There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  An equally serious blow to the Knights’ prestige was workers’ disappointment with the group’s lackluster support of the revived crusade in the 1880s for an eight-hour day. That cause had waned since the collapse of the NLU, but in 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a new trade union conglomerate led by Samuel Gompers, chose eight-hour agitation as a means of galvanizing and growing its membership. Short-hour campaigns were always popular with rank-and-file workers and suited Gompers’s philosophy of organized labor’s proper aims. Although he’s often quoted as having responded cutely to the question “What does labor want?” with the single word “More!,” as if his federation’s aims were solely pecuniary, Gompers’s actual statement, published in 1893, was both visionary and humane, stating in part,

  What does labor want? It wants the earth and the fullness thereof…. Labor wants more schoolhouses and less jail cells; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, and to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.7

  To give workers an objective to rally around, the federation chose May 1, 1886, as a fixed date beyond which no American trade unionist would ever again work more than an eight-hour day. Plans were set for a general strike to take effect on that date—der Tag it was called, in anticipation, by German American workers—and the revived movement buzzed with fervent editorials, poetry, and music, including the infectious “Eight-Hour Song.”

  We mean to make things over;

  we’re tired of toil for naught,

  But bare enough to live on:

  never an hour for thought.

  We want to feel the sunshine;

  we want to smell the flowers;

  We’re sure that God has willed it,

  and we mean to have eight hours.

  We’re summoning our forces

  from shipyard, shop, and mill:

  Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,

  eight hours for what we will!8

  Although Powderly gave the crusade his halfhearted approval, he cautioned his supporters away from direct conflict with employers or strike talk, urging them instead to seek change through legislation and other peaceful means, such as writing short essays on the benefits of the eight-hour day for their local newspapers.9 As had become a pattern with the Knights, many of its unions listened politely to Powderly’s cautious instructions but then went their own way, unable to resist the broadening surge of the eight-hour crusade. Gompers’s federation, as well, found it could not keep pace with its own members’ zeal for the reform. Indeed, enthusiasm proved so universal it brought even doubting anarchists and other radicals into the fold. What neither Powderly nor Gompers could have foreseen was that the growing call for eight hours would spark an incident so emotional and divisive it would not only paralyze the eight-hour cause, but change forever the way America viewed organized labor.

  THE WORKINGMEN’S PARTY, PROMINENT in the St. Louis General Strike of 1877, is often viewed as the first tangible political representation of the Socialist impulse in America. Its seven thousand members were mostly German American craft workers but the group favored worker unity across ethnic and racial lines. Where the organization foundered was on the question of advancing Socialism’s cause through electoral politics. Some members, composing the so-called Lassallean faction, followers of the ideas of the German theorist Ferdinand Lassalle, envisioned a Socialist political party that would incrementally develop support based around appealing core ideals, much as the Republican Party had done in the 1850s. Marxian Socialists, adherents of Karl Marx, did not believe it worthwhile to engage in party politics. There would be no progress until man’s labor was fairly valued, and toward achieving that goal Marxians promoted strong trade unions, strikes, and boycotts that would reveal the weaknesses of capitalism and private property.

  Having renamed itself the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) shortly after the 1877 rail strikes, it achieved its most notable electoral success in Chicago, where in 1878–1879 its candidates won slots for a state senator, three state representatives, and four city aldermen. But within a few years many in the Chicago SLP became disillusioned with the frightful degree of local political corruption. Particularly galling was an 1880 incident in which two crooked election judges tried to deny reelection to Frank A. Stauber, a Socialist alderman popular for his efforts to open public bathhouses for workingmen. He was eventually given his post, but only after a lawsuit that cost his supporters $2,000 and effectively kept Stauber from office for a full year. The two election officials were tried but set free. Such outrages greatly offended Albert Parsons, who had led the Workingmen’s Party in the trying days of 1877 and who had previously placed his faith in the ballot as a means of alleviating the workers’ plight. “It was then I began to realize the hopeless task of political reformation,” Parsons said of the Stauber scandal, and among many Chicago workers, he recounted,

  the conviction began to spread that the State, the Government and its laws, was merely the agent of the owners of capital … that the chief function of all Government was to maintain economic subjection of the man of labor … and that the element of coercion, of force, which enabled one person to dominate and exploit the labor of another, was centered or concentrated in the State … [and] in the last analysis … force was despotism, an invasion of man’s natural right to liberty.10

  Chicago authorities had kept their eye on Parsons ever since his rousing Market Street speech, which was blamed for having helped trigger the violence in the city during the railroad upheaval. What worried them was not solely that he was devoted to workers’ rights; it was that he was an American, gentlemanly and articulate, and his family background denied critics the usual means by which they might smear him as a “labor radical.” Parsons was descended from one of the oldest Anglo-Saxon families in America; his ancestors had arrived in New England in 1632. The Reverend Jonathan Parsons of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a fervent resister of British occupation forces in the 1770s, became the inspiration for the popular American caricature “Brother Jonathan.” An anti-British sermon he delivered from his pulpit in early June 1775 led to the forming of a military company that distinguished itself at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Another relation, Major General Samuel Parsons, lost an arm in the fighting.

  Albert was born into a large family in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1848. Both of his parents, who were religious reformers, died before he was five, leaving him to the care of his eldest brother, William Henry Parsons. A skilled horseman and crack shot by age thirteen, Albert ran away to join the Confederate forces in 1861, eventually serving as a scout attached to a cavalry brigade led by his brother, who was known during the war as “Wild Bill” Parsons. After the peace Albert apprenticed as a printer, and following the example of both William and the renowned Confederate general James Longstreet, became a Republican, accepting Reconstruction and its efforts to assist the former slaves. Such views soon came to be held as traitorous by his neighbors, particularly after he “took to the stump to vindicate my positions,” and Parsons was forced to cease operation of a small newspaper he published.11 In 1869 he began work as a traveling correspondent and agent for a Houston newspaper, and in his meanderings through rural Texas met Lucy E. Gathings, a head-turning beauty who claimed mixed Mexican and Native American heritage but was in all probability part black. They married in Austin in 1871. Two years later, after a brief stint as an internal revenue agent, he and Lucy went north, first to Philadelphia, then Chicago.

  Parsons had been a member of the Typographical Union while still a teenager in Texas, and in Chicago he joined local Typographical Union No. 16, working as a printer and compositor at both the Chicago Inter-Ocean and the Chicago Times. His special empathy for issues affecting working people probably dated from 1874, when he became involved in protests against a local relief agency that in the aftermath
of the Chicago Fire of 1871 had taken funds meant for the destitute and diverted them to stock market speculation and other unauthorized investments. The city’s newspapers declared the rumors false and tried to tar those who’d raised suspicions as “Communists, robbers, loafers, etc.” As Parsons wrote:

  I began to examine into this subject, and I found that the complaints of the working people against the [agency] were just and proper. I also discovered a great similarity between the abuse heaped upon these poor people … and the actions of the late Southern slaveholders in Texas toward the newly enfranchised slaves…. It satisfied me there was a great fundamental wrong at work in society and in existing social and industrial arrangements.12

  Parsons joined the Workingmen’s Party in 1876 and, believing their admirable socialistic aims were misunderstood partly because many members spoke less-than-perfect English, volunteered to become their tribune as a writer and speaker. That same year he gained the distinction of being the first person in Chicago to join the Knights of Labor, serving the organization in various official roles while contributing pieces to the Knights’ periodical, the Journal of United Labor. After he came to national attention during the railroad strike of 1877, he was regularly sought as a lecturer.13

  In fall 1877 Parsons garnered eight thousand votes for county clerk in Chicago on the Workingmen’s Party ticket, narrowly losing, then went on to the national convention in Newark, New Jersey, where the party’s name was changed to the Socialist Labor Party. At an SLP convention in 1879 he was nominated for president of the United States; deeply honored, he nonetheless declined, reminding the delegates that he had not yet reached the qualifying age of thirty-five, as required by the U.S. Constitution. However, he did accept appointment as the head of the Council of Trade and Labor Unions of Chicago, and later broke away to help found the city’s Socialist-oriented Central Labor Union.

  Parsons’s counterpart—another rising star in the Chicago labor firmament—was August Spies, a skilled upholster and saddle maker who had come to Chicago from his native Germany in 1872. Two years later he “went on a tramp” of the West and South, then returned in 1875 to Chicago, where he became a convert to Socialism. Said to possess “a warm heart controlled by a cold, philosopher’s brain,” Spies was as impressive to look at as he was to listen to, an exceedingly handsome man and physical fitness devotee who belonged to a local turnverein, a German American gymnasium. In 1877 he became business manager of a German-language daily, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and a year later its editor. Spies gradually made the paper’s tone more radical, his anger toward authority deepening in 1884 after one of his brothers was shot dead in a fight with a policeman.14 In December of that year he challenged the police directly when he aided a local German family in bringing charges against an “Officer Patten,” who had allegedly taken advantage of their daughter, sixteen-year-old Martha Seidel, a domestic jailed on an accusation of household theft. In what the Alarm termed “an unparalleled crime,” Patten, aware that her family was too poor to post bail for the girl, removed Martha to his own home and, “there, during the long moaning night,” forced her to endure “all that a mountain of bestial flesh insane with lust, restrained by no fear, secure of immunity, could inflict upon her shuddering helplessness.”15

  Despite Parsons’s outrage over the Stauber affair and Spies’s cynicism about the Chicago police, both men retained a tenuous faith in the ballot as an instrument of change; but increasingly they found themselves alone among more adamant colleagues at national gatherings of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, an anarchist splinter element whose New York wing advocated direct actions including terrorism as a means of harassing the ruling elite and emboldening the masses.16

