It is the employer's purpose to bring in ever lower and lower levels in competition among laborers and depress wages; it is the purpose of the union to eliminate those lower levels and to make them stay eliminated. That brings the union men face to face with the whole matter of industrial control. They have no assurance that the employer will not get the best of them in bargaining unless they themselves possess enough control over the shop and the trade to check him. Hence they will strive for the "recognition" of the union by the employer or the associated employers as an acknowledged part of the government of the shop and the trade. It is essential to note that in struggling for recognition, labor is struggling not for something absolute, as would be a struggle for a complete dispossession of the employer, but for the sort of an end that admits of relative differences and gradations. Industrial control may be divided in varying proportions,[101] reflecting at any one time the relative ratio of bargaining power of the contesting sides. It is labor's aim to continue increasing its bargaining power and with it its share of industrial control, just as it is the employer's aim to maintain a status quo or better. Although this presupposes a continuous struggle, it is not a revolutionary but an "opportunist" struggle.

Once we accept the view that a broadly conceived aim to control competitive menaces is the key to the conduct of organized labor in America, light is thrown on the causes of the American industrial class struggles. In place of looking for these causes, with the Marxians, in the domain of technique and production, we shall look for them on the market, where all developments which affect labor as a bargainer and competitor, of which technical change is one, are sooner or later bound to register themselves. It will then become possible to account for the long stretch of industrial class struggle in America prior to the factory system, while industry continued on the basis of the handicraft method of production. Also we shall be able to render to ourselves a clearer account of the changes, with time, in the intensity of the struggle, which, were we to follow the Marxian theory, would appear hopelessly irregular.

We shall take for an illustration the shoe industry.[102] The ease with which shoes can be transported long distances, due to the relatively high money value contained in small bulk, rendered the shoe industry more sensitive to changes in marketing than other industries. Indeed we may say that the shoe industry epitomized the general economic evolution of the country.[103]

We observe no industrial class struggle during Colonial times when the market remained purely local and the work was custom-order work. The journeyman found his standard of life protected along with the master's own through the latter's ability to strike a favorable bargain with the consumer. This was done by laying stress upon the quality of the work. It was mainly for this reason that during the custom-order stage of industry the journeymen seldom if ever raised a protest because the regulation of the craft, be it through a guild or through an informal organization, lay wholly in the hands of the masters. Moreover, the typical journeyman expected in a few years to set up with an apprentice or two in business for himself—so there was a reasonable harmony of interests.

A change came when improvements in transportation, the highway and later the canal, had widened the area of competition among masters. As a first step, the master began to produce commodities in advance of the demand, laying up a stock of goods for the retail trade. The result was that his bargaining capacity over the consumer was lessened and so prices eventually had to be reduced, and with them also wages. The next step was even more serious. Having succeeded in his retail business, the master began to covet a still larger market,—the wholesale market. However, the competition in this wider market was much keener than it had been in the custom-order or even in the retail market. It was inevitable that both prices and wages should suffer in the process. The master, of course, could recoup himself by lowering the quality of the product, but when he did that he lost a telling argument in bargaining with the consumer or the retail merchant. Another result of this new way of conducting the business was that an increased amount of capital was now required for continuous operation, both in raw material and in credits extended to distant buyers.

The next phase in the evolution of the market rendered the separation of the journeymen into a class by themselves even sharper as well as more permanent. The market had grown to such dimensions that only a specialist in marketing and credit could succeed in business, namely, the "merchant-capitalist." The latter now interposed himself permanently between "producer" and consumer and by his control of the market assumed a commanding position. The merchant-capitalist ran his business upon the principle of a large turn-over and a small profit per unit of product, which, of course, made his income highly speculative. He was accordingly interested primarily in low production and labor costs. To depress the wage levels he tapped new and cheaper sources of labor supply, in prison labor, low wage country-town labor, woman and child labor; and set them up as competitive menaces to the workers in the trade. The merchant-capitalist system forced still another disadvantage upon the wage earner by splitting up crafts into separate operations and tapping lower levels of skill. In the merchant-capitalist period we find the "team work" and "task" system. The "team" was composed of several workers: a highly skilled journeyman was in charge, but the other members possessed varying degrees of skill down to the practically unskilled "finisher." The team was generally paid a lump wage, which was divided by an understanding among the members. With all that the merchant-capitalist took no appreciable part in the productive process. His equipment consisted of a warehouse where the raw material was cut up and given out to be worked up by small contractors, to be worked up in small shops with a few journeymen and apprentices, or else by the journeyman at his home,—all being paid by the piece. This was the notorious "sweatshop system."

The contractor or sweatshop boss was a mere labor broker deriving his income from the margin between the piece rate he received from the merchant-capitalist and the rate he paid in wages. As any workman could easily become a contractor with the aid of small savings out of wages, or with the aid of money advanced by the merchant-capitalist, the competition between contractors was of necessity of the cut-throat kind. The industrial class struggle was now a three-cornered one, the contractor aligning himself here with the journeymen, whom he was forced to exploit, there with the merchant-capitalist, but more often with the latter. Also, owing to the precariousness of the position of both contractor and journeyman, the class struggle now reached a new pitch of intensity hitherto unheard of. It is important to note, however, that as yet the tools of production had not undergone any appreciable change, remaining hand tools as before, and also that the journeyman still owned them. So that the beginning of class struggles had nothing to do with machine technique and a capitalist ownership of the tools of production. The capitalist, however, had placed himself across the outlets to the market and dominated by using all the available competitive menaces to both contractor and wage earner. Hence the bitter class struggle.

The thirties witnessed the beginning of the merchant-capitalist system in the cities of the East. But the situation grew most serious during the forties and fifties. That was a period of the greatest disorganization of industry. The big underlying cause was the rapid extension of markets outrunning the technical development of industry. The large market, opened first by canals and then by railroads, stimulated the keenest sort of competition among the merchant-capitalists. But the industrial equipment at their disposal had made no considerable progress. Except in the textile industry, machinery had not yet been invented or sufficiently perfected to make its application profitable. Consequently industrial society was in the position of an antiquated public utility in a community which persistently forces ever lower and lower rates. It could continue to render service only by cutting down the returns to the factors of production,—by lowering profits, and especially by pressing down wages.

