A local assembly of the Knights of Labor had declared a boycott against one George Theiss, a proprietor of a music and beer garden. The latter at first submitted and paid a fine of $1000 to the labor organization, but later brought action in court against the officers charging them with intimidation and extortion.

The judge, George C. Barrett, in his charge to the jury, conceded that striking, picketing, and boycotting as such were not prohibited by law, if not accompanied by force, threats, or intimidation. But in the case under consideration the action of the pickets in advising passers-by not to patronize the establishment and in distributing boycott circulars constituted intimidation. Also, since the $1000 fine was obtained by fear induced by a threat to continue the unlawful injury to Theiss inflicted by the "boycott," the case was one of extortion covered by the penal code. It made no difference whether the money was appropriated by the defendants for personal use or whether it was turned over to their organization. The jury, which reflected the current public opinion against boycotts, found all of the five defendants guilty of extortion, and Judge Barrett sentenced them to prison for terms ranging from one year and six months to three years and eight months.

The Theiss case, coming as it did at a time of general restlessness of labor and closely after the defeat of the eight-hour movement, greatly hastened the growth of the sentiment for an independent labor party. The New York Central Labor Union, the most famous and most influential organization of its kind in the country at the time, with a membership estimated at between 40,000 and 50,000, placed itself at the head of the movement in which both socialists and non-socialists joined. Henry George, the originator of the single tax movement, was nominated by the labor party for Mayor of New York and was allowed to draw up his own platform, which he made of course a simon-pure single tax platform. The labor demands were compressed into one plank. They were as follows: The reform of court procedure so that "the practice of drawing grand jurors from one class should cease, and the requirements of a property qualification for trial jurors should be abolished"; the stopping of the "officious intermeddling of the police with peaceful assemblages"; the enforcement of the laws for safety and the sanitary inspection of buildings; the abolition of contract labor on public work; and equal pay for equal work without distinction of sex on such work.

The George campaign was more in the nature of a religious revival than of a political election campaign. It was also a culminating point in the great labor upheaval. The enthusiasm of the laboring people reached its highest pitch. They felt that, baffled and defeated as they were in their economic struggle, they were now nearing victory in the struggle for the control of government. Mass meetings were numerous and large. Most of them were held in the open air, usually on the street corners. From the system by which one speaker followed another, speaking at several meeting places in a night, the labor campaign got its nickname of the "tailboard campaign." The common people, women and men, gathered in hundreds and often thousands around trucks from which the shifting speakers addressed the crowd. The speakers were volunteers, including representatives of the liberal professions, lawyers, physicians, teachers, ministers, and labor leaders. At such mass meetings George did most of his campaigning, making several speeches a night, once as many as eleven. The single tax and the prevailing political corruption were favorite topics. Against George and his adherents were pitted the powerful press of the city of New York, all the political power of the old parties, and all the influence of the business class. George's opponents were Abram S. Hewitt, an anti-Tammany Democrat whom Tammany had picked for its candidate in this emergency, and Theodore Roosevelt, then as yet known only as a courageous young politician.

The vote cast was 90,000 for Hewitt, 68,000 for George, and 60,000 for Roosevelt. There is possible ground for the belief that George was counted out of thousands of votes. The nature of the George vote can be sufficiently gathered from an analysis of the pledges to vote for him. An apparently trustworthy investigation was made by a representative of the New York Sun. He drew the conclusion that the vast majority were not simply wage earners, but also naturalized immigrants, mainly Irish, Germans, and Bohemians, the native element being in the minority. While the Irish were divided between George and Hewitt, the majority of the German element had gone over to Henry George. The outcome was hailed as a victory by George and his supporters and this view was also taken by the general press.

In spite of this propitious beginning the political labor movement soon suffered the fate of all reform political movements. The strength of the new party was frittered away in doctrinaire factional strife between the single taxers and the socialists. The trade union element became discouraged and lost interest. So that at the next State election, in which George ran for Secretary of State, presumably because that office came nearest to meeting the requirement for a single taxer seeking a practical scope of action, the vote in the city fell to 37,000 and in the whole State amounted only to 72,000. This ended the political labor movement in New York.

Outside of New York the political labor movement was not associated either with the single tax or any other "ism." As in New York it was a spontaneous expression of dissatisfaction brought on by failure in strikes. The movement scored a victory in Milwaukee, where it elected a mayor, and in Chicago where it polled 25,000 out of a total of 92,000. But, as in New York, it fell to pieces without leaving a permanent trace.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] See the next chapter for the scheme of organization followed by the Order.

[19] See above, 79-80.



CHAPTER 5

THE VICTORY OF CRAFT UNIONISM AND THE FINAL FAILURE OF PRODUCERS' COOPERATION

We now come to the most significant aspect of the Great Upheaval: the life and death struggle between two opposed principles of labor organization and between two opposed labor programs. The Upheaval offered the practical test which the labor movement required for an intelligent decision between the rival claims of Knights and trade unionists. The test as well as the conflict turned principally on "structure," that is on the difference between "craft autonomists" and those who would have labor organized "under one head," or what we would now call the "one big union" advocates.

As the issue of "structure" proved in the crucial eighties, and has remained ever since, the outstanding factional issue in the labor movement, it might be well at this point to pass in brief review the structural developments in labor organization from the beginning and try to correlate them with other important developments.

The early[20] societies of shoemakers and printers were purely local in scope and the relations between "locals" extended only to feeble attempts to deal with the competition of traveling journeymen. Occasionally, they corresponded on trade matters, notifying each other of their purposes and the nature of their demands, or expressing fraternal greetings; chiefly for the purpose of counteracting advertisements by employers for journeymen or keeping out dishonest members and so-called "scabs." This mostly relates to printers. The shoemakers, despite their bitter contests with their employers, did even less. The Philadelphia Mechanics' Trades Association in 1827, which we noted as the first attempted federation of trades in the United States if not in the world, was organized as a move of sympathy for the carpenters striking for the ten-hour day. During the period of the "wild-cat" prosperity the local federation of trades, under the name of "Trades' Union,"[21] comes to occupy the center of the stage in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and appeared even as far "West" as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville. The constitution of the New York "Trades' Union" provided, among other things, that each society should pay a monthly per capita tax of 6-1/4 cents to be used as a strike fund. Later, when strikes multiplied, the Union limited the right to claim strike aid and appointed a standing committee on mediation. In 1835 it discussed a plan for an employment exchange or a "call room." The constitution of the Philadelphia Union required that a strike be endorsed by a two-thirds majority before granting aid.

The National Trades' Union, the federation of city trades' unions, 1834-1836, was a further development of the same idea. Its first and second conventions went little beyond the theoretical. The latter, however, passed a significant resolution urging the trade societies to observe a uniform wage policy throughout the country and, should the employers combine to resist it, the unions should make "one general strike."

The last convention in 1836 went far beyond preceding conventions in its plans for solidifying the workingmen of the country. First and foremost, a "national fund" was provided for, to be made up of a levy of two cents per month on each of the members of the trades' unions and local societies represented. The policies of the National Trades' Union instead of merely advisory were henceforth to be binding. But before the new policies could be tried, as we know, the entire trade union movement was wiped out by the panic.

The city "trades' union" of the thirties accorded with a situation where the effects of the extension of the market were noticeable in the labor market, and little as yet in the commodity market; when the competitive menace to labor was the low paid out-of-town mechanic coming to the city, not the out-of-town product made under lower labor costs selling in the same market as the products of unionized labor. Under these conditions the local trade society, reenforced by the city federation of trades, sufficed. The "trades' union," moreover, served also as a source of reserve strength.

Twenty years later the whole situation was changed. The fifties were a decade of extensive construction of railways. Before 1850 there was more traffic by water than by rail. After 1860 the relative importance of land and water transportation was reversed. Furthermore, the most important railway building during the ten years preceding 1860 was the construction of East and West trunk lines; and the sixties were marked by the establishment of through lines for freight and the consolidation of connecting lines. The through freight lines greatly hastened freight traffic and by the consolidations through transportation became doubly efficient.

Arteries of traffic had thus extended from the Eastern coast to the Mississippi Valley. Local markets had widened to embrace half a continent. Competitive menaces had become more serious and threatened from a distance. Local unionism no longer sufficed. Consequently, as we saw, in the labor movement of the sixties the national trade union was supreme.

There were four distinct sets of causes which operated during the sixties to bring about nationalization; two grew out of the changes in transportation, already alluded to, and two were largely independent of such changes.

The first and most far-reaching cause, as illustrated by the stove molders, was the competition of the products of different localities side by side in the same market. Stoves manufactured in Albany, New York, were now displayed in St. Louis by the side of stoves made in Detroit. No longer could the molder in Albany be indifferent to the fate of his fellow craftsman in Louisville. With the molders the nationalization of the organization was destined to proceed to its utmost length. In order that union conditions should be maintained even in the best organized centers, it became necessary to equalize competitive conditions in the various localities. That led to a well-knit national organization to control working conditions, trade rules, and strikes. In other trades, where the competitive area of the product was still restricted to the locality, the paramount nationalizing influence was a more intensive competition for employment between migratory out-of-town journeymen and the locally organized mechanics. This describes the situation in the printing trade, where the bulk of work was newspaper and not book and job printing. Accordingly, the printers did not need to entrust their national officers with anything more than the control of the traveling journeymen and the result was that the local unions remained practically independent.

The third cause of concerted national action in a trade union was the organization of employers. Where the power of a local union began to be threatened by an employers' association, the next logical step was to combine in a national union.

The fourth cause was the application of machinery and the introduction of division of labor, which split up the established trades and laid industry open to invasion by "green hands." The shoemaking industry, which during the sixties had reached the factory stage, illustrates this in a most striking manner. Few other industries experienced anything like a similar change during this period.

Of course, none of the causes of nationalization here enumerated operated in entire isolation. In some trades one cause, in other trades other causes, had the predominating influence. Consequently, in some trades the national union resembled an agglomeration of loosely allied states, each one reserving the right to engage in independent action and expecting from its allies no more than a benevolent neutrality. In other trades, on the contrary, the national union was supreme in declaring industrial war and in making peace, and even claimed absolute right to formulate the civil laws of the trade for times of industrial peace.

The national trade union was, therefore, a response to obvious and pressing necessity. However slow or imperfect may have been the adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade, still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible floundering largely limited. Not so with the next step, namely the national federation of trades. In the sixties we saw the national trade unions join with other local and miscellaneous labor organizations in the National Labor Union upon a political platform of eight-hours and greenbackism. In 1873 the same national unions asserted their rejection of "panaceas" and politics by attempting to create in the National Labor Congress a federation of trades of a strictly economic character. The panic and depression nipped that in the bud. When trade unionism revived in 1879 the national trade unions returned to the idea of a national federation of labor, but this time they followed the model of the British Trades Union Congress, the organization which cares for the legislative interests of British labor. This was the "Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada," which was set up in 1881.

It is easy to understand why the unions of the early eighties did not feel the need of a federation on economic lines. The trade unions of today look to the American Federation of Labor for the discharge of important economic functions, therefore it is primarily an economic organization. These functions are the assistance of national trade unions in organizing their trades, the adjustment of disputes between unions claiming the same "jurisdiction," and concerted action in matters of especial importance such as shorter hours, the "open-shop," or boycotts. None of these functions would have been of material importance to the trade unions of the early eighties. Existing in well-defined trades, which were not affected by technical changes, they had no "jurisdictional" disputes; operating at a period of prosperity with full employment and rising wages, they did not realize a necessity for concerted action; the era of the boycotts had not yet begun. As for having a common agency to do the work of organizing, the trade unions of the early eighties had no keen desire to organize any but the skilled workmen; and, since the competition of workmen in small towns had not yet made itself felt, each national trade union strove to organize primarily the workmen of its trade in the larger cities, a function for which its own means were adequate.

The new organization of 1881 was a loose federation of trade and labor unions with a legislative committee at the head, with Samuel Gompers of the cigar makers as a member. The platform was purely legislative and demanded legal incorporation for trade unions,[22] compulsory education for children, the prohibition of child labor under fourteen, uniform apprentice laws, the enforcement of the national eight-hour law, prison labor reform, abolition of the "truck" and "order" system, mechanics' lien, abolition of conspiracy laws as applied to labor organizations, a national bureau of labor statistics, a protective tariff for American labor, an anti-contract immigrant law, and recommended "all trade and labor organizations to secure proper representation in all law-making bodies by means of the ballot, and to use all honorable measures by which this result can be accomplished." Although closely related to the present American Federation of Labor in point of time and personnel of leadership, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada was in reality the precursor of the present state federations of labor, which as specialized parts of the national federation now look after labor legislation.

Two or three years later it became evident that the Federation as a legislative organization proved a failure.[23] Manifestly the trade unions felt no great interest in national legislation. The indifference can be measured by the fact that the annual income of the Federation never exceeded $700 and that, excepting in 1881, none of its conventions represented more than one-fourth of the trade union membership of the country. Under such conditions the legislative influence of the Federation naturally was infinitesimal. The legislative committee carried out the instructions of the 1883 convention and communicated to the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties the request that they should define their position upon the enforcement of the eight-hour law and other measures. The letters were not even answered. A subcommittee of the legislative committee appeared before the two political conventions, but received no greater attention.

It was not until the majority of the national trade unions came under the menace of becoming forcibly absorbed by the Order of the Knights of Labor that a basis appeared for a vigorous federation.

The Knights of Labor were built on an opposite principle from the national trade unions. Whereas the latter started with independent crafts and then with hesitating hands tried, as we saw, to erect some sort of a common superstructure that should express a higher solidarity of labor, the former was built from the beginning upon a denial of craft lines and upon an absolute unity of all classes of labor under one guiding head. The subdivision was territorial instead of occupational and the government centralized.

The constitution of the Knights of Labor was drawn in 1878 when the Order laid aside the veil of secrecy to which it had clung since its foundation in 1869. The lowest unit of organization was the local assembly of ten or more, at least three-fourths of whom had to be wage earners at any trade. Above the local assembly was the "district assembly" and above it the "General Assembly." The district assembly had absolute power over its local assemblies and the General Assembly was given "full and final jurisdiction" as "the highest tribunal" of the Order.[24] Between sessions of the General Assembly the power was vested in a General Executive Board, presided over by a Grand Master Workman.

The Order of the Knights of Labor in practice carried out the idea which is now advocated so fervently by revolutionary unionists, namely the "One Big Union," since it avowedly aimed to bring into one organization "all productive labor." This idea in organization was aided by the weakness of the trade unions during the long depression of the seventies, which led many to hope for better things from a general pooling of labor strength. But its main appeal rested on a view that machine technique tends to do away with all distinctions of trades by reducing all workers to the level of unskilled machine tenders. To its protagonists therefore the "one big union" stood for an adjustment to the new technique.

First to face the problem of adjustment to the machine technique of the factory system were the shoemakers. They organized in 1867 the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, mainly for the purpose of suppressing the competitive menace of "green hands," that is unskilled workers put to work on shoe machines. At its height in 1872, the Crispins numbered about 50,000, perhaps the largest union in the whole world at that time. The coopers began to be menaced by machinery about the middle of the sixties, and about the same time the machinists and blacksmiths, too, saw their trade broken up by the introduction of the principle of standardized parts and quantity production in the making of machinery. From these trades came the national leaders of the Knights of Labor and the strongest advocates of the new principle in labor organization and of the interests of the unskilled workers in general. The conflict between the trade unions and the Knights of Labor turned on the question of the unskilled workers.

The conflict was held in abeyance during the early eighties. The trade unions were by far the strongest organizations in the field and scented no particular danger when here or there the Knights formed an assembly either contiguous to the sphere of a trade union or even at times encroaching upon it.

With the Great Upheaval, which began in 1884, and the inrushing of hundreds of thousands of semi-skilled and unskilled workers into the Order, a new situation was created. The leaders of the Knights realized that mere numbers were not sufficient to defeat the employers and that control over the skilled, and consequently the more strategic occupations, was required before the unskilled and semi-skilled could expect to march to victory. Hence, parallel to the tremendous growth of the Knights in 1886, there was a constantly growing effort to absorb the existing trade unions for the purpose of making them subservient to the interests of the less skilled elements. It was mainly that which produced the bitter conflict between the Knights and the trade unions during 1886 and 1887. Neither the jealousy aroused by the success of the unions nor the opposite aims of labor solidarity and trade separatism gives an adequate explanation of this conflict. The one, of course, aggravated the situation by introducing a feeling of personal bitterness, and the other furnished an appealing argument to each side. But the struggle was one between groups within the working class, in which the small but more skilled group fought for independence of the larger but weaker group of the unskilled and semi-skilled. The skilled men stood for the right to use their advantage of skill and efficient organization in order to wrest the maximum amount of concessions for themselves. The Knights of Labor endeavored to annex the skilled men in order that the advantage from their exceptional fighting strength might lift up the unskilled and semi-skilled. From the point of view of a struggle between principles, this was indeed a clash between the principle of solidarity of labor and that of trade separatism, but, in reality, each of the principles reflected only the special interest of a certain portion of the working class. Just as the trade unions, when they fought for trade autonomy, really refused to consider the unskilled men, so the Knights of Labor overlooked the fact that their scheme would retard the progress of the skilled trades.

