it has never been explained, even to those most interested in its
support. All that is known is that on February 3 the strike was called
off at a meeting of the Strikers' Executive Committee, at which Mr.
T.A. Rickert, president of the United Garment Workers of America, and
his organizers, were present. This was done, without consulting the
Joint Conference Board, which for fourteen weeks had had charge of
the strike, and which was composed of representatives from the United
Garment Workers of America, the Garment Workers' local District
Council, the strikers' own Executive Committee, the Chicago Federation
of Labor, and the Women's Trade Union League.
This meant the close of the struggle. Three out of the four commissary
stations were closed the following day, and the fourth a week later.
As regards the great mass of strikers then left, it was but a hunger
bargain. They had to return to work without any guarantee for fair
treatment, without any agency through which grievances could be dealt
with, or even brought before the employers. And hundreds of the
workers had not even the poor comfort that they could go back.
Business was disorganized, work was slack, and the Association houses
would not even try to make room for their rebellious employés. The
refusal of work would be made more bitter by the manner of its
refusal. Several were met with the gibe, "You're a good speaker,
go down to your halls, they want you there." One employer actually
invited a returned striker into his private office, shook hands with
him as if in welcome, and then told him it was his last visit, he
might go!
The beginning of the present stage of the industrial rebellion among
working-women in the United States may be said to have been made with
the immense garment-workers' strikes. All have been strikes of the
unorganized, the common theory that strikes must have their origin in
the mischief-breeding activities of the walking delegate finding no
confirmation here. They were strikes of people who knew not what
a union was, making protest in the only way known to them against
intolerable conditions, and the strikers were mostly very young women.
One most significant fact was that they had the support of a national
body of trade-union women, banded together in a federation, working
on the one hand with organized labor, and on the other bringing in as
helpers large groups of outside women. Such measure of success as came
to the strikers, and the indirect strengthening of the woman's cause,
which has since borne such fruit, was in great part due to the
splendid reinforcement of organized labor, through the efforts of this
league of women's unions.
I need touch but lightly on the strikes in other branches of the
sewing trades, where the history of the uprising was very similar.
In July, 1910, 70,000 cloak-makers of New York were out on strike
for nine weeks asking shorter hours, increase of wages; and sanitary
conditions in their workshops. All these and some minor demands were
in the end granted by the Manufacturers' Association, who controlled
the trade, but the settlement nearly went to pieces on the rock of
union recognition. An arrangement was eventually arrived at, on the
suggestion of Mr. Louis Brandeis, that the principle of preference
to unionists, first enforced in Australia, should be embodied in the
agreement. Under this plan, union standards as to hours of labor,
rates of wages and working conditions prevail, and, when hiring help,
union men of the necessary qualifications and degree of skill must
have precedence over non-union men. With the signing of the agreement
the strike ended.
January, 1913, saw another group of garment-workers on strike in New
York. This time there were included men and women in the men's garment
trades, also the white-goods-workers, the wrapper and kimono-makers,
and the ladies' waist-and dress-makers. There is no means of knowing
how many workers were out at any one time, but the number was
estimated at over 100,000. The white-goods-workers embraced the
very youngest girls, raw immigrants from Italy and Russia, whom the
manufacturers set to work as soon as they were able to put plain seams
through the machine, and this was all the skill they ever attained.
These children from their extreme youth and inexperience were
peculiarly exposed to danger from the approaches of cadets of the
underworld, and an appeal went out for a large number of women to
patrol the streets, and see that the girls at least had the protection
of their presence.
The employers belonging to the Dress and Waist Manufacturers'
Association made terms with their people, after a struggle, under an
agreement very similar to that described above in connection with the
cloak-makers.
One of the most satisfactory results of the strikes among the
garment-workers has been the standardizing of the trade wherever an
agreement has been procured and steadily adhered to. It is not only
that hours are shorter and wages improved, and the health and safety
of the worker guarded, and work spread more evenly over the entire
year, but the harassing dread of the cut without notice, and of
wholesale, uncalled-for dismissals is removed. Thus is an element
of certainty and a sense of method and order introduced. Above all,
home-work is abolished.
In an unstandardized trade there can be no certainty as to wages and
hours, while there is a constant tendency to level down under the
pressure of unchecked competition from both above and below. There is
too frequent breaking of factory laws and ignoring of the city's fire
and health ordinances, because the unorganized workers dare not, on
peril of losing their jobs, insist that laws and ordinances were made
to be kept and not broken. Also, in any trade where a profit can be
made by giving out work, as in the sewing trades, we find, unless this
is prevented by organization or legislation, an enormous amount of
home-work, ill-paid and injurious to all, cutting down the wages
of the factory hands, and involving the wholesale exploitation of
children.
Home-work the unions will have none of, and therefore, wherever the
collective bargain has been struck and kept, there we find the giving
out of work from the factory absolutely forbidden, the home guarded
from the entrance of the contractor, motherhood respected, babyhood
defended from the outrage of child labor, and a higher standard of
living secured for the family by the higher and securer earnings of
the normal breadwinners.
Everywhere on the continent the results of these strikes have been
felt, women's strikes as they have been for the most part. The trade
unionists of this generation have been encouraged in realizing
how much fight there was in these young girls. All labor has been
inspired. In trade after trade unorganized workers have learned the
meaning of the words "the solidarity of labor," and it has become
to them an article of faith. Whether it has been button-workers in
Muscatine, or corset-workers in Kalamazoo, shoe-workers in St. Louis,
or textile-workers in Lawrence, whether the struggle has been crowned
with success or crushed into the dust of failure, the workers have
been heartened to fight the more bravely because of the thrilling
example set them by the garment-workers, and have thus brought the day
of deliverance for all a little nearer hand.
Again, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the public has been taught
many lessons. The immense newspaper publicity, which could never have
been obtained except for a struggle on a stupendous scale, has proved
a campaign of education for young and old, for business man and
farmer, for lawyer and politician, for housewife and for student.
It has left the manufacturer less cocksure of the soundness of his
individualist philosophy. More often is he found explaining and even
apologizing for industrial conditions, which of yore he would have
ignored as non-existent. He can no longer claim from the public his
aforetime undisputed privilege of running his own business as he
pleases, without concern for either the wishes or the welfare of
employés and community.
The results are also seen in the fact that it is now so much easier
to get the workers' story across the footlights in smaller local
struggles, such as those of the porcelain-workers in Trenton and! the
waitresses in Chicago; in the increasing success in putting through
legislation for the limitation of hours and the regulation of wages
for the poorest paid in state after state. By state or by nation
one body after another is set the task of doing something towards
accounting for the unceasing industrial unrest, towards solving the
general industrial problem. Even if to some of us the remedial
plans outlined seem to fall far short of the mark, they still are a
beginning and are a foretaste of better things ahead.
The conferences and discussions on unemployment are an admission,
however belated, that a society which has, in the interests of the
privileged classes, permitted the exploitation of the worker, must
face the consequences, bear some of the burden, and do its share
towards preventing the continuance of the evil. We do not cure
smallpox by punishing the patient, nor do we thus prevent its
recurrence among others. We handle the disease both by treating the
sick person himself, and by finding the causes that lead to its
spread, and arresting these. Industrial eruptive diseases have to
be dealt with in like fashion, the cause sought for, and the social
remedy applied fearlessly.
V
THE IMMIGRANT WOMAN AND ORGANIZATION
The melting-pot of the races is also the melting-pot of nationalities.
The drama that we are witnessing in America is a drama on a more
tremendous scale than can ever have been staged in the world before.
By the unawakened and so-called pure American the incoming Italian or
Jew is regarded as an outsider, who may be graciously permitted to hew
wood and draw water, to forge steel in a rolling-mill or to sew in a
factory, to cut ice or make roads for the rest of us, and who may,
on the other hand, be given the cold shoulder more or less politely,
generally less, when it comes to acquaintanceship, to the simple
democratic social intercourse which we share with those whom we admit
as our equals.
I, too, am an immigrant, although an English-speaking and Anglo-Saxon
immigrant. Therefore I am accepted among Americans as one of
themselves. But there comes to me often a bitter sense of separation
from my fellow-immigrants, a separation by not one wall, but many.
First, the wall we none of us can help, the wall raised by difference
of language. Next, the wall raised by different manners and customs.
This we might try to scale oftener than we do. Again, there are
separating walls, harder than these either to surmount or to lay low,
walls of provincial arrogance and crass self-satisfaction, and the
racial pride that is mostly another name for primitive ignorance.
An ordinary city-dwelling American or an English-speaking foreigner
earning a living in business or in one of the professions or even in
some of the skilled trades might live a lifetime in the United States
and never meet non-Americanized foreigners socially at all. In church
or club or on the footing of private entertainment these first-comers
and their friends keep themselves to themselves. And although among us
such race-defined limits are less hard and fast than, say, the lines
of class in old European countries, still there they are. The less
enlightened do not even think about the immigrant within our shores
at all. Those somewhat more advanced will talk glibly about the
Americanization of the foreigner that is going on all the time. So is
it. That is true, but the point here to be noted is that the desirable
and inevitable process of the Americanization of the foreigner, and
his assimilation by and into the American nation takes place outside
the charmed circles wherein these good respectable folks dwell; takes
place in spite of their indifference; takes place without their active
assistance, without their coöperation, save and except so far as that
coöperation is unconscious and unavoidable.
The Americanizing process takes place in the street, in the cars, in
the stores, in the workshop, at the theater, and the nickel show, in
the wheatfield and on the icefield; best and quickest of all in the
school, and nowhere so consciously as in the trade union, for all that
section of foreigners whom organized labor has been able to reach
and draw into its fold. Carried out for the most part in crude and
haphazard fashion the process goes on, only in the vast majority of
cases it is far slower than it need be.
Too many are but little touched, or touched only in painful ways by
the Americanizing process, especially the married women who stay in
their homes. Their lot is so often a tragedy. They have lost their own
country and yet have not gained another. Even this is not the worst.
The younger folks are in some fashion made over into American men and
women. And here comes in the crucial question which concerns something
more than universality of opportunity, quality of opportunity. These
little Poles and Ruthenians and Bohemians are finally made over into
Americans. Their life-contribution will be given to the generation now
growing up, of which they will form a part. We want that contribution
to be as fine as possible. They cannot give more than they themselves
are. And what they are to be in very large part we are making them.
Will they not be all the finer citizens-to-be if we come closer to
them and to their parents in the warm friendly social relations of
life?
The plane of social intercourse is the last to be transformed by
democracy. Here is it that aristocratic and undemocratic limitations
hamper us the longest. Here we are still far behind the fine, free and
admirable planing out of differences, and rounding off of angles and
making over of characters that is part of the democracy of the street
and the marketplace. Here between strangers is the closest physical
nearness. Here the common need to live and earn a living supplies a
mutual education through the very acts of serving and being served,
of buying and selling and using the common thoroughfares and means
of transportation. And that basic democracy of the street and the
marketplace is all between strangers.
It is the very fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of
racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings
of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder
of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right
adjustments being made, and made early. But to the observer whose eyes
are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing a
warfare of Titans, that in these prosaic American communities it is
world powers that are in clash and in conflict while in preparation
for the harmony to be.
Upon careful consideration it would appear that the immigrant problem
is only a slightly varied expression of the general social and
economic problem. It focuses public attention because the case of the
immigrant is so extreme. For instance, whatever conditions, industrial
or civic, press hardly upon the American worker, these conditions
press with yet greater hardship upon the alien. The alien and his
difficulties form therefore a first point of contact, the point where
the social reformer begins with his suggestions for improvement.
The very same thought unconsciously forms the basis of many of the
proposed methods of dealing with the immigrant, however startlingly
these may differ from one another in expression. On the one hand we
have such suggestions as that of Mr. Paul Kellogg, which he called "A
Labor Tariff, A Minimum Wage for the Immigrant." It does not take
very acute reasoning to perceive that if such a proposal were ever to
become law, it would not be very long before there would have to be a
universal minimum wage for everyone.
On the other hand, Mr. Edward B. Whitney in his Memorandum appended to
the Report of the Commission of the State of New York argues thus
in discussing the claim made by the majority of the Commission that
certain special help and protection is needed by the alien. He asks
"whether, if a further extension of this kind of state charity is to
be made, it would not be better to take up something for the benefit
of our own citizens or for the benefit of citizen and alien alike."
Mr. Whitney is entirely logical. Only progress rarely takes place for
logical reasons, or on lines dictated by logic, but it does in
almost all cases follow the line of least resistance, and the wise
progressive accepts gratefully whatever he can get, without being too
anxious as to whether it seems to be logically the next step or not.
The immigrant has hitherto been used as an excuse to permit the
dehumanizing of our cities; he has been used industrially as an
instrument to make life harder for the hardly pressed classes of
workers whom he joined on his arrival here. That such has been his
sorry function has been his misfortune as well as theirs. Would it not
be equally natural and far more fair to utilize his presence among us
to raise our civic and economic and industrial standards? It is no
new story, this. Out of every social problem we can construct a
stepping-stone to something better and higher than was before. The
most that we know of health has been learned through a study of
the misadjustments that bring about disease. What has been done
educationally to assist the defective, the handicapped and the
dependent has thrown a flood of light upon the training of the normal
child. Through work undertaken in the first instance for the benefit
of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.
In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and
women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they
are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their
unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite
natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them
so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the
schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in
others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children
when grown but a little older.
We shall find that whatever we do for the immigrant will be, in the
end, so much accomplished for the good of all. Let us lessen this
unfair pressure upon him, as far as we can, and we shall surely find
that in helping him to help himself, we have, at the same time,
benefited all workers.
It is easy to see that the great strikes in the sewing and textile
trades of the last few years have proved a searchlight especially into
women's industrial conditions, educating the whole public by informing
them of the terrible price paid for our comfort by the makers of the
commonest articles of household purchase and use, the sacrifice of
youth, health, happiness, and life itself demanded by any industry
which exacts of the employés cruelly long hours of work at an
exhausting speed, and which for such overwork pays them wretchedly.
These uprisings have besides stimulated to an encouraging degree the
forming of an intelligent public opinion upon the problem of the
immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards
the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of
the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story,
illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can
be in relation to immigrant problems.
"Not long ago," she says, "I listened to a paper by a sanitary
engineer, on the relation between the immigrant and public health. It
was based on a study of typhoid fever in a certain city in the United
States. He showed that most typhoid epidemics started among our
foreign colonies, and spread to other sections. This, he explained, is
because the foreigner has been accustomed to a pure water supply, and
is therefore much more susceptible to typhoid than the American
who has struggled since birth against the diseases which come from
polluted water.
"Instead, then, of urging this as an additional reason for giving
us all decent water, he drew the remarkable conclusion that in the
interests of the public health, some new basis for the exclusion of
immigrants must be adopted. In this way," Miss Abbott adds, "most
discussions on the immigrant are diverted, and leave the fundamental
problems quite untouched. For whether we adopt a literary and physique
test, increase the head-tax, and do all the other things suggested by
the restrictionists, thousands of immigrants will continue to come to
us every year."
Apart from general considerations, these gigantic industrial
upheavals have afforded to the public-spirited citizen an unsurpassed
opportunity of understanding and appreciating the industrial problem
as it affects and is affected by the immigrant girl and young woman. A
few of us, here and there, from personal and trade experience knew the
facts years ago as well as they are generally known today. But not
all the Government reports, not an army of investigators could have
imparted this knowledge to the public, and impressed upon them the
sordid suffering of the working and living conditions of the foreign
woman in the sewing trades in any great American city.
For in strikes of such magnitude, where whole groups of the
participators themselves lived for months in a white heat of idealism
and enthusiasm, life-stories are no longer dragged out of shy retiring
girls, but are poured out in a burning flood by those very same girls,
now quite transformed by the revolution through which they have
passed, and by the new ideas of liberty and sisterhood with which they
are possessed.
I speak of the woman worker here, because it is she who is my concern
at present, and in all the now historic strikes she has played a very
large part. Indeed in the first of these risings, in the shirtwaist
strikes of 1909-1910 in New York and Philadelphia, very few men
workers were involved, and in the huge Chicago strike, 1910-1911,
among the makers of men's ready-made clothing, although there the girl
strikers numbered only about one-fourth of the whole, even that fourth
made up the very respectable total of, it is believed, somewhere
around 10,000 individuals, the population of a small city. Indeed it
would give most Americans pause to be told that in this same Chicago
strike the whole of the workers, men and women together, numbered more
than the troops that Washington was able to place in the field at any
one time during the War of Independence.
Most of these strikes have been strikes of unorganized workers, who
did not know even of the existence of a union till after they had gone
out, and therefore with no idea of appealing to an organization for
even moral support. In Chicago the strikers belonged to nine different
nationalities, speaking as many different languages, so it is clear
that the pressure must have been indeed irresistible that forced so
many thousands with apparently no common meeting-ground or even common
means of communication out of the shops into the street. When
the organized strike, they know why. When the unorganized of one
nationality and one tongue strike, they can tell one another why. Yet
these people struck in spots all over the city almost simultaneously,
although in most cases without any knowledge by one group that other
groups were also resisting oppression and making a last stand against
any further degradation of their poor standards of living. Amid every
variety of shop grievance, and with the widest possible difference
in race, language and customs, they shared two disadvantageous
conditions: industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were
subject races. Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine
nationalities. These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another
complicating and intensifying the struggle. But because of this very
intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real
questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into
wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers
and sisters. To him they could be one group, for their interests
were one, and they had been too long separated from him and from one
another by the accidents of birth and speech.