In the sixties the market became a national one as the effect of the consolidation into trunk lines of the numerous and disconnected railway lines built during the forties and fifties. Coincident with the nationalized market for goods, production began to change from a handicraft to a machine basis. The former sweatshop boss having accumulated some capital, or with the aid of credit, now became a small "manufacturer," owning a small plant and employing from ten to fifty workmen. Machinery increased the productivity of labor and gave a considerable margin of profits, which enabled him to begin laying a foundation for his future independence of the middleman. As yet he was, however, far from independent.

The wider areas over which manufactured products were now to be distributed, called more than ever before for the services of the specialist in marketing, namely, the wholesale-jobber. As the market extended, he sent out his traveling men, established business connections, and advertised the articles which bore his trade mark. His control of the market opened up credit with the banks, while the manufacturer, who with the exception of his patents possessed only physical capital and no market opportunities, found it difficult to obtain credit. Moreover, the rapid introduction of machinery tied up all of the manufacturers' available capital and forced him to turn his products into money as rapidly as possible, with the inevitable result that the merchant was given an enormous bargaining advantage over him. Had the extension of the market and the introduction of machinery proceeded at a less rapid pace, the manufacturer probably would have been able to obtain greater control over the market opportunities, and the larger credit which this would have given him, combined with the accumulation of his own capital, might have been sufficient to meet his needs. However, as the situation really developed, the merchant obtained a superior bargaining power and, by playing off the competing manufacturers one against another, produced a cut-throat competition, low prices, low profits, and consequently a steady and insistent pressure upon wages. This represents the situation in the seventies and eighties.

For labor the combination of cut-throat competition among employers with the new machine technique brought serious consequences. In this era of machinery the forces of technical evolution decisively joined hands with the older forces of marketing evolution to depress the conditions of the wage bargain. It is needless to dilate upon the effects of machine technique on labor conditions—they have become a commonplace of political economy. The shoemakers were first among the organized trades to feel the effects. In the later sixties they organized what was then the largest trade union in the world, the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin,[104] to ward off the menace of "green hands" set to work on machines. With the machinists and the metal trades in general, the invasion of unskilled and little skilled competitors began a decade later. But the main and general invasion came in the eighties, the proper era from which to date machine production in America. It was during the eighties that we witness an attempted fusion into one organization, the Order of the Knights of Labor, of the machine-menaced mechanics and the hordes of the unskilled.[105]

With the nineties a change comes at last. The manufacturer finally wins his independence. Either he reaches out directly to the ultimate consumer by means of chains of stores or other devices, or else, he makes use of his control over patents and trade marks and thus succeeds in reducing the wholesale-jobber to a position which more nearly resembles that of an agent working on a commission basis than that of the quondam industrial ruler. The immediate outcome is, of course, a considerable increase in the manufacturer's margin of profit. The industrial class struggle begins to abate in intensity. The employer, now comparatively free of anxiety that he may be forced to operate at a loss, is able to diminish pressure on wages. But more than this: the greater certainty about the future, now that he is a free agent, enables him to enter into time agreements with a trade union. At first he is generally disinclined to forego any share of his newly acquired freedom by tying himself up with a union. But if the union is strong and can offer battle, then he accepts the situation and "recognizes" it. Thus the class struggle instead of becoming sharper and sharper with the advance of capitalism and leading, as Marx predicted, to a social revolution, in reality, grows less and less revolutionary and leads to a compromise or succession of compromises,—namely, collective trade agreements.

But the manufacturer's emancipation from the middleman need not always lead to trade agreements. In the shoe industry this process did not do away with competition. In other industries such an emancipation was identical with the coming in of the "trust," or a combination of competing manufacturers into a monopoly. As soon as the "trust" becomes practically the sole employer of labor in an industry, the relations between labor and capital are thrown almost invariably back into the state of affairs which characterized the merchant-capitalist system at its worst, but with one important difference. Whereas under the merchant-capitalist system the employer was obliged to press down on wages and fight unionism to death owing to cut-throat competition, the "trust," its strength supreme in both commodity and labor market, can do so and usually does so of free choice.

The character of the labor struggle has been influenced by cyclical changes in industry as much as by the permanent changes in the organization of industry and market. In fact, whereas reaction to the latter has generally been slow and noticeable only over long periods of time, with a turn in the business cycle, the labor movement reacted surely and instantaneously.

We observed over the greater part of the history of American labor an alternation of two planes of thought and action, an upper and a lower. On the upper plane, labor thought was concerned with ultimate goals, self-employment or cooperation, and problems arising therefrom, while action took the form of politics. On the lower plane, labor abandoned the ultimate for the proximate, centering on betterments within the limits of the wage system and on trade-union activity. Labor history in the past century was largely a story of labor's shifting from one plane to another, and then again to the first. It was also seen that what determined the plane of thought and action at any one time was the state of business measured by movements of wholesale and retail prices and employment and unemployment. When prices rose and margins of employers' profits were on the increase, the demand for labor increased and accordingly also labor's strength as a bargainer; at the same time, labor was compelled to organize to meet a rising cost of living. At such times trade unionism monopolized the arena, won strikes, increased membership, and forced "cure-alls" and politics into the background. When, however, prices fell and margins of profit contracted, labor's bargaining strength waned, strikes were lost, trade unions faced the danger of extinction, and "cure-alls" and politics received their day in court. Labor would turn to government and politics only as a last resort, when it had lost confidence in its ability to hold its own in industry. This phenomenon, noticeable also in other countries, came out with particular clearness in America.

For, as a rule, down to the World War, prices both wholesale and retail, fluctuated in America more violently than in England or the Continent. And twice, once in the thirties and again in the sixties, an irredeemable paper currency moved up the water mark of prices to tremendous heights followed by reactions of corresponding depth. From the war of 1812, the actual beginning of an industrial America, to the end of the century, the country went through several such complete industrial and business cycles. We therefore conveniently divide labor and trade union history into periods on the basis of the industrial cycle. It was only in the nineties, as we saw, that the response of the labor movement to price fluctuations ceased to mean a complete or nearly complete abandonment of trade unionism during depressions. A continuous and stable trade union movement consequently dates only from the nineties.