  THE VIEWS OF JOHANN MOST, a German émigré and resident of New York’s Lower East Side who published the nation’s best-known anarchist paper, Die Freiheit, typified the radicals’ estrangement from “routine” labor-management solutions. “Extirpate the miserable brood!” he declared of the lords of capital. “Let us rely upon the unquenchable spirit of destruction and annihilation which is the perpetual spring of new life. The joy of destruction is a creative joy.”17 The aim was to disrupt the world of commerce and government, not to gain such “petty reforms” as shorter hours or higher wages, which Most dismissed as “sops thrown to the proletariat.”18 As one anarchist paper explained, “Right and wrong cannot arbitrate. The wage laborer who resorts to arbitration condones the wrongs, practiced by capital upon himself, and compounds the capitalistic felony which robs him of his labor product.”19

  Most had emerged from childhood with a mysterious “cancer” of the cheek, and a botched operation to repair it left his face “a wrinkled, malformed, lurid knot” that gave him a freakish jawline, which as an adult he attempted to disguise with a bushy beard. Ostracized by his peers on account of his disfigurement, he pursued a life of the mind, reading deeply in politics, history, and philosophy and becoming a Socialist scholar and politician. He served two terms in the Reichstag, although his own father, who had brutalized the boy when young, disliked his progeny to the extent that he gave speeches on behalf of Most’s political opponents.20 Eventually he surfaced in London, where he was jailed in 1881 for publishing an article approving of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

  In America Most lectured widely and spread his views through Die Freiheit and other publications, including a seventy-four-page booklet called The Science of Revolutionary Warfare. Subtitled A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc., this “manual for the extermination of the bourgeoisie”21 denigrated police, capitalists, clergy, and government officials and recommended they be killed by whatever means came to hand. It offered detailed information on arson, poisoning, the use of knives, guns, and letter bombs, and waxed rhapsodic about the day when massive annihilation might be visited on the powerful by dropping bombs from hovering airships, particularly into the midst of military processions. The Science of Revolutionary Warfare sold well in anarchist circles and its contents were often excerpted by radical newspapers. Thanks in part to Most’s exhortations, allusions to dynamite, a substance possessing an almost mythical power to equalize society, became frequent in radical journals. Inexpensive to make, easy to conceal, it was technology’s gift to the have-nots of the world. A disciple of Most’s, a “Professor Mezzeroff” of New York City, reported that he took a dynamite bomb with him wherever he went. “If you carry two or three pounds with you people will respect you much more than if you carried a pistol,” Mezzeroff advised.22

  Popular in late-nineteenth-century America primarily in the immigrant enclaves of large cities, anarchism centered around the view “that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful as well as unnecessary.”23 There were no better forms of government. Whether organized as a dictatorship of the left or right, or as a democratic republic, each ruled by force, each was a means for the fortunate to safeguard their property and privilege, and all were at odds with natural principles of human social organization. Anarchists, like Socialists, believed that private control of the means of production was unfair to labor, but while Socialists envisioned the end of capitalism and the creation of a revolutionary proletariat through worker solidarity and either electoral politics or trade union agitation, anarchists sought more immediate means of displacing the state apparatus. “Rather than contracting with governments to ensure his well-being, as in the Lockean tradition that informed the American Declaration of Independence,” writes scholar Miriam Brody, “the individual liberated from state tyranny enters into free associations with other individuals, these associations forming the social networks of public life.”24

  The anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat and geologist, promulgated the idea that all living creatures have the capacity for self-organization “in response to natural conditions,” and that “free of the constraints of government, [they]
would continue to do so.”25 The New England anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who would later, along with Nicola Sacco, be executed for their anarchistic beliefs, described it as a living philosophy, an insight that guided one to a state of buoyant liberation. “The anarchism is as beauty as a woman for me,” Vanzetti wrote, “perhaps even more since it includes all the rest and me and her. Calm, serene, honest, natural, virile, muddy and celestial at once, austere, heroic, fearless, fatal, generous and implacable—all these and more it is.”26

  But what always remained somewhat vague (even to anarchists) was precisely how the desired future would come into being. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an early-nineteenth-century French founder of anarchistic thought, saw widespread proletariat cooperation geared to a world of artisans and small craftsman; he didn’t account for large-scale industrialization. Mikhail Bakunin, Proudhoun’s Russian compere, saw “an apocalyptic breakdown of society, a purifying and regenerating baptism by fire out of which, phoenixlike, the voluntary and autonomous network of workers’ federations would emerge.”27 Bakunin’s vision gained adherents in the radical wing of anarchism peopled by the likes of Johann Most, but Karl Marx deemed such notions so unacceptable that in 1872 he drove Bakunin’s followers out of the First International, the original version of the International Workingmen’s Association, founded in London in 1864.