A History of Trade Unionism in the United States Part 18

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 cla.s.ses in Russian society--the industrial proletariat, the landed and industrial propertied cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses, in which the landed aristocracy, the capitalist cla.s.s, and the wage earning cla.s.s are raised successively to rulership as, with the progress of society's technical equipment, first one and then another cla.s.s can operate it with the maximum efficiency. Marx a.s.sumed that when the time has arrived for a given economic cla.s.s to take the helm, that cla.s.s will be found in full possession of all the psychological attributes of a ruling cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s destined to rule. Yet, whatever may be the case in the countries of the West, in Russia the ruling cla.s.ses, 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'etat_.

To get at the secret of this apparent feebleness and want of s.p.u.n.k in Russia's ruling cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 n.o.ble cla.s.s, the "Boyars," were but a shadow of the Western contemporary medieval landed aristocracy. When the several princ.i.p.alities 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 surrept.i.tiously to obstruct the carrying out of the Czar's intentions; he dared not try to impose the will of his cla.s.s upon the crown. The other cla.s.ses were even more apolitical. So little did the several cla.s.ses 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 "a.s.semblies of the land" to help administer the country. But, as a matter of fact, these a.s.semblies 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 n.o.bles and to that end decreed that the n.o.bility organize themselves into provincial a.s.sociations. But so little did the n.o.bility care for political power and active cla.s.s prerogative that, in spite of the broadest possible charters, the a.s.sociations of n.o.bles were never more than social organizations in the conventional sense of the word.

Even less did the commercial cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.s-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 compet.i.tion, they appealed to the Minister of Finances, who immediately created a government-enforced "trust" and a.s.sured them huge dividends. Since business success was a.s.sured 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s.

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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s in Russia was concerned.

Just as the capitalist cla.s.s reached the threshold of the revolution psychologically below par, so the wage-earning cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, a unity broken by no rifts between highly paid skilled groups and an inferior unskilled cla.s.s, or between a well-organized labor aristocracy and an unorganized helot cla.s.s. The economic and social oppression under the old regime 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s will even dream that it would under any circ.u.mstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities.

A Bolshevist _coup d'etat_ in America would mean a civil war to the bitter end, and a war in which the numerous cla.s.s of farmers would join the capitalists in the defense of the inst.i.tution 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1911, the leadership was revolutionary, it does not follow that the rank and file was animated by the same purpose. Given an inarticulate ma.s.s 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 d.y.k.e 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 cla.s.s. 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion for revolution, a pa.s.sion 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 rea.s.sure the great American middle cla.s.s 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 regime of private property and individual enterprise despite the many recognized shortcomings of the inst.i.tution.

[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 a.s.sociates,[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 Doc.u.mentary 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 a.s.sociation, 1909.

BING, ALEXANDER M., _War-Time Strikes and their Adjustment_, Dutton and Co., 1921.

BONNETT, CLARENCE E., _Employers' a.s.sociations 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.

SCHLuTER, 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.