Chapter 20

WHY THERE IS NOT AN AMERICAN LABOR PARTY

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[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.

[109] See above, 203-204.