The Knights were in nearly every case the aggressors, and it is significant that among the local organizations of the Knights inimical to trade unions, District Assembly 49, of New York, should prove the most relentless. It was this assembly which conducted the longshoremen's and coal miners' strike in New York in 1887 and which, as we saw,[25] did not hesitate to tie up the industries of the entire city for the sake of securing the demands of several hundred unskilled workingmen. Though District Assembly 49, New York, came into conflict with not a few of the trade unions in that city, its battle royal was fought with the cigar makers' unions. There were at the time two factions among the cigar makers, one upholding the International Cigar Makers' Union with Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers as leaders, the other calling itself the Progressive Union, which was more socialistic in nature and composed of more recent immigrants and less skilled workers. District Assembly 49 of the Knights of Labor took a hand in the struggle to support the Progressive Union and by skillful management brought the situation to the point where the latter had to allow itself to be absorbed into the Knights of Labor.

The events in the cigar making trade in New York brought to a climax the sporadic struggles that had been going on between the Order and the trade unions. The trade unions demanded that the Knights of Labor respect their "jurisdiction" and proposed a "treaty of peace" with such drastic terms that had they been accepted the trade unions would have been left in the sole possession of the field. The Order was at first more conciliatory. It would not of course cease to take part in industrial disputes and industrial matters, but it proposed a modus vivendi on a basis of an interchange of "working cards" and common action against employers. At the same time it addressed separately to each national trade union a gentle admonition to think of the unskilled workers as well as of themselves. The address said: "In the use of the wonderful inventions, your organization plays a most important part. Naturally it embraces within its ranks a very large proportion of laborers of a high grade of skill and intelligence. With this skill of hand, guided by intelligent thought, comes the right to demand that excess of compensation paid to skilled above the unskilled labor. But the unskilled labor must receive attention, or in the hour of difficulty the employer will not hesitate to use it to depress the compensation you now receive. That skilled or unskilled labor may no longer be found unorganized, we ask of you to annex your grand and powerful corps to the main army that we may fight the battle under one flag."

But the trade unions, who had formerly declared that their purpose was "to protect the skilled trades of America from being reduced to beggary," evinced no desire to be pressed into the service of lifting up the unskilled and voted down with practical unanimity the proposal. Thereupon the Order declared open war by commanding all its members who were also members of the cigar makers' union to withdraw from the latter on the penalty of expulsion.

Later events proved that the assumption of the aggressive was the beginning of the undoing of the Order. It was, moreover, an event of first significance in the labor movement since it forced the trade unions to draw closer together and led to the founding in the same year, 1886, of the American Federation of Labor.

Another highly important effect of this conflict was the ascendency in the trade union movement of Samuel Gompers as the foremost leader. Gompers had first achieved prominence in 1881 at the time of the organization of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. But not until the situation created by the conflict with the Knights of Labor did he get his first real opportunity, both to demonstrate his inborn capacity for leadership and to train and develop that capacity by overcoming what was perhaps the most serious problem that ever confronted American organized labor.

The new Federation avoided its predecessor's mistake of emphasizing labor legislation above all. Its prime purpose was economic. The legislative interests of labor were for the most part given into the care of subordinate state federations of labor. Consequently, the several state federations, not the American Federation of Labor, correspond in America to the British Trades Union Congress. But in the conventions of the American Federation of Labor the state federations are represented only nominally. The Federation is primarily a federation of national and international (including Canada and Mexico) trade unions.

Each national and international union in the new Federation was acknowledged a sovereignty unto itself, with full powers of discipline over its members and with the power of free action toward the employers without any interference from the Federation; in other words, its full autonomy was confirmed. Like the British Empire, the Federation of Labor was cemented together by ties which were to a much greater extent spiritual than they were material. Nevertheless, the Federation's authority was far from being a shadowy one. If it could not order about the officers of the constituent unions, it could so mobilize the general labor sentiment in the country on behalf of any of its constituent bodies that its good will would be sought even by the most powerful ones. The Federation guaranteed to each union a certain jurisdiction, generally coextensive with a craft, and protected it against encroachments by adjoining unions and more especially by rival unions. The guarantee worked absolutely in the case of the latter, for the Federation knew no mercy when a rival union attempted to undermine the strength of an organized union of a craft. The trade unions have learned from experience with the Knights of Labor that their deadliest enemy was, after all, not the employers' association but the enemy from within who introduced confusion in the ranks. They have accordingly developed such a passion for "regularity," such an intense conviction that there must be but one union in a given trade that, on occasions, scheming labor officials have known how to checkmate a justifiable insurgent movement by a skillful play upon this curious hypertrophy of the feeling of solidarity. Not only will a rival union never be admitted into the Federation, but no subordinate body, state or city, may dare to extend any aid or comfort to a rival union.

The Federation exacted but little from the national and international unions in exchange for the guarantee of their jurisdiction: A small annual per capita tax; a willing though a not obligatory support in the special legislative and industrial campaigns it may undertake; an adherence to its decisions on general labor policy; an undertaking to submit to its decision in the case of disputes with other unions, which however need not in every case be fulfilled; and lastly, an unqualified acceptance of the principle of "regularity" relative to labor organization. Obviously, judging from constitutional powers alone, the Federation was but a weak sort of a government. Yet the weakness was not the forced weakness of a government which was willing to start with limited powers hoping to increase its authority as it learned to stand more firmly on its own feet; it was a self-imposed weakness suggested by the lessons of labor history.

By contrast the Order of the Knights of Labor, as seen already, was governed by an all-powerful General Assembly and General Executive Board. At a first glance a highly centralized form of government would appear a promise of assured strength and a guarantee of coherence amongst the several parts of the organization. Perhaps, if America's wage earners were cemented together by as strong a class consciousness as the laboring classes of Europe, such might have been the case.

But America's labor movement lacked the unintended aid which the sister movements in Europe derived from a caste system of society and political oppression. Where the class lines were not tightly drawn, the centrifugal forces in the labor movement were bound to assert themselves. The leaders of the American Federation of Labor, in their struggle against the Knights of Labor, played precisely upon this centrifugal tendency and gained a victory by making an appeal to the natural desire for autonomy and self-determination of any distinctive group. But originally perhaps intended as a mere "strategic" move, this policy succeeded in creating a labor movement which was, on fundamentals, far more coherent than the Knights of Labor even in the heyday of their glory. The officers and leaders of the Federation, knowing that they could not command, set themselves to developing a unified labor will and purpose by means of moral suasion and propaganda. Where a bare order would breed resentment and backbiting, an appeal, which is reinforced by a carefully nurtured universal labor sentiment, will eventually bring about common consent and a willing acquiescence in the policy supported by the majority. So each craft was made a self-determining unit and "craft autonomy" became a sacred shibboleth in the labor movement without interfering with unity on essentials.

The principle of craft autonomy triumphed chiefly because it recognized the existence of a considerable amount of group selfishness. The Knights of Labor held, as was seen, that the strategic or bargaining strength of the skilled craftsman should be used as a lever to raise the status of the semi-skilled and unskilled worker. It consequently grouped them promiscuously in "mixed assemblies" and opposed as long as it could the demand for "national trade assemblies." The craftsman, on the other hand, wished to use his superior bargaining strength for his own purposes and evinced little desire to dissipate it in the service of his humbler fellow worker. To give effect to that, he felt obliged to struggle against becoming entangled with undesirable allies in the semi-skilled and unskilled workers for whom the Order spoke. Needless to say, the individual self-interest of the craft leaders worked hand in hand with the self-interest of the craft as a whole, for had they been annexed by the Order they would have become subject to orders from the General Master Workman or the General Assembly of the Order.

In addition to platonic stirrings for "self-determination" and to narrow group interest, there was a motive for craft autonomy which could pass muster both as strictly social and realistic. The fact was that the autonomous craft union could win strikes where the centralized promiscuous Order merely floundered and suffered defeat after defeat. The craft union had the advantage, on the one hand, of a leadership which was thoroughly familiar with the bit of ground upon which it operated, and, on the other hand, of handling a group of people of equal financial endurance and of identical interest. It has already been seen how dreadfully mismanaged were the great Knights of Labor strikes of 1886 and 1887. The ease with which the leaders were able to call out trade after trade on a strike of sympathy proved more a liability than an asset. Often the choice of trades to strike bore no particular relation to their strategic value in the given situation; altogether one gathers the impression that these great strikes were conducted by blundering amateurs who possessed more authority than was good for them or for the cause. It is therefore not to be wondered at if the compact craft unions led by specialists scored successes where the heterogeneous mobs of the Knights of Labor had been doomed from the first. Clearly then the survival of the craft union was a survival of the fittest; and the Federation's attachment to the principle of craft autonomy was, to say the least, a product of an evolutionary past, whatever one may hold with reference to its fitness in our own time.

Whatever reasons moved the trade unions of the skilled to battle with the Order for their separate and autonomous existence were bound sooner or later to induce those craftsmen who were in the Order to seek a similar autonomy. From the very beginning the more skilled and better organized trades in the Knights sought to separate from the mixed "district assemblies" and to create within the framework of the Order "national trade assemblies."[26] However, the national officers, who looked upon such a move as a betrayal of the great principle of the solidarity of all labor, were able to stem the tide excepting in the case of the window glass blowers, who were granted their autonomy in 1880.

The obvious superiority of the trade union form of organization over the mixed organization, as revealed by events in 1886 and 1887, strengthened the separatist tendency. Just as the struggle between the Knights of Labor and the trade unions on the outside had been fundamentally a struggle between the unskilled and the skilled portions of the wage-earning class, so the aspiration toward the national trade assembly within the Order represented the effort of the more or less skilled men for emancipation from the dominance of the unskilled. But the Order successfully fought off such attempts until after the defeat of the mixed district assemblies, or in other words of the unskilled class, in the struggle with the employers. With the withdrawal of a very large portion of this class, as shown in 1887,[27] the demand for the national trade assembly revived and there soon began a veritable rush to organize by trades. The stampede was strongest in the city of New York where the incompetence of the mixed District Assembly 49 had become patent. At the General Assembly in 1887 at Minneapolis all obstacles were removed from forming national trade assemblies, but this came too late to stem the exodus of the skilled element from the order into the American Federation of Labor.

The victory of craft autonomy over the "one big union" was decisive and complete.

The strike activities of the Knights were confessedly a deviation from "First Principles." Yet the First Principles with their emphasis on producers' cooperation were far from forgotten even when the enthusiasm for strikes was at its highest. Whatever the actual feelings of the membership as a whole, the leaders neglected no opportunity to promote cooperation. T.V. Powderly, the head of the Order since 1878, in his reports to the annual General Assembly or convention, consistently urged that practical steps be taken toward cooperation. In 1881, while the general opinion in the Order was still undecided, the leaders did not scruple to smuggle into the constitution a clause which made cooperation compulsory.

Notwithstanding Powderly's exhortations, the Order was at first slow in taking it up. In 1882 a general cooperative board was elected to work out a plan of action, but it never reported, and a new board was chosen in its place at the Assembly of 1883. In that year, the first practical step was taken in the purchase by the Order of a coal mine at Cannelburg, Indiana, with the idea of selling the coal at reduced prices to the members. Soon thereafter a thorough change of sentiment with regard to the whole matter of cooperation took place, contemporaneously with the industrial depression and unsuccessful strikes. The rank and file, who had hitherto been indifferent, now seized upon the idea with avidity. The enthusiasm ran so high in Lynn, Massachusetts, that it was found necessary to raise the shares of the Knights of Labor Cooperative Shoe Company to $100 in order to prevent a large influx of "unsuitable members." In 1885 Powderly complained that "many of our members grow impatient and unreasonable because every avenue of the Order does not lead to cooperation."

The impatience for immediate cooperation, which seized the rank and file in practically every section of the country, caused an important modification in the official doctrine of the Order. Originally it had contemplated centralized control under which it would have taken years before a considerable portion of the membership could realize any benefit. This was now dropped and a decentralized plan was adopted. Local organizations and, more frequently, groups of members with the financial aid of their local organizations now began to establish shops. Most of the enterprises were managed by the stockholders, although, in some cases, the local organization of the Knights of Labor managed the plant.

Most of the cooperative enterprises were conducted on a small scale. Incomplete statistics warrant the conclusion that the average amount invested per establishment was about $10,000. From the data gathered it seems that cooperation reached its highest point in 1886, although it had not completely spent itself by the end of 1887. The total number of ventures probably reached two hundred. The largest numbers were in mining, cooperage, and shoes. These industries paid the poorest wages and treated their employes most harshly. A small amount of capital was required to organize such establishments.

With the abandonment of centralized cooperation in 1884, the role of the central cooperative board changed correspondingly. The leading member of the board was now John Samuel, one of those to whom cooperation meant nothing short of a religion. The duty of the board was to educate the members of the Order in the principles of cooperation; to aid by information and otherwise prospective and actual cooperators; in brief, to coordinate the cooperative movement within the Order. It issued forms of a constitution and by-laws which, with a few modifications, could be adopted by any locality. It also published articles on the dangers and pitfalls in cooperative ventures, such as granting credit, poor management, etc., as well as numerous articles on specific kinds of cooperation. The Knights of Labor label was granted for the use of cooperative goods and a persistent agitation was steadily conducted to induce purchasers to give a preference to cooperative products.

As a scheme of industrial regeneration, cooperation never materialized. The few successful shops sooner or later fell into the hands of an "inner group," who "froze out" the others and set up capitalistic partnerships. The great majority went on the rocks even before getting started. The causes of failure were many: Hasty action, inexperience, lax shop discipline, internal dissensions, high rates of interest upon the mortgage of the plant, and finally discriminations instigated by competitors. Railways were heavy offenders, by delaying side tracks and, on some pretext or other, refusing to furnish cars or refusing to haul them.

The Union Mining Company of Cannelburg, Indiana, owned and operated by the Order as its sole experiment of the centralized kind of cooperation, met this fate. After expending $20,000 in equipping the mine, purchasing land, laying tracks, cutting and sawing timber on the land and mining $1000 worth of coal, they were compelled to lie idle for nine months before the railway company saw fit to connect their switch with the main track. When they were ready to ship their product, it was learned that their coal could be utilized for the manufacture of gas only, and that contracts for supply of such coal were let in July, that is nine months from the time of connecting the switch with the main track. In addition, the company was informed that it must supply itself with a switch engine to do the switching of the cars from its mine to the main track, at an additional cost of $4000. When this was accomplished they had to enter the market in competition with a bitter opponent who had been fighting them since the opening of the mine. Having exhausted their funds and not seeing their way clear to securing additional funds for the purchase of a locomotive and to tide over the nine months ere any contracts for coal could be entered into, they sold out to their competitor.

But a cause more fundamental perhaps than all other causes of the failure of cooperation in the United States is to be found in the difficulties of successful entrepreneurship. In the labor movement in the United States there has been a failure, generally speaking, to appreciate the significance of management and the importance which must be imputed to it. Glib talk often commands an undeserved confidence and misleads the wage earner. Thus by 1888, three or four years after it had begun, the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and succumbed. The failure, as said, was hastened by external causes and discrimination. But the experiments had been foredoomed anyway,—through the incompatibility of producers' cooperation with trade unionism. The cooperators, in their eagerness to get a market, frequently undersold the private employer expecting to recoup their present losses in future profits. In consequence, the privately employed wage earners had to bear reductions in their wages. A labor movement which endeavors to practice producers' cooperation and trade unionism at the same time is actually driving in opposite directions.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] See Chapter 1.

[21] In the thirties the term "union" was reserved for the city federations of trades. What is now designated as a trade union was called trade society. In the sixties the "Union" became the "trades' assembly."

[22] See below, 152-154.

[23] See below, 285-290, for a discussion why American labor looks away from legislation.

[24] The Constitution read as follows: "It alone possesses the power and authority to make, amend, or repeal the fundamental and general laws and regulations of the Order; to finally decide all controversies arising in the Order; to issue all charters.... It can also tax the members of the Order for its maintenance."

[25] See above, 98-100.

[26] The "local assemblies" generally followed in practice trade lines, but the district assemblies were "mixed."

[27] See above, 100-101.



CHAPTER 6

STABILIZATION, 1888-1897

The Great Upheaval of 1886 had, as we saw, suddenly swelled the membership of trade unions; consequently, during several years following, notwithstanding the prosperity in industry, further growth was bound to proceed at a slower rate.

The statistics of strikes during the later eighties, like the figures of membership, show that after the strenuous years from 1885 to 1887 the labor movement had entered a more or less quiet stage. Most prominent among the strikes was the one of 60,000 iron and steel workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the West, which was carried to a successful conclusion against a strong combination of employers. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers stood at the zenith of its power about this time and was able in 1889, by the mere threat of a strike, to dictate terms to the Carnegie Steel Company. The most noted and last great strike of a railway brotherhood was the one of the locomotive engineers on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company. The strike was begun jointly on February 27, 1888, by the brotherhoods of locomotive engineers and locomotive firemen. The main demands were made by the engineers, who asked for the abandonment of the system of classification and for a new wage scale. Two months previously, the Knights of Labor had declared a miners' strike against the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company, employing 80,000 anthracite miners, and the strike had been accompanied by a sympathetic strike of engineers and firemen belonging to the Order. The members of the brotherhoods had filled their places and, in retaliation, the former Reading engineers and firemen now took the places of the Burlington strikers, so that on March 15 the company claimed to have a full contingent of employes. The brotherhoods ordered a boycott upon the Burlington cars, which was partly enforced, but they were finally compelled to submit. The strike was not officially called off until January 3, 1889. Notwithstanding the defeat of the strikers, the damage to the railway was enormous, and neither the railways of the country nor the brotherhoods since that date have permitted a serious strike of their members to occur.

The lull in the trade union movement was broken by a new concerted eight-hour movement managed by the Federation, which culminated in 1890.

Although on the whole the eight-hour movement in 1886 was a failure, it was by no means a disheartening failure. It was evident that the eight-hour day was a popular demand, and that an organization desirous of expansion might well hitch its wagon to this star. Accordingly, the convention of the American Federation of Labor in 1888 declared that a general demand should be made for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. The chief advocates of the resolution were the delegates of the carpenters, who announced a readiness to lead the way for a general eight-hour day in 1890.

The Federation at once inaugurated an aggressive campaign. For the first time in its history it employed special salaried organizers. Pamphlets were issued and widely distributed. On every important holiday mass meetings were held in the larger cities. On Labor Day 1889, no less than 420 such mass meetings were held throughout the country. Again the Knights of Labor came out against the plan.

The next year the plan of campaign was modified. The idea of a general strike for the eight-hour day in May 1890, was abandoned in favor of a strike trade by trade. In March 1890, the carpenters were chosen to make the demand on May 1 of the same year, to be followed by the miners at a later date.

The choice of the carpenters was indeed fortunate. Beginning with 1886, that union had a rapid growth and was now the largest union affiliated with the Federation. For several years it had been accumulating funds for the eight-hour day, and, when the movement was inaugurated in May 1890, it achieved a large measure of success. The union officers claimed to have won the eight-hour day in 137 cities and a nine-hour day in most other places.

However, the selection of the miners to follow on May 1, 1891, was a grave mistake. Less than one-tenth of the coal miners of the country were then organized. For years the miners' union had been losing ground, with the constant decline of coal prices. Some months before May 1, 1891, the United Mine Workers had become involved in a disastrous strike in the Connelsville coke region, and the plan for an eight-hour strike was abandoned. In this manner the eight-hour movement inaugurated by the convention of the Federation in 1888 came to an end. Apart from the strike of the carpenters in 1890, it had not led to any general movement to gain the eight-hour work day. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of workingmen had won reduced hours of labor, especially in the building trades. By 1891 the eight-hour day had been secured for all building trades in Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Indianapolis, and San Francisco. In New York and Brooklyn the carpenters, stone-cutters, painters, and plasterers worked eight hours, while the bricklayers, masons, and plumbers worked nine. In St. Paul the bricklayers alone worked nine hours, the remaining trades eight.

In 1892 the labor movement faced for the first time a really modern manufacturing corporation with its practically boundless resources of war, namely the Carnegie Steel Company, in the strike which has become famous under the name of the Homestead Strike. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, with a membership of 24,068 in 1891, was probably the strongest trade union in the entire history of the American labor movement. Prior to 1889 the relations between the union and the Carnegie firm had been invariably friendly. In January 1889, H.C. Frick, who, as owner of the largest coke manufacturing plant, had acquired a reputation of a bitter opponent of organized labor, became chairman of Carnegie Brothers and Company. In the same year, owing to his assumption of management, as the union men believed, the first dispute occurred between them and the company. Although the agreement was finally renewed for three years on terms dictated by the Association, the controversy left a disturbing impression upon the minds of the men, since during the course of the negotiations Frick had demanded the dissolution of the union.

Negotiations for the new scale presented to the company began in February 1892. A few weeks later the company presented a scale to the men providing for a reduction and besides demanded that the date of the termination of the scale be changed from July 1 to January 1. A number of conferences were held without result; and on May 30 the company submitted an ultimatum to the effect that, if the scale were not signed by June 29, they would treat with the men as individuals. At a final conference which was held on June 23, the company raised its offer from $22 per ton to $23 as the minimum base of the scale, and the union lowered its demand from $25, the rate formerly paid, to $24. But no agreement could be reached on this point nor on others and the strike began June 29 upon the definite issue of the preservation of the union.

Even before the negotiations were broken up, Frick had arranged with the Pinkerton detective agency for 300 men to serve as guards. These men arrived at a station on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh near midnight of July 5. Here they embarked on barges and were towed up the river to Pittsburgh and taken up the Monangahela River to Homestead, which they approached about four o'clock on the morning of July 6. The workmen had been warned of their coming and, when the boat reached the landing back of the steel works, nearly the whole town was there to meet them and to prevent their landing. Passion ran high. The men armed themselves with guns and gave the Pinkertons a pitched battle. When the day was over, at least half a dozen men on both sides had been killed and a number were seriously wounded. The Pinkertons were defeated and driven away and, although there was no more disorder of any sort, the State militia appeared in Homestead on July 12 and remained for several months.

The strike which began in Homestead soon spread to other mills. The Carnegie mills at 29th and 33d Streets, Pittsburgh, went on strike. The strike at Homestead was finally declared off on November 20, and most of the men went back to their old positions as non-union men. The treasury of the union was depleted, winter was coming, and it was finally decided to consider the battle lost.

The defeat meant not only the loss by the union of the Homestead plant but the elimination of unionism in most of the mills in the Pittsburgh region. Where the great Carnegie Company led, the others had to follow. The power of the union was henceforth broken and the labor movement learned the lesson that even its strongest organization was unable to withstand an onslaught by the modern corporation. The Homestead strike stirred the labor movement as few other single events. It had its political reverberation, since it drove home to the workers that an industry protected by high tariff will not necessarily be a haven to organized labor, notwithstanding that the union had actively assisted the iron and steel manufacturers in securing the high protection granted by the McKinley tariff bill of 1890. Many of the votes which would otherwise have gone to the Republican candidate for President went in 1892 to Grover Cleveland, who ran on an anti-protective tariff issue. It is not unlikely that the latter's victory was materially advanced by the disillusionment brought on by the Homestead defeat.

In the summer of 1893 occurred the financial panic. The panic and the ensuing crisis furnished a conclusive test of the strength and stability of the American labor movement. Gompers in his presidential report at the convention of 1899, following the long depression, said: "It is noteworthy, that while in every previous industrial crisis the trade unions were literally mowed down and swept out of existence, the unions now in existence have manifested, not only the power of resistance, but of stability and permanency," and he assigned as the most prominent cause the system of high dues and benefits which had come into vogue in a large number of trade unions. He said: "Beyond doubt the superficial motive of continued membership in unions organized upon this basis was the monetary benefits the members were entitled to; but be that as it may, the results are the same, that is, membership is maintained, the organization remains intact during dull periods of industry, and is prepared to take advantage of the first sign of an industrial revival." Gompers may have overstated the power of resistance of the unions, but their holding power upon the membership cannot be disputed. The aggregate membership of all unions affiliated with the Federation remained near the mark of 275,000 throughout the period of depression from 1893 to 1897. At last the labor movement had become stabilized.

The year 1894 was exceptional for labor disturbances. The number of employes involved reached nearly 750,000, surpassing even the mark set in 1886. However, in contradistinction to 1886, the movement was defensive. It also resulted in greater failure. The strike of the coal miners and the Pullman strike were the most important ones. The United Mine Workers began their strike in Ohio on April 21. The membership did not exceed 20,000, but about 125,000 struck. At first the demand was made that wages should be restored to the level at which they were in May 1893. But within a month the union in most regions was struggling to prevent a further reduction in wages. By the end of July the strike was lost.

The Pullman strike marks an era in the American labor movement because it was the only attempt ever made in America of a revolutionary strike on the Continental European model. The strikers tried to throw against the associated railways and indeed against the entire existing social order the full force of a revolutionary labor solidarity embracing the entire American wage-earning class brought to the point of exasperation by unemployment, wage reductions, and misery. That in spite of the remarkable favorable conjuncture the dramatic appeal failed to shake the general labor movement out of its chosen groove is proof positive of the completion of the stabilization process which had been going on since the early eighties.

The Pullman strike began May 11, 1894, and grew out of a demand of certain employes in the shops of the Pullman Palace Car Company, situated at Pullman, Illinois, for a restoration of the wages paid during the previous year. In March 1894, the Pullman employes had voted to join the American Railway Union. The American Railway Union was an organization based on industrial lines, organized in June 1893, by Eugene V. Debs. Debs, as secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, had watched the failure of many a strike by only one trade and resigned this office to organize all railway workers in one organization. The American Railway Union was the result. Between June 9 and June 26 the latter held a convention in Chicago. The Pullman matter was publicly discussed before and after its committee reported their interviews with the Pullman Company. On June 21, the delegates under instructions from their local unions, feeling confident after a victory over the Great Northern in April, unanimously voted that the members should stop handling Pullman cars on June 26 unless the Pullman Company would consent to arbitration.

On June 26 the railway strike began. It was a purely sympathetic strike as no demands were made. The union found itself pitted against the General Managers' Association, representing twenty-four roads centering or terminating in Chicago, which were bound by contracts with the Pullman Company. The association had been organized in 1886, its main business being to determine a common policy as to traffic and freight rates, but incidentally it dealt also with wages. The strike soon spread over an enormous territory. Many of the members of the brotherhoods joined in, although their organizations were opposed to the strike. The lawless element in Chicago took advantage of the opportunity to rob, burn, and plunder, so that the scenes of the great railway strike of 1877 were now repeated. The damages in losses of property and business to the country have been estimated at $80,000,000. On July 7, E.V. Debs, president, and other principal officers of the American Railway Union were indicted, arrested, and held under $10,000 bail. On July 13 they were charged with contempt of the United States Court in disobeying an injunction which enjoined them, among other things, from compelling or inducing by threats railway employes to strike. The strike had already been weakening for some days. On July 12, at the request of the American Railway Union, about twenty-five of the executive officers of national and international labor unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor met in conference in Chicago to discuss the situation. Debs appeared and urged a general strike by all labor organizations. But the conference decided that "it would be unwise and disastrous to the interests of labor to extend the strike any further than it had already gone," and advised the strikers to return to work. On July 13, the American Railway Union, through the Mayor of Chicago, offered the General Managers' Association to declare the strike off, provided the men should be restored to their former positions without prejudice, except in cases where they had been convicted of crime. But the Association refused to deal with the union. The strike was already virtually beaten by the combined moral effect of the indictment of the leaders and of the arrival in Chicago of United States troops, which President Cleveland sent in spite of the protest of Governor Altgeld of Illinois.

The labor organizations were taught two important lessons. First, that nothing can be gained through revolutionary striking, for the government was sufficiently strong to cope with it; and second, that the employers had obtained a formidable ally in the courts.[28]

Defeats in strikes, depression in trade, a rapidly falling labor market and court prosecutions were powerful allies of those socialistic and radical leaders inside the Federation who aspired to convert it from a mere economic organization into an economic-political one and make it embark upon the sea of independent politics.

The convention of 1893 is memorable in that it submitted to the consideration of affiliated unions a "political programme." The preamble to the "programme" recited that the English trade unions had recently launched upon independent politics "as auxiliary to their economic action." The eleven planks of the program demanded: compulsory education; the right of popular initiative in legislation; a legal eight-hour work-day; governmental inspection of mines and workshops; abolition of the sweating system; employers' liability laws; abolition of the contract system upon public work; municipal ownership of electric light, gas, street railway, and water systems; the nationalization of telegraphs, telephones, railroads, and mines; "the collective ownership by the people of all means of production and distribution"; and the referendum upon all legislation.

Immediately after the convention of 1893 affiliated unions began to give their endorsement to the political program. Not until comparatively late did any opposition make itself manifest. Then it took the form of a demand by such conservative leaders as Gompers, McGuire, and Strasser, that plank 10, with its pledge in favor of "the collective ownership by the people of all means of production and distribution," be stricken out. Notwithstanding this, the majority of national trade unions endorsed the program.

During 1894 the trade unions were active participants in politics. In November, 1894, the Federationist gave a list of more than 300 union members candidates for some elective office. Only a half dozen of these, however, were elected. It was mainly to these local failures that Gompers pointed in his presidential address at the convention of 1894 as an argument against the adoption of the political program by the Federation. His attitude clearly foreshadowed the destiny of the program at the convention. The first attack was made upon the preamble, on the ground that the statement therein that the English trade unions had declared for independent political action was false. By a vote of 1345 to 861 the convention struck out the preamble. Upon motion of the typographical union, a substitute was adopted calling for the "abolition of the monopoly system of land holding and the substitution therefor of a title of occupancy and use only." Some of the delegates seem to have interpreted this substitute as a declaration for the single tax; but the majority of those who voted in its favor probably acted upon the principle "anything to beat socialism." Later the entire program was voted down. That sealed the fate of the move for an independent labor party.

The American Federation of Labor was almost drawn into the whirlpool of partisan politics during the Presidential campaign of 1896. Three successive conventions had declared in favor of the free coinage of silver; and now the Democratic party had come out for free coinage. In this situation very many prominent trade union leaders declared publicly for Bryan. President Gompers, however, issued a warning to all affiliated unions to keep out of partisan politics. Notwithstanding this Secretary McGraith, at the next convention of the Federation, charged President Gompers with acting in collusion with the Democratic headquarters throughout the campaign in aid of Bryan's candidacy. After a lengthy secret session the convention approved the conduct of Gompers. Free silver continued to be endorsed annually down to the convention of 1898, when the return of industrial prosperity and rising prices put an end to it as a demand advocated by labor.

The depressed nineties demonstrated conclusively that a new era had arrived. No longer was the labor movement a mere plaything of the alternating waves of prosperity and depression. Formerly, as we saw, it had centered on economic or trade-union action during prosperity only to change abruptly to "panaceas" and politics with the descent of depression. Now the movement, notwithstanding possible changes in membership, and persistent political leanings in some portions of it, as a whole for the first time became stable in purpose and action. Trade unionism has won over politics.

This victory was synchronous with the first successful working out of a national trade agreement and the institutionalization of trade unionism in a leading industry, namely stove molding. While one of the earliest stable trade agreements in a conspicuous trade covering a local field was a bricklayers' agreement in Chicago in 1887, the era of trade agreements really dates from the national system established in the stove foundry industry in 1891. It is true also that the iron and steel workers had worked under a national trade agreement since 1866. However, that trade was too exceptionally strong to be typical.

The stove industry had early reached a high degree of development and organization. There had existed since 1872 the National Association of Stove Manufacturers, an organization dealing with prices and embracing in its membership the largest stove manufacturers of the country. The stove foundrymen, therefore, unlike the manufacturers in practically all other industries at that time, controlled in a large measure their own market. Furthermore, the product had been completely standardized and reduced to a piecework basis, and machinery had not taken the place of the molders' skill. It consequently was no mere accident that the stove industry was the first to develop a system of permanent industrial peace. But, on the other hand, this was not automatically established as soon as the favorable external conditions were provided. In reality, only after years of struggle, of strikes and lockouts, and after the two sides had fought each other "to a standstill," was the system finally installed.

The eighties abounded in stove molders' strikes, and in 1886 the national union began to render effective aid. The Stove Founders' National Defense Association was formed in 1886 as an employers' association of stove manufacturers. The Defense Association aimed at a national labor policy; it was organized for "resistance against any unjust demands of their workmen, and such other purposes as may from time to time prove or appear to be necessary for the benefit of the members thereof as employers of labor." Thus, after 1886, the alignment was made national on both sides. The great battle was fought the next year.

March 8, 1887, the employes of the Bridge and Beach Manufacturing Company in St. Louis struck for an advance in wages and the struggle at once became one between the International Union and the National Defense Association. The St. Louis company sent its patterns to foundries in other districts, but the union successfully prevented their use. This occasioned a series of strikes in the West and of lockouts in the East, affecting altogether about 5000 molders. It continued thus until June, when the St. Louis patterns were recalled, the Defense Association having provided the company with a sufficient number of strike-breakers. Each side was in a position to claim the victory for itself; so evenly matched were the opposing forces.

During the next four years disputes in Association plants were rare. In August 1890, a strike took place in Pittsburgh and, for the first time in the history of the industry, it was settled by a written trade agreement with the local union. This supported the idea of a national trade agreement between the two organizations. Since the dispute of 1887, negotiations with this object were from time to time conducted, the Defense Association invariably taking the initiative. Finally, the national convention of the union in 1890 appointed a committee to meet a like committee of the Defense Association. The conference took place March 25, 1891, and worked out a complete plan of organization for the stove molding industry. Every year two committees of three members each, chosen respectively by the union and the association, were to meet in conference and to draw up general laws for the year. In case of a dispute arising in a locality, if the parties immediately concerned were unable to arrive at common terms, the chief executives of both organizations, the president of the union and the president of the association, were to step in and try to effect an adjustment. If, however, they, too, failed, a conference committee composed of an equal number of members from each side was to be called in and its findings were to be final. Meanwhile the parties were enjoined from engaging in hostilities while the matter at dispute was being dealt with by the duly appointed authorities. Each organization obligated itself to exercise "police authority" over its constituents, enforcing obedience to the agreement. The endorsement of the plan by both organizations was practically unanimous, and has continued in operation without interruption for thirty years until the present day.

Since the end of the nineties the trade agreement has become one of the most generally accepted principles and aspirations of the American labor movement. However, it is not to be understood that by accepting the principle of the trade agreement the labor movement has committed itself to unlimited arbitration of industrial disputes. The basic idea of the trade agreement is that of collective bargaining rather than arbitration. The two terms are not always distinguished, but the essential difference is that in the trade agreement proper no outside party intervenes to settle the dispute and make an award. The agreement is made by direct negotiation between the two organized groups and the sanction which each holds over the head of the other is the strike or lockout. If no agreement can be reached, the labor organization as well as the employers' association, insists on its right to refuse arbitration, whether it be "voluntary" or so-called "compulsory."

The clarification of the conception of the trade agreement was perhaps the main achievement of the nineties. Without the trade agreement the labor movement could hardly come to eschew "panaceas" and to reconstitute itself upon the basis of opportunism. The coming in of the trade agreement, whether national, sectional, or local, was also the chief factor in stabilizing the movement against industrial depressions.

FOOTNOTE:

[28] See below, 159-160.



CHAPTER 7

TRADE UNIONISM AND THE COURTS

While it was in the nineties that trade unionists first tasted the sweets of institutionalization in industry through "recognition" by employers, it was also during the later eighties and during the nineties that they experienced a revival of suspicion and hostility on the part of the courts and a renewal of legal restraints upon their activities, which were all the more discouraging since for a generation or more they had practically enjoyed non-interference from that quarter. It was at this period that the main legal weapons against trade unionism were forged and brought to a fine point in practical application. The history of the courts' attitude to trade unionism may therefore best be treated from the standpoint of the nineties.

The subject of court interference was not altogether new in the eighties. We took occasion to point out the effect of court interference in labor disputes in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century and again in the thirties. Mention was made also of the court's decision in the Theiss boycott case in New York in 1886, which proved a prime moving factor in launching the famous Henry George campaign for Mayor. And we gave due note to the role of court injunctions in the Debs strike of 1894 and in other strikes. Our present interest is, however, more in the court doctrines than in their effects: more concerned with the development of the legal thought underlying the policies of the courts than with the reactions of the labor movement to the policies themselves.

The earliest case on record, namely the Philadelphia shoemakers' strike case in 1806,[29] charged two offences; one was a combination to raise wages, the other a combination to injure others; both offences were declared by the judge to be forbidden by the common law. To the public at large the prosecution seemed to rest solely upon the charge that the journeymen combined to raise wages. The defense took advantage of this and tried to make use of it for its own purposes. The condemnation of the journeymen on this ground gave rise to a vehement protest on the part of the journeymen themselves and their friends. It was pointed out that the journeymen were convicted for acts which are considered lawful when done by masters or merchants. Therefore when the next conspiracy case in New York in 1809 was decided, the court's charge to the jury was very different. Nothing was said about the illegality of the combinations to raise wages; on the contrary, the jury was instructed that this was not the question at issue. The issue was stated to be whether the defendants had combined to secure an increase in their wages by unlawful means. To the question what means were unlawful, in this case the answer was given in general terms, namely that "coercive and arbitrary" means are unlawful. The fines imposed upon the defendants were only nominal.

A third notable case of the group, namely the Pittsburgh case in 1815, grew out of a strike for higher wages, as did the preceding cases. The charges were the same as in those and the judge took the identical view that was taken by the court in the New York case. However, he explained more fully the meaning of "coercive and arbitrary" action. "Where diverse persons," he said, "confederate together by direct means to impoverish or prejudice a third person, or to do acts prejudicial to the community," they are engaged in an unlawful conspiracy. Concretely, it is unlawful to "conspire to compel an employer to hire a certain description of persons," or to "conspire to prevent a man from freely exercising his trade in a particular place," or to "conspire to compel men to become members of a particular society, or to contribute toward it," or when persons "conspire to compel men to work at certain prices." Thus it was the effort of the shoemakers' society to secure a closed shop which fell chiefly under the condemnation of the court.

The counsel for the defense argued in this case that whatever is lawful for one individual is lawful also for a combination of individuals. The court, however, rejected the arguments on the ground that there was a basic difference between an individual doing a thing and a combination of individuals doing the same thing. The doctrine of conspiracy was thus given a clear and unequivocal definition.

Another noteworthy feature of the Pittsburgh case was the emphasis given to the idea that the defendants' conduct was harmful to the public. The judge condemned the defendants because they tended "to create a monopoly or to restrain the entire freedom of the trade." What a municipality is not allowed to do, he argued, a private association of individuals must not be allowed to do.

Of the group of cases which grew out of the revival of trade union activity in the twenties, the first, a case against Philadelphia master shoemakers, was decided in 1821, and the judge held that it was lawful for the masters, who had recently been forced by employes to a wage increase, to combine in order to restore wages to their "natural level." But he also held that had the employers combined to depress wages of journeymen below the level fixed by free competition, it would have been criminal.

Another Pennsylvania case resulted from a strike by Philadelphia tailors in 1827 to secure the reinstatement of six discharged members. As in previous cases the court rejected the plea that a combination to raise wages was illegal, and directed the attention of the jury to the question of intimidation and coercion, especially as it affected third parties. The defendants were found guilty.

In a third, a New York hatters' case of 1823, the charge of combining to raise wages was entirely absent from the indictment. The issue turned squarely on the question of conspiring to injure others by coercion and intimidation. The hatters were adjudged guilty of combining to deprive a non-union workman of his livelihood.

The revival of trade unionism in the middle of the thirties brought in, as we saw, another crop of court cases.

In 1829 New York State had made "conspiracy to commit any act injurious to public morals or to trade or commerce" a statutory offence, thus reenforcing the existing common law. In 1835 the shoemakers of Geneva struck to enforce the closed shop against a workman who persisted in working below the union rate. The indictment went no further than charging this offence. The journeymen were convicted in a lower court and appealed to the Supreme Court of the State. Chief Justice Savage, in his decision condemning the journeymen, broadened the charge to include a conspiracy to raise wages and condemned both as "injurious to trade or commerce" and thus expressly covered by statute.

The far-reaching effects of this decision came clearly to light in a tailor's case the next year. The journeymen were charged with practising intimidation and violence, while picketing their employers' shops during a prolonged strike against a reduction in wages. Judge Edwards, the trial judge, in his charge to the jury, stigmatized the tailors' society as an illegal combination, largely basing himself upon Judge Savage's decision. The jury handed in a verdict of guilty, but recommended mercy. The judge fined the president of the society $150, one journeyman $100, and the others $50 each. The fines were immediately paid with the aid of a collection taken up in court.

The decisions produced a violent reaction among the workingmen. They held a mass-meeting in City Hall Park, with an estimated attendance of 27,000, burned Judge Savage and Judge Edwards in effigy, and resolved to call a state convention to form a workingmen's party.

So loud, indeed, was the cry that justice had been thwarted that juries were doubtless influenced by it. Two cases came up soon after the tailors' case, the Hudson, New York, shoemakers' in June and the Philadelphia plasterers' in July 1836. In both the juries found a verdict of not guilty. Of all journeymen indicted during this period the Hudson shoemakers had been the most audacious ones in enforcing the closed shop. They not only refused to work for employers who hired non-society men, but fined them as well; yet they were acquitted.

Finally six years later, in 1842, long after the offending trade societies had gone out of existence under the stress of unemployment and depression, came the famous decision in the Massachusetts case of Commonwealth v. Hunt.

This was a shoemakers' case and arose out of a strike. The decision in the lower court was adverse to the defendants. However, it was reversed by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The decision, written by Chief Justice Shaw, is notable in that it holds trade unions to be legal organizations. In the earlier cases it was never in so many words held that trade unions were unlawful, but in all of them there were suggestions to this effect. Now it was recognized that trade unions are per se lawful organizations and, though men may band themselves together to effect a criminal object under the disguise of a trade union, such a purpose is not to be assumed without positive evidence. On the contrary, the court said that "when an association is formed for purposes actually innocent, and afterwards its powers are abused by those who have the control and management of it to purposes of oppression and injustice, it will be criminal in those who misuse it, or give consent thereto, but not in other members of the association." This doctrine that workingmen may lawfully organize trade unions has since Commonwealth v. Hunt been adopted in nearly every case.

The other doctrine which Justice Shaw advanced in this case has been less generally accepted. It was that the members of a union may procure the discharge of non-members through strikes for this purpose against their employers. This is the essence of the question of the closed shop; and Commonwealth v. Hunt goes the full length of regarding strikes for the closed shop as legal. Justice Shaw said that there is nothing unlawful about such strikes, if they are conducted in a peaceable manner. This was much in advance of the position which is taken by many courts upon this question even at the present day.

After Commonwealth v. Hunt came a forty years' lull in the courts' application of the doctrine of conspiracy to trade unions. In fact so secure did trade unionists feel from court attacks that in the seventies and early eighties their leaders advocated the legal incorporation of trade unions. The desire expressed for incorporation is of extreme interest compared with the opposite attitude of the present day. The motive behind it then was more than the usual one of securing protection for trade union funds against embezzlement by officers. A full enumeration of other motives can be obtained from the testimony of the labor leaders before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1883. McGuire, the national secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, argued before the committee for a national incorporation law mainly for the reason that such a law passed by Congress would remove trade unions from the operation of the conspiracy laws that still existed though in a dormant state on the statute books of a number of Slates, notably New York and Pennsylvania. He pleaded that "if it (Congress) had not the power, it shall assume the power; and, if necessary, amend the constitution to do it." Adolph Strasser of the cigar makers raised the point of protection for union funds and gave as a second reason that it "will give our organization more stability, and in that manner we shall be able to avoid strikes by perhaps settling with our employers, when otherwise we should be unable to do so, because when our employers know that we are to be legally recognized that will exercise such moral force upon them that they cannot avoid recognizing us themselves." W.H. Foster, the secretary of the Legislative Committee of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, stated that in Ohio the law provided for incorporation at a slight cost, but he wanted a national law to "legalize arbitration," by which he meant that "when a question of dispute arose between the employers and the employed, instead of having it as now, when the one often refuses to even acknowledge or discuss the question with the other, if they were required to submit the question to arbitration, or to meet on the same level before an impartial tribunal, there is no doubt but what the result would be more in our favor than it is now, when very often public opinion cannot hear our cause." He, however, did not desire to have compulsory arbitration, but merely compulsory dealing with the union, or compulsory investigation by an impartial body, both parties to remain free to accept the award, provided, however, "that once they do agree the agreement shall remain in force for a fixed period." Like Foster, John Jarrett, the President of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, argued for an incorporation law before the committee solely for its effect upon conciliation and arbitration. He, too, was opposed to compulsory arbitration, but he showed that he had thought out the point less clearly than Foster.

The young and struggling trade unions of the early eighties saw only the good side of incorporation without its pitfalls; their subsequent experience with courts converted them from exponents into ardent opponents of incorporation and of what Foster termed "legalized arbitration."

During the eighties there was much legislation applicable to labor disputes. The first laws against boycotting and blacklisting and the first laws which prohibited discrimination against members who belonged to a union were passed during this decade. At this time also were passed the first laws to promote voluntary arbitration and most of the laws which allowed unions to incorporate. Only in New York and Maryland were the conspiracy laws repealed. Four States enacted such laws and many States passed laws against intimidation. Statutes, however, played at that time, as they do now, but a secondary role. The only statute which proved of much importance was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. When Congress passed this act in 1890, few people thought it had application to labor unions. In 1893-1894, as we shall see, however, this act was successfully invoked in several labor controversies, notably in the Debs case.

The bitterness of the industrial struggle during the eighties made it inevitable that the labor movement should acquire an extensive police and court record. It was during that decade that charges like "inciting to riot," "obstructing the streets," "intimidation," and "trespass" were first extensively used in connection with labor disputes. Convictions were frequent and penalties often severe. What attitude the courts at that time took toward labor violence was shown most strikingly, even if in too extreme a form to be entirely typical, in the case of the Chicago anarchists.[30]

But the significance of the eighties in the development of relations of the courts to organized labor came not from these cases which were, after all, nothing but ordinary police cases magnified to an unusual degree by the intensity of the industrial struggle and by the excited state of public opinion, but in the new lease of life to the doctrine of conspiracy as affecting labor disputes. During the eighties and nineties there seemed to have been more conspiracy cases than during all the rest of the century. It was especially in 1886 and 1887 that organized labor found court interference a factor. At this time, as we saw, there was also passed voluminous state legislation strengthening the application of the common law doctrine of conspiracy to labor disputes. The conviction of the New York boycotters in 1886 and many similar convictions, though less widely known, of participants in strikes and boycotts were obtained upon this ground.

Where the eighties witnessed a revolution was in a totally new use made of the doctrine of conspiracy by the courts when they began to issue injunctions in labor cases. Injunctions were an old remedy, but not until the eighties did they figure in the struggles between labor and capital. In England an injunction was issued in a labor dispute as early as 1868;[31] but this case was not noticed in the United States and had nothing whatever to do with the use of injunctions in this country. When and where the first labor injunction was issued in the United States is not known. An injunction was applied for in a New York case as early as 1880 but was denied.[32] An injunction was granted in Iowa in 1884, but not until the Southwest railway strike in 1886 were injunctions used extensively. By 1890 the public had yet heard little of injunctions in connection with labor disputes, but such use was already fortified by numerous precedents.

The first injunctions that attained wide publicity were those issued by Federal courts during the strike of engineers against the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad[33] in 1888 and during the railway strikes of the early nineties. Justification for these injunctions was found in the provisions of the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Often the State courts used these Federal cases as precedents, in disregard of the fact that there the issuance of injunctions was based upon special statutes. In other cases the more logical course was followed of justifying the issuance of injunctions upon grounds of equity. But most of the acts which the courts enjoined strikers from doing were already prohibited by the criminal laws. Hence organized labor objected that these injunctions violated the old principle that equity will not interfere to prevent crime. No such difficulties arose when the issuance of injunctions was justified as a measure for the protection of property. In the Debs case,[34] when the Supreme Court of the United States passed upon the issuance of injunctions in labor disputes, it had recourse to this theory.

But the theory of protection to property also presented some difficulties. The problem was to establish the principle of irreparable injury to the complainant's property. This was a simple matter when the strikers were guilty of trespass, arson, or sabotage. Then they damaged the complainant's physical property and, since they were usually men against whom judgments are worthless, any injury they might do was irreparable. But these were exceptional cases. Usually injunctions were sought to prevent not violence, but strikes, picketing, or boycotting. What is threatened by strikes and picketing is not the employer's physical property, but the relations he has established as an employer of labor, summed up in his expectancy of retaining the services of old employes and of obtaining new ones. Boycotting, obviously, has no connection with acts of violence against physical property, but is designed merely to undermine the profitable relations which the employer had developed with his customers. These expectancies are advantages enjoyed by established businesses over new competitors and are usually transferable and have market value. For these reasons they are now recognized as property in the law of good-will and unfair competition for customers, having been first formulated about the middle of the nineteenth century.

The first case which recognized these expectancies of a labor market was Walker v. Cronin,[35] decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1871. It held that the plaintiff was entitled to recover damages from the defendants, certain union officials, because they had induced his employes, who were free to quit at will, to leave his employ and had also been instrumental in preventing him from getting new employes. But as yet these expectancies were not considered property in the full sense of the word. A transitional case is that of Brace Bros. v. Evans in 1888.[36] In that case an injunction against a boycott was justified on the ground that the value of the complainant's physical property was being destroyed when the market was cut off. Here the expectancies based upon relations which customers and employes were thought of as giving value to the physical property, but they were not yet recognized as a distinct asset which in itself justifies the issuance of injunctions.