A History of Trade Unionism in the United States Part 4

But just as the Greenback-Labor movement was a.s.suming promising proportions a change for the better in the industrial situation cut under the very roots of its existence. In addition, one month after the election of 1878, its princ.i.p.al issue disappeared. January 1, 1879, was the date fixed by the act for resumption of redemption of greenbacks in gold and on December 17, 1878, the premium on gold disappeared. From that day on, the greenback became a dead issue.

Another factor of great importance was the large increase in the volume of the currency. In 1881 the currency, which had averaged about $725,000,000 for the years 1876-1878, reached over $1,111,000,000. Under these conditions, all that remained available to the platform-makers and propagandists of the party was their opposition to the so-called "monopolistic" national banks with their control over currency and to the refunding of the bonded debt of the government.

The disappearance of the financial issue snapped the threads which had held together the farmer and the wage-worker. So long as depression continued, the issue was financial and the two had, as they thought, a common enemy--the banker. The financial issue once settled, or at least suspended, the object of the attack by labor became the employer, and that of the attack by the farmer--the railway corporation and the warehouse man. Prosperity had mitigated the grievances of both cla.s.ses, but while the farmer still had a great deal to expect from politics in the form of state regulation of railway rates, the wage earners'

struggle now turned entirely economic and not political.

In California, as in the Eastern industrial States, the railway strikes of 1877 precipitated a political movement. California had retained gold as currency throughout the entire period of paper money, and the labor movement at no time had accepted the greenback platform. The political issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but also "direct action"--violence. The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the Exclusion Law pa.s.sed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of cla.s.ses.[10]

The seventies witnessed another of those recurring attempts of consumers' cooperation already noticed in the forties and sixties. This time the movement was organized by the "Sovereigns of Industry," a secret order, founded at Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1874 by one William H. Earle. The spirit of the Order was entirely peaceful and un.o.btrusive as expressed in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Purposes which reads as follows:

"The Order of the Sovereigns of Industry is an a.s.sociation of the industrial or laboring cla.s.ses, without regard to race, s.e.x, color, nationality, or occupation; not founded for the purpose of waging any war of aggression upon any other cla.s.s, or for fostering any antagonism of labor against capital, or of arraying the poor against the rich; but for mutual a.s.sistance in self-improvement and self-protection."

The scheme of organization called for a local council including members from the town or district, a state council, comprising representatives from the local councils and a National Council in which the States were represented. The president of the National Council was the founder of the Order, William H. Earle.

Success accompanied the efforts of the promoters of the Sovereigns of Industry for a few years. The total membership in 1875-1876 was 40,000, of whom seventy-five percent were in New England and forty-three percent in Ma.s.sachusetts. Though the Order extended into other States and even reached the territories, its chief strength always remained in New England and the Middle States. During the last period of its existence a national organ was published at Washington, but the Order does not appear to have gained a foothold in any of the more Southern sections of the country.

In 1875, 101 local councils reported as having some method of supplying members with goods, 46 of whom operated stores. The largest store belonged to the council at Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, which in 1875 built the "Sovereign Block" at a cost of $35,500. In his address at the fourth annual session in Washington, President Earle stated that the store in Springfield led all the others with sales amounting to $119,000 for the preceding year. About one-half of the councils failed to report, but at the Congress of 1876 President Earle estimated the annual trade at $3,000,000.

Much enthusiasm accompanied the progress of the movement. The hall in "Sovereign Block" at Springfield was dedicated amid such jubilation as marks an event thought to be the forerunner of a new era. There is indeed a certain pathos in the high hopes expressed in the Address of Dedication by President Earle, for, though the Order continued to thrive until 1878, shortly after a decline began, and dissolution was its fate in 1880.

The failure of the Sovereigns marked the latest attempt on a large scale[11] to inoculate the American workingmen with the sort of cooperative spirit which proved so successful in England.[12]

This failure of distributive cooperation to gain the strong and lasting foothold in this country that it has abroad has been accounted for in various ways by different writers. Great emphasis has been laid upon the lack of capital, the lack of suitable legislation on the subject of cooperation, the mutual isolation of the educated and wage-earning cla.s.ses, the lack of business ability among wage earners, and the altogether too frequent venality and corruption among cooperators.

Probably the lack of adequate leadership has played as important a part as any. It is peculiar to America that the wage earner of exceptional ability can easily find a way for escaping into the cla.s.s of independent producers or even employers of labor. The American trade union movement has suffered much less from this difficulty. The trade unions are fighting organizations; they demand the sort of leader who is of a combative spirit, who possesses the organizing ability and the "personal magnetism" to keep his men in line; and for this kind of ability the business world offers no particular demand. On the other hand, the qualifications which go to make a successful manager of a cooperative store, namely, steadiness, conservatism of judgment, attention to detail and business punctuality always will be in great demand in the business world. Hence, when no barrier is interposed in the form of preempted opportunities or cla.s.s bias, the exceptional workingman who possesses these qualifications will likely desert his cla.s.s and set up in business for himself. In England, fortunately for the cooperative movement, such an escape is very difficult.

The failure of consumers' cooperation in America was helped also by two other peculiarly American conditions. European economists, when speaking of the working cla.s.s, a.s.sume generally that it is fixed in residence and contrast it with capital, which they say is fluid as between city and city and even between country and country. American labor, however, native as well as immigrant, is probably more mobile than capital; for, tradition and habit which keep the great majority of European wage earners in the place where their fathers and forefathers had lived before them are generally absent in this country, except perhaps in parts of New England and the South. It is therefore natural that the cooperative spirit, which after all is but an enlarged and more generalized form of the old spirit of neighborliness and mutual trust, should have failed to develop to its full strength in America.

Another condition fatal to the development of the cooperative spirit is the racial heterogeneity of the American wage-earning cla.s.s, which separates it into mutually isolated groups even as the social cla.s.ses of England and Scotland are separated by cla.s.s spirit. As a result, we find a want of mutual trust which depends so much on "consciousness of kind."

This is further aggravated by compet.i.tion and a continuous displacement in industry of nationalities of a high standard of living by those of a lower one. This conflict of nationalities, which lies also at the root of the closed shop policy of many of the American trade unions, is probably the most effective carrier that there is to a widespread growth of the cooperative spirit among American wage earners. This is further hindered by other national characteristics which more or less pervade all cla.s.ses of society, namely, the traditional individualism--the heritage of puritanism and the pioneer days, and the emphasis upon earning capacity with a corresponding aversion to thrift.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The National Labor Union came out against Chinese immigration in 1869, when the issue was brought home to the Eastern wage earners following the importation by a shoe manufacturer in North Adams, Ma.s.sachusetts, of Chinese strike breakers.

[11] There were many cooperative stores in the eighties and a concerted effort to duplicate the venture of the Sovereigns was attempted as late as 1919 under the pressure of the soaring cost of living.

[12] Where Consumers' Cooperation has worked under most favorable conditions as in England, its achievements have been all that its most ardent champions could have desired. Such is the picture presented by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in the following glowing terms:

"The organization of industry by a.s.sociations of Consumers offers, as far as it goes, a genuine alternative to capitalist ownership, because it supersedes the capitalist power, whether individual or joint-stock, alike in the control of the instruments of production by which the community lives, and in the absorption of the profits, which otherwise support a capitalist cla.s.s. The ownership and control are vested in, and the profits are distributed among, the whole community of consumers, irrespective of their industrial wealth. Through the device of dividend on purchases the Cooperative Movement maintains an open democracy, through the control of this democracy of consumers it has directly or indirectly kept down prices, and protected the wage-earning cla.s.s from exploitation by the Credit System and from the extortions of monopolist traders and speculators. By this same device on purchases, and the automatic acc.u.mulation of part of the profit in the capital of each society and in that of the Wholesales, it has demonstratedly added to the personal wealth of the manual working cla.s.s, and has, alike in Great Britain, and in other countries, afforded both a valuable financial reserve to the wage earners against all emergencies and an instrument for their elevation from the penury to which compet.i.tion is always depressing them. By making possible the upgrowth of great business enterprises in working cla.s.s hands, the Cooperative Movement has, without divorcing them from their fellows, given to thousands of the manual workers both administrative experience and a well-grounded confidence; and has thus enabled them to take a fuller part in political and social life than would otherwise have been probable."--_New Statesman_, May 30, 1916. "Special Supplement on the Cooperative Movement."

