American Syndicalism/Chapter 04

by John Graham Brooks

IV

THE PLAGUE OF MISCONCEPTIONS

(I)

With cynical hilarity a business friend has just read to me a proposal by Mr. Debs to raise at once "$500,000 for the approaching socialist campaign." "There you have it, like a staged farce. The starved millions, living on the margin of want, are to paint the country red with two million votes for Debs and Seidel. Not a nickel from the big interests, no blackmailing of corporations, but the whole half million subscribed by the starving, downtrodden working class." "And this," he adds, "is but an item. They pour thousands of dollars into Lawrence and a dozen other struck towns at the same time. They have just been buncoed out of a quarter of a million to free the McNamaras. They are paying for costly conventions, hundreds of lectures, and a very expensive press. Doesn't such penury wring the heart?"

In this sportive mood he filled in other features of the comedy, ending with that annihilating phrase—"They must be destitute of humor."

This gentleman had been telling a great deal of truth, but by no means all of it or the most important part of it. These objects of his lampooning are raising far larger funds than he knew. They are doing it all over the world, in countries where the purchasing power of the year's income is far lower than in the United States. They have for many years been doing it on a scale which most well-to-do people would consider insane or criminal. The propertied classes very generally shuffle and kick at ordinary taxes, but with voluntary devotion millions of working men and women bring hard earned money to support an idea. They are not doing this in spurts of enthusiasm, but with tireless persistency, sustained by a great faith.

I read for a year a socialist paper in which I never saw a single advertisement. Debts were incurred to start it. Deficits followed like a shadow. Asked how they went on with such a load: "Why, we have to give a lot of time free, and beg the rest from comrades. Two in the office work three or four hours a day after their own work is done and never take a cent. One woman has a little money and gives all her time. We have our pious formulas. 'He who quickly gives, gives twice': 'Who gives himself gives better than his coin.' "But no part of our citizenship puts these pieties to more instant or wider use than socialists.

If richer folk were taxed according to their means, one half of that which thousands of socialists in our midst are freely taxing themselves, it would be thought an outrage and a tyranny. The sacrifices to carry on the socialist sheet just mentioned are but a leaf from a thick book. What goes on in that dingy office is only a very tiny sample. In many hundreds of other offices the same story could be told. And yet the sum total of this press activity is itself also but a fraction of the unpaid or poorly paid service which this cause now inspires in the world.

One would think that devotions like these might give some seriousness even to the jauntiest critic. It is not for nothing that great multitudes in twenty different countries work like that. They do not upon principle hold out year after year in spite of perpetual defeats and at such direct and heavy costs except for something believed to be of life and death importance. Many of them pay this price for what they know never can be theirs. On a bench by the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, I sat one night after a socialist meeting with an old man who had seen about all one could see of service in the Confederate cause. He had for years given himself to build up a socialist sentiment in that community. "I shall not live," he said, "to see even the beginning of it. But it is a great cause." He was one of an army, far greater than the South sent to the field, who know that no extra penny can come to them, but they bring their offerings just the same.

This inner spirit and soul of a great movement is what my business friend did not see. Not seeing it, there was only an occasion for mockery.

It was only an absurdity to this critic that men and women who could give so much money for their cause should claim to have a serious grievance. "What do they want?" he asked. "Their reckless giving is proof enough that they are getting on; otherwise they couldn't give it." He was irritated by the aggressions of discontent which seemed to him stupidly unjustified. "The more they get on," he argued, "the worse they behave."

This is the fact about labor's discontent. It feeds on its own betterment. It increases because our prosperities and the general social atmosphere have created and stimulated in every class new wants and new determinations. Of a struggle that has become sacred to us Edmund Burke spoke in the English Parliament. He heard the tory taunt that the Americans were not oppressed, to which he answered: "Mr. Speaker, the question is not whether the Americans are oppressed or not; but whether they think they are."

That increasing millions in the wage receiving class have come to think as they do about economic imperfections over which men have control, constitutes our industrial problem as its political counterpart was the problem of our rebellious forebears.

These breeding dissatisfactions constitute a pressure from below that will be neither shamed nor checked by optimistic platitudes about the rise of wages. On the long curves, generation by generation, the purchasing power of labor's income has risen and the working hours are fewer. The wiser socialists know this and proclaim it.

"What, then, is the fuss about?" The fuss has to do with a thing that is wholly relative. This may have the simplest graphic expression

Let the upper line stand for the increasing income of the more prosperous and the lower line for the increasing prosperity of labor. Both have risen, but the well-to-do have gained relatively far more than the wage earner. In the United States, the distance between the large incomes and the small ones seems to have grown steadily through the century. The wage earner's contention that he should have a relatively larger share in wealth-production is justified. As he has had to fight for this in the past, he will fight for it in the future. Socialism puts a new weapon into his hands. To the old weapon of the trade union, it now adds an instrument that cuts deeper and has a longer thrust. That the masses are to use this weapon with all the force and cunning at their command is now a certainty that we need not question. Largely on account of the extent and rawness of our immigration, nowhere will they use it more ruthlessly than in the United States. No nation offers such an arena. The material advantages we put at the disposal of labor; all the stalking laxities that pass for liberty,^[1] every easy facility for the widest scattering of revolutionary literature, are illustrations of the field and the occasion we open to this socialistic insurgency as it overflows into new and threatening shapes.

(II)

Especially among our more prosperous folk, if a "quiz" could be held on the causes and nature of the present strain and turbulence between capital and labor, I should submit as the first question this: Why does the word "scab" carry with it an indignity so poignant? To justify the scab or to condemn him has no part in the question. It is only sought to explain him and the savage animosities he excites. An engineer upon one of our great structures had a strike. He crushed it with strike-breakers within a week. When the work was done, I asked him about the men who took the places of those who left. "A few of them," he said, "were good fellows, but the bulk of them were skunks." I tried to learn why this impression had been made upon him, but could not get beyond this fact of explosive contempt.

In a sharp labor disturbance, I have seen a man wholly unruffled under such words as liar, coward and thief, but the monosyllable "scab" had an instantaneous effect like a dash of vitriol in the face. During the recent strike at Lawrence a generous and active friend of the strikers asked a trade union official if her organization was not really scabbing against the large body of men and women who had left the mills. I saw the woman to whom the question was put flush hot as if insulted. A little later, the tears in her eyes, she left her office saying, "I cannot stand it, I cannot stand it."

These instances are neither exceptional nor do they exaggerate by a tittle the mordant power of this word. Really to answer this question; really to see what the maddened protest implies of guilt and treachery to one's own, is a good first step in understanding what is before us of impending tasks.

A good second to the question about the scab, concerns the strike itself. It is so incessant; reaches, year after year, in a dozen countries so many millions of people and shows no sign of abating.

What explanation have we of this? In the twitter of the drawing-room it is "perversity," "ignorance," "wickedness," "ingratitude," and with the angered business man, it is oftenest "labor poisoned and misguided by the agitator."

That, at this date, puerilities like these should have influence with rational folk is as strange as it is ominous. Here, as in moving pictures before us, are events involving on any calendar day far more bitterness than the sharp agonies on the down-going Titanic. In that year in the world's workhouse more than four hundred thousand men were out on long strikes and more than a million and a half in lesser ones. With their families this stands for a population like that of a larger state. Nor is there any outer fate of compulsion like that of the Titanic disaster.

The determining majority of these strikers, according to their own law, deliberately took up the burden, the weight of which they know far better than any or all others. The unvoiced misery of a long strike is always in the background. It is among the wives, the weaker workers, the more timid, those that have saved no money, those that have passed their prime, and those in debt or with mortgaged homes. It is among such as these that the main tragedy goes on, and for the thousandth time, it is entered upon. It is these who live in the tradition of defeat and suffering caused by strikes. Veterans are always there to tell them that it costs. But in the face of it all, in dreary succession, it still goes on. Of a strike at this moment wearing itself out among English dockers, a London reporter thus speaks:

The suffering of the strikers' families has become so dreadful that the public is fairly paralyzed with horror. The streets in the dockyards districts are filled with hollow-eyed women and children, reduced almost to skeletons and so weak that they are hardly able to stand.

Many have died almost wholly of starvation. The number of the victims is so great that the authorities and private charitable organizations are unable to cope with the situation.

The official explanation that the rivalries of a few leaders give us all the answer we need is pitiable. Of the strike movement as a whole, it does not contain even a paltry half-truth. I have a fairly close personal record of eighteen strikes. Of two of them, conceivably three, the cause may be attributed to conscienceless or imperilled leadership. But in the majority of strikes the world over the leaders are forced to the fighting line by the workers behind them. For the most part this leadership is a symptom and result, not a cause.

On the surface of a serious strike are conspicuous and frisky gaieties. Youth and the irresponsible are so much in evidence that the public does not see the background with its silences and distress. To stagger on, decade after decade, under a self-imposed immolation like this, must have a cause not accounted for by petulant phrases. The unexplained obstinacy with which this costly warfare goes on is the more strange because for half a century in several countries elaborate mechanisms have been devised to check and soften these revolts. Arbitration, conciliation, sliding scales, trade agreements,—each in its time has been hailed as peace bringer. Each has done its little work, but, tearing through them all, the gathering unrest makes its way as if these buffers had no existence. Human tenacities like these have no explaining, except in terms of structural changes in society. A letter describing mere glimpses of this suffering in the recent English coal strike adds, "There are such depths of it, that three days were all that I could physically stand merely to observe it, and yet among those suffering most the determination to face it out was almost fierce."

This is a part of the "quiz." Why? Behind all perversities, blunders, betrayals and defeats,—why do these multitudes continue to load themselves with sacrifices so heavy? No copy-book answer can be given to these questions, but a larger answer is possible in terms of changing social and economic experience.

In the second quarter of the last century an Austrian Minister thought it an adequate account of the democratic uprising in Italy, that it was "a mere disease of envy and irreligion." He was sure that a little wholesome severity would at once restore these disturbers to the ways of obedience and common sense. This explanation and the remedy proposed now satisfy only our humor. But it is a bit of history that may well serve us as a mirror. In that feudal explanation and remedy, we may see ourselves in presence of our own industrial rebels. We now know that those early nineteenth century strikers, sick with "envy and irreligion," were fighting for political freedom. At appalling costs they were striking politically. Today the strike is consciously upon the field of industry. It is still the old rebelling against autocratic usages that have come first under criticism and suspicion, then under direct attack. The political uprisings that crowd the first half of the nineteenth century were full of havoc, waste and lawlessness, precisely like our own strikes. There was much vanity and self-seeking in many of the leaders then as now. But upon the whole, the political strikers of those days had the valor and disinterestedness which those must have, who break the hardened conventions of their time and open the ways of growth to larger and freer life.

In those earlier days, the enemy at which the political strikers aimed was arbitrary authority. It was an authority always justifying itself by whatever traditional sanctity had power over the imagination of the time;—religion, patriotism, and existing "law and order," as interpreted by those in office. Within these symbols, property interests and social proprieties solemnly cloaked themselves as they do today. They were not necessarily hypocrites. There is a terrible French utterance which most of us should learn by heart, "Why be a hypocrite, when it is so easy to deceive yourself?"

Whatever is precious in our private belongings leads readily to much deceiving and neither the defenders of the existing system nor those who rise against it will escape the danger in these hypocrisies. Few social groups have more frailties than political or industrial strikers. They are forever the easy butt of ridicule in their time. A classmate of Wendell Phillips told me that he saw the coming agitator practising his oratories before a glass and always had thereafter proper contempt for him. He would neither hear him speak nor consider his opinions. The test is rather contemptible, but it is probably as old as the history of man's likes and dislikes.

These periods of revolutionary change are not to be measured by frailties in their leaders. The only measure is the necessity of the movement itself. Political and religious authority had reached an intolerable stage early in the nineteenth century and enough brave men had found it out to make a life-and-death issue. For two generations, in spite of much squalid vanity and dreary demagogic play, it was a rousing struggle for an enlarged and richer human life. These wider opportunities for the mass of men were plainly impossible until the pretentious pieties of authority, arbitrarily enforced, were beaten. But arbitrary power did not then quit the scene. It slowly changed its form, and on the field of industry and commerce it grew great and held its own. Its cumulating power has now reached a climax. It stalks among us so flauntingly that millions of common folk can see it. It has passed from the speculations of students to the growling remonstrance of masses of men. In an age grown acute with democratic feeling, in days when political power or what is believed to be such is passing to the people through direct primaries, recalls and such like devices, our economic destinies seem still to be at the beck and call of elusive and shadowy authorities as ruthless as their predecessors. Finance and markets are their throne. They, too, have their solemn draperies, their secrecies, and neighborly interchange of inside information. Here in our midst is the real heart of monopoly power. Here are the obvious sources of that ludicrous overloading of individuals with wealth. The Power of Kings has not been greater, but it is the unknown use of this vast power, its essentially arbitrary character, that the people again have come to challenge. It seems to them in very deadly conflict with every essential of real liberty. Multitudes, no longer to be silenced, are everywhere asking what respect or patience they should have with a system producing day by day the kind of inequality now visible in the United States. Especially are they asking about the measure and uses of this power which one or two per cent of the people now coin for themselves. They no longer ask, but know that democracy, or any real approach to it, is impossible until these privileged economic resources are themselves in some sense democratized. Multitudes now believe that the wage system is but an instrument in the hands of these powers. Of the dizzy heights of finance and credit labor knows nothing, and even special students war with each other over its most elemental explanation; but of the "wage system" the worker has his own opinion, founded on experience. Labor therefore begins its rebellion at this point. It is striking at the kind of power that appears through this wage system. Its very ignorance of the power behind, deepens its suspicions. But for us just now, it is a dangerous obliquity not to recognize that capitalists cannot continue to work those forces in the old arbitrary spirit. If they insist upon this at the points (as in public utilities) directly and sensitively touching the general welfare, such managers will create their own trouble, and every day they will more and more create it. They will themselves be responsible for it, because they insist upon a method and, above all, upon a spirit that is outgrown. At these more developed stages in the wage system, there is from now on not a step toward security or progress, unless labor (as well as the public) is allowed some voice in management. This is the lesson which every industrial autocrat has to learn. Strictly on this issue, the side of the striker is as sacred as any struggling reform in human history. It has long been as sacred as at present, but the practically eventful fact now is that millions of wage earners have become sensitively conscious of the situation. They need no more evidence that the old wage method arbitrarily enforced shuts them too sharply out of privileges and rights that should be theirs. They are so convinced of this, and the army of them has grown so great, as to constitute a problem that no advanced society will safely ignore.

Hundreds of employers in the world, and a few great ones, are admitting all this and doing their best to act upon it. They are creating organs through which labor may have its representation in management. This frankly assumes that in highly organized industries, arbitrary wage systems have had their day. It is popularly seen that our age is supremely the age of industrial organization. If it is that, why should labor be excluded from its benefits? But of more significance still is it that the new principle of progressively democratized management demands the education of employer and laborer alike. Now the education of labor cannot longer be kept outside this common organization. It may go on in excluded and hostile areas with all the dangers that imports. Or it may go on in essential and increasing partnership with management.

To set our faces henceforth in this direction, to understand that this inclusive association, though it take a century, is the way of safety and the way of growth, is the lesson to be learned, especially in the United States. One of the most successful of English business men now in Parliament recently spent six weeks in this country. He saw a great many of our larger employers. I heard him asked about his impressions. One of them was this. "So many of your big men don't seem to me to realize in the least what is happening."

Let us begin by avoiding the blunder of that autocrat in Austria, that our present insurrection is "a mere disease of envy and irreligion." This is not in the least "what is happening." The harsh and mutinous protest of our I. W. W. is to be judged solely in its relation to a vastly larger democratic rising against the absolutism and masked economic privilege of our own day. Cynical men of the world will make light of this belief of the many. It will be so easy for them to show the muddled misconceptions in the "mass-conviction," but for what we have here in hand, it is enough that the conviction is real and that it has won alliances and quite strength enough to make its reactions felt in our political life.

1. I have seen strikes in which extreme violence lasted for weeks with much shooting, and yet guns and pistols were allowed the freest selling and the saloons faithfully kept open, though they were the direct occasion of brawls, resulting in some of the most brutal cases with which the local court was plagued.