Penguin History of the United States of America (78 page)

The root reason was the extreme heterogeneity of the American workforce. It was divided, like the British, into an ‘aristocracy’ of skilled craftsmen and a mass of comparatively unskilled hands. But it was also divided by several American peculiarities: for example, sectionalism. In the East, where conditions had long been settled and the Industrial Revolution had brought, as well as its factories, mills and foundries, European ideas of class-consciousness, job identification and joint action might thrive, but in the West the old, undifferentiated America still flourished. There, a man might move easily from job to job – might be a miner one year and a farmer
the next; and his relations with his employers were likely to be as informal, occasionally as violent, as any other social relation on the frontier. There could be little common ground between such a man and a steelworker in Pittsburgh. Westerners wanted to form broad alliances of the discontented to agitate for general improvement; Eastern workers were much more interested in evolving exclusive working-class organizations to concentrate on working-class wrongs. Then, there was racial prejudice. North and South, the black was universally snubbed and slighted. He was certainly not welcomed by the emergent craft unions. No wonder, then, that he had no objection to being used as a strike-breaker when the opportunity arose. The white workers had never shown any solidarity with him: why should he show any with them? The immigrants in many cases felt the same. Those of them, particularly, who belonged to the ‘new immigration’ – Poles, Jews, Italians, etc. – had little experience of industrial labour, and none of the English language. They received, at best, a cool welcome from the labour aristocracy. So they too let themselves be used as strike-breakers by big business and accepted wage-rates that undercut union demands; and even when, in due course, they understood the need for unionization, they tended to form their own unions and in some cases to monopolize certain trades. This did nothing to help the cause and spirit of working-class unity.
⁴

It should also be borne in mind that the industrial working class never formed a majority of the American population. For most of the nineteenth century the farmers were the majority; and even when that ceased to be true, the numerical ascendancy passed, not to the blue-collar workers, but to the vast amorphous group that must, I suppose, be called the middle class.

Organized labour thus operated from a weak basis, as was amply demonstrated, again and again, during the post-reconstruction years. Attempts to wrest some concessions from the mine-owners in western Pennsylvania through a secret society, mostly Irish, known as the Molly Maguires, failed when ten of the leaders were hanged for murder and conspiracy in 1876. The evidence against them was provided by an undercover agent employed by Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, a sinister body which got its start during the Civil War and subsequently became the industrialists’ secret police, furnishing spies, gunmen and strike-breakers on demand. (The Pinkerton tradition was to prove all too durable, and was influential in the founding conception of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, set up in 1908.) The year 1877 was one of great railroad strikes, which culminated in ferocious riots in Pittsburgh that lasted for three days, caused twenty-six deaths and did 85,000,000 worth of damage to property. The workers were totally defeated and turned away from the union idea in search of allies. They gave support to the Greenback party, which had come into being in protest against the return to the gold standard and was popular in frontier regions which now, as so often in the past – in colonial Massachusetts, in Jacksonian Tennessee – hoped to find economic salvation in an inflated paper currency: in this case, the Civil War paper dollars, or ‘greenbacks’. But the proposed remedy was too remote from the real problems of both farmers and workers to serve for long as the basis for an effective movement, and although the Greenback party won over a million votes in the Congressional elections of 1878, it fell to pieces almost immediately when the Hayes administration in January 1879 announced that greenbacks would henceforward be convertible at face value into gold. It would no longer be of any advantage to borrow gold and repay in paper.

Much more promising was the association known as the Order of the Knights of Labor, which rose rapidly to fame in the early eighties. As it evolved under the guidance of its Grand Master Workman, Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924), the Order was an attempt to solve the new problems of social relations in accordance with traditional American notions, sidestepping both unionism and socialism. Originally it borrowed a good many organizational features from the Freemasons, which got it into trouble with the Roman Catholic church. Powderly, himself a Catholic, induced the Knights to drop their secrecy and most of their ritual, which he must have found difficult, for Americans love dressing up and mumbo-jumbo, as the success of certain fraternal and charitable organizations such as the Shriners have amply demonstrated in the twentieth century. His reward was a rapid growth in membership, based on two sorts of local assembly: the ‘trade assembly’, which was in all essentials a union, and the ‘mixed assembly’, which almost anyone could join, even small employers. Dues were high and gave the central body, run by Powderly, considerable leverage, since it would be up to the executive to decide which undertakings to back with its treasury. In principle this formula might have worked well: the Order could switch tactics according to opportunity, and by inducing farmers and city-dwellers, skilled and unskilled workers, socialists and small businessmen to co-operate might eventually mount a serious challenge to the ruling alliance of big business, the old political parties and Southern oligarchs. Unfortunately the difficulties were immense, for the hostilities between the various components of the Order were deep and bitter; and Powderly was not the man to overcome them. He was a poor administrator and insufficiently flexible. He was deeply opposed to strikes as weapons, preferring the boycott, although in many cases, particularly in the industrial East, it could not be applied effectively. For a few years the Knights were successful, and their membership swelled to a peak of more than 700,000 in the summer of 1886. But 1886 was the year of trial for Powderly and the
Knights, and they failed the test. The chief cry of the working men was now for the eight-hour day; strikes and public meetings were held all over the country to secure this concession, and some dramatic clashes with authority occurred, the most famous being the Haymarket meeting in Chicago on 4 May, when some unidentified idiot or
agent provocateur
threw a bomb which killed a policeman and wounded others. (Only the day before, during a fight between strikers and strike-breakers at the McCormick Reaper factory, the police had killed two workers.) The police rioted, inflicting bloody injuries on everyone they could catch. The leaders of the workers’ movement in Chicago were arrested. It was never convincingly shown that these men had anything to do with the bomb (several of them were certainly innocent) but they were socialists and (with one exception) foreign-born. That was enough for the police, the courts and many business leaders. In due course, though scarcely according to due process, four of the prisoners were hanged. The strike action in support of the eight-hour day planned for the month of May failed; similar strikes on the railroads and in the meat-packing industry also failed. Powderly could do nothing in all this but wring his hands: he dissociated himself from the martyrs of the Hay-market, not wishing the Knights of Labor to get a name for anarchism, and he tried to stop the meat-packers’ strike. All this disgusted the workers. A revival of trade-unionism proper was taking place, for during the eighties a mild economic recovery, which had helped to swell the membership of the Knights (by bringing their dues within more people’s reach), had also stimulated efforts to create an American organization on the lines of the British Trades Union Congress. Some attempts were made to work out a demarcation agreement with the Knights of Labor, but the chance was muffed, partly because of Powderly’s inefficiency, partly because of bitter feelings lower down the hierarchy on both sides. The failure of the Knights to provide effective leadership in the crisis finished the possibility of collaboration. In December 1886 a ‘Trades Congress’ was held at Columbus, Ohio, where the American Federation of Labor was launched. Before very long the Knights of Labor went into a sharp decline; Powderly was dethroned in 1893; then the socialists were expelled; by 1900 the Order was little more than a memory.

The AFL, on the other hand, became a permanent feature of the American scene. It owed this somewhat limited achievement above all to able and realistic leadership, which was supplied for nearly forty years by Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), its first president. Gompers, of Dutch-Jewish parentage, grew up in England, emigrating to America at the age of thirteen. His strength was that he understood perfectly the grievances, aspirations and limitations of the craft-workers, of whom he was one. He modelled the AFL accordingly. He worked in a cigar-factory in New York. It was a room in a tenement, airless, filthy, smelly, with a constant risk of tuberculosis (called the cigar-maker’s disease); the sort of sweatshop that was then known as a buckeye. But it was a place where workers could talk, shape
each other’s views and discover leaders. Before long Gompers was the head of the cigar-makers’ union, and in 1886 he became the first president of the AFL. Most of his members, like himself, had come to America on a quest for personal betterment, and a union, or a league of unions, was only an instrument to further that quest: it carried no implications of class-consciousness, or solidarity, or socialism, or indeed any particular programme. The important point was by one means or another to safeguard and if possible to better your standard of living; to get a larger slice of the great American cake. Strikes were allowable, if directed pragmatically to the achievement of a precise goal: for Gompers, indeed, one of the merits of the AFL was that it would increase the funds available to strikers by giving them a national war-chest to draw on and make strike-breaking more difficult; but it was an equally good idea to get what you wanted by collaboration with the bosses. Gompers, rather like Booker T. Washington, hoped to get concessions from the employers in return for organizing and disciplining the American workforce. In return for (say) the eight-hour day, the AFL would guarantee that there would be no trouble on the factory floor, no strikes or commotions, until the next contract had to be negotiated. (Unfortunately all too few employers saw the advantage of this: the majority continued to harry unionism for all it was worth and then wondered why their workforce was hard to control.) As to ideology, all Gompers had to offer was what came to be known as ‘voluntarism’. This meant that unions ought to operate as mere friendly societies, looking voluntarily after their own members in sickness and old age: compulsory insurance, imposed and organized by the state, was a socialistic, un-American idea. Nor did Gompers believe in a highly centralized, high dues system such as the Knights of Labor had been. Local unions must be allowed the greatest possible autonomy. The AFL’s dues were only 3 cents a year.

This extremely restricted programme was worthless to the unskilled or the unemployed, and even some skilled workers would get very little out of it: when Carnegie and Frick set out to crush the steelworkers’ union in the strike and lockout at the Homestead works in Pittsburgh in 1892, there was not much that Gompers could do, while strikers fought a pitched battle with Pinkerton men, and blacklegs were poured into the works, and Frick was stabbed by a foreign-born anarchist from New York, and the strike was broken, and Carnegie cabled that life was worth living again, and Rockefeller (who believed in ‘obedient servants and good masters’) sent his congratulations. As a result the steel industry was to all intents and purposes de-unionized for the next forty-five years. Given the immense strength of the great capitalists in the late nineteenth century, it is perhaps likely that any more ambitious organization than the AFL would have come to grief, like the Knights of Labor. In 1893–4 Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926), perhaps the most attractive figure ever thrown up by the American labour movement, founded just such a militant, all-inclusive big union for the railroad workers; but he was defeated by the combination of hard times
(1893 saw one of the most serious crashes in American economic history, followed by an intensified depression), the hostility of the railroad craft unions (or brotherhoods), the unity of the employers – who knew a dangerous enemy when they saw one – and the intervention of the federal government. Members of Debs’s American Railway Union went on strike at the works of the Pullman Palace Car Company; the ARU instituted a boycott of Pullman cars and trains hauling them; the US Attorney-General, employing a new legal device, the so-called ‘labour injunction’, accused them of acting in restraint of trade and of impeding the free circulation of the mails, and sent troops against them; the strike and the boycott collapsed and Debs served six months in prison. That was the end of the ARU, though not of Debs, or American socialism (he was converted to that doctrine in prison), or of the idea of ‘One Big Union’. Yet Gompers and the AFL survived in rather better shape, and the sluggish conservatism of ‘Big Labor’ in the twentieth century owes a lot to the Gompers tradition, which explains, for instance, why the AFL had only three presidents in its first ninety-three years (ignoring John McBride, who dislodged Gompers for one year in 1894), each of whom died in office,
⁵
of extreme old age, while the AFL grew arthritic around him. Perhaps, if Gompers had set a livelier precedent, the AFL might not be so decrepit today and might have achieved more during its earliest years.

As it was, it lay low; and the only serious challenge mounted to the Congressional and business oligarchs in these years was thereby so isolated that its failure was almost inevitable.

This challenge came from the West in these, the years when the pioneer saga was ending. There was still a great deal of public land to be taken up. Oklahoma was not opened to settlement (that is, stolen from the Indians) until 1890; even after that last border had been crossed, after the mob of waiting cowboys and farmers had heard the starting gun and raced across the line to claim the choicest pieces of the former Indian Territory, there was still an immense acreage waiting to be claimed for exploitation. But on the whole the eighties were a decade when it was generally recognized that the new country was filling. In future Americans would have to make do with the place they were in, or retreat. Sometimes they took the second alternative: one of the more poignant symbols of the time was the stream of prairie schooners heading east, not west as they always had done before. Those who chose not to admit defeat could no longer steer for the sunset with the same certainty of finding the happy valley across the ranges, although individuals might and did choose still to seek their fortune in California or Oregon or, when the Klondike Gold Rush started, in Alaska or the Yukon. The happy valley had already been claimed. As a rule, obstinate farmers would now have to find a new way out of their difficulties.