There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  In captivity, “the foreign crank,” as the newspapers called Berkman, declared he had attacked Frick because he was “an enemy of the people.” The would-be assassin’s clothes, soaked with Frick’s blood, were removed; “when stripped, the crank was five feet 3½ inches high and weighed 116 pounds,” reported the police. “He was of slender frame and showed no evidence of having been engaged in a laborious occupation. His lips were thick, his nose large, and he was a typical Russian Jew in appearance.”18

  Berkman surprised his captors by evincing a singular cool. A day after the attack “the crank” was observed passing time in his jail cell smoking cigarettes and whistling show tunes from the New York variety houses.19 Back in that city, however, his recent movements were being closely investigated. There were calls for the arrests of Goldman and Johann Most; police broke into Goldman’s apartment and made off with some revolutionary pamphlets. But the investigators somehow failed to detect her role in the incident, so she remained free, worrying about “Sasha,” her pet name for Berkman, and attempting to rally the city’s anarchist community in support of the attentat.

  “It is stated by Berkman’s acquaintances that of late he had been the lover of a German girl named Goldman,” reported the Times, misstating her nationality. “This girl attended a meeting … held at Paul Wilzig’s saloon, 85 East Fourth Street, on Saturday night. The Goldman woman exulted in the deed of her lover, and made a speech to the assembly. She deplored the fact that Frick had not been instantly killed. It was evident that she had no advance knowledge of Berkman’s intended deed.”20

  To Goldman’s extreme irritation, it was soon evident that Berkman’s courageous revolutionary act had not particularly inspired their fellow anarchists. Berkman had, of course, failed to assassinate Frick; nor did it help that he was not highly regarded in anarchist circles, as his views were considered extreme and his behavior immature. Then, in an August 27 article in Die Freiheit came the ultimate betrayal: Johann Most, America’s best-known anarchist, repudiated Berkman’s assault on Frick. Goldman was livid, replying to Most with an article in the Anarchist insisting that Most explain his blatant disloyalty. When Most ignored her, Goldman showed up at Most’s next public lecture with a horse whip concealed in her coat. As the speaker approached the lectern, Goldman suddenly leaped to her feet and shouted, “I came to demand proof of your insinuations against Alexander Berkman,” and began horsewhipping the older man. “Repeatedly I lashed him across the face and neck,” she later said, “then broke the whip over my knee and threw the pieces at him. It was all done so quickly that no one had time to interfere.”21

  Back in Pittsburgh Berkman’s day in court did not go well. The standard sentence for attempted murder was seven years, but he received a sentence three times as long—“twenty-two years in a living tomb,” as Goldman characterized it.22 As for Frick, the “King of Coke’s” brush with death at the hands of an anarchistic zealot had the unintended effect of making him appear both heroic and indestructible, and served the Carnegie Company as a useful distraction from the otherwise unfavorable coverage it was getting over the Homestead fracas; certainly it reinforced the impression that radical elements had infiltrated the forces of organized labor.

  Andrew Carnegie was not so fortunate; editorials in the mainstream press noted that he had left the dirty work of ousting the Amalgamated in the hands of subordinates while he conveniently absented himself on the other side of the Atlantic, and that the extremely messy consequences had been the violence involving the Pinkertons and the assault on Frick. Even his much-vaunted philanthropy could not help him. “Ten thousand ‘Carnegie Public Libraries’ [will] not compensate the country for the direct and indirect evils resulting from the Homestead lockout,” commented the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Say what you will of Frick, he is a brave man. Say what you will of Carnegie, he is a coward. And gods and men hate cowards.”23

  BY THE 1890S, an era historian Rayford Logan has famously termed “the nadir” of the black experience in America, Southern state legislatures had begun the devious process of eliminating black voting across the former Confederacy. Other rights of citizenship granted African Americans by the postwar amendments were also stripped away. Meanwhile, reports of the lynching of African American men began appearing in newspapers almost every other day; magazines ran insulting caricatures of blacks and published articles of pseudoscientific nonsense about Negroes’ genetic backwardness; finally, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson certified Jim Crow segregation as the law of the land.24 Black inferiority appeared beyond question. As for the worker of color, now formally a second-class citizen, “separate but equal,” his position had never been more precarious.

  Part of the problem was demographic. Until 1900 no more than 10 percent of black Americans resided in the North, which was rapidly industrializing; the percentage in the mining and agricultural empires of the West was even smaller, less than one half of one percent.25 At the same time the perception of the Negro as an agricultural serf, a “carrier of water and a hewer of wood,” had been so firmly established by slavery and the sharecropping system, and now by law, many factory owners treated it as an article of faith that blacks were physiologically unsuited to industrial work.26

  Neither had the labor movement shown itself willing to accommodate African American workers, except under the most rigid, piecemeal terms. In the decades after the Civil War all three major federations—the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, and to a lesser degree the American Federation of Labor—gave lip service to the idea of creating and maintaining a biracial labor coalition. Of the three, the Knights were probably the most committed to a program of inclusiveness. That they did make occasional strides toward black organizing in the South is perhaps best revealed in the ferocity with which the Knights were targeted by white vigilantes, including the Ku Klux Klan. As the Knights faltered in the late 1880s, however, so did their outreach to African American members. The People’s Party, the Populist urge that swept the South and West in the 1890s, was nominally dedicated to a biracial coalition of workers and farmers, but it was undone, in part, by an inability to achieve biracial trust and parity within its own ranks, and to put its enlightened ideals into practice.

  It was apparent to the AFL’s Sam Gompers, as it had been to William Sylvis, that keeping blacks out of unions had the effect of creating an available pool of cheap labor that industry could and did exploit, using blacks as replacement workers and strikebreakers. It was equally clear that only unity across racial lines would guarantee labor the fullest bargaining power. “Wage-workers like many others may not care to socially meet colored people,” Gompers said, “but as working men we are not justified in refusing them the right of the opportunity to organize for their common protection…. If organizations do, we will only make enemies of them, and of necessity they will be antagonistic to our interests.”27 Four delegates from black workers’ organizations attended the founding convention of the AFL in 1886; there, attendees resolved that the new federation would include “the whole laboring element of this country, no matter of what calling,” and vowed “never to discriminate against a fellow worker on account of color, creed or nationality.”28

  Gompers, however, was limited in how much he could do to dictate policy to unions within his federation, and the AFL response remained inconsistent. An 1890 AFL convention passed a resolution expressing the federation’s displeasure with unions that excluded members due to their race, but many locals refused to desegregate under any terms. Some opted for parallel unions—white and black butchers, white and black plumbers, white and black miners—although even when working side by side at the same location and for the same employer, white union locals frequently shrugged off opportunities for joint labor bargaining. White-controlled unions were often unwilling to allow black locals to be represented on central labor councils, the local committees that coordinated strategy and were often the liaison to the national federation’s leadership.


  By 1895 Gompers appeared to weary of the fight. The decline in the nation’s economy had placed greater pressure on workers to find and retain employment. Whites were, if anything, less inclined to elevate blacks—whom they perceived as competition willing to accept lower wages—onto an equal platform from which they could negotiate with employers. At the same time the AFL itself became more lenient toward those unions that barred black membership. As a half-measure, Gompers asked unions to at least not carry exclusionary “whites-only” language in their constitutions. This condition received a test of sorts in the mid-1890s when the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen considered joining the AFL. The railroad brotherhoods tended to be of such strong social and fraternal character that the inclusion of blacks was unlikely and in some instances explicitly denied. When Gompers suggested that the AFL’s only stipulation was that no statements of racial bias appear in the union’s documents,29 the firemen decried the condition as unacceptable temporizing. “The brotherhood protested that it did not want its ‘honor’ compromised by affiliation with a labor federation that pretended to oppose the exclusion of nonwhites,” relates scholar Herbert Hill, “but in reality would allow Negro exclusion to be practiced discreetly as a reward for new members.”30 Several nationally prominent unions, including the Cigar Makers, the International Typographical Union, the Bricklayers, and the Carpenters and Joiners, were, in contrast to the AFL, open in their stated exclusion of blacks.31

  Interestingly, and as a sign of what might have been, AFL locals—white and black, skilled and unskilled—came together in 1892 to mount an historic action in New Orleans. A walkout by streetcar drivers demanding a twelve-hour day (instead of being made to work sixteen-hour shifts) had been resolved by arbitration in the drivers’ favor; other local workers, inspired by the breakthrough, began pursuing further possibilities for labor reform. Thirty new AFL locals were chartered and a Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council was established that included both black and white workers from the teamsters and warehouse industries. On October 24, 1892, this biracial force struck their industries for a ten-hour day, overtime wages, and exclusive union bargaining authority. The town’s conservative Board of Trade retaliated with calls for the militia and court injunctions, and commercial leaders and the press used race-baiting and warnings of “Negro domination” to try to split the coalition, but the biracial coalition held firm and called a general strike. On November 8 an estimated twenty-five thousand people halted work, bringing the city to a four-day standstill as even nonindustrial workers such as musicians, store clerks, printers, and utility workers went out in sympathy. “I am sorry you are not down here to take a hand in it,” one organizer enthused in a letter to Gompers. “It is a strike that will go down in history.”32

  Ultimately, Louisiana governor Murphy J. Foster’s threats to deploy the militia and declare martial law brought the strike to an end, but the wage and hour demands of the biracial shipping unions were met, although businesses refused to recognize them as sole representatives of the workers. The Board of Trade, furious that union solidarity had led to such a widespread stoppage, saw to it that numerous strike leaders were indicted for violating an injunction under the Sherman Antitrust Act, setting a controversial precedent.

  That the two races could unite as wage earners to present a strong front to employers in a major Southern city spoke volumes about how worker bargaining power might, under ideal circumstances, be multiplied; however, New Orleans would remain a tantalizing exception.33 Gompers saw the strike as “a very bright ray of hope for the future of organized labor” and often mentioned it in later years as proof positive of what worker unity could achieve, but in the main he and other AFL leaders had little choice but to adhere to the existing policy of informal acquiescence to individual unions’ racial bias.34 While sticking to its policy of not chartering unions that had discriminatory language in their constitutions, the federation began recommending that such restrictions simply be transferred to other membership rituals; and locals found their own methods of keeping blacks away—requiring skills that few had had an opportunity to acquire, or charging exorbitant dues. In many Southern communities, maintaining a “lily-white” local was perceived as a sign of strength and regional loyalty, and was an inducement to employers who thought likewise and wished to retain a “preferred” body of able workers.

  “The history of the labor movement from 1886 to 1902 so far as the Negro is concerned,” W. E. B. Du Bois observed, “has been a gradual receding from the righteous declaration of earlier years.”35 Of course, given the reality of race relations in the country at the time, which were essentially nonexistent, and black citizenship rights, which had become invisible, labor’s success at cracking so intractable a problem would have been remarkable, if not miraculous. As Philip Foner points out, labor’s inability to achieve integration was more truly a national failure. Gompers could thus with a clear conscience relinquish the effort when it became evident it was impractical; he had even begun to fear that too persistent a devotion to black labor would likely doom his own federation, the survival of which was his primary obligation.36 “We cannot overcome prejudice in a day,” he concluded, and seemingly oblivious to the fact they had no other options, took to lashing out at black workers for their willingness to serve as strikebreakers.37

