PROGRESS IN SPITE OF LEADERS
Other strikes come to my mind, strikes of less fire and flame and hence
attracting less national notice. The papers proclaimed to stockholders
and investors that there was peace, and there was no peace. The garment
workers struck and won. In Roosevelt, New Jersey, the workingmen in the
fertilizing plant of Williams and Clark struck.
Two strikers were shot dead--shot in the back by the hired gunmen. The
guards were arraigned, let out on bail, and reported back on the job.
The strikers were assembled in a vacant lot. Guards shot into their
midst, firing low and filling the legs of the workers with bullets.
“Mother,” the strikers wrote to me, “come help us with our women!”
I went. “Women,” said I, “see that your husbands use no fire arms or
violence no matter what the provocation. Don’t let your husbands scab.
Help them stand firm and above all keep them from the saloons. No
strike was ever won that did not have the support of the womenfolk.”
The street car men struck along in 1916 in New York City.
I spoke to a mass meeting of carmen’s wives and we certainly had those
women fighting like wildcats. They threatened me with jail and I told
the police I could raise as much hell in jail as out. The police said
if anyone was killed I should be held responsible and hanged.
“If they want to hang me, let them,” I said. “And on the scaffold
I will shout ‘Freedom for the working class!’ And when I meet God
Almighty I will tell him to damn my accusers and the accusers of the
working class, the people who tend and develop and beautify His world.”
The last years of my life have seen fewer and fewer strikes. Both
employer and employee have become wiser. Both have learned the value
of compromise. Both sides have learned that they gain when they get
together and talk things out in reason rather than standing apart,
slinging bricks, angry words and bullets. The railway brotherhoods have
learned that lesson. Strikes are costly. Fighting them is costly.
All the average human being asks is something he can call home; a
family that is fed and warm; and now and then a little happiness; once
in a long while an extravagance.
I am not a suffragist nor do I believe in “careers” for women,
especially a “career” in factory and mill where most working women have
their “careers.” A great responsibility rests upon woman--the training
of the children. This is her most beautiful task. If men earned money
enough, it would not be necessary for women to neglect their homes and
their little ones to add to the family’s income.
The last years of my life have seen long stretches of industrial peace.
Occasionally has come war. I regretted that illness kept me from
helping the railway shopmen in their brave fight for recognition a few
years ago. And I rejoiced to see the formation of a third political
party--a Farmer-Labor Party. Too long has labor been subservient to the
old betrayers, politicians and crooked labor leaders.
I had passed my ninety-third milestone when I attended the convention
of the Farmer-Labor Party and addressed the assembly. “The producer,
not the meek, shall inherit the earth,” I told them. “Not today
perhaps, nor tomorrow, but over the rim of the years my old eyes can
see the coming of another day.”
I was ninety-one years old when I attended the Pan-American Federation
of labor held in Mexico City in 1921. This convention was called to
promote a better understanding between the workers of America, Mexico
and Central America. Gompers attended as did a number of the American
leaders.
I spoke to the convention. I told them that a convention such as this
Pan-American Convention of labor was the beginning of a new day, a
day when the workers of the world would know no other boundaries other
than those between the exploiter and the exploited. Soviet Russia, I
said, had dared to challenge the old order, had handed the earth over
to those who toiled upon it, and the capitalists of the world were
quaking in their scab-made shoes. I told them of the national farce of
prohibition in America.
“Prohibition came,” said I, “through a combination of business men
who wanted to get more out of their workers, together with a lot of
preachers and a group of damn cats who threw fits when they saw a
workingman buy a bottle of beer but saw no reason to bristle when they
and their women and little children suffered under the curse of low
wages and crushing hours of toil.
“Prohibition,” said I, “has taken away the workingman’s beer, has
closed the saloon which was his only club. The rich guzzle as they
ever did. Prohibition is not for them. They have their clubs which are
sacred and immune from interference. The only club the workingman has
is the policeman’s. He has that when he strikes.”
I visited the coal mines of Coalhulia and saw that the life of the
miner is the same wherever coal is dug and capital flies its black flag.
As I look back over the long, long years, I see that in all movements
for the bettering of men’s lives, it is the pioneers who bear most
of the suffering. When these movements become established, when they
become popular, others reap the benefits. Thus it has been with the
labor movement.
The early days of the labor movement produced great men. They differed
greatly from the modern labor leader. These early leaders sought no
publicity, they were single minded, not interested in their own glory
nor their own financial advancement. They did not serve labor for pay.
They made great sacrifices that the future might be a bit brighter for
their fellow workers.
I remember John Siney, a miner. Holloran, a miner. James, a miner.
Robert Watchorn, the first and most able secretary that the miners of
this country ever had. These men gave their lives that others might
live. They died in want.
Dick Williams, McLaughlan, Travlick, Roy, Stevens, Wright, Powderly,
Martin Irons, Davis, Richards, Griffith, Thomas and Morgan were
pioneers worthy of our memory.
Powderly had to get up a subscription to defray the expenses of
Griffith’s funeral. Many of these pioneers died without even the
gratitude of those whom they served. Their monuments are the good they
did.
Many of our modern leaders of labor have wandered far from the thorny
path of these early crusaders. Never in the early days of the labor
struggle would you find leaders wining and dining with the aristocracy;
nor did their wives strut about like diamond-bedecked peacocks; nor
were they attended by humiliated, cringing colored servants.
The wives of these early leaders took in washing to make ends meet.
Their children picked and sold berries. The women shared the heroism,
the privation of their husbands.
In those days labor’s representatives did not sit on velvet chairs in
conference with labor’s oppressors; they did not dine in fashionable
hotels with the representatives of the top capitalists, such as the
Civic Federation. They did not ride in Pullmans nor make trips to
Europe.
The rank and file have let their servants become their masters and
dictators. The workers have now to fight not alone their exploiters but
likewise their own leaders, who often betray them, who sell them out,
who put their own advancement ahead of that of the working masses, who
make of the rank and file political pawns.
Provision should be made in all union constitutions for the recall of
leaders. Big salaries should not be paid. Career hunters should be
driven out, as well as leaders who use labor for political ends. These
types are menaces to the advancement of labor.
In big strikes I have known, the men lay in prison while the leaders
got out on bail and drew high salaries all the time. The leaders did
not suffer. They never missed a meal. Some men make a profession out of
labor and get rich thereby. John Mitchell left to his heirs a fortune,
and his political friends are using the labor movement to gather funds
to erect a monument to his memory, to a name that should be forgotten.
In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, in spite of labor’s
own lack of understanding of its needs, the cause of the worker
continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to
read and to think. Slowly his standard of living rises to include some
of the good and beautiful things of the world. Slowly the cause of his
children becomes the cause of all. His boy is taken from the breaker,
his girl from the mill. Slowly those who create the wealth of the world
are permitted to share it. The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands.