THE BEGINNING OF THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR AND OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF
LABOR
With the practical disintegration of the organized labor movement in the
seventies, two nuclei held together and showed promise of future growth.
One was the "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor" and the other a small
trade union movement grouped around the International Cigar Makers'
Union.
The "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," while it first became
important in the labor movement after 1873, was founded in 1869 by Uriah
Smith Stephens, a tailor who had been educated for the ministry, as a
secret organization. Secrecy was adopted as a protection against
persecutions by employers.
The principles of the Order were set forth by Stephens in the secret
ritual. "Open and public association having failed after a struggle of
centuries to protect or advance the interest of labor, we have lawfully
constituted this Assembly," and "in using this power of organized effort
and cooperation, we but imitate the example of capital heretofore set in
numberless instances;" for, "in all the multifarious branches of trade,
capital has its combinations, and, whether intended or not, it crushes
the manly hopes of labor and tramples poor humanity into the dust."
However, "we mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism
to necessary capital." The remedy consists first in work of education:
"We mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor (the
only creator of values or capital) and the justice of its receiving a
full, just share of the values or capital it has created." The next
remedy was legislation: "We shall, with all our strength, support laws
made to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, for labor alone
gives life and value to capital, and also those laws which tend to
lighten the exhaustiveness of toil." Next in order were mutual benefits.
"We shall use every lawful and honorable means to procure and retain
employ for one another, coupled with a just and fair remuneration, and,
should accident or misfortune befall one of our number, render such aid
as lies within our power to give, without inquiring his country or his
creed."
For nine years the Order remained a secret organization and showed but a
slow growth. In 1878 it was forced to abolish secrecy. The public mind
was rendered uneasy by the revolutionary uprising of workingmen of Paris
who set up the famous "Commune of Paris" of 1871, by the destructive
great railway strikes in this country in 1877 and, lastly, by a wave of
criminal disorders in the anthracite coal mining region in Eastern
Pennsylvania,[13] and became only too prone to attribute revolutionary
and criminal intents to any labor organization that cloaked itself in
secrecy. Simultaneously with coming out into the open, the Knights
adopted a new program, called the Preamble of the Knights of Labor, in
place of the vague Secret Ritual which hitherto served as the
authoritative expression of aims.
This Preamble recites how "wealth," with its development, has become so
aggressive that "unless checked" it "will inevitably lead to the
pauperisation and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses." Hence, if
the toilers are "to enjoy the blessings of life," they must organize
"every department of productive industry" in order to "check" the power
of wealth and to put a stop to "unjust accumulation." The battle cry in
this fight must be "moral worth not wealth, the true standard of
individual and national greatness." As the "action" of the toilers ought
to be guided by "knowledge," it is necessary to know "the true condition
of the producing masses"; therefore, the Order demands "from the various
governments the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics." Next in
order comes the "establishment of cooperative institutions productive
and distributive." Union of all trades, "education," and producers'
cooperation remained forever after the cardinal points in the Knights of
Labor philosophy and were steadily referred to as "First Principles,"
namely principles bequeathed to the Order by Uriah Stephens and the
other "Founders."[14]
These idealistic "First Principles" found an ardent champion in Terence
V. Powderly, a machinist by trade and twice mayor of Scranton,
Pennsylvania, on a labor ticket, who succeeded Stephens in 1878 to the
headship of the Order. Powderly bore unmistakably the stamp of this sort
of idealism throughout all the time when he was the foremost labor
leader in the country. Unlike Samuel Gompers, who came to supplant him
about 1890, he was foreign to that spirit of combative unionism which
accepts the wage system but concentrates on a struggle to wrest
concessions from the employers. Even when circumstances which were
largely beyond his control made Powderly a strike leader on a huge
scale, his heart lay elsewhere--in circumventing the wage system by
opening to the worker an escape into self-employment through
cooperation.
Producers' cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the
Order of the Knights of Labor expected to lead the American wage-earning
class out of the bondage of the wage system into the Canaan of
self-employment. Thus the Order was the true successor of the
cooperative movement in the forties and sixties. Its motto was
"Cooperation of the Order, by the Order, and for the Order." Not
scattered local initiative, but the Order as a whole was to carry on the
work. The plan resembled the Rochdale system of England in that it
proposed to start with an organization of consumers--the large and
ever-growing membership of the Order. But it departed radically from the
English prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the
consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive
establishments which were to follow. Consumers' cooperation was to be
but a stepping stone to producers' self-employment. Eventually when the
Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society--so the
plan contemplated--it would control practically the whole market and
cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception.
So far, therefore, as "First Principles" went, the Order was not an
instrument of the "class struggle," but an association of idealistic
cooperators. It was this pure idealism which drew to the Order of the
Knights of Labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects
and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like Dr.
Richard T. Ely[15] and President John Bascom of Wisconsin.
The other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the
sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union
movement grouped around the Cigar Makers' Union, was neither so purely
American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently
idealistic. On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its
program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and
"pragmatic." The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism
was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies,
particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen's
Association, the "First _Internationale_," which was founded by Karl
Marx in London in 1864. The conception of _economic_ labor organization
which was advanced by the _Internationale_ in a socialistic formulation
underwent in the course of years a process of change: On the one hand,
through constant conflict with the rival conception of _political_ labor
organization urged by American followers of the German socialist,
Ferdinand Lassalle, and on the other hand, through contact with American
reality. Out of that double contact emerged the trade unionism of the
American Federation of Labor.
The _Internationale_ is generally reputed to have been organized by Karl
Marx for the propaganda of international socialism. As a matter of fact,
its starting point was the practical effort of British trade union
leaders to organize the workingmen of the Continent and to prevent the
importation of Continental strike-breakers. That Karl Marx wrote its
_Inaugural Address_ was merely incidental. It chanced that what he wrote
was acceptable to the British unionists rather than the draft of an
address representing the views of Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of the
"New Italy" and the "New Europe," which was submitted to them at the
same time and advocated elaborate plans of cooperation. Marx emphasized
the class solidarity of labor against Mazzini's harmony of capital and
labor. He did this by reciting what British labor had done through the
Rochdale system of cooperation without the help of capitalists and what
the British Parliament had done in enacting the ten-hour law of 1847
against the protest of capitalists. Now that British trade unionists in
1864 were demanding the right of suffrage and laws to protect their
unions, it followed that Marx merely stated their demands when he
affirmed the independent economic and political organization of labor in
all lands. His _Inaugural Address_ was a trade union document, not a
_Communist Manifesto_. Indeed not until Bakunin and his following of
anarchists had nearly captured the organization in the years 1869 to
1872 did the program of socialism become the leading issue.
The philosophy of the _Internationale_ at the period of its ascendency
was based on the economic organization of the working class in trade
unions. These must precede the political seizure of the government by
labor. Then, when the workingmen's party should achieve control, it
would be able to build up successively the socialist state on the
foundation of a sufficient number of existing trade unions.
This conception differed widely from the teaching of Ferdinand Lassalle.
Lassallean socialism was born in 1863 with Lassalle's _Open Letter_ to a
workingmen's committee in Leipzig. It sprang from his antagonism to
Schultze-Delizsch's[16] system of voluntary cooperation. In Lassalle's
eagerness to condemn the idea of the harmony of capital and labor, which
lay at the basis of Schultze's scheme for cooperation, he struck at the
same time a blow against all forms of non-political organization of wage
earners. Perhaps the fact that he was ignorant of the British trade
unions accounts for his insufficient appreciation of trade unionism. But
no matter what the cause may have been, to Lassalle there was but one
means of solving the labor problem-political action. When political
control was finally achieved, the labor party, with the aid of state
credit, would build up a network of cooperative societies into which
eventually all industry would pass.
In short, the distinction between the ideas of the _Internationale_ and
of Lassalle consisted in the fact that the former advocated trade
unionism prior to and underlying political organization, while the
latter considered a political victory as the basis of socialism. These
antagonistic starting points are apparent at the very beginning of
American socialism as well as in the trade unionism and socialism of
succeeding years.
Two distinct phases can be seen in the history of the _Internationale_
in America. During the first phase, which began in 1866 and lasted until
1870, the _Internationale_ had no important organization of its own on
American soil, but tried to establish itself through affiliation with
the National Labor Union. The inducement held out to the latter was of a
practical nature, the international regulation of immigration. During
the second phase the _Internationale_ had its "sections" in nearly every
large city of the country, centering in New York and Chicago, and the
practical trade union part of its work receded before its activity on
behalf of the propaganda of socialism.
These "sections," with a maximum membership which probably never
exceeded a thousand, nearly all foreigners, became a preparatory school
in trade union leadership for many of the later organizers and leaders
of the American Federation of Labor: for example, Adolph Strasser, the
German cigar maker, whose organization became the new model in trade
unionism, and P.J. McGuire, the American-born carpenter, who founded the
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and who was for many years the
secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor.
Fate had decreed that these sections of a handful of immigrants should
play for a time high-sounding parts in the world labor movement. When,
at the World Congress of the International Workingmen's Association at
the Hague in 1872, the anarchist faction led by Bakunin had shown such
strength that Marx and his socialist faction deemed it wise to move the
General Council out of mischief's way, they removed it to New York and
entrusted its powers into the hands of the faithful German Marxians on
this side of the Atlantic. This spelled the end of the _Internationale_
as a world organization, but enormously increased the stakes of the
factional fights within the handful of American Internationalists. The
organization of the workers into trade unions, the _Internationale's_
first principle, was forgotten in the heat of intemperate struggles for
empty honors and powerless offices. On top of that, with the panic of
1873 and the ensuing prolonged depression, the political drift asserted
itself in socialism as it had in the labor movement in general and the
movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions,
entered, urged on by the Lassalleans, into a series of political
campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succumbing to the
inevitable fate of all amateurish attempts. Upon men of Strasser's
practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could
only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade
unionism as the only activity worth his while. Strasser had been elected
president of the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1877, in the midst
of a great strike in New York against the tenement-house system.
The president of the local New York union of cigar makers was at the
time Samuel Gompers, a young man of twenty-seven, who was born in
England and came to America in 1862. In his endeavor to build up a model
for the "new" unionism and in his almost uninterrupted headship of that
movement for forty years is indicated Gompers' truly representative
character. Born of Dutch-Jewish parents in England in 1850, he typifies
the cosmopolitan origins of American unionism. His early contact in the
union of his trade with men like Strasser, upon whom the ideas of Marx
and the International Workingmen's Association had left an indelible
stamp, and his thorough study of Marx gave him that grounding both in
idealism and class consciousness which has produced many strong leaders
of American unions and saved them from defection to other interests.
Aggressive and uncompromising in a perpetual fight for the strongest
possible position and power of trade unions, but always strong for
collective agreements with the opposing employers, he displays the
business tactics of organized labor. At the head of an organization
which denies itself power over its constituent unions, he has brought
and held together the most widely divergent and often antagonistic
unions, while permitting each to develop and even to change its
character to fit the changing industrial conditions.
The dismal failure of the strike against the tenement house system in
cigar making brought home to both Strasser and Gompers the weakness of
the plan of organization of their union as well as that of American
trade unions in general. They consequently resolved to rebuild their
union upon the pattern of the British unions, although they firmly
intended that it should remain a militant organization. The change
involved, first, complete authority over the local unions in the hands
of the international officers; second, an increase in the membership
dues for the purpose of building up a large fund; and, third, the
adoption of a far-reaching benefit system in order to assure stability
to the organization. This was accomplished at the convention held in
August, 1879. This convention simultaneously adopted the British idea of
the "equalization of funds," which gave the international officers the
power to order a well-to-do local union to transfer a portion of its
funds to another local union in financial straits. With the various
modifications of the feature of "equalization of funds," the system of
government in the Cigar Makers' International Union was later used as a
model by the other national and international trade unions.
As Strasser and men of his ilk grew more and more absorbed in the
practical problems of the everyday struggle of the wage-earners for
better conditions of employment, the socialistic portion of their
original philosophy kept receding further and further into the
background until they arrived at pure trade unionism. But their trade
unionism differed vastly from the "native" American trade unionism of
their time, which still hankered for the haven of producers'
cooperation. The philosophy which these new leaders developed might be
termed a philosophy of pure wage-consciousness. It signified a labor
movement reduced to an opportunistic basis, accepting the existence of
capitalism and having for its object the enlarging of the bargaining
power of the wage earner in the sale of his labor. Its opportunism was
instrumental--its idealism was home and family and individual
betterment. It also implied an attitude of aloofness from all those
movements which aspire to replace the wage system by cooperation,
whether voluntary or subsidized by government, whether greenbackism,
socialism, or anarchism.
Perhaps the most concise definition of this philosophy is to be found
in Strasser's testimony before the Senate Committee on Education and
Labor in 1883:
"_Q._ You are seeking to improve home matters first?
"_A._ Yes, sir, I look first to the trade I represent; I look first
to cigars, to the interests of men who employ me to represent their
interest.
"_Chairman_: I was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends.
"_Witness_: We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to
day. We are fighting only for immediate objects--objects that can
be realized in a few years.
"By Mr. Call: _Q._ You want something better to eat and to wear,
and better houses to live in?
"_A._ Yes, we want to dress better and to live better, and become
better citizens generally.
"_The Chairman_: I see that you are a little sensitive lest it
should be thought that you are a mere theoriser, I do not look upon
you in that light at all.
"_The Witness_: Well, we say in our constitution that we are
opposed to theorists, and I have to represent the organization
here. We are all practical men."
Another offshoot of the same Marxian _Internationale_ were the "Chicago
Anarchists."[17] The _Internationale_, as we saw, emphasized trade
unionism as the first step in the direction of socialism, in opposition
to the political socialism of Lassalle, which ignored the trade union
and would start with a political party outright. Shorn of its
socialistic futurity this philosophy became non-political "business"
unionism; but, when combined with a strong revolutionary spirit, it
became a non-political revolutionary unionism, or syndicalism.
The organization of those industrial revolutionaries was called the
International Working People's Association, also known as the "Black"
or anarchist International, which was formed at Pittsburgh in 1883. Like
the old _Internationale_ it busied itself with forming trade unions, but
insisted that they conform to a revolutionary model. Such a "model"
trade union was the Federation of Metal Workers of America, which was
organized in 1885. It said in its Declaration of Principles that the
entire abolition of the present system of society can alone emancipate
the workers, but under no consideration should they resort to politics;
"our organization should be a school to educate its members for the new
condition of society, when the workers will regulate their own affairs
without any interference by the few. Since the emancipation of the
productive classes must come by their own efforts, it is unwise to
meddle in present politics.... All _direct_ struggles of the laboring
masses have our fullest sympathy." Alongside the revolutionary trade
unions were workers' armed organizations ready to usher in the new order
by force. "By force," recited the Pittsburgh Manifesto of the Black
International, "our ancestors liberated themselves from political
oppression, by force their children will have to liberate themselves
from economic bondage. It is, therefore, your right, it is your duty,
says Jefferson,--to arms!"
The following ten years were to decide whether the leadership of the
American labor movement was to be with the "practical men of the trade
unions" or with the cooperative idealists of the Knights of Labor.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] After the defeat of a strong anthracite miners' union in 1869,
which was an open organization, the fight against the employers was
carried on by a secret organization known as the Molly Maguires, which
used the method of terrorism and assassination. It was later exposed and
many were sentenced and executed.
[14] The Preamble further provides that the Order will stand for the
reservation of all lands for actual settlers; the "abrogation of all
laws that do not bear equally upon capital and labor, the removal of
unjust technicalities, delays, and discriminations in the administration
of justice, and the adopting of measures providing for the health and
safety of those engaged in mining, manufacturing, or building pursuits";
the enactment of a weekly pay law, a mechanics' lien law, and a law
prohibiting child labor under fourteen years of age; the abolition of
the contract system on national, state, and municipal work, and of the
system of leasing out convicts; equal pay for equal work for both sexes;
reduction of hours of labor to eight per day; "the substitution of
arbitration for strikes, whenever and wherever employers and employees
are willing to meet on equitable grounds"; the establishment of "a
purely national circulating medium based upon the faith and resources of
the nation, issued directly to the people, without the intervention of
any system of banking corporations, which money shall be a legal tender
in payment of all debts, public or private".
[15] Dr. Ely in his pioneer work, _The Labor Movement in America_,
published in 1886, showed a most genuine sympathy for the idealistic
strivings and gropings of labor for a better social order. He even
advised some of his pupils at the Johns Hopkins University to join the
Knights of Labor in order to gain a better understanding of the labor
movement.
[16] Schultze-Delizsch was a German thinker and practical reformer of
the liberal school.
[17] The Anarchists who were tried and executed after the Haymarket
Square bomb in Chicago in May, 1886. See below, 91-93.