Indeed the success of the consumer's cooperative movement in European countries has been marvellous, even measured by bare figures. In all Europe in 1914, there were about 9,000,000 cooperators of whom one-third lived in Great Britain and not less than two and a half millions in Germany. In England and Scotland alone, the 1400 stores and two Wholesale Cooperative Societies controlled in 1914 about 420 million dollars of retail distributive trade and employed nearly 50,000 operatives in processes of production in their own workshops and factories.

CHAPTER 3

THE BEGINNING OF THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR AND OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

With the practical disintegration of the organized labor movement in the seventies, two nuclei held together and showed promise of future growth.

One was the "n.o.ble Order of the Knights of Labor" and the other a small trade union movement grouped around the International Cigar Makers'

Union.

The "n.o.ble Order of the Knights of Labor," while it first became important in the labor movement after 1873, was founded in 1869 by Uriah Smith Stephens, a tailor who had been educated for the ministry, as a secret organization. Secrecy was adopted as a protection against persecutions by employers.

The principles of the Order were set forth by Stephens in the secret ritual. "Open and public a.s.sociation having failed after a struggle of centuries to protect or advance the interest of labor, we have lawfully const.i.tuted this a.s.sembly," and "in using this power of organized effort and cooperation, we but imitate the example of capital heretofore set in numberless instances;" for, "in all the multifarious branches of trade, capital has its combinations, and, whether intended or not, it crushes the manly hopes of labor and tramples poor humanity into the dust."

However, "we mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital." The remedy consists first in work of education: "We mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor (the only creator of values or capital) and the justice of its receiving a full, just share of the values or capital it has created." The next remedy was legislation: "We shall, with all our strength, support laws made to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, for labor alone gives life and value to capital, and also those laws which tend to lighten the exhaustiveness of toil." Next in order were mutual benefits.

"We shall use every lawful and honorable means to procure and retain employ for one another, coupled with a just and fair remuneration, and, should accident or misfortune befall one of our number, render such aid as lies within our power to give, without inquiring his country or his creed."

For nine years the Order remained a secret organization and showed but a slow growth. In 1878 it was forced to abolish secrecy. The public mind was rendered uneasy by the revolutionary uprising of workingmen of Paris who set up the famous "Commune of Paris" of 1871, by the destructive great railway strikes in this country in 1877 and, lastly, by a wave of criminal disorders in the anthracite coal mining region in Eastern Pennsylvania,[13] and became only too p.r.o.ne to attribute revolutionary and criminal intents to any labor organization that cloaked itself in secrecy. Simultaneously with coming out into the open, the Knights adopted a new program, called the Preamble of the Knights of Labor, in place of the vague Secret Ritual which hitherto served as the authoritative expression of aims.

This Preamble recites how "wealth," with its development, has become so aggressive that "unless checked" it "will inevitably lead to the pauperisation and hopeless degradation of the toiling ma.s.ses." Hence, if the toilers are "to enjoy the blessings of life," they must organize "every department of productive industry" in order to "check" the power of wealth and to put a stop to "unjust acc.u.mulation." The battle cry in this fight must be "moral worth not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness." As the "action" of the toilers ought to be guided by "knowledge," it is necessary to know "the true condition of the producing ma.s.ses"; therefore, the Order demands "from the various governments the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics." Next in order comes the "establishment of cooperative inst.i.tutions productive and distributive." Union of all trades, "education," and producers'

cooperation remained forever after the cardinal points in the Knights of Labor philosophy and were steadily referred to as "First Principles,"

namely principles bequeathed to the Order by Uriah Stephens and the other "Founders."[14]

These idealistic "First Principles" found an ardent champion in Terence V. Powderly, a machinist by trade and twice mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on a labor ticket, who succeeded Stephens in 1878 to the headship of the Order. Powderly bore unmistakably the stamp of this sort of idealism throughout all the time when he was the foremost labor leader in the country. Unlike Samuel Gompers, who came to supplant him about 1890, he was foreign to that spirit of combative unionism which accepts the wage system but concentrates on a struggle to wrest concessions from the employers. Even when circ.u.mstances which were largely beyond his control made Powderly a strike leader on a huge scale, his heart lay elsewhere--in circ.u.mventing the wage system by opening to the worker an escape into self-employment through cooperation.

Producers' cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the Order of the Knights of Labor expected to lead the American wage-earning cla.s.s out of the bondage of the wage system into the Canaan of self-employment. Thus the Order was the true successor of the cooperative movement in the forties and sixties. Its motto was "Cooperation of the Order, by the Order, and for the Order." Not scattered local initiative, but the Order as a whole was to carry on the work. The plan resembled the Rochdale system of England in that it proposed to start with an organization of consumers--the large and ever-growing membership of the Order. But it departed radically from the English prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive establishments which were to follow. Consumers' cooperation was to be but a stepping stone to producers' self-employment. Eventually when the Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society--so the plan contemplated--it would control practically the whole market and cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception.

So far, therefore, as "First Principles" went, the Order was not an instrument of the "cla.s.s struggle," but an a.s.sociation of idealistic cooperators. It was this pure idealism which drew to the Order of the Knights of Labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like Dr.

Richard T. Ely[15] and President John Bascom of Wisconsin.

The other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union movement grouped around the Cigar Makers' Union, was neither so purely American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently idealistic. On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and "pragmatic." The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies, particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen's a.s.sociation, the "First _Internationale_," which was founded by Karl Marx in London in 1864. The conception of _economic_ labor organization which was advanced by the _Internationale_ in a socialistic formulation underwent in the course of years a process of change: On the one hand, through constant conflict with the rival conception of _political_ labor organization urged by American followers of the German socialist, Ferdinand La.s.salle, and on the other hand, through contact with American reality. Out of that double contact emerged the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor.

The _Internationale_ is generally reputed to have been organized by Karl Marx for the propaganda of international socialism. As a matter of fact, its starting point was the practical effort of British trade union leaders to organize the workingmen of the Continent and to prevent the importation of Continental strike-breakers. That Karl Marx wrote its _Inaugural Address_ was merely incidental. It chanced that what he wrote was acceptable to the British unionists rather than the draft of an address representing the views of Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of the "New Italy" and the "New Europe," which was submitted to them at the same time and advocated elaborate plans of cooperation. Marx emphasized the cla.s.s solidarity of labor against Mazzini's harmony of capital and labor. He did this by reciting what British labor had done through the Rochdale system of cooperation without the help of capitalists and what the British Parliament had done in enacting the ten-hour law of 1847 against the protest of capitalists. Now that British trade unionists in 1864 were demanding the right of suffrage and laws to protect their unions, it followed that Marx merely stated their demands when he affirmed the independent economic and political organization of labor in all lands. His _Inaugural Address_ was a trade union doc.u.ment, not a _Communist Manifesto_. Indeed not until Bakunin and his following of anarchists had nearly captured the organization in the years 1869 to 1872 did the program of socialism become the leading issue.

The philosophy of the _Internationale_ at the period of its ascendency was based on the economic organization of the working cla.s.s in trade unions. These must precede the political seizure of the government by labor. Then, when the workingmen's party should achieve control, it would be able to build up successively the socialist state on the foundation of a sufficient number of existing trade unions.

This conception differed widely from the teaching of Ferdinand La.s.salle.

La.s.sallean socialism was born in 1863 with La.s.salle's _Open Letter_ to a workingmen's committee in Leipzig. It sprang from his antagonism to Schultze-Delizsch's[16] system of voluntary cooperation. In La.s.salle's eagerness to condemn the idea of the harmony of capital and labor, which lay at the basis of Schultze's scheme for cooperation, he struck at the same time a blow against all forms of non-political organization of wage earners. Perhaps the fact that he was ignorant of the British trade unions accounts for his insufficient appreciation of trade unionism. But no matter what the cause may have been, to La.s.salle there was but one means of solving the labor problem-political action. When political control was finally achieved, the labor party, with the aid of state credit, would build up a network of cooperative societies into which eventually all industry would pa.s.s.

In short, the distinction between the ideas of the _Internationale_ and of La.s.salle consisted in the fact that the former advocated trade unionism prior to and underlying political organization, while the latter considered a political victory as the basis of socialism. These antagonistic starting points are apparent at the very beginning of American socialism as well as in the trade unionism and socialism of succeeding years.

Two distinct phases can be seen in the history of the _Internationale_ in America. During the first phase, which began in 1866 and lasted until 1870, the _Internationale_ had no important organization of its own on American soil, but tried to establish itself through affiliation with the National Labor Union. The inducement held out to the latter was of a practical nature, the international regulation of immigration. During the second phase the _Internationale_ had its "sections" in nearly every large city of the country, centering in New York and Chicago, and the practical trade union part of its work receded before its activity on behalf of the propaganda of socialism.

These "sections," with a maximum membership which probably never exceeded a thousand, nearly all foreigners, became a preparatory school in trade union leadership for many of the later organizers and leaders of the American Federation of Labor: for example, Adolph Stra.s.ser, the German cigar maker, whose organization became the new model in trade unionism, and P.J. McGuire, the American-born carpenter, who founded the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and who was for many years the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor.

Fate had decreed that these sections of a handful of immigrants should play for a time high-sounding parts in the world labor movement. When, at the World Congress of the International Workingmen's a.s.sociation at the Hague in 1872, the anarchist faction led by Bakunin had shown such strength that Marx and his socialist faction deemed it wise to move the General Council out of mischief's way, they removed it to New York and entrusted its powers into the hands of the faithful German Marxians on this side of the Atlantic. This spelled the end of the _Internationale_ as a world organization, but enormously increased the stakes of the factional fights within the handful of American Internationalists. The organization of the workers into trade unions, the _Internationale's_ first principle, was forgotten in the heat of intemperate struggles for empty honors and powerless offices. On top of that, with the panic of 1873 and the ensuing prolonged depression, the political drift a.s.serted itself in socialism as it had in the labor movement in general and the movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions, entered, urged on by the La.s.salleans, into a series of political campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succ.u.mbing to the inevitable fate of all amateurish attempts. Upon men of Stra.s.ser's practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade unionism as the only activity worth his while. Stra.s.ser had been elected president of the Cigar Makers' International Union in 1877, in the midst of a great strike in New York against the tenement-house system.

The president of the local New York union of cigar makers was at the time Samuel Gompers, a young man of twenty-seven, who was born in England and came to America in 1862. In his endeavor to build up a model for the "new" unionism and in his almost uninterrupted headship of that movement for forty years is indicated Gompers' truly representative character. Born of Dutch-Jewish parents in England in 1850, he typifies the cosmopolitan origins of American unionism. His early contact in the union of his trade with men like Stra.s.ser, upon whom the ideas of Marx and the International Workingmen's a.s.sociation had left an indelible stamp, and his thorough study of Marx gave him that grounding both in idealism and cla.s.s consciousness which has produced many strong leaders of American unions and saved them from defection to other interests.

Aggressive and uncompromising in a perpetual fight for the strongest possible position and power of trade unions, but always strong for collective agreements with the opposing employers, he displays the business tactics of organized labor. At the head of an organization which denies itself power over its const.i.tuent unions, he has brought and held together the most widely divergent and often antagonistic unions, while permitting each to develop and even to change its character to fit the changing industrial conditions.

The dismal failure of the strike against the tenement house system in cigar making brought home to both Stra.s.ser and Gompers the weakness of the plan of organization of their union as well as that of American trade unions in general. They consequently resolved to rebuild their union upon the pattern of the British unions, although they firmly intended that it should remain a militant organization. The change involved, first, complete authority over the local unions in the hands of the international officers; second, an increase in the membership dues for the purpose of building up a large fund; and, third, the adoption of a far-reaching benefit system in order to a.s.sure stability to the organization. This was accomplished at the convention held in August, 1879. This convention simultaneously adopted the British idea of the "equalization of funds," which gave the international officers the power to order a well-to-do local union to transfer a portion of its funds to another local union in financial straits. With the various modifications of the feature of "equalization of funds," the system of government in the Cigar Makers' International Union was later used as a model by the other national and international trade unions.

As Stra.s.ser and men of his ilk grew more and more absorbed in the practical problems of the everyday struggle of the wage-earners for better conditions of employment, the socialistic portion of their original philosophy kept receding further and further into the background until they arrived at pure trade unionism. But their trade unionism differed vastly from the "native" American trade unionism of their time, which still hankered for the haven of producers'

cooperation. The philosophy which these new leaders developed might be termed a philosophy of pure wage-consciousness. It signified a labor movement reduced to an opportunistic basis, accepting the existence of capitalism and having for its object the enlarging of the bargaining power of the wage earner in the sale of his labor. Its opportunism was instrumental--its idealism was home and family and individual betterment. It also implied an att.i.tude of aloofness from all those movements which aspire to replace the wage system by cooperation, whether voluntary or subsidized by government, whether greenbackism, socialism, or anarchism.

Perhaps the most concise definition of this philosophy is to be found in Stra.s.ser's testimony before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1883: