# American Syndicalism/Chapter 06

VI
FORERUNNERS OF THE I. W. W.
No one has given us a deeper or truer perspective through which we may see labor's long struggle to organize than Beatrice and Sidney Webb. With exhaustive thoroughness, they show in the third chapter of their History of Trade Unionism a brief, throbbing period like that of our Knights of Labor. It is a passionate moment that fuses labor, so precisely in the spirit of our I. W. W., that we seem to be reading sentence by sentence the latest syndicalist utterance. There was breathless expectation that capitalism was doomed. It is an even eighty years since Owen and his followers proposed—almost to the last detail—all that our I. W. W. now urge,—"eliminate politics, band labor together at the bottom with light dues or no dues at all, with power decentralized, the general strike, and the dream of the coöperative commonwealth." The "means of production" were, of course, to be "taken over" but "were to become the property not of the whole community, but of the particular set of workers who used them. The trade unions were to be transformed into 'national companies' to carry on all the manufactures. The agricultural union was to take possession of the land, the miners' union of the mines, the textile unions of the factories. Each trade was to be carried on by its particular trade union, centralized into one 'grand lodge.'"
​Syndicalism at its best has got far beyond this naïve proposal that miners are alone to own and dispose of the product; that railway employees, textile workers and shoemakers are each to have exclusive possession of the industry in which they happen just then to be working. Little reflection is needed to show that this would leave us with the same old difficulties of privileged and parasitic groups. While one finds plenty of youthful Syndicalists who have not got beyond this artless conception, the more mature thought is of a "federated administration" that shall distribute unearned increment and advantage to the social whole. Here in some form is the "Grand Lodge" of Owen's days.
In contagious enthusiasm and rapidity of growth, this forerunner far outmatches anything yet accomplished by modern Syndicalism. More than four hundred thousand workers were grouped into fellowship fired with expectation of some great oncoming event. So quick was the exhaustion, that the story is one of the most pathetic in labor annals.
Of the real power of capitalistic industry, there seems to have been, even among the leaders, no slightest intimation, and quite as little sense of the law and its influence over property rights. This over-heated movement left its own priceless legacy of coöperative impulse, though with only faintest resemblance to the expected reformation.
Adequately to fill out these origins, Chartism also would claim notice. This is usually described as a political uprising and, therefore anti-Syndicalist. But it had also its outcry against politics. There was direct onslaught against actual politicians; the ​same emphasis on the economic aspects—the same appeal to the entire labor mass. Disraeli's Sybil, written in this period, has a passage to which I have seen several references in syndicalist sheets. It has the ring of the I. W. W. orator in every line. "Hope had deserted the laboring classes: they had no confidence in any future of the existing system. Their organization, independent of the political system of the Chartists, was complete. Every trade had its union, and every union its lodge in every town and its central committee in every district.
"Every engine was stopped, the plug was driven out of every boiler, every fire was extinguished, every man was turned out. The decree went forth that labor was to cease until the charter was the law of the land; the mine and the mill, the foundry and the loomshop, were, until that consummation, to be idle; nor was the mighty pause to be confined to these great enterprises. Every trade of every kind and description was to be stopped—tailor and cobbler, brushmaker and sweep, tinker and carter, mason and builder, all, all."
The next link is the "International" of the early sixties. The "General Rules" of this body throw the entire responsibility for their emancipation upon the "working classes." It is to be an economic emancipation. "Solidarity of labor" is the shibboleth.
The founder of French Syndicalism expressly acknowledges the parenthood of the International, as ​also does Emil Pouget. But for more direct light upon the I. W. W. our own recent labor history is still more useful.
In the midst of a strike, I heard a studious and conscientious journalist ask a leader busy with the strike, how one could best "book up" on the history of the I. W. W. The reply came, "Study the Knights of Labor first; most of it is there." He qualified this later, but there is quite truth enough in the hurried suggestion to merit attention. From the early thirties, labor unions had felt the weakness of isolation and there was consequent striving for such federation as would band these scattered bodies into state and national organizations. This especially appears after periods of defeat. In no industry has defeat been brought home to the workers with more tragic frequency than in the clothing trade. From these discouragements and from the brain of one of the most thoughtful men the labor movement has produced in the United States, M. S. Stephens, the "Knights of Labor" sprang. His own union among the garment workers had had a bitter history, ending at last in failure. Like Henry George, Stephens had traveled widely, spending several years on the Pacific Coast. With rare gifts for reflective observation, he turned every experience to good account. He was one of the first to see the hopelessness of labor's struggle, if dependence were placed alone on the separate craft union. His observations on this point sound like an I. W. W. orator attacking the groundwork of existing unions. He dreamed of a federation which should ​sweep in the millions, giving labor the "full united strength of associated manhood." In his house in Philadelphia, late in 1869, this large desire was embodied in the plan, solemnly named "The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor." "Noble" and "Holy" were soon dropped, and the Knights of Labor entered upon their work as a secret order with much ceremonial pomp, which brought its own penalties in the end. As clearly as Fourier and Marx saw the coming of the great organization in business, Stephens noted the rapid rise of these new powers that followed so swiftly after the Civil War. If capital was to have these enormous advantages, labor must secure them or be crushed. This was his problem. Every member received for instruction the following appeal:
Labor is noble and holy. To defend it from degradation; to divest it of the evils to body, mind, and estate which ignorance and greed have imposed; to rescue the toiler from the grasp of the selfish,—is a work worthy of the noblest and best of our race. . . . We mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital; but men, in their haste and greed, blinded by self-interests, overlook the interests of others, and sometimes violate the rights of those they deem helpless. We mean to uphold the dignity of labor, to affirm the nobility of all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. We mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor (the only creator of values), and the justice of its receiving a full, just share of the values or capital it has created.
