Part 4 (1/2)
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 members.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p, 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 owners.h.i.+p 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.