American Syndicalism/Chapter 02
II
THE MORE IMMEDIATE DANGER
In the hope of making more intelligible the general purpose of this study, I wish to connect it with experiences out of which an earlier volume grew—The Social Unrest. The book was at best only the A. B. C. of some economic disorders observable at the time. As in a primer, I tried to interpret those features of the trade union struggle, as it met on one side the resistance of the employer and upon the other an already invading socialism. It seemed to me then, as it seems today, that socialism has no such personal friend as the capitalist possessing power and inclination to crush labor organization. There are other and deeper causes of socialism over which we have little control, but in our relation to labor organization, we can exercise choice and conscious direction. Not all the bulky offences of trade union aggression should obscure the fact that these organizations are among the educational and conservative forces of our time. The trade union expressly recognizes the wage system and tries always, however awkwardly, to make terms with it. Just as expressly, socialism aims to destroy that system as part and parcel of the one "iniquitous despoiler," capitalism; i. e., our present methods of doing business.
Even in theory, if capital once convinces labor that its trade union is futile; that it can have no organic and recognized part with capitalist management, then labor, if it have a gleam of intelligence, will look elsewhere for succor. It will say, "The capitalist refuses to play fair with us. Real power in the business world has become organic. Its great achievements now come through organization. Knowing this and glorying in it, capital either fights us or palavers. It fights or it seeks diverting substitutes,—anything to prevent that collective efficiency among us which it finds indispensable for itself."
My appeal is not, however, to theory, but to such fact and open illustration as appear in pages that follow.
Before the sullen reactions of the Homestead Strike in Pittsburg had ceased, I asked a man of real power in those great industries, if it were true that he and his friends had determined to wipe out trade union organization. "Yes," he said, "that is our purpose. They seem to exist only to make trouble and we are done with them." Without excitement or braggadocio, he explained to me how this could be done and would be done. "They bother the life out of us," he added. "They keep men at work we do not want; prevent or try to prevent our turning off those for whom we have no further use. They level things toward the meanest worker. We have got on with them only because we were forced to it. They everywhere check product. We are now going to control our own business, and we are going to do it entirely."[1] I knew that in general and in detail, there was a good deal of truth in what this gentlemen said, but I left Pittsburg wondering what the American people would say, and especially what they would continue to say about this question. Quite incontestable is it that to most employers trade unions are a nuisance. But the employer's point of view is neither exclusive nor final. There is also the point of view of twenty-two or -three millions of wage earners. More important still is a point of view above them both; namely, that of the general public. The momentous event in our country is that at last the public is becoming aware of its right and its power as a collective whole. It will alas, be long in learning a wise and temperate use of its power. Because of its ignorance and much blundering, it will frighten many investors; discourage many enterprises; let loose upon us a pest of self-seeking politicians, but none of these unavoidable abuses will stop the growing assertion of public authority over the organized forces at war with each other in the ever widening field of competition. People have learned that if trade unions have bothered capital, so has capital bothered the public. Capitalistic organizations have annoyed the public in ways that are different, but so gravely have they threatened the community, that a large part of governmental energies, federal, state and city, is now devoted to a very desperate struggle with these incorporated forces. We are trying to control tendencies in them that are seen to be anti-social. Most people who retain their sanity, see that these interknitted powers neither can be nor ought to be crushed. That in the common interest, we must at least try to "regulate" them, is now admitted. This implies the necessity of organization. It also implies its justification. But why should street car systems, express companies, telegraph and mining corporations require organization, while the wage labor connected with them is deprived of it? Capital asks for organization because an unchecked competition raises plain havoc with its undertakings. Organization brings these pillaging disorders under conscious control which helps to steady and maintain price standards. But what of labor at the bottom? Is it less mercilessly beset by competition than is the employer?
With its mobility, with its facilities and habits of moving from place to place, and, above all, with the inpouring of multitudinous immigrants, is it to be held for an instant that labor stands in less urgent need of organization than capital? I have just put this question to an employer tormented by a strike over this very issue. He admits that "in theory perhaps" his men should have what he has and must have, organization. But "practically," he adds, "it is impossible. The men will misuse it. There will be constant and intolerable interference with our management."
Yes, there would be interference, precisely as society had been forced, in its own defense, to interfere with organized capital. We had a century of interference to create the whole structure of factory legislation, and now again begins another struggle to devise the agencies of regulating lawless propensities in the "trusts." There is not an aspect of our social policy that does not assume the fact and the necessity of capitalistic organization and also that it is to be "interfered" with by systematized control. It is the very pick of our overlords who now tell us why regulation is inevitable.
The overlord in Pittsburg nearly twenty years ago, said that capital had to be organized on such a scale, that it was extremely open and sensitive to disturbances of all sorts and the trade union disturbance was one that they could control with more safety and more easily than any other. The statement is exact. Capital in that neighborhood had power enough to deny organization to labor. Troublesome workmen could be quietly dropped. The energetic and skilled could be paid above the trade union scale. It was all so easy, if you had the power.
It was very ominous to the mere student to be told so convincingly that this was the age of organization; that all our towering prosperities depended upon it, but that the wage man and woman, so far as possible, should be excluded from it. For is it not also an age of the common school; of contagious enlightenment through the press; of rapidly multiplying agencies of very definite labor agitation? Is it not the age when Socialism appears, not as a cloud no larger than a man's hand on the horizon, but in gathering hosts like that of an army with banners?
In the face of all this, what must be the result of this amazing attitude? "I, the capitalist, cannot live without organization: without conceded privileges from Government, State, or City; but you, swarming and competing legions of labor, shall not have it. You are so many, you are so ignorant, you are so easily fooled by agitators. Though in theory you ought to have it, in practice we cannot trust you with its use." Leaving Pittsburg, I wondered what labor would continue to say of this and also what would be the final judgment of the general public. On the train I wrote out, as best I could, some fumbling answers to these questions. Who and what are they who receive wages that they should be excluded and set apart as unworthy to share in this indispensable form of association that is such a tower of strength to those who are already strong? Was it in the least likely that the mass of wage earners, sore under this treatment, would not resent it? If so, what shapes would this resentment assume? With popular agencies of agitation so far developed; with socialism already so vigorous in its rivalry with the unions, the case seemed clear. Capital could gain no victory over labor association that left its pang of felt injustice, without throwing the door wider still to socialism. In what appeared later in The Social Unrest, I wrote:
"If capital should prove too strong in this struggle, the result is easy to predict. The employers have only to convince organized labor that it cannot hold its own against the capitalist manager, and the whole energy that now goes to the union will turn to an aggressive political socialism. It will not be the harmless sympathy with increased city and state functions which trade unions already feel; it will become a turbulent political force bent upon using every weapon of taxation against the rich."
"Those who represent the interests of capital must make the choice. With magnificent energy they have created an industrial organization that no other nation now matches. Will they use some fair portion of this strength to complete this principle of organization so that it includes those who help them do their work? or will they, in the fighting spirit of competition under which they were bred, insist upon an unrestrained and unmodified mastery?"There are plenty of other causes for the rise of social unrest besides this defeat of effective labor organization, but in this country socialism owes an immense debt of gratitude to every capitalist who rejoices over the undoing of labor unions.
Some years later, I twice spent a week in Pittsburg. Though incomparably better at the top than twenty other roaring centers of industry, it was not worse at the bottom except in volume and intensity. As nowhere else, one could mark the massed energies of wealth-production at the point of utmost achievement. The top of the pyramid was in quite dazzling light. Priceless art collections open to the public, noble music, heaps of best books, and such higher schools as the country had not seen. But lower down upon the pyramid, the light turned into shadow; lower still, it grew black as pitch. Here in choking tenements was the forgotten city. Here were the legions that worked twelve hours in the day, and even Sundays. Here was the chaos of low and uncertain pay. Here was every incalculable shape that insecurity could take, all the horrors of maiming and unnatural death. On this great army of the forgotten rested the pyramid with its glistening cap.
But this was "great industry" in America. It was Pittsburg, only in heightened pace and concentration. For this reason came the ghastly "Survey" of that city. It directed public attention from the shining top to the broad base. After the main body of this wholly admirable investigation had been published, I found an ironmaster in the city who had read it. He was about half angry. He pointed out to me "mistakes," but in their relation to the whole disclosure these "mistakes" were so trivial as to excite laughter. "Yes," he said, "it is in the main true, but it makes a Pittsburger mad to have his own town picked out and held up as if it were the only sinner. In our business we are no worse than the rest of the world, and in many respects far better." Every one of us who is properly human will respond to this local patriotism. The "Survey" only shows us what an unfolding there would have been if investigators had done for the country as a whole what they did for Pittsburg. Restricted as it is, the popularized education based upon that study is beyond price.
Bits from the income of one great capitalist were used to pry off the lid of things subterranean, and let the public study what went on there. Owners, managers, and stockholders were compelled to see probably for the first time, what was really happening beneath the pyramid, under the shadow of which they lived. Clear as flame in a dark night, one fact stood out. Here was a business, touching and enveloping the life of the nation. Woodrow Wilson was just then saying in a public speech, "Business is no longer in any sense a private matter." "Society is the senior partner in all business." If this is true, or half true, of "all business," what is to be said of this Colossus whose products are riveted into the whole material fabric of our existence? Through all the vast enginery, the phalanxes of labor passed, but at a pace and strain which burned out the vitality of average men in half life's working time.
Is this no business of the public? Who is to pay the bill for all the wreckage which such overpaced industries throw back upon the community? We do not forget that when managers themselves looked through the lid they, too, were startled into belated action. Quite magnificently have they set to work to standardize the human side of their industry; to deal with the living factor as cunningly as with steel beams and finance. This honorable step should have its recognition, but it is a beginning only, and the slowly waking public will continue to observe; to reflect and hold the managers to account.
It will press, too, that other question: Are the giants alone to have organization? If not, what follows?
Two years ago, I found in a Pittsburg suburb the first sure sign of Syndicalism that I had seen in the United States since its abrupt formation out of that portentous strike of Colorado miners in 1903–4. It was a strike in which the lawlessness of labor was matched and outmatched by the lawlessness of capital. The fruits of it were Syndicalism, or, as here named, the "Industrial Workers of the World." Belted and armed, it now enters the arena of discontent. For several weeks in 1911, I watched it in a half dozen cities on the Pacific coast.
The I. W. W. taps labor strata not only lower than those of the trade union, but still lower than those from which Socialism generally gets recruits. It appeals to youth, to the most detached and irresponsible, to those free to follow a life of adventure. It appeals to those who rebel at the discipline of the trade union. It easily becomes a brother to the tramp and the outcast. Nor is there one of these traits that is not a source of temporary strength from its own point of view—that of rousing and educating discontent, of hectoring and obstructing the solidities of capitalism. Every difference which a heterogeneous and unassimilated immigration means for the United States will advantage the I. W. W. We have consented to and encouraged the conditions out of which these frondeurs come. They are now integrally a part of us. Abuse and lawless rigors among good citizens will enrich both their material and emotional resources. As with the trade union and our more ripened socialism, this new and more refractory contingent must be understood. In spite of deliriums, it too holds its heart of truth. If it brings the plague, it also brings suggestion. For the classes more safely lodged, they are hints rather in the form of news that we ought to know; news like that which a scout brings in, untested, but with forewarnings that the wise do not ignore. We shall safely exclude no man on the firing line of social change.
If, in these grave concerns, we are to create a saving statesmanship it must have first of all the courage of open-mindedness, willing to listen even to I. W. Ws.: to know their leaders: yes, even to work with them rather than contemptuously and excludingly to work against them.
Local, legal and other authorities, during the last two years in the United States, have done more for the growth of this revolutionary group, shading into anarchy, than it has done for itself. This assistance has been rendered because the most important thing in the I. W. W. was misconceived by frightened property owners and by the officials who represented them. Social authorities on the Pacific coast insisted that the whole I. W. W. "bunch" was composed of "bums," and on that theory used the legal machinery in their control to harry them out of town. If the "Great Bad" is in "mixing things that do not belong together," this attitude accurately defines the Great Bad.
The I. W. W. movement is strictly a revolutionary uprising against that part of the present order which is known as capitalism. Its ground-swell is felt in many very different types of nationality. Like every revolution, it attracts the most unselfish and courageous, together with the self-seeking and the semi-criminal. Garibaldi's famous "Thousand" had in it as large a percentage of this latter class as the I. W. W. at its worst. The King of Naples tried to treat Garibaldi's followers like "bums." It proved a most damaging error, because these revolutionists began to excite powerful sympathy. It was a sympathy that soon passed into political action, as many of our own great strikes pass into politics, forcing employers to yield to a new and hated influence. As the revolt of labor increases, popular sympathy acts through politicians whom, if they are against us, we call "demagogues."
This is the landmark we have now reached. So many people have come to sympathize with the socialistic ideals that these disturbances can no longer be kept out of politics. It is a sympathy of such strength, that even politicians of high character will use it. A Public Service Corporation which has not now learned this lesson cannot even make the bluff that its managers are really practical men. No one can claim that distinction who ignores the most obdurate facts that enter into this kind of strike.
Yet all this is on the surface of our problem. What concerns us far more is the character and justification of this new popular sympathy with those in revolt. If the Boston Elevated Railroad in its strike of 1912, is forced to do finally about everything that it at first stoutly and rather contemptuously said it could not do, our interest is to know about the forces that brought about the change. If greater events like the English "Taff-Vail Decision" and the "Osborn Judgment" have finally to be utterly remodeled because a new political reckoning has to be made, we want also to know what meaning there is in this insistance that the most solemnly sanctioned laws must be changed; that labor shall retain rights and privileges that courts would deny, If the public, once instructed, will not stand it to see men discharged because they join a trade union, or because I. W. W. agitators are treated as "bums," it must suggest at least this,—that the deeper cause these agitators have at heart is misconceived by those who think such summary methods either wise or "practical." That these misunderstandings are now our most immediate danger seems to the writer so clear that some space must be given to justify this opinion.
Let us first note however, a change in the common atmosphere of industrial disturbance; the wider sweep of the world's sympathy with those about the base of the pyramid. We shall not otherwise see the meaning of the newer movement which is the special purpose of this study.
- ↑ This employer, like others, did not of course object to a "good trade union"—one that would in no way interfere. But the employer cannot be allowed to define "goodness" in a trade union any more than we can allow labor to define it. The definition above them both is that which public welfare finds workably just and fair for social security.