There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The Communist Party, forever stigmatized, saw its membership decline from between sixty and eighty-eight thousand in 1919 to less than six thousand at the end of 1920.131 Among conservatives, the fervent dedication to the theme of “Americanism” continued to find righteous spokesmen in the American Legion and in a revived Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s became a quasi-religious business association, complete with a ladies’ auxiliary, devoted to the suppression of aliens, Jews, blacks, Catholics, and social transgressions it deemed immoral, such as drinking, adultery, and spousal abuse.

  While the fervor and hysteria of the Palmer era had been reined in, the impulse to suppress radicals and anarchists lived on most famously in the celebrated case of Sacco and Vanzetti, veteran anarchists connected to the proudly violent Galleani group and involved in immigrant labor efforts in southern New England. Both had come to America as young men: Nicola Sacco becoming a skilled shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti making his way through several unskilled jobs, his only preference being that the work was out of doors. Vanzetti had once helped lead a successful strike at a rope factory, and had been subsequently blacklisted by management; at the time of his arrest he was living in Plymouth, Massachusetts, supporting himself as a fish peddler. Sacco had been active in efforts to assist the Lawrence strikers and their families, and had been a spectator at the trial of Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti in Salem in 1912.

  On May 3, 1920, Vanzetti learned that an anarchist friend, a printer named Andrea Salsedo, had mysteriously wound up dead on the pavement fourteen floors below the Department of Justice offices in New York City, where he’d been held incommunicado for eight weeks as a suspect in the string of bombings that included the assault on Attorney General Palmer’s home. Vanzetti had made an unsuccessful trip to New York earlier that spring to see if he could learn anything about Salsedo’s detention. Stunned by the strange circumstances of their friend’s “suicide,” Vanzetti and Sacco were in the process of organizing a meeting to be held in Brockton on May 9 to protest Salsedo’s death when, on May 5, they were both arrested and charged with the South Braintree robbery and shootings of April 15. Vanzetti was also charged with taking part in a failed payroll holdup in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, on December 19. Regarding the Bridgewater allegation against Vanzetti, Judge Webster Thayer remarked, “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions.”132 Vanzetti assured Elizabeth Gurley Flynn that he was hardly surprised he had been fingered as a threatening anarchist capable of murder. “I have [known] many good individuals among the American people—more good in them than I would have dreamt, but I have a too big pair of moustache, and the Americans do not know if I am a bear or a man, and consequently, feel unsure at my presence.”133

  Worldwide protest over the Sacco-Vanzetti case and convictions became the 1920s’ reigning liberal crusade, and helped stave off their executions for six years. But after the court denied a retrial and Governor Alvan T. Fuller of Massachusetts ordered a committee to review the convictions, the sentences were carried out on August 22, 1927. There was near-universal revulsion at the men’s deaths, “the never-ending wrong,” as author Katherine Anne Porter called it, a gross injustice on par with the Haymarket executions. Upton Sinclair considered what had occurred “the most shocking crime that has been committed in American history since the assassination of Lincoln,” and warned it would “empoison our public life for a generation.”134

  In death, Sacco and Vanzetti were enshrined as martyrs to the cause of justice and tolerance.135 As Vanzetti reflected a few months before he and Sacco went to the electric chair:

  If it not been for this case, I might have lived out my life, talking on street corners to scornful men. I might have died unmarked, unknown, a failure…. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph…. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler—all! The last moment belongs to us.136

  It was the sole consolation America had to offer.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LET US HAVE PEACE AND MAKE CARS

  WE IN AMERICA ARE NEARER TO THE FINAL triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,” presidential candidate Herbert Hoover declared in 1928, speaking of the phenomenal business expansion and worker contentment that characterized the 1920s.1 The decade following the First World War had indeed been an era of transformation—a boom time of accelerating profits, rising wages, and, most noticeably, the arrival of new consumer products available to the working class, such as refrigerators, cars, radios, phonographs, as well as, in some rural areas, the first electrification and indoor plumbing. Industrial workers enjoyed shorter hours, increased leisure time, and new levels of corporate generosity in the form of benefits and employee programs.

  Finding work itself was easier in part because immigration had ebbed, due initially to the disruption of the war and later to a quota system that restricted the coming of workers from Southern and Eastern Europe. Immigrant arrivals fell from 5 million per annum before the war to about 150,000 afterward.

  In these years of peace, many employers returned to the Taylorism of the Progressive Era, exploring ways to improve efficiency and productivity, and also showed an increasing willingness, in conjunction with these aims, to bear in mind the aspirations and anxieties of workers. There appeared new methods focused on worker pacing and task variety on the job, as well as greater appreciation of the value of worker retention, developments that reflected a trend away from the harsh industrial-labor relations of the past, as well as from the cutthroat competition among businesses that had typified American enterprise in the nineteenth century. “Even the most skeptical devotees of the old dog-eat-dog theory,” observed one Chamber of Commerce leader, “are being gradually persuaded from the sheer, cold pressure of the facts that … war doesn’t pay in this complicated world of ours.”2 A well-run plant depended “more and more upon the management of men than upon the organization of machines.”3

  Manufacturers came out of the war convinced that worker output increased when production goals were linked to patriotism. The possibilities inherent in this discovery were advanced through research done between 1924 and 1932 at the Hawthorne Telephone Company outside Chicago. There, a team led by the Australian sociologist and “organizational theorist” G. Elton Mayo found that production improved each time the lights were turned up or down in consideration of worker comfort. Mayo’s conclusion was that employees responded positively to being noticed and having something done on their behalf. Certain factors such as praise from their superiors, simple job perks, the feeling of camaraderie with coworkers, actually appeared to outweigh wages as integers of overall worker happiness. From Mayo’s writings emerged “the Hawthorne effect,” a reaffirmation of the anecdotal Progressive Era experiences at Filene’s, National Cash Register, and elsewhere that improved on-the-job human relations and employee programs could be useful dynamics in binding a worker to the employer and reducing the friction and frustration that brought on labor disputes.4

  The beauty for employers in such discoveries was that they diminished the need for workers to form unions, and fit nicely with the postwar resurgence of the open shop concept, which sought to deny unions the power of collective bargaining under the guise of safeguarding individual Americans’ liberty and freedom of choice. The “open shop” drive, first articulated in the years before the First World War, rose on the wartime mood of national pride and distrust of the “alien” notion of collective unionism; so identified was it with homegrown virtues, its boosters came to refer to it as the “American plan.” Enhancing the open shop concept was a compelling program of welfare capitalism, the provision of paid vacations, bonuses, pension plans, picnics, and sporting events. Chairman Elbert Gary of U.S. Steel, which spent $10 million a year on employee benefits in the 1920s, summed up the philosophy neatly with the observa
tion that such costs were worthwhile “because it is the way men ought to be treated, and … because it pays to treat men in that way.”5 As for that perennial favorite of employers, the company union, created to give workers a sense of having a democratic voice and perhaps a grievance process, there were by 1926 about four hundred company unions nationwide (about half the total number of independent trade unions affiliated with the AFL), boasting memberships of 1,370,000.6

  Benefits programs and company-managed employee representation, and the accompanying notion that working cooperatively with management was the most secure way to promotion and better wages, augured poorly for traditional labor organizing. Just before the stock market crash of 1929 there were about 3.5 million workers in noncompany unions and by 1933 only about 2 million, not even 6 percent of the total of U.S. workers, as compared to 12 percent in 1920.7 A committee of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) compared the impact of welfare capitalism on the labor movement to “Delilah’s method of robbing Samson of his power. It destroys the self-respecting manhood and womanhood in the American citizen.” ACW head Sidney Hillman cautioned that “the difficulty with most plans of industrial democracy is that they are granted by employers, and what the employers grant they can take away.” Real industrial democracy, he predicted, would require a more “genuine and definite transfer of power.”8 As George J. Anderson, managing director of a printing employers’ group, told John D. Rockefeller Jr., whom he served as a consultant:

  There is a psychological appeal in labor unionism which has not yet been analyzed. It seems to give the men a sense not only of power but of dignity and self-respect. They feel that only through labor unions can they deal with employers on an equal plane. They seem to regard the [company-sponsored] representation plan as a sort of counterfeit, largely perhaps, because the machinery of such plans is too often managed by the employers. They want something which they themselves have created and not something which is handed down to them by those who pay their wages.9

  But the lulling effect of corporate largesse perhaps suited the times. By 1920 and the end of the Red Scare, the reformist spirit of the prewar years had abated. “The nation was tired of public crisis,” notes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “It was tired of discipline and sacrifice. It was tired of abstract and intangible objectives. It could gird itself no longer for heroic moral or intellectual effort. Its instinct for idealism was spent.”10 With the cry of “Bolsheviki” heard less often these days and the bugles of patriotism muted, business found new ways to assault the legitimacy of unions, such as alleging that labor organizations were corrupt. Some firms turned to stealth tactics such as spies and informers to keep tabs on unionizing efforts and disrupt them where possible.

