There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  A far more important product of the Pullman Strike was the political evolution of Eugene Debs. As president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs had disdained strikes; he believed the purpose of unions to be largely benevolent, providing hospitalization and death benefits for men in a dangerous occupation. Even the staid Gompers was initially more “radical” than Debs, insisting on unions’ right to strike and bargain, a power Debs had only slowly come to accept. What the Pullman debacle had shown him was that not only corporations were capable of wrongful, unprincipled actions; the government and its federal judges, the “ermined sycophants,” as Debs called them; President Cleveland, for whom he’d campaigned in 1892; as well as the military and powerful newspapers—all, in their disdain for workers’ just demands, were willing to twist facts, to scheme, and to employ blunt force.

  Like George Pullman, he, too, had been personally wounded by events. Turning his back on mainstream politics, he denounced all but the Populists’ People’s Party, which had called for a number of labor-related reforms, including the enforcement of the eight-hour day in government jobs and the suppression of the “hireling army” known as the Pinkertons; to this list of objectives the party would soon add the demand for an end to the use of court injunctions against labor unions. “I have been a Democrat all my life and I am ashamed to admit it,” he said at the last ARU gathering he addressed before beginning a six-month jail term for contempt. “I want every one of you to go to the polls and vote the People’s ticket.”132

  Debs had to deal with two separate legal proceedings against him. His six-month prison sentence arose from his violation of the July 2 antitrust injunction (his codefendants were each sentenced to three months). All appealed their conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court. While awaiting the high court’s ruling, they also had to answer to charges of conspiracy emanating from the ARU’s alleged blocking of a mail train on the Rock Island Railroad. That trial began in January 1895 and was presided over by none other than Judge Peter Grosscup, who had issued the original edict against the ARU. Clarence Darrow, defending Debs, tried to put the GMA’s lawyers on trial, accusing them of “persecution not prosecution,” and pointing out that there was not a scintilla of evidence that Debs or any other ARU official had conspired to halt mail traffic. The executives of the GMA were vague and seemed forgetful, no doubt because a true accounting of their actions would reveal their conspiratorial intent to defeat the labor organization; notably, George Pullman left the state so as to be unavailable to testify. The case dragged on for a month, and many observers felt Darrow was getting the better of the government, but then a juror fell ill—mysteriously, in Debs’s opinion—and Judge Grosscup discharged the jury and continued the case, but it was never reopened. Debs later wrote that the members of the jury had privately assured him of their intent to acquit.

  The July 2 injunction case eventually did get a hearing before the Supreme Court in spring 1895, and for Debs’s forces the Court’s ruling was a disappointment. In In re Debs, the Court essentially dodged the critical issue of whether the federal government had the right to issue an injunction based on the Sherman Act against a labor union, and instead reaffirmed unanimously that a federal injunction was valid where interstate commerce and the U.S. mails were disrupted. The Supreme Court’s consideration of the validity of antitrust injunctions against labor would not be resolved, and then unfavorably for labor, until the Court’s decision in Loewe v. Lawlor in 1908.133

  Debs’s six-month incarceration at a jail in rural Woodstock, Illinois, has become a legendary chapter in the story of his long progress from railroad unionist to Socialist Party presidential candidate. “My imprisonment is very much to arouse the public conscience,” Debs wrote to his father,134 but the time also proved to be one of self-discovery and reevaluation. Debs exercised, received visitors, made friends of the sheriff and his family, and charmed the small town’s residents, many of whom took the opportunity to stop by to meet and befriend the celebrity prisoner. He told stories of his days on the railroad. He read a great deal in Socialist and Marxist texts sent to him, and was particularly taken by a book called The Cooperative Commonwealth by Laurence Gronlund, who as “Peter Lofgreen” had been active in the St. Louis Workingmen’s Party at the time of the 1877 general strike in that city.

  By the time he completed his term in November 1895, Debs had developed a keen interest in Socialism. He was convinced that what was required was not more of the labor struggle’s give-and-take with management, or largely futile opposition to government hirelings, but a reordering of American society on the scale of the revolution that had toppled chattel slavery. Returning to Chicago, he received a hero’s welcome. “Go Wild over Debs,” the Tribune headlined its coverage.135 Hatless, somewhat thinner, he was borne along by a throng of one hundred thousand from the depot to a speakers’ stand. “That’s our boy, Gene!” “Tell the bosses now!” urged the workingmen who pressed in from all sides, as Debs, touched by the adulation, accepted telegrams of congratulation from Western Union boys who had to be lifted over the crowd.