  Confounded by their own inhibition and intolerance from realizing what should have been a natural alliance, white unionists could only rage at blacks for undercutting union bargaining, for being, in Logan’s phrase, “cheap men.”38 Black workers, angry at being shunned and refusing to be blamed for the situation thrust upon them, understandably became cynical about organized labor generally. There may be no better example of the mounting disillusionment than Tuskegee educator Booker T. Washington, a former member of the Knights of Labor, who in 1895 delivered his famous Atlanta Compromise address in which he advised black Americans to relinquish their efforts to attain the constitutional promises of Emancipation and Reconstruction and focus on becoming dependable workers. By 1897 he was criticizing the AFL openly, warning that the federation’s racial policies left him no choice but to side with employers against labor unions. He pointed out to factory owners the benefits of hiring the black worker who, unlike a white unionist, was “almost a stranger to strife, lock-outs, and labor wars … is law-abiding, peaceable, teachable … [and] has never been tempted to follow the red flag of anarchy.”39 Washington, upon the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895, had become America’s most influential spokesman on race, and his counsel on the union racial divide resonated widely, in black newspapers and among employers happy to justify their use of black nonunion labor.

  WHEN THE RAILROAD INNOVATOR George Mortimer Pullman introduced his elegant new sleeping car in the 1870s, advisers called it impractical: travelers, they feared, would never respect such opulent furnishings. Pullman, however, maintained that his insistence on quality would be appreciated, and that the very behavior of passengers would be transformed by the experience of riding in a luxurious railroad car. His faith in what he termed “the commercial value of beauty” soon proved correct: consumers were grateful for the Pullman cars, and didn’t mind paying more to ride in comfort. In 1889 he applied a similar philosophy to his employees, creating a model community for them near Chicago meant to alleviate the hardship and insecurity in the lives of workers and their dependents.40 The Pullman sleeper would become synonymous with the indulgence of superior rail travel; the model town of Pullman, Illinois, was destined to be the source of one of the most infamous labor disputes in American history.

  Born in upstate New York in 1831, Pullman left high school to become a cabinetmaker, and soon entered the employ of his father, Lewis, a mechanic who specialized in hoisting and moving buildings and who had patented a device for rolling a lifted structure on wheels. George proved an adept and diligent apprentice, the first to volunteer to crawl into the tight places beneath lifted buildings to remove impeding stones. Upon Lewis Pullman’s death in 1853, George assu
med control of the enterprise, supervising a contract to move twenty warehouses along the Erie Canal.

  In 1859 he was hired to relocate the five-story Matteson House, a prominent Chicago hotel whose foundation was threatened by water seepage from Lake Michigan. It was the largest building ever raised by mechanical means. Additional work of this kind was offered him, crowned by a unique challenge the following year in which Pullman lifted an entire city block of buildings and stores, a feat brought off with the coordinated help of six hundred workers. Chicagoans considered it such a marvel of technology, a popular lithograph was struck of the achievement. In another impressive lift, he directed an army of twelve hundred men in moving a four-story hotel, the Tremont House, without breaking a single pane of window glass.

  Pullman’s abundant ingenuity was soon drawn to the technical challenges confronting America’s railroads. Train travel over great distances was still something of a marvel, but the trip between New York and Chicago took three and a half days and followed a roundabout route that added five hundred miles to the journey. Passengers were forced to purchase tickets on several connecting railroads and endured layovers for hours in small junction towns; once aboard, they sat on hard wooden benches and often breathed soot from the locomotive blowing in through open windows. Carriages were too hot in summer, too cold in winter; sleep was near impossible due to the train’s vibration. Pullman knew firsthand the suffering of the long-distance rail passenger, and became intrigued by the idea of building a workable sleeping car, or “land barge,” as some called it, that would offer greater comfort. Working with cast-off cars that he refurbished, he produced several prototypes, one of which, the “Pioneer,” was used in May 1865 as part of the funeral train carrying the remains of President Lincoln from Chicago to Springfield, Illinois.41