The question of a political labor party hinges, in the last analysis, on the benefits which labor expects from government. If, under the constitution, 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 constitutions, 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 constitutional 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 class 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 constitution. However, adult male labor offers a far different case. Moreover, should the unexpected happen and the courts become converted to a broader view, the legislative standards would be small compared with the standards already enforced by most of the trade unions. Consequently, so far as adult male workers are concerned (and they are of course the great bulk of organized labor), labor in America would scarcely be justified in diverting even a part of its energy from trade unionism to a relatively unprofitable seeking of redress through legislatures and courts.[106]
But this is no more than half the story. Granting even that political power may be worth having, its attainment is beset with difficulties and dangers more than sufficient to make responsible leaders pause. The causes reside once more in the form of government, also in the general nature of American politics, and in political history and tradition. To begin with, labor would have to fight not on one front, but on forty-nine different fronts.[107]
Congress and the States have power to legislate on labor matters; also, in each, power is divided between an executive and the two houses of the legislature. Decidedly, government in America was built not for strength but for weakness. The splitting up of sovereignty does not especially interfere with the purposes of a conservative party, but to a party of social and industrial reform it offers a disheartening obstacle. A labor party, to be effective, would be obliged to capture all the diffused bits of sovereignty at the same time. A partial gain is of little avail, since it is likely to be lost at the next election even simultaneously with a new gain. But we have assumed here that the labor party had reached the point where its trials are the trials of a party in power or nearing power. In reality, American labor parties are spared this sort of trouble by trials of an anterior order residing in the nature of American politics.
The American political party system antedates the formation of modern economic classes, especially the class alignment of labor and capital. Each of the old parties represents, at least in theory, the entire American community regardless of class. Party differences are considered differences of opinion or of judgment on matters of public policy, not differences of class interest. The wage earner in America, who never had to fight for his suffrage but received it as a free gift from the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic movements and who did not therefore develop the political class consciousness which was stamped into the workers in Europe by the feeling of revolt against an upper ruling class, is prone to adopt the same view of politics. Class parties in America have always been effectively countered by the old established parties with the charge that they tend to incite class against class.
But the old parties had on numerous occasions, as we saw, an even more effective weapon. No sooner did a labor party gain a foothold, than the old party politician, the "friend of labor," did appear and start a rival attraction by a more or less verbal adherence to one or more planks of the rising party. Had he been, as in Europe, a branded spokesman of a particular economic class or interest, it would not have been difficult to ward him off. But here in America, he said that he too was a workingman and was heart and soul for the workingman. Moreover, the workingman was just as much attached to an old party label as any average American. In a way he considered it an assertion of his social equality with any other group of Americans that he could afford to take the same "disinterested" and tradition-bound view of political struggles as the rest. This is why labor parties generally encountered such disheartening receptions at the hands of workingmen; also why it was difficult to "deliver the labor vote" to any party. This, on the whole, describes the condition of affairs today as it does the situations in the past.