The cooperative movement which was, as we saw, far less continuous than trade unionism, has also shown the effects of the business cycle. The career of distributive cooperation in America has always been intimately related to the movements of retail prices and wages. If, in the advance of wages and prices during the ascending portion of the industrial cycle, the cost of living happened to outdistance wages by a wide margin, the wage earners sought a remedy in distributive cooperation. They acted likewise during the descending portion of the industrial cycle, when retail prices happened to fall much less slowly than wages.

Producers' cooperation in the United States has generally been a "hard times" remedy. When industrial prosperity has passed its high crest and strikes have begun to fail, producers' cooperation has often been used as a retaliatory measure to bring the employer to terms by menacing to underbid him in the market. Also, when in the further downward course of industry the point has been reached where cuts in wages and unemployment have become quite common, producers' cooperation has sometimes come in as an attempt to enable the wage earner to obtain both employment and high earnings bolstered through cooperative profits.

FOOTNOTES:

[101] The struggle for control, as carried on by trade unions, centers on such matters as methods of wage determination, the employer's right of discharge, hiring and lay-off, division of work, methods of enforcing shop discipline, introduction of machinery and division of labor, transfers of employes, promotions, the union or non-union shop, and similar subjects.

[102] The first trade societies were organized by shoemakers. (See above, 4-7.)

[103] See Chapter on "American Shoemakers," in Labor and Administration, by John R. Commons (Macmillan, 1913).

[104] See Don D. Lescohier, The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin.

[105] See above, 114-116.



CHAPTER 13

THE IDEALISTIC FACTOR

The puzzling fact about the American labor movement is, after all, its limited objective. As we saw before, the social order which the typical American trade unionist considers ideal is one in which organized labor and organized capital possess equal bargaining power. The American trade unionist wants, first, an equal voice with the employer in fixing wages and, second, a big enough control over the productive processes to protect job, health, and organization. Yet he does not appear to wish to saddle himself and fellow wage earners with the trouble of running industry without the employer.

But materialistic though this philosophy appears, it is nevertheless the product of a long development to which the spiritual contributed no less than the material. In fact the American labor movement arrived at an opportunist trade unionism only after an endeavor spread over more than seventy years to realize a more idealistic program.

American labor started with the "ideology" of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Intended as a justification of a political revolution, the Declaration was worded by the authors as an expression of faith in a social revolution. To controvert the claims of George III, Thomas Jefferson quoted Rousseau. To him Rousseau was in all probability little more than an abstract "beau ideal," but Rousseau's abstractions were no mere abstractions to the pioneer American farmer. To the latter the doctrine that all men are born free and equal seemed to have grown directly out of experience. So it appeared, two or three generations later, to the young workmen when they for the first time achieved political consciousness. And, if reality ceased to square with the principles of the Declaration, it became, they felt, the bounden duty of every true American to amend reality.

Out of a combination of the principles of individual rights, individual self-determination, equality of opportunity, and political equality enumerated and suggested in the Declaration, arose the first and most persistent American labor philosophy. This philosophy differed in no wise from the philosophy of the old American democracy except in emphasis and particular application, yet these differences are highly significant. Labor read into the Declaration of Independence a condemnation of the wage system as a permanent economic regime; sooner or later in place of the wage system had to come self-employment. Americanism to them was a social and economic as well as a political creed. Economic self-determination was as essential to the individual as political equality. Just as no true American will take orders from a king, so he will not consent forever to remain under the orders of a "boss." It was the uplifting force of this social ideal as much as the propelling force of the changing economic environment that molded the American labor program.

We find it at work at first in the decade of the thirties at the very beginning of the labor movement. It then took the form of a demand for a free public school system. These workingmen in Philadelphia and New York discovered that in the place of the social democracy of the Declaration, America had developed into an "aristocracy." They thought that the root of it all lay in "inequitable" legislation which fostered "monopoly," hence the remedy lay in democratic legislation. But they further realized that a political and social democracy must be based on an educated and intelligent working class. No measure, therefore, could be more than a palliative until they got a "Republican" system of education. The workingmen's parties of 1828-1831 failed as parties, but humanitarians like Horace Mann took up the struggle for free public education and carried it to success.

If in the thirties the labor program was to restore a social and political democracy by means of the public school, in the forties the program centered on economic democracy, on equality of economic opportunity. This took the form of a demand of a grant of public land free of charge to everyone willing to brave the rigors of pioneer life. The government should thus open an escape to the worker from the wage system into self-employment by way of free land. After years of agitation, the same cry was taken up by the Western States eager for more settlers to build up their communities and this combined agitation proved irresistible and culminated in the Homestead law of 1862.

The Homestead law opened up the road to self-employment by way of free land and agriculture. But in the sixties the United States was already becoming an industrial country. In abandoning the city for the farm, the wage earner would lose the value of his greatest possession—his skill. Moreover, as a homesteader, his problem was far from solved by mere access to free land. Whether he went on the land or stayed in industry, he needed access to reasonably free credit. The device invented by workingmen to this end was the bizarre "greenback" idea which held their minds as if in a vise for nearly twenty years. "Greenbackism" left no such permanent trace on American social and economic structure as "Republican education" or "free land."

The lure of "greenbackism" was that it offered an opportunity for self-employment. But already in the sixties, it became clear that the workingman could not expect to attain self-employment as an individual, but if at all, it had to be sought on the basis of producers' cooperation. In the eighties, it became doubly clear that industry had gone beyond the one-man-shop stage; self-employment had to stand or fall with the cooperative or self-governing workshop. The protagonist of this most interesting and most idealistic striving of American labor was the "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," which reached its height in the middle of the eighties.

The period of the greatest enthusiasm for cooperation was between 1884 and 1887; and by 1888 the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and succumbed. The failure of cooperation proved a turning point in the evolution of the American labor program. Whatever the special causes of failure, the idealistic unionism, for which the ideas of the Declaration of Independence served as a fountain head, suffered in the eyes of labor, a degree of discredit so overwhelming that to regain its old position was no longer possible. The times were ripe for the opportunistic unionism of Gompers and the trade unionists.