This has not the definiteness of Syndicalism as now stated. In the words, "We mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital"—we have a phrasing which every I. W. W. ​follower would challenge. To him there is no "necessary capital" except that which society itself owns.
But like the I. W. W., Stephens looked toward the complete extirpation of the wage system. To this end, decades of educational effort were to be made through the organs created by this new order. As in the I. W. W., hostility was shown to "intellectuals." Physicians, politicians, and lawyers were excluded:—the lawyers because they were so largely a parasitic class like liquor-dealers, who were also excluded.
After 1872, beginning with plumbers and painters, a steady increase of carpenters, masons, machinists, steel makers, weavers, fell into line. State after state joined with an ever larger variety of craft unions, until at Richmond in 1886, nearly nine thousand trade unions had gathered under the banners of the Knights of Labor. But with each mounting step, troubles followed. Every added thousand brought its increment of conflict. A local union, or even all the unions in a given trade, had interests in common. The "local" understood those interests and could define and act upon them far more intelligently than any distant official body.
It thrilled like a trumpet note to hear that "the heart of labor beats with a common throb," that "its interests are one with the all-embracing brotherhood of toil"; but when a plague of petty strikes broke out in 1880–1, the responsible officials were frightened. Mr. Powderly was then "General Master Workman." He sent out a pathetic protest, precisely as the French ​Syndicalist Lagardelle has recently cried out for a "revision of the facts and the ideas" of his order. "After a glorious beginning," he says, "we find ourselves faced with what generally results from forced marches—complete exhaustion." English Syndicalism, since the pitiable failure of the dockers' strike, is eating the same bitter fruit. The over-stimulated activity of the strike will enfeeble the I. W. W. as it did the Knights of Labor. The power of the strike is in its restraint, not in its profusion.
But the greater lesson is that the Knights of Labor, like the I. W. W., brought to the front an ideal relationship of labor that does not stand the strain put upon it. It is pleasant to say that the interests of Western lumbermen are one with those of New Jersey Glass Blowers, but a conflict with employers in the lumber camp may prove within a week that, for the fighting moment, they have nothing in common with far-off glass blowers or with labor in an hundred other removed industries. Soon after 1880, this actual conflict of interests between craft unions and the Knights of Labor set in with increasing violence. It was found that "craft autonomy" had its own sturdy vitality. In the first high enthusiasms, organizers were sent broadcast to create new unions. They were chartered and set on their way irrespective of any grievance with employer, past or present. One or two years passed when it slowly became clear to the members that their ​regular dues were paid solely to assist unknown and far-off strikers of whose case they knew nothing except through reporters whose interest it was to see that dues were collected. Rumors followed that many of these strikes were from inner jurisdictional feuds or from local rivalries between envious leaders. Was hard-earned money to be paid by labor in Cincinnati to doubtful quarrels in some New England "local"? Hundreds of unions fell away, one after another, because the resonant phrases about "labor's united interests" came to be questioned and then defied. When errors of judgment are made or violent passions lead, it is a wild folly to insist that "labor's cause is always sacred against the employer." The sole measure of labor's common interest is the soundness and justice of its cause. There are no "common interests of labor, right or wrong," any more than there is a decent patriotism, "right or wrong."
In the height of the Knights of Labor ascendency, I stopped off the train in a New England textile town to inquire about a strike then raging. It was on the slippery edges of defeat. It was from a trade unionist that I heard at once, "We have put our foot in it. We thought the employers were making a thirty per cent profit and we acted on that, and now we have got perfectly good evidence that they are not making seven per cent, and we've got to get out of the scrape as best we can." There have been quite uncounted thousands of such strikes. A few years later, conflicts in the K. of L. became so frequent that unions by scores dropped from their allegiance and the first intimations of a new order, The American Federation ​of Labor, were heard. This body restored again the more localized power in the trade union.
The Knights of Labor had in its Constitution for Local Assemblies lines calling for "the grand union of all who toil, regardless of sex, of creed, or of color," in the exact vein of Mr. Haywood's latest speech. This had an emotional value like that of a new religion, until the stress of an actual strike revealed the real intensities of local self-interest as against that sublime but shadowy vision,—"the brotherhood of labor as wide as the world, as linked as a chain, with no enemy but the master class."
