intensity, has been the suffrage movement in Great Britain. That
movement has educated the public of this country, as they never would
have been educated by any movement confined to this country alone.
Inside the ranks of enrolled suffragists it has been an inspiration,
showering upon their cause a new baptism of mingled tears and
rejoicing. In calmer mood we have learned from our British sisters
much regarding policies adapted to modern situations, and they
have assuredly shown us all sorts of new and original methods of
organization and education. The immense and nation-wide publicity
given by the press of the United States to the more striking and
sensational aspects of the British movement and all the subsequent
talk and writing in other quarters has roused to sex-consciousness
thousands of American women of all classes who had not been previously
interested in the movement for obtaining full citizenship for
themselves and their daughters. These women also aroused, and men,
too, have furnished the huge audiences which have everywhere greeted
such speakers as Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Philip Snowden, when in
person they have presented the mighty story of the transatlantic
struggle. There is no difficulty nowadays in gathering suffrage
audiences anywhere, for the man and the woman walking along the street
supply them to the open-air speaker in the large city and the little
country town as one by one city and town take up the new methods.
Even more close to lasting work for all the issues that affect the
community through placing upon women an ordered civic responsibility
are the plans for the organizing under different names of woman
suffrage parties and civic leagues which blend the handling of local
activities everywhere with a demand for the ballot in keeping with the
needs of the modern community. No clear-eyed woman can work long in
this sort of atmosphere without realizing how unequally social burdens
press, how unequally social advantages are allotted, whether the
burdens come through hours of work, inadequate remuneration, sanitary
conditions, whether in home or in factory, and whether the advantages
are obtainable through public education, vocational training, medical
care, or in the large field of recreation.
So important does work through organization, appear to me that,
remembering always that tendencies are more important than conditions,
it would seem in some respects a more wholesome and hopeful situation
for women to be organized and working for one of their common aims,
even though that aim be for the time being merely winning of the vote,
rather than to have the vote, and with it working merely as isolated
individuals, and with neither the power that organization insures nor
the training that it affords.
But with what we know nowadays there should be no need for any such
unsatisfactory alternative. It would be much more in keeping with the
modern situation if the object of suffrage organizations were to read,
not "to obtain the vote" but "to obtain political, legal and social
equality for women."
Then as each state, or as the whole country (we hope by and by)
obtains the ballot, so might the organizations go on in a sense as if
nothing had happened. And nothing would have happened, save that a
great body of organized women would be more effective than ever. The
members would individually be equipped with the most modern instrument
of economic and social expression. The organizations themselves would
have risen in public importance and esteem and therefore in influence.
Moreover, and this is the most important point of all, they would be
enrolled among those bodies, whose declared policy would naturally
help in guiding the great bulk of new and untrained feminine voters.
In the early days of the woman movement, the leaders, I believe,
desired as earnestly and as keenly saw the need for legal and social
or economic equality as we today with all these years of experience
behind us. But the unconscious assumption was all the time that given
political equality every other sort of equality would readily and
logically follow. Even John Stuart Mill seems to have taken this
much for granted. Not indeed that he thought that with universal
enfranchisement the millennium would arrive for either men or women.
But even to his clear brain and in his loyal and chivalrous heart,
political freedom for women did appear as one completed stage in
development, an all-inclusive boon, as it were, in due time bringing
along by irrefragable inference equality on every other plane,
equality before the law and equality in all social and sexual
relations.
Looking back now, we can see that whatever thinkers and statesmen
fifty years ago may have argued for as best meeting the immediate
needs of the hour, the organized suffrage movement in all the most
advanced countries should long ago have broadened their platform,
and explicitly set before their own members and the public as their
objective not merely "the vote," but "the political, legal and social
equality of women."
We are not abler, not any broader-minded nor more intellectually
daring than those pioneers, but we have what they had not, the test of
results. Let us briefly glance at what has been the course of events
in those states and countries which were the earliest to obtain
political freedom for their women.
In none of the four suffrage states first enfranchised in this
country, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Colorado, in Australia or in New
Zealand, did any large proportion of women ask for or desire their
political freedom. In that there is nothing strange or exceptional.
Those who see the need of any reform so clearly that they will work
for it make up comparatively a small proportion of any nation or of
any class. Women are no exception. Note Australia. As the suffrage
societies there, as elsewhere, had been organized for this one
purpose, "to obtain the vote," with the obtaining of the vote all
reason for their continued existence ceased. The organizations at once
and inevitably went to pieces. The vote, gained by the efforts of the
few, was now in the hands of great masses of women, who had given
little thought to the matter previously, who were absolutely unaware
of the tremendous power of the new instrument placed in their hands. A
whole sex burst into citizenship, leaderless and with no common policy
upon the essential needs of their sex.
Except in Victoria, where the state franchise lagged behind till 1909,
the women of Australia have been enfranchised for over twelve years,
and yet it is only recently that they are beginning to get together as
sister women. Those leaders who all along believed in continuous and
organized work by women for the complete freeing of the sex from all
artificial shackles and unequal burdens are now justified of their
belief. New young leaders are beginning to arise, and there are signs
that the rank and file are beginning to march under these leaders
towards far-off ends that are gradually being defined more clearly
from the mists of these years. But they have much ground to make up.
Only so lately as 1910 there were leading women in one of the
large labor conferences who protested against women entering the
legislature, using against that very simple and normal step in advance
the very same moss-grown arguments as we hear used in this country
against the conferring of the franchise itself.
Nowadays, it is true, no quite similar result is likely to happen in
any state or country which from now on receives enfranchisement, for
the reason that there are now other organizations, such as the General
Federation of Women's Clubs here, and the active women's trade unions,
and suffrage societies on a broad basis and these are every day coming
in closer touch with one another and with the organized suffrage
movement. But neither women's trade unions nor women's clubs can
afford to neglect any means of strengthening their forces, and a sort
of universal association having some simple broad aim such as I
have tried to outline would be an ally which would bring them into
communication with women outside the ranks of any of the great
organizations, for it alone would be elastic enough to include all
women, as its appeal would necessarily be made to all women.
The universal reasons for equipping women with the vote as with a tool
adapted to her present day needs, and the claims made upon her by the
modern community, the reasons, in short why women want and are asking
for the vote, the universal reasons why men, even good men, cannot be
trusted to take care of women's interests, were never better or more
tersely summed up than in a story told by Philip Snowden in the debate
in the British House of Commons on the Woman Suffrage Bill of 1910,
known as the Conciliation Bill. He said that after listening to the
objections urged by the opponents of the measure, he was reminded of a
man who, traveling with his wife in very rough country, came late at
night to a very poor house of accommodation. When the meal was served
there was nothing on the table but one small mutton chop. "What," said
the man in a shocked tone, "have you nothing at all for my wife?"
XIII
TRADE UNION IDEALS AND POLICIES
Trade unionism does not embrace the whole of industrial democracy,
even for organized labor and even were the whole of labor organized,
as we hope one of these days it will be, but it does form one of the
elements in any form of industrial democracy as well as affording one
of the pathways thither.
The most advanced trade unionists are those men and women who
recognize the limitations of industrial organization, but who value
it for its flexibility, for the ease with which it can be transformed
into a training-school, a workers' university, while all the while
it is providing a fortified stronghold from behind whose shelter
the industrial struggle can be successfully carried on, and carried
forward into other fields.
If we believe, as all, even non-socialists, must to some extent admit,
that economic environment is one of the elemental forces moulding
character and deciding conduct, then surely the coming together of
those who earn their bread in the same occupation is one of the most
natural methods of grouping that human beings can adopt.
There are still in the movement in all countries those of such a
conservative type that they look to trade organization as we know
it today as practically the sole factor in solving the industrial
problem.
In order to fulfill its important functions of protecting the workers,
giving to them adequate control over their working conditions, and
the power of bargaining for the disposal of their labor power
through recognized representatives, trade-union organization must be
world-wide. Organizations of capital are so, or are becoming so, and
in order that the workers may bargain upon an equal footing, they must
be in an equally strong position. Now is the first time in the history
of the world that such a plan could be even dreamt of. Rapid means of
communication and easy methods of transport have made it possible for
machine-controlled industry to attract workers from all over the world
to particular centers, and in especial to the United States, and this
has taken place without any regard as to where there was the best
opening for workers of different occupations or as to what might
be the effects upon the standards of living of the workers of
artificially fostered migrations, and haphazard distribution of the
newcomers.
It is sadly true of the labor movement, as of all other movements
for social advance, that it lags behind the movements organized for
material success and private profit. It lags behind because it lacks
money, money which would keep more trained workers in the field, which
would procure needed information, which would prevent that bitterest
of defeats, losing a strike because the strikers could no longer hold
out against starvation. The labor movement lacks money, partly because
money is so scarce among the workers; they have no surplus from which
to build up the treasury as capital does so readily, and partly
because so many of them do not as yet understand that alone they are
lost, in organization they have strength. While they need the labor
movement, just as much does the labor movement need them.
More and more, however, are the workers acknowledging their own
weakness, at the same time that they remember their own strength. As
they do so, more and more will they adopt capital's own magnificent
methods of organization to overcome capital's despotism, and be able
to stand out on a footing of equality, as man before man.
One tendency, long too much in evidence in the labor movement
generally, and one which has still to be guarded against, is to take
overmuch satisfaction in the unionizing of certain skilled trades or
sections of trades, and to neglect the vast bulk of those already
handicapped by want of special skill or training, by sex or by race.
I have heard discussions among labor men which illustrate this. The
platform of the Federation of Labor is explicit, speaking out on this
point in no doubtful tone, but there are plenty of labor men, and
labor women who make their own particular exceptions to a rule that
should know of none.
I have heard men in the well-paid, highly skilled, splendidly
organized trades speak even contemptuously of the prospect of
organizing the nomad laborers of the land, recognizing no moral claim
laid upon themselves by the very advantages enjoyed by themselves in
their own trade, advantages in which they took so much pride. That is
discouraging enough, but more discouraging still was it to gather one
day from the speech of one who urged convincingly that while both
for self-defense and for righteousness' sake, the skilled organized
workers must take up and make their own the cause of the unskilled and
exploited wanderers, that he too drew his line, and that he drew it at
the organization of the Chinese.[A]
[Footnote A: I am not here discussing the unrestricted admission
of Orientals under present economic conditions. I merely use the
illustration to press the point, that organized labor should include
in its ranks all workers already in the United States. A number of the
miners in British Columbia are advocates of the organization of the
Chinese miners in that province.]
Others again, while they do not openly assert that they disapprove of
the bringing of women into the trade unions, not only give no active
assistance towards that end, but in their blindness even advocate the
exclusion of women from the trades, and especially from their own
particular trade. The arguments which they put forward are mostly of
these types: "Girls oughtn't to be in our trade, it isn't fit for
girls"; or, "Married women oughtn't to work"; or, "Women folks should
stay at home," and if the speaker is a humane and kindly disposed man,
he will add, "and that's where they'll all be one of these days,
when we've got things straightened out again." As instances of this
attitude on the part of trade-union men who ought to know better, and
its results, the pressmen in the printing shops of our great cities
are well organized, and the girls who feed the presses, and stand
beside the men and work with them, are mostly outside the protection
of the union. Some of the glass-blowers are seriously arguing against
the suggestion of organizing the girls who are coming into the trade
in numbers. "Organization won't settle it. That's no sort of a
solution," say the men; "they're nice girls and would be much better
off in some other trade." Just as if girls went into hard and trying
occupations from mere contrariness! It is too late in the day, again,
to shut the door on the women who are going in as core-makers in the
iron industry, but the men in the foundries think they can do it. Men
who act and talk like this have yet much to learn of the true meaning
and purposes of labor organization.
Wherever, then, we find this spirit of exclusion manifested, whether
actively as in some of the instances I have cited, or passively in
apathetic indifference to the welfare of the down-trodden worker, man
or woman, American or foreign, white or colored, there is no true
spirit of working-class solidarity, only a self-seeking acceptance
of a limited and antiquated form of labor organization, quite out of
keeping with twentieth-century conditions and needs. This does not
make for advance ultimately in any branch of labor, but is one of the
worst retarding influences to the whole movement. In former ages the
principles of democracy could only extend within one class after
another. The democracy of our day is feeling after a larger solution;
the democracy of the future cannot know limits or it will be no
democracy at all.
It has been pointed out many times that the rich are rich, not so much
in virtue of what they possess, but in virtue of what others do not
possess. The ratio of the difference between the full pocket and many
empty pockets represents the degree in which the one rich man or woman
is able to command the services of many poor men and women. We all
recognize these crude differences and regret the results to society.
But after all is the case so very much bettered when for rich and
poor, we read skilled and unskilled, when we have on the one hand a
trade whose members have attained their high standing through the
benefits of years of training, a strong union, high initiation
fees, perhaps limitation of apprentices? I am neither praising nor
criticizing any methods of trade protection. All of them are probably
highly beneficial to those within the charmed circle of the highly
organized trades. But if, in the very midst of the general state of
industrial anarchy and oppression which the unskilled workers have to
accept, it is possible to find trades in which organization has been
so successful in maintaining good conditions, this is partly because
the number of such artisans, so skilled and so protected, has always
been limited. And let us ask ourselves what are the effects of these
limitations upon those outside the circle, whether those excluded from
the trade or from the organization because of the demands exacted, or
those debarred by poverty or other circumstances from learning any
skilled trade at all. Unquestionably the advantages of the highly
protected ones are not won solely from the employers. Some part of
their industrial wealth is contributed by the despised and ignored
outsiders. Some proportion of their high wages is snatched from
the poor recompense of the unskilled. Women are doubly sufferers,
underpaid both as women and as unskilled workers. It is not necessary
to subscribe to the old discredited wage-fund theory, in order to
agree with this.
Just here lies the chief danger of the craft form of organization as
a final objective. If the trade-union movement is ever to be wholly
effective and adequate to fulfill its lofty aims, it must cease to
look upon craft organization as a final aim. The present forms of
craft organization are useful, only so long as they are thought of as
a step to something higher, only in so far as the craft is regarded as
a part of the whole. Were this end ever borne in mind, we should hear
less of jurisdictional fights, and there would be more of sincere
endeavor and more of active effort among the better organized workers
to share the benefits of organization with all of the laboring world.
The more helpless and exploited the group, the keener would be the
campaign, the more unsparing the effort on the part of the more
fortunate sons of toil.
Against such a narrow conservatism, however, there are other forces at
work, both within and without the regularly organized labor movement,
one of them aiming at such reorganization of the present unions as
shall gradually merge the many craft unions into fewer and larger
bodies.[A] This process is evolutionary, and constructive, but slow,
and meanwhile the exploited workers cry in their many tongues, "O
Lord, how long!" or else submit in voiceless despair.
[Footnote A: The United Mine Workers are essentially on an industrial
basis; they take in all men and boys working in and about the mine.]
Is it any wonder that under these conditions of industrial anarchy
and imperfect organization of labor power a new voice is heard in the
land, a voice which will not be stilled, revolutionary, imperious,
aiming frankly at the speedy abolition of organized governments, and
of the present industrial system? This is the movement known in Europe
as syndicalism, and on this continent represented by the Industrial
Workers of the World, usually termed the I.W.W.
Their program stands for the one big union of all the workers, the
general strike and the gaining possession and the conducting of the
industries by the workers engaged in them. They deprecate the making
of agreements with employers, and acknowledge no duty in the keeping
of agreements.
The year 1911 will be remembered among word-historians as the year
when the word "syndicalism" became an everyday English word. It had
its origin in the French word "syndicalisme," which is French
for trade unionism, just as French and Belgian trade unions are
"syndicats." But because for reasons that cannot be gone into here
so many of the French trade unionists profess this peculiarly
revolutionary philosophy, there has grown up out of and around the
word "syndicalisme" a whole literature with writers like George Sorel
and Gustave Hervé as the prophets and exponents of the new movement.
So the word "syndicalism," thus anglicized, has come to signify this
latest form of trade-union organization and action.
Although sabotage, interfering with output, clogging machinery,
blocking transportation and so forth have been advocated and practiced
by extreme syndicalists, such do not seem to me to form an essential
and lasting element in syndicalist activity, any more than we find the
wholesale destruction of machinery as carried on by displaced workmen
a hundred years ago, has remained an accepted method of trade-union
action, although such acts may easily form incidents in the progress
of the industrial warfare to which syndicalists are pledged. Neither
at Lawrence, Massachusetts, nor later at Paterson, New Jersey, did the
Industrial Workers of the World, or the large bodies of strikers whom
they led set any of these destructive practices in operation.
Syndicalism is the latest despairing cry of the industrially
vanquished and down-trodden, and is not to be suppressed by force of
argument, whether the argument comes from the side of the employer or
the fellow-workman. Only with the removal of the causes can we expect
this philosophy of despair to vanish, for it is the courage of despair
that we witness in its converts. The spirit they display lies outside
the field of blame from those who have never known what it means to
lose wife and children in the slow starvation of the strike or husband
and sons in the death-pit of a mine, and themselves to be cheated
life-long of the joys that ought to fall to the lot of the normal,
happiness-seeking human being, from birth to death.
The syndicalists will have done their work if they rouse the rest of
us to a keener sense of our responsibilities. When the day comes that
every worker receives the full product of his toil, the reasons for
existence of this form of revolutionary activity will have passed
away.