by Michael R. Allen
Searching for a copy of the difficult-to-find St. Louis Labor History Tour this week, we should have known where we would find it: on the Internet, and on the editor’s own website! Rosemary Feurer’s excellent website Labor History Links has the booklet online in PDF format. St. Louis Labor History Tour was edited by Feurer with contributions by Dave Roediger, Marilyn Slaughter, Lon Smith and Diana Young. The 27-page booklet was published in 1994 and 1996 by one St. Louis Bread and Roses, Inc.
St. Louis Labor History Tour tells, among others, the stories of the “Washington Avenue Massacre,” a 1900 incident in which three striking streetcar workers were killed by an upper-class posse; the telephone operators’ efforts to unionize Southwestern Bell between 1913 and 1919; and, one of the biggest forgotten tales, the unemployed marches on City Hall in the 1930s.