Part 17 (1/2)
[104] See Don D. Lescohier, _The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin_.
[105] See above, 114-116.
CHAPTER 13
THE IDEALISTIC FACTOR
The puzzling fact about the American labor movement is, after all, its limited objective. As we saw before, the social order which the typical American trade unionist considers ideal is one in which organized labor and organized capital possess equal bargaining power. The American trade unionist wants, first, an equal voice with the employer in fixing wages and, second, a big enough control over the productive processes to protect job, health, and organization. Yet he does not appear to wish to saddle himself and fellow wage earners with the trouble of running industry without the employer.
But materialistic though this philosophy appears, it is nevertheless the product of a long development to which the spiritual contributed no less than the material. In fact the American labor movement arrived at an opportunist trade unionism only after an endeavor spread over more than seventy years to realize a more idealistic program.
American labor started with the ”ideology” of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Intended as a justification of a political revolution, the Declaration was worded by the authors as an expression of faith in a social revolution. To controvert the claims of George III, Thomas Jefferson quoted Rousseau. To him Rousseau was in all probability little more than an abstract ”beau ideal,” but Rousseau's abstractions were no mere abstractions to the pioneer American farmer. To the latter the doctrine that all men are born free and equal seemed to have grown directly out of experience. So it appeared, two or three generations later, to the young workmen when they for the first time achieved political consciousness. And, if reality ceased to square with the principles of the Declaration, it became, they felt, the bounden duty of every true American to amend reality.
Out of a combination of the principles of individual rights, individual self-determination, equality of opportunity, and political equality enumerated and suggested in the Declaration, arose the first and most persistent American labor philosophy. This philosophy differed in no wise from the philosophy of the old American democracy except in emphasis and particular application, yet these differences are highly significant. Labor read into the Declaration of Independence a condemnation of the wage system as a permanent economic regime; sooner or later in place of the wage system had to come _self-employment_.
Americanism to them was a social and economic as well as a political creed. Economic self-determination was as essential to the individual as political equality. Just as no true American will take orders from a king, so he will not consent forever to remain under the orders of a ”boss.” It was the _uplifting_ force of this social ideal as much as the propelling force of the changing economic environment that molded the American labor program.
We find it at work at first in the decade of the thirties at the very beginning of the labor movement. It then took the form of a demand for a free public school system. These workingmen in Philadelphia and New York discovered that in the place of the social democracy of the Declaration, America had developed into an ”aristocracy.” They thought that the root of it all lay in ”inequitable” legislation which fostered ”monopoly,” hence the remedy lay in democratic legislation. But they further realized that a political and social democracy must be based on an educated and intelligent working cla.s.s. No measure, therefore, could be more than a palliative until they got a ”Republican” system of education. The workingmen's parties of 1828-1831 failed as parties, but humanitarians like Horace Mann took up the struggle for free public education and carried it to success.
If in the thirties the labor program was to restore a social and political democracy by means of the public school, in the forties the program centered on economic democracy, on equality of economic opportunity. This took the form of a demand of a grant of public land free of charge to everyone willing to brave the rigors of pioneer life.
The government should thus open an escape to the worker from the wage system into self-employment by way of free land. After years of agitation, the same cry was taken up by the Western States eager for more settlers to build up their communities and this combined agitation proved irresistible and culminated in the Homestead law of 1862.
The Homestead law opened up the road to self-employment by way of free land and agriculture. But in the sixties the United States was already becoming an industrial country. In abandoning the city for the farm, the wage earner would lose the value of his greatest possession--his skill.
Moreover, as a homesteader, his problem was far from solved by mere access to free land. Whether he went on the land or stayed in industry, he needed access to reasonably free credit. The device invented by workingmen to this end was the bizarre ”greenback” idea which held their minds as if in a vise for nearly twenty years. ”Greenbackism” left no such permanent trace on American social and economic structure as ”Republican education” or ”free land.”
The lure of ”greenbackism” was that it offered an opportunity for self-employment. But already in the sixties, it became clear that the workingman could not expect to attain self-employment as an individual, but if at all, it had to be sought on the basis of producers'
cooperation. In the eighties, it became doubly clear that industry had gone beyond the one-man-shop stage; self-employment had to stand or fall with the cooperative or self-governing workshop. The protagonist of this most interesting and most idealistic striving of American labor was the ”n.o.ble Order of the Knights of Labor,” which reached its height in the middle of the eighties.
The period of the greatest enthusiasm for cooperation was between 1884 and 1887; and by 1888 the cooperative movement had pa.s.sed the full cycle of life and succ.u.mbed. The failure of cooperation proved a turning point in the evolution of the American labor program. Whatever the special causes of failure, the idealistic unionism, for which the ideas of the Declaration of Independence served as a fountain head, suffered in the eyes of labor, a degree of discredit so overwhelming that to regain its old position was no longer possible. The times were ripe for the opportunistic unionism of Gompers and the trade unionists.
These latter, having started in the seventies as Marxian socialists, had been made over into opportunistic unionists by their practical contact with American conditions. Their philosophy was narrower than that of the Knights and their concept of labor solidarity narrower still. However, these trade unionists demonstrated that they could win strikes. It was to this practical trade unionism, then, that the American labor movement turned, about 1890, when the idealism of the Knights of Labor had failed. From groping for a cooperative economic order or self-employment, labor turned with the American Federation of Labor to developing bargaining power for use against employers. This trade unionism stood for a strengthened group consciousness. While it continued to avow sympathy with the ”anti-monopoly” aspirations of the ”producers,” who fought for the opportunity of self-employment, it also declared that the interests of democracy will be best served if the wage earners organized by themselves.
This opportunist unionism, now at last triumphant over the idealistic unionism induced by America's spiritual tradition, soon was obliged to fight against a revolutionary unionism which, like itself, was an offshoot of the socialism of the seventies. At first, the American Federation of Labor was far from hostile to socialism as a philosophy.
Its att.i.tude was rather one of mild contempt for what it considered to be wholly impracticable under American conditions, however necessary or efficacious under other conditions. When, about 1890, the socialists declared their policy of ”boring from within,” that is, of capturing the Federation for socialism by means of propaganda in Federation ranks, this att.i.tude remained practically unchanged. Only when, dissatisfied with the results of boring from within, the socialists, now led by a more determined leaders.h.i.+p, attempted in 1895 to set up a rival to the Federation in the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, was there a sharp line drawn between socialist and anti-socialist in the Federation. The issue once having become a fighting issue, the leaders of the Federation experienced the need of a positive and well rounded-out social philosophy capable of meeting socialism all along the front instead of the former self-imposed super-pragmatism.
By this time, the Federation had become sufficiently removed in point of time from its foreign origin to turn to the social ideal derived from pioneer America as the philosophy which it hoped would successfully combat an aggressive and arrogant socialism. Thus it came about that the front against socialism was built out from the immediate and practical into the ultimate and spiritual; and that inferences drawn from a reading of Jefferson's Declaration, with its emphasis on individual liberty, were pressed into service against the seductive collectivist forecasts of Marx.
CHAPTER 14
WHY THERE IS NOT AN AMERICAN LABOR PARTY
The question of a political labor party hinges, in the last a.n.a.lysis, on the benefits which labor expects from government. If, under the const.i.tution, government possesses considerable power to regulate industrial relations and improve labor conditions, political power is worth striving for. If, on the contrary, the power of the government is restricted by a rigid organic law, the matter is reversed. The latter is the situation in the United States. The American const.i.tutions, both Federal and State, contain bills of rights which embody in fullness the eighteenth-century philosophy of economic individualism and governmental _laissez-faire_. The courts, Federal and State, are given the right to override any law enacted by Congress or the State legislatures which may be shown to conflict with const.i.tutional rights.
In the exercise of this right, American judges have always inclined to be very conservative in allowing the legislature to invade the province of economic freedom. At present after many years of agitation by humanitarians and trade unionists, the cause of legislative protection of child and woman laborers seems to be won in principle. But this progress has been made because it has been shown conclusively that the protection of these most helpless groups of the wage-earning cla.s.s clearly falls within the scope of public purpose and is therefore a lawful exercise of the state's police power within the meaning of the const.i.tution. However, adult male labor offers a far different case.