In the end, should the workingman be pried loose from his traditional party affiliation by a labor event of transcendent importance for the time being, should he be stirred to political revolt by an oppressive court decision, or the use of troops to break a strike; then, at the next election, when the excitement has had time to subside, he will usually return to his political normality. Moreover, should labor discontent attain depth, it may be safely assumed that either one or the other of the old parties or a faction therein will seek to divert its driving force into its own particular party channel. Should the labor party still persist, the old party politicians, whose bailiwick it will have particularly invaded, will take care to encourage, by means not always ethical but nearly always effective, strife in its ranks. Should that fail, the old parties will in the end "fuse" against the upstart rival. If they are able to stay "fused" during enough elections and also win them, the fidelity of the adherent of the third party is certain to be put to a hard and unsuccessful test. To the outsider these conclusions may appear novel, but labor in America learned these lessons through a long experience, which began when the first workingmen's parties were attempted in 1828-1832. The limited potentialities of labor legislation together with the apparent hopelessness of labor party politics compelled the American labor movement to develop a sort of non-partisan political action with limited objectives thoroughly characteristic of American conditions. Labor needs protection from interference by the courts in the exercise of its economic weapons, the strike and the boycott, upon which it is obviously obliged to place especial reliance. In other words, though labor may refuse to be drawn into the vortex of politics for the sake of positive attainments, or, that is to say, labor legislation, it is compelled to do so for the sake of a negative gain—a judicial laissez-faire. That labor does by pursuing a policy of "reward your friends" and "punish your enemies" in the sphere of politics. The method itself is an old one in the labor movement; we saw it practiced by George Henry Evans and the land reformers of the forties as well as by Steward and the advocates of the eight-hour day by law in the sixties. The American Federation of Labor merely puts it to use in connection with a new objective, namely, freedom from court interference. Although the labor vote is largely "undeliverable," still where the parties are more or less evenly matched in strength, that portion of the labor vote which is politically conscious of its economic interests may swing the election to whichever side it turns. Under certain conditions[108] labor has been known even to attain through such indirection in excess of what it might have won had it come to share in power as a labor party.
The controversy around labor in politics brings up in the last analysis the whole problem of leadership in labor organizations, or to be specific, the role of the intellectual in the movement. In America his role has been remarkably restricted. For a half century or more the educated classes had no connection with the labor movement, for in the forties and fifties, when the Brook Farm enthusiasts and their associates took up with fervor the social question, they were really alone in the field, since the protracted trade depression had laid all labor organization low. It was in the eighties, with the turmoil of the Knights of Labor and the Anarchist bomb in Chicago, that the "intellectuals" first awakened to the existence of a labor problem. To this awakening no single person contributed more than the economist Professor Richard T. Ely, then of Johns Hopkins University. His pioneer work on the Labor Movement in America published in 1886, and the works of his many capable students gave the labor movement a permanent place in the public mind, besides presenting the cause of labor with scientific precision and with a judicious balance. Among the other pioneers were preachers like Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott, who conceived their duty as that of mediators between the business class and the wage earning class, exhorting the former to deal with their employes according to the Golden Rule and the latter to moderation in their demands. Together with the economists they helped to break down the prejudice against labor unionism in so far as the latter was non-revolutionary. And though their influence was large, they understood that their maximum usefulness would be realized by remaining sympathetic outsiders and not by seeking to control the course of the labor movement.
In recent years a new type of intellectual has come to the front. A product of a more generalized mental environment than his predecessor, he is more daring in his retrospects and his prospects. He is just as ready to advance an "economic interpretation of the constitution" as to advocate a collectivistic panacea for the existing industrial and social ills. Nor did this new intellectual come at an inopportune time for getting a hearing. Confidence in social conservatism has been undermined by an exposure in the press and through legislative investigations of the disreputable doings of some of the staunchest conservatives. At such a juncture "progressivism" and a "new liberalism" were bound to come into their own in the general opinion of the country.
But the labor movement resisted. American labor, both during the periods of neglect and of moderate championing by the older generation of intellectuals, has developed a leadership wholly its own. This leadership, of which Samuel Gompers is the most notable example, has given years and years to building up a united fighting morale in the army of labor. And because the morale of an army, as these leaders thought, is strong only when it is united upon one common attainable purpose, the intellectual with his new and unfamiliar issues has been given the cold shoulder by precisely the trade unionists in whom he had anticipated to find most eager disciples. The intellectual might go from success to success in conquering the minds of the middle classes; the labor movement largely remains closed to him.
To make matters worse the intellectual has brought with him a psychology which is particularly out of fit with the American labor situation. We noted that the American labor movement became shunted from the political arena into the economic one by virtue of fundamental conditions of American political institutions and political life. However, it is precisely in political activity where the intellectual is most at home. The clear-cut logic and symmetry of political platforms based on general theories, the broad vistas which it may be made to encompass, and lastly the opportunity for eloquent self-expression offered by parliamentary debates, all taken together exert a powerful attraction for the intellectualized mind. Contrast with this the prosaic humdrum work of a trade union leader, the incessant wrangling over "small" details and "petty" grievances, and the case becomes exceedingly clear. The mind of the typical intellectual is too generalized to be lured by any such alternative. He is out of patience with mere amelioration, even though it may mean much in terms of human happiness to the worker and his family.
When in 1906, in consequence of the heaping up of legal disabilities upon the trade unions, American labor leaders turned to politics to seek a restraining hand upon the courts,[109] the intellectuals foresaw a political labor party in the not distant future. They predicted that one step would inevitably lead to another, that from a policy of bartering with the old parties for anti-injunction planks in their platforms, labor would turn to a political party of its own. The intellectual critic continues to view the political action of the American Federation of Labor as the first steps of an invalid learning to walk; and hopes that before long he will learn to walk with a firmer step, without feeling tempted to lean upon the only too willing shoulders of old-party politicians. On the contrary, the Federation leaders, as we know, regard their political work as a necessary evil, due to an unfortunate turn of affairs, which forces them from time to time to step out of their own trade union province in order that their natural enemy, the employing class, might get no aid and comfort from an outside ally.
Of late a rapprochement between the intellectual and trade unionist has begun to take place. However, it is not founded on the relationship of leader and led, but only on a business relationship, or that of giver and receiver of paid technical advice. The role of the trained economist in handling statistics and preparing "cases" for trade unionists before boards of arbitration is coming to be more and more appreciated. The railway men's organizations were first to put the intellectual to this use, the miners and others followed. From this it is still a far cry to the role of such intellectuals as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, G.D.H. Cole and the Fabian Research group in England, who have really permeated the British labor movement with their views on labor policy. However, there is also a place for the American intellectual as an ally of trade unionism, not only as its paid servant. The American labor movement has committed a grave and costly error because it has not made use of the services of writers, journalists, lecturers, and speakers to popularize its cause with the general public. Some of its recent defeats, notably the steel strike of 1919, were partly due to the neglect to provide a sufficient organization of labor publicity to counteract the anti-union publicity by the employers.
[106] This assumes that the legislative program of labor would deal primarily with the regulation of labor conditions in private employment analogous to the legislative program of the British trade unions until recent years. Should labor in America follow the newer program of labor in Britain and demand the taking over of industries by government with compensation, it is not certain that the courts would prove as serious a barrier as in the other case. However, the situation would remain unchanged so far as the difficulties discussed in the remainder of this chapter are concerned.
[107] For the control of the national government and of the forty-eight State governments.
[108] Such as a state of war; see above, 235-236.
The rise of a political and economic dictatorship by the wage-earning class in revolutionary Russia in 1917 has focussed public opinion on the labor question as no other event ever did. But one will scarcely say that it has tended to clarity of thought. On the one hand, the conservative feels confirmed in his old suspicions that there is something inherently revolutionary in any labor movement. The extreme radical, on the other hand, is as uncritically hopeful for a Bolshevist upheaval in America as the conservative or reactionary is uncritically fearful. Both forget that an effective social revolution is not the product of mere chance and "mob psychology," nor even of propaganda however assiduous, but always of a new preponderance of power as between contending economic classes.
To students of the social sciences, it is self-evident that the prolonged rule of the proletariat in Russia in defiance of nearly the whole world must be regarded as a product of Russian life, past and present. In fact, the continued Bolshevist rule seems to be an index of the relative fighting strength of the several classes in Russian society—the industrial proletariat, the landed and industrial propertied class, and the peasantry.
It is an irony of fate that the same revolution which purports to enact into life the Marxian social program should belie the truth of Marx's materialistic interpretation of history and demonstrate that history is shaped by both economic and non-economic forces. Marx, as is well known, taught that history is a struggle between classes, in which the landed aristocracy, the capitalist class, and the wage earning class are raised successively to rulership as, with the progress of society's technical equipment, first one and then another class can operate it with the maximum efficiency. Marx assumed that when the time has arrived for a given economic class to take the helm, that class will be found in full possession of all the psychological attributes of a ruling class, namely, an indomitable will to power, no less than the more vulgar desire for the emoluments that come with power. Apparently, Marx took for granted that economic evolution is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding development of an effective will to power in the class destined to rule. Yet, whatever may be the case in the countries of the West, in Russia the ruling classes, the gentry and the capitalists, clearly failed in the psychological test at the critical time. This failure is amply attested by the manner in which they submitted practically without a fight after the Bolshevist coup d'état.
To get at the secret of this apparent feebleness and want of spunk in Russia's ruling class one must study a peculiarity of her history, namely, the complete dominance of Russia's development by organized government. Where the historian of the Western countries must take account of several independent forces, each standing for a social class, the Russian historian may well afford to station himself on the high peak of government and, from this point of vantage, survey the hills and vales of the society which it so thoroughly dominated.
Apolitism runs like a red thread through the pages of Russian history. Even the upper layer of the old noble class, the "Boyars," were but a shadow of the Western contemporary medieval landed aristocracy. When the several principalities became united with the Czardom of Muscovy many centuries ago, the Boyar was in fact no more than a steward of the Czar's estate and a leader of a posse defending his property; the most he dared to do was surreptitiously to obstruct the carrying out of the Czar's intentions; he dared not try to impose the will of his class upon the crown. The other classes were even more apolitical. So little did the several classes aspire to domination that they missed many golden opportunities to seize and hold a share of the political power. In the seventeenth century, when the government was exceptionally weak after what is known as the "period of troubles," it convoked periodical "assemblies of the land" to help administer the country. But, as a matter of fact, these assemblies considered themselves ill used because they were asked to take part in government and not once did they aspire to an independent position in the Russian body politic. Another and perhaps even more striking instance we find a century and a half later. Catherine the Great voluntarily turned over the local administration to the nobles and to that end decreed that the nobility organize themselves into provincial associations. But so little did the nobility care for political power and active class prerogative that, in spite of the broadest possible charters, the associations of nobles were never more than social organizations in the conventional sense of the word.
Even less did the commercial class aspire to independence. In the West of Europe mercantilism answered in an equal measure the needs of an expanding state and of a vigorous middle class, the latter being no less ardent in the pursuit of gain than the former in the pursuit of conquest. In Russia, on the other hand, when Peter the Great wanted manufacturing, he had to introduce it by government action. Hence, Russian mercantilism was predominantly a state mercantilism. Even where Peter succeeded in enlisting private initiative by subsidies, instead of building up a class of independent manufacturers, he merely created industrial parasites and bureaucrats without initiative of their own, who forever kept looking to the government.
Coming to more recent times, we find that the modern Russian factory system likewise owes its origin to governmental initiative, namely, to the government's railway-building policy. The government built the railways for strategic and fiscal reasons but incidentally created a unified internal market which made mass-production of articles of common consumption profitable for the first time. But, even after Russian capitalism was thus enabled to stand on its own feet, it did not unlearn the habit of leaning on the government for advancement rather than relying on its own efforts. On its part the autocratic government was loath to let industry alone. The government generously dispensed to the capitalists tariff protection and bounties in the form of profitable orders, but insisted on keeping industry under its thumb. And though they might chafe, still the capitalists never neglected to make the best of the situation. For instance, when the sugar producers found themselves running into a hole from cut-throat competition, they appealed to the Minister of Finances, who immediately created a government-enforced "trust" and assured them huge dividends. Since business success was assured by keeping on the proper footing with a generous government rather than by relying on one's own vigor, it stands to reason that, generally speaking, the capitalists and especially the larger capitalists, could develop only into a class of industrial courtiers. And when at last the autocracy fell, the courtiers were not to be turned overnight into stubborn champions of the rights of their class amid the turmoil of a revolution. To be sure, Russia had entered the capitalistic stage as her Marxians had predicted, but nevertheless her capitalists were found to be lacking the indomitable will to power which makes a ruling class.
The weakness of the capitalists in the fight on behalf of private property may be explained in part by their want of allies in the other classes in the community. The Russian peasant, reared in the atmosphere of communal land ownership, was far from being a fanatical defender of private property. No Thiers could have rallied a Russian peasant army for the suppression of a communistic industrial wage-earning class by an appeal to their property instinct. To make matters worse for the capitalists, the peasant's strongest craving was for more land, all the land, without compensation! This the capitalists, being capitalists, were unable to grant. Yet it was the only sort of currency which the peasant would accept in payment for his political support. In November, 1917, when the Bolsheviki seized the government, one of their first acts was to satisfy the peasant's land hunger by turning over to his use all the land. The "proletariat" had then a free hand so far as the most numerous class in Russia was concerned.
Just as the capitalist class reached the threshold of the revolution psychologically below par, so the wage-earning class in developing the will to rule outran all expectations and beat the Marxian time-schedule. Among the important contributing factors was the unity of the industrial laboring class, a unity broken by no rifts between highly paid skilled groups and an inferior unskilled class, or between a well-organized labor aristocracy and an unorganized helot class. The economic and social oppression under the old régime had seen to it that no group of laborers should possess a stake in the existing order or desire to separate from the rest. Moreover, for several decades, and especially since the memorable days of the revolution of 1905, the laboring class has been filled by socialistic agitators and propagandists with ideas of the great historical role of the proletariat. The writer remembers how in 1905 even newspapers of the moderately liberal stamp used to speak of the "heroic proletariat marching in the van of Russia's progress." No wonder then that, when the revolution came, the industrial wage earners had developed such self-confidence as a class that they were tempted to disregard the dictum of their intellectual mentors that this was merely to be a bourgeois revolution—with the social revolution still remote. Instead they listened to the slogan "All power to the Soviets."
The idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" reached maturity in the course of the abortive revolution of 1905-1906. After a victory for the people in October, 1905, the bourgeoisie grew frightened over the aggressiveness of the wage-earning class and sought safety in an understanding with the autocracy. An order by the Soviet of Petrograd workmen in November, 1905, decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of champions of popular liberty against autocracy. If the bourgeoisie itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary socialists, why have such a democracy at all? Have we not seen the democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in Europe and America? Why run at all the risk of corruption of the post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists? Why first admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and effort in preventing them from coming to the top? Therefore, they declined parliamentarism with thanks and would accept nothing less than a government by the representative organ of the workers—the Soviets.
If we are right in laying the emphasis on the relative fighting will and fighting strength of the classes struggling for power rather than on the doctrines which they preach and the methods, fair or foul, which they practice, then the American end of the problem, too, appears in a new light. No longer is it in the main a matter of taking sides for or against the desirability of a Bolshevist rule or a dictatorship by the proletariat, but a matter of ascertaining the relative strength and probable behavior of the classes in a given society. It is as futile to "see red" in America because of Bolshevism in Russia as to yearn for Bolshevism's advent in the United States. Either view misses the all-important point that so far as social structure is concerned America is the antipodes of Russia, where the capitalists have shown little fighting spirit, where the tillers of the soil are only first awakening to a conscious desire for private property and are willing to forego their natural share in government for a gift of land, and where the industrial proletariat is the only class ready and unafraid to fight. Bolshevism is unthinkable in America, because, even if by some imaginable accident the government were overthrown and a labor dictatorship declared, it could never "stay put." No one who knows the American business class will even dream that it would under any circumstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities. A Bolshevist coup d'état in America would mean a civil war to the bitter end, and a war in which the numerous class of farmers would join the capitalists in the defense of the institution of private property.[110]
But it is not only because the preponderance of social power in the United States is so decisively with private property that America is proof against a social upheaval like the Russian one. Another and perhaps as important a guarantee of her social stability is found in her four million organized trade unionists. For, however unjustly they may feel to have been treated by the employers or the government; however slow they may find the realization of their ideals of collective bargaining in industry; their stakes in the existing order, both spiritual and material, are too big to reconcile them to revolution. The truth is that the revolutionary labor movement in America looms up much bigger than it actually is. Though in many strikes since the famous textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1911, the leadership was revolutionary, it does not follow that the rank and file was animated by the same purpose. Given an inarticulate mass of grievously exploited workers speaking many foreign tongues and despised alike by the politician, the policeman, and the native American labor organizer; given a group of energetic revolutionary agitators who make the cause of these workers their own and become their spokesmen and leaders; and a situation will clearly arise where thousands of workmen will be apparently marshalled under the flag of revolution while in reality it is the desire for a higher wage and not for a realization of the syndicalist program that reconciles them to starving their wives and children and to shedding their blood on picket duty. If they follow a Haywood or an Ettor, it is precisely because they have been ignored by a Golden or a Gompers.
Withal, then, trade unionism, despite an occasional revolutionary facet and despite a revolutionary clamor especially on its fringes, is a conservative social force. Trade unionism seems to have the same moderating effect upon society as a wide diffusion of private property. In fact the gains of trade unionism are to the worker on a par with private property to its owner. The owner regards his property as a protective dyke between himself and a ruthless biological struggle for existence; his property means liberty and opportunity to escape dictation by another man, an employer or "boss," or at least a chance to bide his time until a satisfactory alternative has presented itself for his choice. The French peasants in 1871 who flocked to the army of the government of Versailles to suppress the Commune of Paris (the first attempt in history of a proletarian dictatorship), did so because they felt that were the workingmen to triumph and abolish private property, they, the peasants, would lose a support in their daily struggle for life for the preservation of which it was worth endangering life itself. And having acquired relative protection in their private property, small though it might be, they were unwilling to permit something which were it to succeed would lose them their all.
Now with some exceptions every human being is a "protectionist," provided he does possess anything at all which protects him and which is therefore worth being protected by him in turn. The trade unionist, too, is just such a protectionist. When his trade union has had the time and opportunity to win for him decent wages and living conditions, a reasonable security of the job, and at least a partial voice in shop management, he will, on the relatively high and progressive level of material welfare which capitalism has called into being, be chary to raze the existing economic system to the ground on the chance of building up a better one in its place. A reshuffling of the cards, which a revolution means, might conceivably yield him a better card, but then again it might make the entire stack worthless by destroying the stakes for which the game is played. But the revolution might not even succeed in the first round; then the ensuing reaction would probably destroy the trade union and with it would go the chance of a recovery of the original ground, modest though that may have been. In practice, therefore, the trade union movements in nearly all nations[111] have served as brakes upon the respective national socialist movements; and, from the standpoint of society interested in its own preservation against catastrophic change, have played and are playing a role of society's policemen and watch-dogs over the more revolutionary groups in the wage-earning class. These are largely the unorganized and ill-favored groups rendered reckless because, having little to lose from a revolution, whatever the outcome might be, they fear none.
In America, too, there is a revolutionary class which, unlike the striking textile workers in 1911-1913, owes its origin neither to chance nor to neglect by trade union leaders. This is the movement of native American or Americanized workers in the outlying districts of the West or South—the typical I.W.W., the migratory workers, the industrial rebels, and the actors in many labor riots and lumber-field strikes. This type of worker has truly broken with America's spiritual past. He has become a revolutionist either because his personal character and habits unfit him for success under the exacting capitalistic system; or because, starting out with the ambitions and rosy expectations of the early pioneer, he found his hopes thwarted by a capitalistic preemptor of the bounty of nature, who dooms to a wage-earner's position all who came too late. In either case he is animated by a genuine passion for revolution, a passion which admits no compromise. Yet his numbers are too few to threaten the existing order.
In conclusion, American trade unionism, no matter whether the American Federation of Labor keeps its old leaders or replaces them by "progressives" or socialists, seems in a fair way to continue its conservative function—so long as no overpowering open-shop movement or "trustification" will break up the trade unions or render them sterile. The hope of American Bolshevism will, therefore, continue to rest with the will of employers to rule as autocrats.
[110] Though writers and public speakers of either extreme have often overlooked the fundamental consideration of where the preponderance of social power lies in their prognostications of revolutions, this has not escaped the leaders of the American labor movement. The vehemence with which the leaders of the American Federation of Labor have denounced Sovietism and Bolshevism, and which has of late been brought to a high pitch by a fear lest a shift to radicalism should break up the organization, is doubtless sincere. But one cannot help feeling that in part at least it aimed to reassure the great American middle class on the score of labor's intentions. The great majority of organized labor realize that, though at times they may risk engaging in unpopular strikes, it will never do to permit their enemies to tar them with the pitch of subversionism in the eyes of the great American majority—a majority which remains wedded to the régime of private property and individual enterprise despite the many recognized shortcomings of the institution.
[111] Notably in Germany since the end of the World War.
The first seven chapters of the present work are based on the History of Labour in the United States by John R. Commons and Associates,[112] published in 1918 in two volumes by the Macmillan Company, New York. The major portion of the latter was in turn based on A Documentary History of the American Industrial Society, edited by Professor Commons and published in 1910 in ten volumes by Clark and Company, Cleveland. In preparing chapters 8 to 11, dealing with the period since 1897, which is not covered in the History of Labour, the author used largely the same sort of material as that in the preparation of the above named works; namely, original sources such as proceedings of trade union conventions, labor and employer papers, government reports, etc. There are, however, many excellent special histories relating to the recent period in the labor movement, especially histories of unionism in individual trades or industries, to which the author wishes to refer the reader for more ample accounts of the several phases of the subject, which he himself was of necessity obliged to treat but briefly. The following is a selected list of such works together with some others relating to earlier periods:
BARNETT, GEORGE E., The Printers—A Study in American Trade Unionism,
American Economic Association, 1909.
BING, ALEXANDER M., War-Time Strikes and their Adjustment, Dutton and Co., 1921.
BONNETT, CLARENCE E., Employers' Associations in the United States, Macmillan, 1922.
BRISSENDEN, PAUL F., The I.W.W.—A Study in American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1920.
BROOKS, JOHN G., American Syndicalism: The I.W.W., Macmillan, 1913.
BUDISH AND SOULE, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry, Harcourt, 1920.
CARLTON, FRANK T., Economic Influences upon Educational Progress in the United States, 1820-1850, University of Wisconsin, 1908.
DEIBLER, FREDERICK S., The Amalgamated Wood Workers' International Union of America, University of Wisconsin, 1912.
FITCH, JOHN L., The Steel Workers, Russell Sage Foundation, 1911.
HOAGLAND, HENRY E., Wage Bargaining on the Vessels of the Great Lakes, University of Illinois, 1915.
------, Collective Bargaining in the Lithographic Industry, Columbia University, 1917.
INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT, Commission of Inquiry, Report on the Steel Strike of 1919, Harcourt, 1920.
LAIDLER, HARRY, Socialism in Thought and Action, Macmillan, 1920.
ROBBINS, EDWIN C., Railway Conductors—A Study in Organized Labor, Columbia University, 1914.
SCHLÜTER, HERMAN, The Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workmen's Movement in America, International Union of Brewery Workmen, 1910.
SUFFERN, ARTHUR E., Conciliation and Arbitration in the Coal Mining Industry in America, Mifflin, 1915.
SYDENSTRICKER, EDGAR, Collective Bargaining in the Anthracite Coal Industry, Bulletin No. 191 of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1916.
WOLMAN, LEO, The Boycott in American Trade Unions, Johns Hopkins University, 1916.
Labor Encyclopedias:
AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR, History, Encyclopedia, Reference Book, American Federation of Labor, 1919.
BROWNE, WALDO R., What's What in the Labor Movement, Huebsch, 1921.
FOOTNOTE: