American Experiment (201 page)

Another woman’s movement focused on a very specific threat to mothers and children—the saloon. Founded in 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had grown rapidly during the next quarter century, reaching a membership of 300,000 by century’s end. It was the largest woman’s organization in the country, at least ten times larger than the suffrage organizations of the day, which were emerging from a political dry spell. The WCTU had not been concerned only with drunkards and their power to abuse their families and even grab the earnings of wife and children, without legal redress. Despite Carrie Nation’s notoriety as a “saloon-wrecker,” the women of the WCTU had studied and agitated on issues of labor reform, prostitution, health and hygiene, prison reform, needs of black women, drug use, international arbitration, and world peace. These broad interests were in part the product of the gifted leadership of Frances Willard, a onetime college president who moved into the temperance legions and governed with the inspired motto, “Do Everything.” With her death in 1898, the movement drifted back to its original emphasis on drinking.

Margaret Sanger, the boldest of the women’s leaders, confronted the most intimate and controversial question of all—sexuality and reproduction. A number of influences combined to convert this slight, mild-looking young woman into a dauntless crusader: a marriage at nineteen that ended in divorce; her friendship with Emma Goldman and militant radicals in the Industrial Workers of the World; her association with Malthus-oriented French syndicalists during a Paris visit in 1913. Returning to the United States the next year, she established a monthly called the
Woman Rebel,
advocated “birth control” (a term she coined), and aroused her foes even more by allying with anarchists, woman liberationists, and assorted radicals. After the federal government indicted her and her journal under the Comstock anti-obscenity act of 1873, she fled to England for almost a year, fearlessly returned to open the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, and was arrested and jailed.

Sanger would not be silenced. “The basic freedom of the world is woman’s freedom,” she wrote in
Woman and the New Race.
“A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.”

As in the case of all strong leaders, these women divided potential followers as well as uniting them. Millions of low-income Americans, including hosts of women who desperately needed her counsels, feared and
hated Margaret Sanger and all she stood for. Millions of American workers—including some women—who liked their beer and wine and the harder stuff, loathed the WCTU saloon closers. Many men—and a few women—opposed woman’s suffrage. Few objected to the settlement houses, for they seemed caring and unthreatening, but some low-income women scorned the middle-class maternalists as members of what one woman trade unionist called the “mink brigade.”

When would working women take matters into their own hands, build their own movement, choose their own leaders? At century’s end, unionization of women, after many setbacks, seemed poised for a takeoff. They were moving by the tens of thousands out of farm labor and domestic service into occupations far easier to unionize. Women employed in non-agricultural pursuits had more than doubled, from 2 million to 4.3 million, between 1880 and 1900. But hardly 3 percent of those women were unionized by century’s end. With populist and progressive winds blowing, surely women’s trade unionism would escalate during the decade ahead.

It was not to be. Women’s efforts to join men’s unions or organize their own seemed to meet all the past furies, only redoubled. Trade unions themselves seemed weighted against women. Their leaders often held their meetings in saloons, amid the stench of cigar smoke and stale beer. They resented interference by women, suggesting they should stick to home and hearth. They charged high dues. They feared low-wage competition from women workers just off the farm or out of the kitchen. It seemed to some women workers that some unionists were organized as much against them as against the bosses.

For many women the only recourse was to form their own organizations, but this required able and militant leadership—and here above all women were disadvantaged. They could not find such leadership in the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers, who was as conservative toward unionizing women as he was toward organizing blacks and the unskilled. The AFL did oppose discriminatory pay for women, in order to protect all workers from cheap labor, but this policy harmed the millions of unskilled women whose only hope of a job was one with low pay. The Federation had only one female organizer in the 1890s; when she left to be married, Gompers waited until 1908 before appointing another, Annie Fitzgerald. It was not until working women organized militantly in the Lawrence textile strike of 1912 that the AFL paid much attention to them.

Women workers had only the leadership they could mobilize from their own ranks; there was no Jane Addams or Frances Willard of female trade unionism. Brilliant leaders arose from the movement, especially in the conduct of strikes, as with the textile operatives of Chicopee and the
clothing makers of Chicago. Twenty thousand New York shirtwaist makers walked out, over the opposition of their male leaders. Certain unions like the hat and cap makers generated their own activists, most notably in the person of the fiery organizer Rose Schneidermann. But typically women’s leadership hardly rose above the level of “shop chairladies.”

It was in this connection that the National Women’s Trade Union League assumed special importance. Its goal was to enable women of social influence and progressive ideas to join hands with activist women in the trades. The former would supply creative ideas and leadership, the latter practical experience and information. Founded in 1903 at an AFL convention in Boston, the NWTUL became strong enough to help produce a peak organizing period for women between 1909 and 1915. Its platform called for organization of all workers into trade unions; equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex; the eight-hour day and forty-four-hour week; a “living wage”; full citizenship for women.

Effective though it was, the Women’s Trade Union League could not wholly overcome the old class barriers. For “middle class feminists outside the WTUL,” according to Robin Miller Jacoby, “class identity outweighed their rhetorical commitment to the ideal of cross-class female solidarity.” It was the society women within the NWTUL whom Schneidermann had labeled the mink brigade. Women of all classes, however, could unite in the pursuit of two goals—woman’s suffrage and social legislation—and the NWTUL plunged into both battles. Even so, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt could not help observing, “I am a
good
democrat in theory, but my faith weakens when it meets bad air, dirt, horrid smells, the democratic odor diluted with perfumes of beer and uncleanliness.”

Women could also unite as consumers, under the leadership of Florence Kelley, general secretary of the National Consumers’ League. But Kelley was interested in far broader matters than consumer problems. Living at the Henry Street Settlement, she fought for the legal protection of women against long hours and unhealthful conditions; she was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; she organized sixty or more local Consumers’ Leagues pledged to boycott companies that employed child labor. She was so active and effective that years later a Supreme Court justice would call her “a woman who had probably the largest single share in shaping the social history of the United States during the first thirty years of the century.” By expanding the concept of consumerism to cover the social price of making goods and not merely the money price in the stores, Kelley transcended some of the old conflict between low-income women factory workers and middle-class women consumers.

Whatever the differences among women leaders, they were minuscule compared to the conflicts that cut through the ranks of working people.

After vanquishing the remnants of the militant Knights of Labor in the late 1880 s, the American Federation of Labor had come to hold a commanding place in the organization of skilled workers. By 1904, it was boasting a membership of over a million and a half. Under its founding leader, Samuel Gompers, now a burly, bespectacled gentleman usually attired in dignified clothes and carrying a cane, the Federation continued to practice business unionism—jealous guardian of the skilled crafts, protector of labor against injunctions and other hostile governmental action, critic of immigration. The AFL rejected socialism, radicalism, government welfarism, independent political action. While AFL unions often fought hard-line employers with strikes, boycotts, and other weapons, the AFL had become an essential buttress of the business system—conservative in outlook, restrictive and monopolistic in economic tactics, transactional in leadership, bargaining and competitive in its relationship with business. The Federation’s membership rose and fell with the business cycle; it joined with business and government in the National Civic Federation founded in 1900 to “unite” labor and capital; President Gompers supped with the mighty, including magnates and Presidents.

As it fought off challenge after challenge to its power, the AFL left millions of workers unorganized, politically adrift, and ready to be led. The next threat to the Federation came less from the unorganized masses of the urban East than from the embattled workers in the West. There the pugnacious Western Federation of Miners had conducted a running and often bloody war with equally pugnacious mine and railroad owners. In the bloody Coeur d’Alene area of Idaho, mine workers thwarted by antiunion bosses had dynamited a company mill, leaving two men dead; the governor promptly obtained federal troops to round up strikers by the hundreds and throw them into bull pens. The WFM was everything the AFL was not—eager to organize the unorganized, including immigrants and even blacks, and totally opposed to capitalism and capitalists. And it had a new young leader, William D. Haywood, who was everything Gompers was not.

Son of a Pony Express rider who died when he was three, Big Bill had been raised in a mining camp, put to work at fifteen as a hardrock miner, and then drifted through the West as a prospector, cowboy, surveyor, and miner again, before joining the WFM. With his huge frame, a “dead eye” lost in a childhood mishap, and a “dead hand” crushed in a mining accident, Haywood intimidated bosses and union rivals alike.

But the western miners desperately needed allies. In 1905 Haywood and other WFM leaders, along with delegates from Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and individual socialists like Eugene Debs, gathered in Chicago to establish the Industrial Workers of the World, with the aim of uniting all workers, of all skills, races, and national origins, ready to use strikes, boycotts, and sabotage, if necessary, to realize their grand objectives of a socialist, classless, egalitarian society.

The “Wobblies” scored some organizing successes with western lumber workers and farm laborers and eastern textile workers. Haywood exercised brilliant leadership of a mass walkout against pay cuts in the Massachusetts textile town of Lawrence. As his picket lines held firm, he dramatized police brutality and won a great public-relations coup when striking parents sent their children to outlying towns to be fed. His strikers finally won in Lawrence in that year of 1912 and gave the union’s organizing drives a big boost. But the IWW’s victories—and Big Bill’s—were ephemeral. The Wobblies fought among themselves, with the AFL, with their socialist and syndicalist friends. They purged De Leon’s socialists, but they could not make a dent in the skilled ranks of the AFL. The WFM’s metalworkers could not even establish unity with the AFL’s coal miners. After a time the WFM pulled out of the IWW, leaving the Wobblies with a shrunken core.

It was a poignant state of affairs. Labor was producing its own luminaries in the progressive era—Gompers the labor “statesman” and executive, De Leon the doctrinaire syndicalist, Victor Berger the socialist politician, Eugene Debs the propagandist and election campaigner, Haywood the direct-actionist, and a host of others of almost equal talents. Yet these men could not work together for more than brief intervals. They preached unity above all else, but they could not practice it. They were not simply the victims of their own competing egos and ambitions. They were the victims too of conflicting ideologies, some imported and some homegrown, of nativist-immigrant tensions, of ethnic and racial rivalries, of an individualistic and competitive ethos that even penetrated radical labor, of capitalist opposition and divisiveness, of the sheer space and variety and regionalism of America.

And off to the side stood Emma Goldman, watching the radicals’ Virginia reel with mingled concern and contempt. She believed in activism, not organization. Following McKinley’s assassination, she was arrested, given the third degree, and then released for lack of evidence against her. Later she founded an anarchist monthly,
Mother Earth,
welcomed Berkman on his release after fourteen years in prison, became a friend and lover of Ben Reitman, the King of the Hobos. She scorned marriage as an institution that made wives the private property of their husbands. She scorned
woman’s suffrage as tending to co-opt them into the political status quo. She scorned unions as instruments of the capitalist system. Above all, she came to oppose war. But, cut off as she was from parties and unions, she could serve only as a gadfly, albeit one with a sharp sting.

The wide split between Gompers-style and Haywood-style unionism had its counterpart in a deep political and philosophical chasm among black Americans—and the opposing black leaders were as remarkable a set of adversaries as the two unionists.

Booker T. Washington, born a slave on a Virginia plantation a few years before the Civil War, emerged out of conditions that might have made a white man either an Andrew Carnegie or a flaming radical. Washington remembered growing up in a small log cabin with earthen floor and glassless windows, eating with hands and fingers out of the family pot of cornbread and pork, going to work after Emancipation in a salt-packing factory, where he might labor seventeen hours straight. Illiterate and forbidden by his stepfather to attend school, Booker developed a fierce desire to read, prompted by his curiosity over figures on salt barrels and the gift of a Webster’s spelling book from his mother. He managed to take night lessons, then to attend day school, and finally to make the long trek to the Hampton Institute, where he served as both student and janitor. Invited to run the Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school, he set out with white patronage to convert it into a major enterprise with 1,400 pupils and thirty trades. From this base he fought his way to immense power and prestige.