These latter, having started in the seventies as Marxian socialists, had been made over into opportunistic unionists by their practical contact with American conditions. Their philosophy was narrower than that of the Knights and their concept of labor solidarity narrower still. However, these trade unionists demonstrated that they could win strikes. It was to this practical trade unionism, then, that the American labor movement turned, about 1890, when the idealism of the Knights of Labor had failed. From groping for a cooperative economic order or self-employment, labor turned with the American Federation of Labor to developing bargaining power for use against employers. This trade unionism stood for a strengthened group consciousness. While it continued to avow sympathy with the "anti-monopoly" aspirations of the "producers," who fought for the opportunity of self-employment, it also declared that the interests of democracy will be best served if the wage earners organized by themselves.

This opportunist unionism, now at last triumphant over the idealistic unionism induced by America's spiritual tradition, soon was obliged to fight against a revolutionary unionism which, like itself, was an offshoot of the socialism of the seventies. At first, the American Federation of Labor was far from hostile to socialism as a philosophy. Its attitude was rather one of mild contempt for what it considered to be wholly impracticable under American conditions, however necessary or efficacious under other conditions. When, about 1890, the socialists declared their policy of "boring from within," that is, of capturing the Federation for socialism by means of propaganda in Federation ranks, this attitude remained practically unchanged. Only when, dissatisfied with the results of boring from within, the socialists, now led by a more determined leadership, attempted in 1895 to set up a rival to the Federation in the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, was there a sharp line drawn between socialist and anti-socialist in the Federation. The issue once having become a fighting issue, the leaders of the Federation experienced the need of a positive and well rounded-out social philosophy capable of meeting socialism all along the front instead of the former self-imposed super-pragmatism.

By this time, the Federation had become sufficiently removed in point of time from its foreign origin to turn to the social ideal derived from pioneer America as the philosophy which it hoped would successfully combat an aggressive and arrogant socialism. Thus it came about that the front against socialism was built out from the immediate and practical into the ultimate and spiritual; and that inferences drawn from a reading of Jefferson's Declaration, with its emphasis on individual liberty, were pressed into service against the seductive collectivist forecasts of Marx.



CHAPTER 14

WHY THERE IS NOT AN AMERICAN LABOR PARTY

The question of a political labor party hinges, in the last analysis, on the benefits which labor expects from government. If, under the constitution, government possesses considerable power to regulate industrial relations and improve labor conditions, political power is worth striving for. If, on the contrary, the power of the government is restricted by a rigid organic law, the matter is reversed. The latter is the situation in the United States. The American constitutions, both Federal and State, contain bills of rights which embody in fullness the eighteenth-century philosophy of economic individualism and governmental laissez-faire. The courts, Federal and State, are given the right to override any law enacted by Congress or the State legislatures which may be shown to conflict with constitutional rights.

In the exercise of this right, American judges have always inclined to be very conservative in allowing the legislature to invade the province of economic freedom. At present after many years of agitation by humanitarians and trade unionists, the cause of legislative protection of child and woman laborers seems to be won in principle. But this progress has been made because it has been shown conclusively that the protection of these most helpless groups of the wage-earning class clearly falls within the scope of public purpose and is therefore a lawful exercise of the state's police power within the meaning of the constitution. However, adult male labor offers a far different case. Moreover, should the unexpected happen and the courts become converted to a broader view, the legislative standards would be small compared with the standards already enforced by most of the trade unions. Consequently, so far as adult male workers are concerned (and they are of course the great bulk of organized labor), labor in America would scarcely be justified in diverting even a part of its energy from trade unionism to a relatively unprofitable seeking of redress through legislatures and courts.[106]

But this is no more than half the story. Granting even that political power may be worth having, its attainment is beset with difficulties and dangers more than sufficient to make responsible leaders pause. The causes reside once more in the form of government, also in the general nature of American politics, and in political history and tradition. To begin with, labor would have to fight not on one front, but on forty-nine different fronts.[107]

Congress and the States have power to legislate on labor matters; also, in each, power is divided between an executive and the two houses of the legislature. Decidedly, government in America was built not for strength but for weakness. The splitting up of sovereignty does not especially interfere with the purposes of a conservative party, but to a party of social and industrial reform it offers a disheartening obstacle. A labor party, to be effective, would be obliged to capture all the diffused bits of sovereignty at the same time. A partial gain is of little avail, since it is likely to be lost at the next election even simultaneously with a new gain. But we have assumed here that the labor party had reached the point where its trials are the trials of a party in power or nearing power. In reality, American labor parties are spared this sort of trouble by trials of an anterior order residing in the nature of American politics.

The American political party system antedates the formation of modern economic classes, especially the class alignment of labor and capital. Each of the old parties represents, at least in theory, the entire American community regardless of class. Party differences are considered differences of opinion or of judgment on matters of public policy, not differences of class interest. The wage earner in America, who never had to fight for his suffrage but received it as a free gift from the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic movements and who did not therefore develop the political class consciousness which was stamped into the workers in Europe by the feeling of revolt against an upper ruling class, is prone to adopt the same view of politics. Class parties in America have always been effectively countered by the old established parties with the charge that they tend to incite class against class.

But the old parties had on numerous occasions, as we saw, an even more effective weapon. No sooner did a labor party gain a foothold, than the old party politician, the "friend of labor," did appear and start a rival attraction by a more or less verbal adherence to one or more planks of the rising party. Had he been, as in Europe, a branded spokesman of a particular economic class or interest, it would not have been difficult to ward him off. But here in America, he said that he too was a workingman and was heart and soul for the workingman. Moreover, the workingman was just as much attached to an old party label as any average American. In a way he considered it an assertion of his social equality with any other group of Americans that he could afford to take the same "disinterested" and tradition-bound view of political struggles as the rest. This is why labor parties generally encountered such disheartening receptions at the hands of workingmen; also why it was difficult to "deliver the labor vote" to any party. This, on the whole, describes the condition of affairs today as it does the situations in the past.