  His ARU had lost its boycott (and would not recover any meaningful semblance of organization), but the power of an industrial union had been demonstrated. Armies and bogus court rulings could not repress it. “They might as well try to stop Niagara with a feather as to crush the spirit of organization in this country,” Eugene Debs believed with all his heart. “It may not come up in the form of the American Railway Union, but this spirit of resistance to wrong is there, it is growing stronger constantly.”136

  CHAPTER FIVE

  INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

  THE PULLMAN STRIKE HAD DEEPENED UNDERSTANDING ON BOTH SIDES of the labor-management divide. Labor perceived that even well-run work stoppages would face not only corporate might and determination, but industry’s powerful handmaidens—the anti-labor bias of the courts, as well as military force. As for capital, it had learned that successfully breaking a strike could prove a hollow victory, in that it still meant consequential financial loss and inconvenience. As the economic desperation of the 1890s lifted and relative prosperity returned, there arose a constructive impatience with the status quo in industrial relations and its by-now visible shortcomings, while technological progress and the rise in living standards that accompanied the dawn of the new century helped spawn a desire for more workable solutions. Persistent unemployment and urban poverty, the inability to peacefully resolve labor-management issues, the intractability of business barons—might not all such issues be enabled by society’s willingness to grant them greater empathy and closer, wiser analysis?1

  The Progressive viewpoint that produced such questions had gathered energy throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Driven initially by the church-based reform movement known as the Social Gospel, which rejected Social Darwinism’s cruel formulas and worked to reverse the determinative influences of fate on the poor, Progressivism had expanded on numerous fronts. These included efforts to study and reform factory conditions and to intercede in a range of unacceptable factors of modern life from tainted food to child labor to the conditions of urban tenement slums and corruption in municipal government.

  Adding to the crises of the cities was the tremendous influx of new immigrants in the years around the turn of the century, all record-setting years, which peaked at 1,285,000 in 1907.2 The newcomers helped overwhelm the civic resources of many communities, resulting in the urban corruption and slum conditions cataloged in the work of the muckrakers—Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities; Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives; and William Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago—among numerous others. The muckrakers went beyond shaming readers with the squalor of urban life; they introduced America to an underworld of racketeers, political bosses, and red-light districts; they described a fallen nation, one whose redemption demanded nothing less than a rediscovery of the country’s fundamental values. These insights were reflected in the literature of the day, inspiring Theodore Dreis
er, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Frank Norris, among others. Of particular interest was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1877, published in 1888, an innovative novel about a futuristic Socialist utopia in the United States; the book proved such a sensation that “Bellamy Societies” sprang up across the country to weigh its implications.

  Progressivism has been described as an attempt by the rising middle class to readjust the chief organizing principles of society; this included a call for a new public morality, one that recognized that great wrongs could result not solely from conscious acts, but also from decisions made by faceless institutions, corporate boards, the courts, and neglectful government agencies.3 For labor, it meant a new openness to the idea that workers and capital might acknowledge the other’s necessity, that trade unions had a role to play in standardizing decent wages so as to alleviate the need for relief or charity, and that some form of mutualism, the working out of problems, could replace the cyclical tradition of hurtful strikes and class antagonism. In this evolving process government would be asked whether, if it was to be involved in labor disputes, it might find more constructive methods than urging court injunctions and dispatching regiments.

  A valuable influence on Progressivism and the labor front in particular was a brand of English Socialism associated with the Fabian Society, a group that included playwright George Bernard Shaw and the sociologists Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Fabianism sought to reform society gradually through enlightenment of the individual, but the Webbs, authors and social critics, also promoted the idea that major institutional forces in the industrial age—capital, government, and labor organizations—all had important roles to play in maintaining a semblance of balance. In Industrial Democracy, published in 1897, the Webbs described unions as entities that would check the excesses of impersonal, large-scale capitalism. They coined the term “collective bargaining” to designate the method by which industry and labor would together rectify their relationship’s inherent inequalities. The phrase that served as the title of their book, “industrial democracy,” would come in America to represent the idea that the democratic principles and “basic civil and political rights embedded in the Constitution and its post Civil War amendments” should apply to the issues of labor and industry as much as they informed the nation’s political system. Industrial democracy implied the recognition that neither side in labor disputes held all the answers, and that neither was entirely in the right. It also came to mean the inclusion in conflict resolution of not only workers and employers but legislatures, reformers, and public relief agencies, as well as scholars, the press, and the public.4

  One indirect force behind the Progressive yearning for moderate solutions was the relative vibrancy and popularity of Socialism. In the years surrounding the turn of the century, U.S. readers could select from eight foreign-language Socialist dailies, five English-language Socialist dailies, and 262 English- and 36 foreign-language Socialist weeklies. By 1904 the most prominent weekly Socialist periodical, the Appeal to Reason, published in Kansas, had a circulation of 500,000,5 while a special antitrust broadside it published in late 1905 sold 3 million copies.6 By May 1912, the nation had 1,039 Socialists in elected seats of authority, including fifty-six mayors, 160 councilmen, and 145 aldermen. Eugene Debs, the five-time candidate for president of the Socialist Party, racked up 897,000 votes in the 1912 election, 6 percent of the national vote; in 1920 he garnered more than a million votes even as he sat in an Atlanta penitentiary. “When the Socialist said that the grievances of the people could be relieved only under Socialism,” offers historian Richard Hofstadter, “the typical Progressive became the more determined to find ways of showing that these grievances were remediable under capitalism. In [this] way the alleged ‘threat’ of Socialism, much talked about in the Progressive period, actually gave added impetus to middle-class programs.”7

  This impetus, guided in part by the Webbs’ influential ideas, begot a new willingness to view the challenges of modern society, and of labor and industry in particular, as resolvable by a kind of science—social science. If the social and economic problems confronting workers could be studied, measured, rationalized, and improved, went the reformers’ hope, they would cease to assume the form of radical class struggle.8 Labor unions were to have a functional, helpful role in American life, treated for the first time, suggests labor scholar Richard Greenwald, as “constructive institutions rather than economic obstacles.”9

  There were even artistic links between labor and the Progressive sensibility, such as the emergence of the British arts-and-crafts movement, which was welcomed in America by a group associated with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston headed by Charles Loring, and heralded in a prominent exhibit at Copley Hall in April 1897. Arts and crafts represented both an aesthetic response to the dehumanizing effects of the modern factory and an attempt to rediscover the pleasures of craftsmanship, the loss of which to mass production, art critic and reformer John Ruskin had warned, would wreak a destructive effect on mankind. Through the influence of the English designer and Socialist William Morris, arts and crafts spread through architecture (often in the form of bungalow or cottage building), furniture-making, and decorative arts such as pottery and tile-making. A parallel development in America was the movement known as City Beautiful, an aesthetic that emphasized urban beautification and architecture on a monumental scale as a means of instilling values of moral and civic virtue in urban residents. The City Beautiful ideal was first notably explored at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago under the hand of architect Daniel Burnham and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and its influence was widely seen in major American cities during the early decades of the twentieth century, often in the design of government buildings such as 20 Centre Street in New York City, the approach to the Manhattan Bridge, Grand Central Station, and various public statuary and fountains, as well as features of the New York subway system.

  Notably, the Progressive impulse was all-encompassing enough that it did not belong exclusively to muckrakers, reformers, social scientists, or artists. Directors of corporations joined the striving for moderation with a new kind of managerial paternalism, known as welfare capitalism, an effort to turn workers and their families into members of the middle class, stabilizing workforces through the provision to employees of benefits such as pensions, profit-sharing, and a variety of social, financial, and recreational perks. By 1914 an estimated twenty-five hundred firms nationwide were using welfare capitalism as a means of worker retention. So pervasive was the movement that even U.S. Steel, which had since Homestead worked assiduously to snuff out unionization in its plants, became one of the first large corporations to offer its workers pension plans and stock participation. Of course welfare capitalism, while revealing a kinder corporate face to workers, also was aimed at diminishing the need for labor unions.10

  The National Cash Register headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, were the site of one of the nation’s leadings efforts in this field. The cash register itself was a symbol of the emerging era of commercial automation, as was the city of Dayton considered a kind of Silicon Valley of its day. Technologically blessed, this small municipality in the early years of the twentieth century gave the world, in addition to the cash register, the airplane, the crankless automobile, leaded gasoline, and the folded ice cream carton, among other innovations. “The Cash,” led by its dynamic young president, John H. Patterson, strove to apply Progressive ideas to the workplace, introducing free child care, after-work education, organized sports teams and facilities, an on-site medical clinic, as well as split shifts for female employees so they could arrive and depart the plant independently of men. Patterson was also active in bringing to Dayton the reformist city manager system of municipal government, which was intended to undo the traditional bossism and city corruption of American cities exposed in the muckraking of Lincoln Steffens. In addition to municipal reform, Patterson led a campaign for city parks, libraries, concerts, new health and sani
tation rules, and—following a devastating flood that struck Dayton in 1913—measures to improve levees, bridges, and roads. His study of his own workers’ needs was so detailed that it included ideas for specific types of bushes to be planted on company grounds and the colors most appropriate for employees’ houses.

  While some unionists distrusted welfare at work for its tendency to put the incentive for labor organizing to sleep, and to permit management excessive involvement with workers’ financial and even personal lives, others, mostly business and social conservatives, worried that mothering workers ran against America’s ingrained individualism. “Patronizing and coddling grown men and women is not looked upon favorably by the Infinite Power which governs us all,” commented the cereal manufacturer Charles W. Post. “It is intended by the Creator that mankind obtain ‘welfare’ as the result of service and often-times hard service. It is not to be fed to him in a silver spoon and his chin held up while he takes it.”11

  Another influential voice was that of Philadelphia engineer and business consultant Frederick W. Taylor, famous for his emphasis on disciplined plant efficiency, a concept that became known as “scientific management” or “Taylorism.” Born in 1856 to an affluent Philadelphia Quaker family, Taylor overcame debilitating problems with his eyesight to study mechanical engineering, and grew wealthy in his own right by devising a precision method of calibrating the temperatures at which steel can be cut and manipulated. In resolute defiance of the health issues that had plagued his youth, he devoted himself to a life of physical fitness, becoming a cricketer, a better-than-average golfer, and, in 1881, one of the first doubles champions in the history of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association.