This level, horizontal identification of labor interests as against all others, deified into a principle of action, wrecked the Knights of Labor, as it will wreck any conceivable body which attempts its application to the bread and butter tasks of daily life. The wage scale of labor in the world varies from at least six dollars a day to five cents a day. Groups of turbaned and dusky creatures from the far East who received in India less than ten cents daily, now work (timidly because always in risk of their lives) up and down the Pacific Coast. With the swift mobilities of steam navigation this contact between a ten-cent standard and a two-or-three-dollar standard has in it more fatalities of enraged enmity than any which exist between "capital and labor." I have seen negroes working in the lower South for sixty cents daily, and this during less than half the days of the year. What "solidarity" is there between these and Butte miners? What acknowledged "solidarity" was there at the Lawrence strike between the lower polyglot workers ​and the best paid English labor in the mills? I heard no bitterer outbursts there than between members of these two groups. If this antagonism asserts itself when the difference in wages is less than fifty per cent, what must it be between those separated by three or four hundred per cent?
In 1880, the rents in the K. of L. organization were so threatening that the propensity to strike was acknowledged by the ablest leaders to be so perilous as to require immediate attention. Two years later these men ask that the Constitution be thoroughly overhauled. Schism was rife. Threats of withdrawal came in from all quarters. Though the radical element prevailed at this moment, it brought from Grand Master Powderly the following warning, which reads precisely like warnings which began to be heard in France two years ago. Powderly said:
One cause for the tidal wave of strikes that has swept over our Order comes from the exaggerated reports of the strength of the Order, numerically and financially, given by many of our organizers. Such a course may lead men into the Order, but by a path that leads them out again; for, as soon as they become convinced that they were deceived, they lose confidence in the Order.
In 1884, the Knights of Labor had learned that the boycott, unless carefully restrained, was also full of peril. We hear, too, that "benefit funds" must be built up to strengthen the Order. Two years later, ​strikes were so restricted in the proposals of the chief committee as to bring out the retort from radical members that the Order was to be deprived of its one great weapon. Mr. Powderly's most desperate final effort was to persuade the membership to find other means to settle labor disputes. That the strike and boycott had invaluable uses was never questioned, but these few arduous years taught every sane head upon whom responsibilities fell, that no organization could either live or thrive upon measures so costly and so essentially destructive.
This lesson the I. W. W. might learn from their forerunner, as they might learn some hints about the possibilities of the "General Strike" to which they turn as the last great instrument of their freedom. The Knights of Labor were less ambitious. They created an organization which lent itself to new uses of the boycott and the "sympathetic" strike. This sweeps together widely different unions into a common revolt. There was much eloquence expended upon its possibilities. The "sympathetic strike" was but a fine practical illustration of their noble motto: "An injury to one is the injury to all." In three successive ​years, 1886–7–8, this was tried at terrible cost on two railroads and among the longshoremen. It was a most sobering experience which later put the rising "Federation" on its guard.
It is from this time on that confusion and disorder play havoc with the Knights of Labor, until it gives place to its great rival now in the field, the American Federation of Labor.
Because the Knights of Labor became a wreck, it does not follow as a fatality that the I. W. W. will likewise fail. Labor has learned much since then, and what is now "the great industry" has so changed as to require corresponding changes in labor policies. "As capital becomes international, as its organization becomes more compact, we too," says a Syndicalist, "must adapt ourselves to the new economic order." As a general statement, this is harmless, but it does not help us. To "internationalize the common interests of labor over against capital," is to multiply by ten every specific obstacle which wrecked the Knights of Labor. The same conflict of interests which, to their sorrow, sprang up like dragon's teeth, will increase with every widening of racial and national areas where our American Syndicalism proposes to carry the conflict.
* ↑ Quoted in Harley's Syndicalism. The words which I put in italics show the familiar economic reaction against sectional attempts to make too much of political hopes.
* ↑ Pelloutier at the Fourth Congress of the Bourses du Travail.
* ↑ Le parti du travail.
* ↑ The doctors were later admitted. The "Secrecy" of the order accounted in part for these exclusions.
* ↑ Mr. Walling writes in the New Review, Jan. 18, "Revolutionary unionists conclude that the cure for lost strikes is more strikes; strikes more frequent, more aggressive, and on a larger scale."
* ↑ This requires one modification. Individual men and women in receipt of high wages quit work from sympathy in many strikes. It is one of the noblest features in scores of great contests. To suppose, however, that this can be generalized into a universal fact and made the basis of a policy of social reconstruction is an illusion.
* ↑ The words of the proposed amendment were as follows:That no strike shall be entered upon or sanctioned by any Local, Trade, District, or State Assembly, when aid, financial or otherwise, may be required from outside such Assembly, until the General Executive Board shall have been represented by one or more of its members, or assistants, in an effort to settle the pending difficulty by arbitration, and then only by order of the General Executive Board.Any strike entered upon without such order by the General Executive Board shall receive no assistance, financial or otherwise, from the Order outside of such Assembly; nor shall any appeal to the Order for such aid be permitted.
* ↑ The I. W. W. show much determination to avoid the political disasters which befell the Knights of Labor.