In the end, should the workingman be pried loose from his traditional party affiliation by a labor event of transcendent importance for the time being, should he be stirred to political revolt by an oppressive court decision, or the use of troops to break a strike; then, at the next election, when the excitement has had time to subside, he will usually return to his political normality. Moreover, should labor discontent attain depth, it may be safely assumed that either one or the other of the old parties or a faction therein will seek to divert its driving force into its own particular party channel. Should the labor party still persist, the old party politicians, whose bailiwick it will have particularly invaded, will take care to encourage, by means not always ethical but nearly always effective, strife in its ranks. Should that fail, the old parties will in the end "fuse" against the upstart rival. If they are able to stay "fused" during enough elections and also win them, the fidelity of the adherent of the third party is certain to be put to a hard and unsuccessful test. To the outsider these conclusions may appear novel, but labor in America learned these lessons through a long experience, which began when the first workingmen's parties were attempted in 1828-1832. The limited potentialities of labor legislation together with the apparent hopelessness of labor party politics compelled the American labor movement to develop a sort of non-partisan political action with limited objectives thoroughly characteristic of American conditions. Labor needs protection from interference by the courts in the exercise of its economic weapons, the strike and the boycott, upon which it is obviously obliged to place especial reliance. In other words, though labor may refuse to be drawn into the vortex of politics for the sake of positive attainments, or, that is to say, labor legislation, it is compelled to do so for the sake of a negative gain—a judicial laissez-faire. That labor does by pursuing a policy of "reward your friends" and "punish your enemies" in the sphere of politics. The method itself is an old one in the labor movement; we saw it practiced by George Henry Evans and the land reformers of the forties as well as by Steward and the advocates of the eight-hour day by law in the sixties. The American Federation of Labor merely puts it to use in connection with a new objective, namely, freedom from court interference. Although the labor vote is largely "undeliverable," still where the parties are more or less evenly matched in strength, that portion of the labor vote which is politically conscious of its economic interests may swing the election to whichever side it turns. Under certain conditions[108] labor has been known even to attain through such indirection in excess of what it might have won had it come to share in power as a labor party.

The controversy around labor in politics brings up in the last analysis the whole problem of leadership in labor organizations, or to be specific, the role of the intellectual in the movement. In America his role has been remarkably restricted. For a half century or more the educated classes had no connection with the labor movement, for in the forties and fifties, when the Brook Farm enthusiasts and their associates took up with fervor the social question, they were really alone in the field, since the protracted trade depression had laid all labor organization low. It was in the eighties, with the turmoil of the Knights of Labor and the Anarchist bomb in Chicago, that the "intellectuals" first awakened to the existence of a labor problem. To this awakening no single person contributed more than the economist Professor Richard T. Ely, then of Johns Hopkins University. His pioneer work on the Labor Movement in America published in 1886, and the works of his many capable students gave the labor movement a permanent place in the public mind, besides presenting the cause of labor with scientific precision and with a judicious balance. Among the other pioneers were preachers like Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott, who conceived their duty as that of mediators between the business class and the wage earning class, exhorting the former to deal with their employes according to the Golden Rule and the latter to moderation in their demands. Together with the economists they helped to break down the prejudice against labor unionism in so far as the latter was non-revolutionary. And though their influence was large, they understood that their maximum usefulness would be realized by remaining sympathetic outsiders and not by seeking to control the course of the labor movement.

In recent years a new type of intellectual has come to the front. A product of a more generalized mental environment than his predecessor, he is more daring in his retrospects and his prospects. He is just as ready to advance an "economic interpretation of the constitution" as to advocate a collectivistic panacea for the existing industrial and social ills. Nor did this new intellectual come at an inopportune time for getting a hearing. Confidence in social conservatism has been undermined by an exposure in the press and through legislative investigations of the disreputable doings of some of the staunchest conservatives. At such a juncture "progressivism" and a "new liberalism" were bound to come into their own in the general opinion of the country.

But the labor movement resisted. American labor, both during the periods of neglect and of moderate championing by the older generation of intellectuals, has developed a leadership wholly its own. This leadership, of which Samuel Gompers is the most notable example, has given years and years to building up a united fighting morale in the army of labor. And because the morale of an army, as these leaders thought, is strong only when it is united upon one common attainable purpose, the intellectual with his new and unfamiliar issues has been given the cold shoulder by precisely the trade unionists in whom he had anticipated to find most eager disciples. The intellectual might go from success to success in conquering the minds of the middle classes; the labor movement largely remains closed to him.

To make matters worse the intellectual has brought with him a psychology which is particularly out of fit with the American labor situation. We noted that the American labor movement became shunted from the political arena into the economic one by virtue of fundamental conditions of American political institutions and political life. However, it is precisely in political activity where the intellectual is most at home. The clear-cut logic and symmetry of political platforms based on general theories, the broad vistas which it may be made to encompass, and lastly the opportunity for eloquent self-expression offered by parliamentary debates, all taken together exert a powerful attraction for the intellectualized mind. Contrast with this the prosaic humdrum work of a trade union leader, the incessant wrangling over "small" details and "petty" grievances, and the case becomes exceedingly clear. The mind of the typical intellectual is too generalized to be lured by any such alternative. He is out of patience with mere amelioration, even though it may mean much in terms of human happiness to the worker and his family.

When in 1906, in consequence of the heaping up of legal disabilities upon the trade unions, American labor leaders turned to politics to seek a restraining hand upon the courts,[109] the intellectuals foresaw a political labor party in the not distant future. They predicted that one step would inevitably lead to another, that from a policy of bartering with the old parties for anti-injunction planks in their platforms, labor would turn to a political party of its own. The intellectual critic continues to view the political action of the American Federation of Labor as the first steps of an invalid learning to walk; and hopes that before long he will learn to walk with a firmer step, without feeling tempted to lean upon the only too willing shoulders of old-party politicians. On the contrary, the Federation leaders, as we know, regard their political work as a necessary evil, due to an unfortunate turn of affairs, which forces them from time to time to step out of their own trade union province in order that their natural enemy, the employing class, might get no aid and comfort from an outside ally.

Of late a rapprochement between the intellectual and trade unionist has begun to take place. However, it is not founded on the relationship of leader and led, but only on a business relationship, or that of giver and receiver of paid technical advice. The role of the trained economist in handling statistics and preparing "cases" for trade unionists before boards of arbitration is coming to be more and more appreciated. The railway men's organizations were first to put the intellectual to this use, the miners and others followed. From this it is still a far cry to the role of such intellectuals as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, G.D.H. Cole and the Fabian Research group in England, who have really permeated the British labor movement with their views on labor policy. However, there is also a place for the American intellectual as an ally of trade unionism, not only as its paid servant. The American labor movement has committed a grave and costly error because it has not made use of the services of writers, journalists, lecturers, and speakers to popularize its cause with the general public. Some of its recent defeats, notably the steel strike of 1919, were partly due to the neglect to provide a sufficient organization of labor publicity to counteract the anti-union publicity by the employers.

FOOTNOTES:

[106] This assumes that the legislative program of labor would deal primarily with the regulation of labor conditions in private employment analogous to the legislative program of the British trade unions until recent years. Should labor in America follow the newer program of labor in Britain and demand the taking over of industries by government with compensation, it is not certain that the courts would prove as serious a barrier as in the other case. However, the situation would remain unchanged so far as the difficulties discussed in the remainder of this chapter are concerned.

[107] For the control of the national government and of the forty-eight State governments.

[108] Such as a state of war; see above, 235-236.

[109] See above, 203-204.



CHAPTER 15

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT AND TRADE UNIONISM

The rise of a political and economic dictatorship by the wage-earning class in revolutionary Russia in 1917 has focussed public opinion on the labor question as no other event ever did. But one will scarcely say that it has tended to clarity of thought. On the one hand, the conservative feels confirmed in his old suspicions that there is something inherently revolutionary in any labor movement. The extreme radical, on the other hand, is as uncritically hopeful for a Bolshevist upheaval in America as the conservative or reactionary is uncritically fearful. Both forget that an effective social revolution is not the product of mere chance and "mob psychology," nor even of propaganda however assiduous, but always of a new preponderance of power as between contending economic classes.

To students of the social sciences, it is self-evident that the prolonged rule of the proletariat in Russia in defiance of nearly the whole world must be regarded as a product of Russian life, past and present. In fact, the continued Bolshevist rule seems to be an index of the relative fighting strength of the several classes in Russian society—the industrial proletariat, the landed and industrial propertied class, and the peasantry.

It is an irony of fate that the same revolution which purports to enact into life the Marxian social program should belie the truth of Marx's materialistic interpretation of history and demonstrate that history is shaped by both economic and non-economic forces. Marx, as is well known, taught that history is a struggle between classes, in which the landed aristocracy, the capitalist class, and the wage earning class are raised successively to rulership as, with the progress of society's technical equipment, first one and then another class can operate it with the maximum efficiency. Marx assumed that when the time has arrived for a given economic class to take the helm, that class will be found in full possession of all the psychological attributes of a ruling class, namely, an indomitable will to power, no less than the more vulgar desire for the emoluments that come with power. Apparently, Marx took for granted that economic evolution is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding development of an effective will to power in the class destined to rule. Yet, whatever may be the case in the countries of the West, in Russia the ruling classes, the gentry and the capitalists, clearly failed in the psychological test at the critical time. This failure is amply attested by the manner in which they submitted practically without a fight after the Bolshevist coup d'etat.

To get at the secret of this apparent feebleness and want of spunk in Russia's ruling class one must study a peculiarity of her history, namely, the complete dominance of Russia's development by organized government. Where the historian of the Western countries must take account of several independent forces, each standing for a social class, the Russian historian may well afford to station himself on the high peak of government and, from this point of vantage, survey the hills and vales of the society which it so thoroughly dominated.

Apolitism runs like a red thread through the pages of Russian history. Even the upper layer of the old noble class, the "Boyars," were but a shadow of the Western contemporary medieval landed aristocracy. When the several principalities became united with the Czardom of Muscovy many centuries ago, the Boyar was in fact no more than a steward of the Czar's estate and a leader of a posse defending his property; the most he dared to do was surreptitiously to obstruct the carrying out of the Czar's intentions; he dared not try to impose the will of his class upon the crown. The other classes were even more apolitical. So little did the several classes aspire to domination that they missed many golden opportunities to seize and hold a share of the political power. In the seventeenth century, when the government was exceptionally weak after what is known as the "period of troubles," it convoked periodical "assemblies of the land" to help administer the country. But, as a matter of fact, these assemblies considered themselves ill used because they were asked to take part in government and not once did they aspire to an independent position in the Russian body politic. Another and perhaps even more striking instance we find a century and a half later. Catherine the Great voluntarily turned over the local administration to the nobles and to that end decreed that the nobility organize themselves into provincial associations. But so little did the nobility care for political power and active class prerogative that, in spite of the broadest possible charters, the associations of nobles were never more than social organizations in the conventional sense of the word.

Even less did the commercial class aspire to independence. In the West of Europe mercantilism answered in an equal measure the needs of an expanding state and of a vigorous middle class, the latter being no less ardent in the pursuit of gain than the former in the pursuit of conquest. In Russia, on the other hand, when Peter the Great wanted manufacturing, he had to introduce it by government action. Hence, Russian mercantilism was predominantly a state mercantilism. Even where Peter succeeded in enlisting private initiative by subsidies, instead of building up a class of independent manufacturers, he merely created industrial parasites and bureaucrats without initiative of their own, who forever kept looking to the government.

Coming to more recent times, we find that the modern Russian factory system likewise owes its origin to governmental initiative, namely, to the government's railway-building policy. The government built the railways for strategic and fiscal reasons but incidentally created a unified internal market which made mass-production of articles of common consumption profitable for the first time. But, even after Russian capitalism was thus enabled to stand on its own feet, it did not unlearn the habit of leaning on the government for advancement rather than relying on its own efforts. On its part the autocratic government was loath to let industry alone. The government generously dispensed to the capitalists tariff protection and bounties in the form of profitable orders, but insisted on keeping industry under its thumb. And though they might chafe, still the capitalists never neglected to make the best of the situation. For instance, when the sugar producers found themselves running into a hole from cut-throat competition, they appealed to the Minister of Finances, who immediately created a government-enforced "trust" and assured them huge dividends. Since business success was assured by keeping on the proper footing with a generous government rather than by relying on one's own vigor, it stands to reason that, generally speaking, the capitalists and especially the larger capitalists, could develop only into a class of industrial courtiers. And when at last the autocracy fell, the courtiers were not to be turned overnight into stubborn champions of the rights of their class amid the turmoil of a revolution. To be sure, Russia had entered the capitalistic stage as her Marxians had predicted, but nevertheless her capitalists were found to be lacking the indomitable will to power which makes a ruling class.

The weakness of the capitalists in the fight on behalf of private property may be explained in part by their want of allies in the other classes in the community. The Russian peasant, reared in the atmosphere of communal land ownership, was far from being a fanatical defender of private property. No Thiers could have rallied a Russian peasant army for the suppression of a communistic industrial wage-earning class by an appeal to their property instinct. To make matters worse for the capitalists, the peasant's strongest craving was for more land, all the land, without compensation! This the capitalists, being capitalists, were unable to grant. Yet it was the only sort of currency which the peasant would accept in payment for his political support. In November, 1917, when the Bolsheviki seized the government, one of their first acts was to satisfy the peasant's land hunger by turning over to his use all the land. The "proletariat" had then a free hand so far as the most numerous class in Russia was concerned.

Just as the capitalist class reached the threshold of the revolution psychologically below par, so the wage-earning class in developing the will to rule outran all expectations and beat the Marxian time-schedule. Among the important contributing factors was the unity of the industrial laboring class, a unity broken by no rifts between highly paid skilled groups and an inferior unskilled class, or between a well-organized labor aristocracy and an unorganized helot class. The economic and social oppression under the old regime had seen to it that no group of laborers should possess a stake in the existing order or desire to separate from the rest. Moreover, for several decades, and especially since the memorable days of the revolution of 1905, the laboring class has been filled by socialistic agitators and propagandists with ideas of the great historical role of the proletariat. The writer remembers how in 1905 even newspapers of the moderately liberal stamp used to speak of the "heroic proletariat marching in the van of Russia's progress." No wonder then that, when the revolution came, the industrial wage earners had developed such self-confidence as a class that they were tempted to disregard the dictum of their intellectual mentors that this was merely to be a bourgeois revolution—with the social revolution still remote. Instead they listened to the slogan "All power to the Soviets."

The idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" reached maturity in the course of the abortive revolution of 1905-1906. After a victory for the people in October, 1905, the bourgeoisie grew frightened over the aggressiveness of the wage-earning class and sought safety in an understanding with the autocracy. An order by the Soviet of Petrograd workmen in November, 1905, decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of champions of popular liberty against autocracy. If the bourgeoisie itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary socialists, why have such a democracy at all? Have we not seen the democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in Europe and America? Why run at all the risk of corruption of the post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists? Why first admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and effort in preventing them from coming to the top? Therefore, they declined parliamentarism with thanks and would accept nothing less than a government by the representative organ of the workers—the Soviets.

If we are right in laying the emphasis on the relative fighting will and fighting strength of the classes struggling for power rather than on the doctrines which they preach and the methods, fair or foul, which they practice, then the American end of the problem, too, appears in a new light. No longer is it in the main a matter of taking sides for or against the desirability of a Bolshevist rule or a dictatorship by the proletariat, but a matter of ascertaining the relative strength and probable behavior of the classes in a given society. It is as futile to "see red" in America because of Bolshevism in Russia as to yearn for Bolshevism's advent in the United States. Either view misses the all-important point that so far as social structure is concerned America is the antipodes of Russia, where the capitalists have shown little fighting spirit, where the tillers of the soil are only first awakening to a conscious desire for private property and are willing to forego their natural share in government for a gift of land, and where the industrial proletariat is the only class ready and unafraid to fight. Bolshevism is unthinkable in America, because, even if by some imaginable accident the government were overthrown and a labor dictatorship declared, it could never "stay put." No one who knows the American business class will even dream that it would under any circumstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities. A Bolshevist coup d'etat in America would mean a civil war to the bitter end, and a war in which the numerous class of farmers would join the capitalists in the defense of the institution of private property.[110]

But it is not only because the preponderance of social power in the United States is so decisively with private property that America is proof against a social upheaval like the Russian one. Another and perhaps as important a guarantee of her social stability is found in her four million organized trade unionists. For, however unjustly they may feel to have been treated by the employers or the government; however slow they may find the realization of their ideals of collective bargaining in industry; their stakes in the existing order, both spiritual and material, are too big to reconcile them to revolution. The truth is that the revolutionary labor movement in America looms up much bigger than it actually is. Though in many strikes since the famous textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1911, the leadership was revolutionary, it does not follow that the rank and file was animated by the same purpose. Given an inarticulate mass of grievously exploited workers speaking many foreign tongues and despised alike by the politician, the policeman, and the native American labor organizer; given a group of energetic revolutionary agitators who make the cause of these workers their own and become their spokesmen and leaders; and a situation will clearly arise where thousands of workmen will be apparently marshalled under the flag of revolution while in reality it is the desire for a higher wage and not for a realization of the syndicalist program that reconciles them to starving their wives and children and to shedding their blood on picket duty. If they follow a Haywood or an Ettor, it is precisely because they have been ignored by a Golden or a Gompers.

Withal, then, trade unionism, despite an occasional revolutionary facet and despite a revolutionary clamor especially on its fringes, is a conservative social force. Trade unionism seems to have the same moderating effect upon society as a wide diffusion of private property. In fact the gains of trade unionism are to the worker on a par with private property to its owner. The owner regards his property as a protective dyke between himself and a ruthless biological struggle for existence; his property means liberty and opportunity to escape dictation by another man, an employer or "boss," or at least a chance to bide his time until a satisfactory alternative has presented itself for his choice. The French peasants in 1871 who flocked to the army of the government of Versailles to suppress the Commune of Paris (the first attempt in history of a proletarian dictatorship), did so because they felt that were the workingmen to triumph and abolish private property, they, the peasants, would lose a support in their daily struggle for life for the preservation of which it was worth endangering life itself. And having acquired relative protection in their private property, small though it might be, they were unwilling to permit something which were it to succeed would lose them their all.

Now with some exceptions every human being is a "protectionist," provided he does possess anything at all which protects him and which is therefore worth being protected by him in turn. The trade unionist, too, is just such a protectionist. When his trade union has had the time and opportunity to win for him decent wages and living conditions, a reasonable security of the job, and at least a partial voice in shop management, he will, on the relatively high and progressive level of material welfare which capitalism has called into being, be chary to raze the existing economic system to the ground on the chance of building up a better one in its place. A reshuffling of the cards, which a revolution means, might conceivably yield him a better card, but then again it might make the entire stack worthless by destroying the stakes for which the game is played. But the revolution might not even succeed in the first round; then the ensuing reaction would probably destroy the trade union and with it would go the chance of a recovery of the original ground, modest though that may have been. In practice, therefore, the trade union movements in nearly all nations[111] have served as brakes upon the respective national socialist movements; and, from the standpoint of society interested in its own preservation against catastrophic change, have played and are playing a role of society's policemen and watch-dogs over the more revolutionary groups in the wage-earning class. These are largely the unorganized and ill-favored groups rendered reckless because, having little to lose from a revolution, whatever the outcome might be, they fear none.

In America, too, there is a revolutionary class which, unlike the striking textile workers in 1911-1913, owes its origin neither to chance nor to neglect by trade union leaders. This is the movement of native American or Americanized workers in the outlying districts of the West or South—the typical I.W.W., the migratory workers, the industrial rebels, and the actors in many labor riots and lumber-field strikes. This type of worker has truly broken with America's spiritual past. He has become a revolutionist either because his personal character and habits unfit him for success under the exacting capitalistic system; or because, starting out with the ambitions and rosy expectations of the early pioneer, he found his hopes thwarted by a capitalistic preemptor of the bounty of nature, who dooms to a wage-earner's position all who came too late. In either case he is animated by a genuine passion for revolution, a passion which admits no compromise. Yet his numbers are too few to threaten the existing order.

In conclusion, American trade unionism, no matter whether the American Federation of Labor keeps its old leaders or replaces them by "progressives" or socialists, seems in a fair way to continue its conservative function—so long as no overpowering open-shop movement or "trustification" will break up the trade unions or render them sterile. The hope of American Bolshevism will, therefore, continue to rest with the will of employers to rule as autocrats.

FOOTNOTES:

[110] Though writers and public speakers of either extreme have often overlooked the fundamental consideration of where the preponderance of social power lies in their prognostications of revolutions, this has not escaped the leaders of the American labor movement. The vehemence with which the leaders of the American Federation of Labor have denounced Sovietism and Bolshevism, and which has of late been brought to a high pitch by a fear lest a shift to radicalism should break up the organization, is doubtless sincere. But one cannot help feeling that in part at least it aimed to reassure the great American middle class on the score of labor's intentions. The great majority of organized labor realize that, though at times they may risk engaging in unpopular strikes, it will never do to permit their enemies to tar them with the pitch of subversionism in the eyes of the great American majority—a majority which remains wedded to the regime of private property and individual enterprise despite the many recognized shortcomings of the institution.

[111] Notably in Germany since the end of the World War.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

The first seven chapters of the present work are based on the History of Labour in the United States by John R. Commons and Associates,[112] published in 1918 in two volumes by the Macmillan Company, New York. The major portion of the latter was in turn based on A Documentary History of the American Industrial Society, edited by Professor Commons and published in 1910 in ten volumes by Clark and Company, Cleveland. In preparing chapters 8 to 11, dealing with the period since 1897, which is not covered in the History of Labour, the author used largely the same sort of material as that in the preparation of the above named works; namely, original sources such as proceedings of trade union conventions, labor and employer papers, government reports, etc. There are, however, many excellent special histories relating to the recent period in the labor movement, especially histories of unionism in individual trades or industries, to which the author wishes to refer the reader for more ample accounts of the several phases of the subject, which he himself was of necessity obliged to treat but briefly. The following is a selected list of such works together with some others relating to earlier periods:

BARNETT, GEORGE E., The Printers—A Study in American Trade Unionism, American Economic Association, 1909.

BING, ALEXANDER M., War-Time Strikes and their Adjustment, Dutton and Co., 1921.

BONNETT, CLARENCE E., Employers' Associations in the United States, Macmillan, 1922.

BRISSENDEN, PAUL F., The I.W.W.—A Study in American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1920.

BROOKS, JOHN G., American Syndicalism: The I.W.W., Macmillan, 1913.

BUDISH AND SOULE, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry, Harcourt, 1920.

CARLTON, FRANK T., Economic Influences upon Educational Progress in the United States, 1820-1850, University of Wisconsin, 1908.

DEIBLER, FREDERICK S., The Amalgamated Wood Workers' International Union of America, University of Wisconsin, 1912.

FITCH, JOHN L., The Steel Workers, Russell Sage Foundation, 1911.

HOAGLAND, HENRY E., Wage Bargaining on the Vessels of the Great Lakes, University of Illinois, 1915.

———, Collective Bargaining in the Lithographic Industry, Columbia University, 1917.

INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT, Commission of Inquiry, Report on the Steel Strike of 1919, Harcourt, 1920.

LAIDLER, HARRY, Socialism in Thought and Action, Macmillan, 1920.

ROBBINS, EDWIN C., Railway Conductors—A Study in Organized Labor, Columbia University, 1914.

SCHLUeTER, HERMAN, The Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workmen's Movement in America, International Union of Brewery Workmen, 1910.

SUFFERN, ARTHUR E., Conciliation and Arbitration in the Coal Mining Industry in America, Mifflin, 1915.

SYDENSTRICKER, EDGAR, Collective Bargaining in the Anthracite Coal Industry, Bulletin No. 191 of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1916.

WOLMAN, LEO, The Boycott in American Trade Unions, Johns Hopkins University, 1916.

Labor Encyclopedias:

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR, History, Encyclopedia, Reference Book, American Federation of Labor, 1919.

BROWNE, WALDO R., What's What in the Labor Movement, Huebsch, 1921.

FOOTNOTE:

[112] See Author's Preface.

THE END