anthony markets in downtown Barcelona, occupation troops were brought in to these sites.^[11] Trolleys stopped and started. When they were operating under military control it was dangerous to ride them, since crowds along the way threw stones at them.

Normal life ceased for the better part of two and a half months. Women rushed to get their laundering and shopping done at the fountains and markets and then scurried home. Cafés, music halls, and bars shut their doors. Scarcely anyone came out to stroll on the Rambla. Even employees of the municipal government went home early most days, since the light was insufficient for them to work. Corpses accumulated as the funeral workers refused to drive hearses or bury bodies.

Local newspapers could print only sporadically. Rumors spread. When the Congregation of the Sacred Blood, whose chaplains ministered to prisoners condemned to death, flew its flag at half mast, the population was convinced that three strikers had been executed: in fact, the master of the order had died.^[12] Barcelona, with its population of eight hundred thousand, had stopped functioning. Losses were estimated at thirty million pesetas .

Hoping to seal the defeat of the CNT and streamline business, employers locked out two hundred thousand workers in Barcelona between November 25, 1919, and January 26, 1920. The employers' refusal to compromise provoked the most violent elements within the labor movement. Gang wars broke out between the hired guns (pistoleros ) of the factory owners and counterterrorists working for the anarcho-syndicalists. Taking matters into his own hands, the new captain general, Severiano Martínez Anido, who had come to Barcelona after the 1919 general strike, attempted to crush the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Barcelona once and for all. He personally ordered many of the seven hundred political assassinations in Catalunya between 1920 and 1922, in a period that resembled the bloody days of the Argentine junta. Industrialists, too, ordered a succession of assassinations. Between 1920 and 1921, more than 230 people were shot in the streets of Barcelona alone. The CNT, although it commanded the support of up to 80 percent of the city's workers, was driven underground. Despite the chaos, public service workers continued to organize unions and carry out strikes, as, for example, the transport workers did in the summer of 1920. But conservative businessmen offset the CNT's power by creating the Free Unions (Sindicatos libres) filled with gangsters who spoke for whomever paid them the highest price.^[13] It is always possible, too, that the city was deliberately destabilized to discredit Spain's already weak parliamentary government and to prepare the way for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in September 1923.