Meanwhile the railway labor situation remained unsettled and fraught

with danger. The problem was bound up with the general problem as to

what to do with the railways. Many plans were presented to Congress,

from an immediate return to private owners to permanent government

ownership and management. The railway labor organizations, that is, the

four brotherhoods of the train service personnel and the twelve unions

united in the Railway Employes' Department of the American Federation

of Labor, came before Congress with the so-called Plumb Plan, worked out

by Glenn E. Plumb, the legal representative of the brotherhoods. This

plan proposed that the government take over the railways for good,

paying a compensation to the owners, and then entrust their operation to

a board composed of government officials, union representatives, and

representatives of the technical staffs.[91] So much for ultimate plans.

On the more immediate wage problem proper, the government had clearly

fallen down on its promise made to the shopmen in August 1919, when

their demands for higher wages were refused and a promise was made that

the cost of living would be reduced. Early in 1920 President Wilson

notified Congress that he would return the roads to the owners on March

1, 1920. A few days before that date the Esch-Cummins bill was passed

under the name of the Transportation Act of 1920. Strong efforts were

made to incorporate in the bill a prohibition against strikes and

lockouts. In that form it had indeed passed the Senate. In the House

bill, however, the compulsory arbitration feature was absent and the

final law contained a provision for a Railroad Labor Board, of railway,

union, and public representatives, to be appointed by the President,

with the power of conducting investigations and issuing awards, but with

the right to strike or lockout unimpaired either before, during, or

after the investigation. It was the first appointed board of this

description which was to pass on the clamorous demands by the railway

employes for higher wages.[92]

No sooner had the roads been returned under the new law, and before the

board was even appointed, than a strike broke out among the switchmen

and yardmen, whose patience had apparently been exhausted. The strike

was an "outlaw" strike, undertaken against the wishes of national

leaders and organized and led by "rebel" leaders risen up for the

occasion. For a time it threatened not only to paralyze the country's

railway system but to wreck the railway men's organizations as well. It

was finally brought to an end through the efforts of the national

leaders, and a telling effect on the situation was produced by an

announcement by the newly constituted Railroad Labor Board that no

"outlaw" organization would have standing before it. The Board issued an

award on July 20, retroactive to May 1, increasing the total annual wage

bill of the railways by $600,000,000. The award failed to satisfy the

union, but they acquiesced.

When the increase in wages was granted to the railway employes, industry

in general and the railways in particular were already entering a period

of slump. With the depression the open-shop movement took on a greater

vigor. With unemployment rapidly increasing employers saw their chance

to regain freedom from union control. A few months later the tide also

turned in the movement of wages. Inside of a year the steel industry

reduced wages thirty percent, in three like installments; and the

twelve-hour day and the seven-day week, which had figured among the

chief causes of the strike of 1919 and for which the United States Steel

Corporation was severely condemned by a report of a Committee of the

Interchurch World Movement,[93] has largely continued as before. In the

New York "market" of the men's clothing industry, where the union faces

the most complex and least stable condition mainly owing to the

heterogeneous character of the employing group, the latter grasped the

opportunity to break with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union. By

the end of the spring of 1921 the clothing workers won their struggle,

showing that a union built along new lines was at least as efficient a

fighting machine as any of the older unions. It was this union also and

several local branches of the related union in the ladies' garment

industry, which realized the need of assuring to the employer at least a

minimum of labor efficiency if the newly established level of wages was

not to be materially lowered. Hence the acceptance of the principle of

"standards of production" fixed with the aid of scientific managers

employed jointly by the employers and the union.

The spring and summer of 1921 were a time of widespread "readjustment"

strikes, or strikes against cuts in wages, especially in the building

trades. The building industry went through in 1921 and 1922 one of its

periodic upheavals against the tyranny of the "walking delegates" and

against the state of moral corruption for which some of the latter

shared responsibility together with an unscrupulous element among the

employers. In San Francisco, where the grip of the unions upon the

industry was strongest, the employers turned on them and installed the

"open-shop" after the building trades' council had refused to accept an

award by an arbitration committee set up by mutual agreement. The union

claimed, however, in self-justification that the Committee, by awarding

a _reduction_ in the wages of fifteen crafts while the issue as

originally submitted turned on a demand by these crafts for a _raise_

in wages, had gone outside its legitimate scope. In New York City an

investigation by a special legislative committee uncovered a state of

reeking corruption among the leadership in the building trades' council

and among an element in the employing group in connection with a

successful attempt to establish a virtual local monopoly in building.

Some of the leading corruptionists on both sides were given court

sentences and the building trades' council accepted modifications in the

"working rules" formulated by the counsel for the investigating

committee. In Chicago a situation developed in many respects similar to

the one in San Francisco. In a wage dispute, which was submitted by both

sides to Federal Judge K.M. Landis for arbitration, the award authorized

not only a wage reduction but a revision of the "working rules" as well.

Most of the unionists refused to abide by the award and the situation

developed into literal warfare. In Chicago the employers' side was

aggressively upheld by a "citizens' committee" formed to enforce the

Landis award. The committee claimed to have imported over 10,000

out-of-town building mechanics to take the places of the strikers.

In the autumn of 1921 the employers in the packing industry discontinued

the arrangement whereby industrial relations were administered by an

"administrator,"[94] Judge Alschuler of Chicago, whose rulings had

materially restricted the employers' control in the shop. Some of the

employers put into effect company union plans. This led to a strike, but

in the end the unions lost their foothold in the industry, which the War

had enabled them to acquire. By that time, however, the open-shop

movement seemed already passing its peak, without having caused an

irreparable breach in the position of organized labor. Evidently, the

long years of preparation before the War and the great opportunity

during the War itself, if they have failed to give trade unionism the

position of a recognized national institution, have at least made it

immune from destruction by employers, however general or skillfully

managed the attack. In 1920 the total organized union membership,

including the 871,000 in unions unaffiliated with the American

Federation of Labor, was slightly short of 5,000,000, or over four

million in the Federation itself. In 1921 the membership of the

Federation declined slightly to 3,906,000, and the total organized

membership probably in proportion. In 1922 the membership of the

Federation declined to about 3,200,000, showing a loss of about 850,000

since the high mark of 1920.

The legal position of trade unions has continued as uncertain and

unsatisfactory to the unions, as if no Clayton Act had been passed. The

closed shop has been condemned as coercion of non-unionists. Yet in the

Coppage case[95] the United States Supreme Court found that it is not

coercion when an employer threatens discharge unless union membership is

renounced. Similarly, it is unlawful for union agents to attempt

organization, even by peaceful persuasion, when employes have signed

contracts not to join the union as a condition of employment.[96] A

decision which arouses strong doubt whether the Clayton Act made any

change in the status of trade unions was given by the Supreme Court in

the recent Duplex Printing case.[97] In this decision the union rested

its defense squarely on the immunities granted by the Clayton Act.

Despite this, the injunction was confirmed and the boycott again

declared illegal, the court holding that the words "employer and

employes" in the Act restrict its benefits only to "parties standing in

proximate relation to a controversy," that is to the employes who are

immediately involved in the dispute and not to the national union which

undertakes to bring their employer to terms by causing their other

members to boycott his goods.

The prevailing judicial interpretation of unlawful union methods is

briefly as follows: Strikes are illegal when they involve defamation,

fraud, actual physical violence, threats of physical violence, or

inducement of breach of contract. Boycotts are illegal when they bring

third parties into the dispute by threats of strikes, or loss of

business, publication of "unfair lists,"[98] or by interference with

Interstate commerce. Picketing is illegal when accompanied by violence,

threats, intimidation, and coercion. In December 1921 the Supreme Court

declared mere numbers in groups constituted intimidation and, while

admitting that circumstances may alter cases, limited peaceful picketing

to one picket at each point of ingress or egress of the plant.[99] In

another case the Court held unconstitutional an Arizona statute, which

reproduced _verbatim_ the labor clauses of the Clayton Act;[100] this on

the ground that concerted action by the union would be illegal if the

means used were illegal and therefore the law which operated to make

them legal deprived the plaintiff of his property without due process of

law. In June 1922, in the Coronado case, the Court held that unions,

although unincorporated, are in every respect like corporations and are

liable for damages in their corporate capacity, including triple damages

under the Sherman Anti-Trust law, and which may be collected from their

funds.

We have already pointed out that since the War ended the American labor

movement has in the popular mind become linked with radicalism. The

steel strike and the coal miners' strike in 1919, the revolt against the

national leaders and "outlaw" strikes in the printing industry and on

the railways in 1920, the advocacy by the organizations of the railway

men of the Plumb Plan for nationalization of railways and its repeated

endorsement by the conventions of the American Federation of Labor, the

resolutions in favor of the nationalization of coal mines passed at the

conventions of the United Mine Workers, the "vacation" strike by the

anthracite coal miners in defiance of a government wage award, the

sympathy expressed for Soviet Russia in a number of unions, notably of

the clothing industry, have led many to see, despite the assertions of

the leaders of the American Federation of Labor to the contrary, an

apparent drift in the labor movement towards radicalism, or even the

probability of a radical majority in the Federation in the not distant

future.

The most startling shift has been, of course, in the railway men's

organizations, which have changed from a pronounced conservatism to an

advocacy of a socialistic plan of railway nationalization under the

Plumb Plan. The Plumb Plan raises the issue of socialism in its

American form. In bare outline the Plan proposes government acquisition

of the railroads at a value which excludes rights and privileges not

specifically granted to the roads in their charters from the States. The

government would then lease the roads to a private operating corporation

governed by a tri-partite board of directors equally representing the

consuming public, the managerial employes, and the classified employes.

An automatic economy-sharing scheme was designed to assure efficient

service at low rates calculated to yield a fixed return on a value shorn

of capitalized privileges.

The purpose of the Plumb Plan is to equalize the opportunities of labor

and capital in using economic power to obtain just rewards for services

rendered to the public. In this respect it resembles many of the land

reform and other "panaceas" which are scattered through labor history.

Wherein it differs is in making the trade unions the vital and organized

representatives of producers' interests entitled to participate in the

direct management of industry. An ideal of copartnership and

self-employment was thus set up, going beyond the boundaries of

self-help to which organized labor had limited itself in the eighties.

But it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism.

The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the _sine qua non_ of the American

labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the

principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of

1920 and 1921, President Gompers, who spoke against the Plan, was

reelected and again reelected. And in obeying instructions to cooperate

with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune

to press Plumb Plan legislation actively. So far as the railway men

themselves are concerned, after the Railroad Labor Board set up under

the Esch-Cummins act had begun to pass decisions actually affecting

wages and working rules, the pressure for the Plumb Plan subsided.

Instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened

in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of

employment.

The drift towards independent labor politics, which many anticipate,

also remains quite inconclusive. A Farmer-Labor party, launched in 1920

by influential labor leaders of Chicago (to be sure, against the wishes

of the national leaders), polled not more than 350,000 votes. And in the

same election, despite a wide dissatisfaction in labor circles with the

change in the government's attitude after the passage of the War

emergency and with a most sweeping use of the injunction in the coal

strike, the vote for the socialist candidate for President fell below a

million, that is behind the vote of 1912, notwithstanding a doubling of

the electorate with women's suffrage. Finally, the same convention of

the American Federation of Labor, which showed so much sympathy for the

ideas of the Plumb Plan League, approved a rupture with the

International Trade Union Federation, with headquarters in Amsterdam,

Holland, mainly on account of the revolutionary character of the

addresses issued by the latter.

FOOTNOTES:

[89] The most plausible argument in favor of the position taken by the

employing group is that no employer should be forced to decide matters

as intimately connected with the welfare of his business as the ones

relating to his labor costs and shop discipline with national union

leaders, since the latter, at best, are interested in the welfare of the

trade as a whole but rarely in the particular success of _his own_

particular establishment.

[90] The turn in public sentiment really dated from the threat of a

strike for the eight-hour day by the four railway brotherhoods in 1916,

which forced the passage of the Adamson law by Congress. The law was a

victory for the brotherhoods, but also extremely useful to the enemies

of organized labor in arousing public hostility to unionism.

[91] See below, 259-261, for a more detailed description of the Plan.

[92] The Transportation Act included a provision that prior to September

1, 1920, the railways could not reduce wages.

[93] A Protestant interdenominational organization of influence, which

investigated the strike and issued a report.

[94] The union had not been formally "recognized" at any time.

[95] Coppage _v._ Kansas, 236 U.S. (1915).

[96] Hitchman Coal and Coke Co. _v._ Mitchell et al, 245 U.S. 229

(1917).

[97] Duplex Printing Press Co. _v._ Deering, 41 Sup. Ct. 172 (1921).

[98] Montana allows the "unfair list" and California allows all

boycotts.

[99] American Steel Foundries of Granite City, Illinois, _v._ Tri-City

Central Trades' Council, 42 Sup. Ct. 72 (1921).

[100] Truax et al. _v._ Corrigan, 42 Sup. Ct. 124 (1921).

PART III

CONCLUSIONS AND INFERENCES

CHAPTER 12

AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION

To interpret the labor movement means to offer a theory of the struggle

between labor and capital in our present society. According to Karl

Marx, the founder of modern socialism, the efficient cause in all the

class struggles of history has been technical progress. Progress in the

mode of making a living or the growth of "productive forces," says Marx,

causes the coming up of new classes and stimulates in each and all

classes a desire to use their power for a maximum class advantage.

Referring to the struggle between the class of wage earners and the

class of employers, Marx brings out that modern machine technique has

concentrated the social means of production under the ownership of the

capitalist, who thus became absolute master. The laborer indeed remains

a free man to dispose of his labor as he wishes, but, having lost

possession of the means of production, which he had as a master-workman

during the preceding handicraft stage of industry, his freedom is only

an illusion and his bargaining power is no greater than if he were a

slave.

But capitalism, Marx goes on to say, while it debases the worker, at the

same time produces the conditions of his ultimate elevation. Capitalism

with its starvation wages and misery makes the workers conscious of

their common interests as an exploited class, concentrates them in a

limited number of industrial districts, and forces them to organize for

a struggle against the exploiters. The struggle is for the complete

displacement of the capitalists both in government and industry by the

revolutionary labor class. Moreover, capitalism itself renders effective

although unintended aid to its enemies by developing the following three

tendencies: First, we have the tendency towards the concentration of

capital and wealth in the hands of a few of the largest capitalists,

which reduces the number of the natural supporters of capitalism.

Second, we observe a tendency towards a steady depression of wages and a

growing misery of the wage-earning class, which keeps revolutionary

ardor alive. And lastly, the inevitable and frequent economic crises

under capitalism disorganize it and hasten it on towards destruction.

The last and gravest capitalistic industrial crisis will coincide with

the social revolution which will bring capitalism to an end. The

wage-earning class must under no condition permit itself to be diverted

from its revolutionary program into futile attempts to "patch-up"

capitalism. The labor struggle must be for the abolition of capitalism.

American wage earners have steadily disappointed several generations of

Marxians by their refusal to accept the Marxian theory of social

development and the Marxian revolutionary goal. In fact, in their

thinking, most American wage earners do not start with any general

theory of industrial society, but approach the subject as bargainers,

desiring to strike the best wage bargain possible. They also have a

conception of what the bargain ought to yield them by way of real

income, measured in terms of their customary standard of living, in

terms of security for the future, and in terms of freedom in the shop or

"self-determination." What impresses them is not so much the fact that

the employer owns the employment opportunities but that he possesses a

high degree of bargaining advantage over them. Viewing the situation as

bargainers, they are forced to give their best attention to the menaces

they encounter as bargainers, namely, to the competitive menaces; for on

these the employer's own advantage as a bargainer rests. Their impulse

is therefore not to suppress the employer, but to suppress those

competitive menaces, be they convict labor, foreign labor, "green" or

untrained workers working on machines, and so forth. To do so they feel

they must organize into a union and engage in a "class struggle" against

the employer.

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 idéal," 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 régime; 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'état_.

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 régime 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'état_ 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 régime 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.

SCHLÜTER, 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.