  Organized labor also lost ground on the legal front. The Clayton Act of 1914, which had attempted to free unions from the threat of antitrust actions and to permit standard labor practices such as peaceful strikes, picketing, and secondary boycotts, was gutted in 1921 by unfavorable Supreme Court decisions in Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering and Truax v. Corrigan. Among other things, the Clayton Act’s critical provisions against yellow-dog contracts were disallowed and the hated injunction came back into play. The 1920s saw several hundred antiunion injunctions granted by state or federal courts. Also, in 1923 the court ruled in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital against a 1918 federal law establishing a minimum wage for women workers in the District of Columbia. In its 5–3 decision, the court acknowledged that workers, in this case nurses, had a right to a living wage, but found that the employer, Children’s Hospital, was under no obligation to offer one and that the wage could not be mandated by law, citing “liberty of contract,” which was proving to be a very durable legal concept. Indeed it appeared somewhat too robust for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in his dissent criticized the overuse of so blind an application of the constitutional right to make contractual arrangements without government interference or regulation.

  Thus the decade overall lifted the American worker upward, out of the poverty of the muckraker era to a new consumer status that approached middle class. But if consumerism and welfare capitalism were a success, they also were, as Sidney Hillman had said, something of a delusion. For beneath it all remained the stubborn dynamic in which management held all the authority and workers lacked an effective right to collective bargaining. The long puppet strings of corporate control always dangled in plain sight, especially where company unions were involved. Another weakness of the system, soon to be exposed, was that a business’s generosity toward its personnel did not exist independent of the results printed in its annual report; a company would play the role of caring parent only as long as it could afford to do so.

  Most labor historians have treated the era of welfare capitalism as a kind of stopgap, a makeshift philosophy designed to stave off unionization and destined to fail because it denied the natural tendency of workers to organize. Alternatively, labor scholar David Brody suggests that it was killed off only by the monumental economic devastation of the 1930s, and that it may well have been, as its boosters then claimed, the emerging dynamic of American industrial-labor relations. Certainly recent experience has shown that generous corporate benefits and profit-sharing can be persuasive factors in diminishing employee interest in labor unionism.11

  When the economy entered its severe downturn in 1930, of course, all the fears about managerial largesse came real: employee benefits dried up, perks vanished, and the company unions proved toothless, unable to protect workers. As consumer demand plummeted and production and hiring fell, many firms tried to honor a request by President Hoover against wage-cutting, and to the credit of some corporations there were efforts to reduce hours across the board so as to limit layoffs, as well as severances and other arrangements made for hard-hit workers. But not even large entities such as the Ford Motor Company and U.S. Steel could avoid “the inexorable law of the balance sheet.”12 Worse, many unions had become dulled by inactivity during the years of rising wages and corporate munificence, leaving the labor movement standing but vulnerable in the path of the oncoming Great Depression.

  THE NATION’S PREEMINENT ISSUE, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said on assuming the presidency in early 1933, is “our economic condition—a Depression so deep that it is without precedent in modern history.”13 Roosevelt had used the expression “a new deal for the American people” at the 1932 Democratic Convention, where he was chosen as his party’s candidate and pledged that “the federal government has always had and still has a continuing responsibility for the broader public welfare.”14 That responsibility would be tested at once, for the day he took office, between one-third and one-half of American workers lacked a job. Tens of thousands of homes and farms were in foreclosure, banks had failed, and in the cities the traditional civic and church-based charities had run out of resources to help the indigent. “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” Roosevelt declared. “It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”15 As other nations met the global economic crisis with totalitarian programs of Far Right or Left, the president urged the United States to resort to its own best instincts of pragmatism, rational experimentation, and collective initiative.16

  Roosevelt might not at first glance have seemed the person best suited to guide the country in its hour of need. The scion of a wealthy Hudson River Valley family, he had grown up the only child in an insular world of privilege, and remained close even as an adult to his strong-willed mother, Sara Delano. He attended Groton and Harvard, married a distant cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, became a New York State senator, and was assistant secretary of the navy during the Wilson administration. He then experienced two setbacks. He was defeated as a candidate for vice president on the Democratic ticket with James M. Cox in 1920, and the next year contracted polio, probably during a day’s visit to a Boy Scout camp in upstate New York. Partially paraly
zed thereafter, Roosevelt was said by those who knew him to grow in his depth of empathy and compassion for others. He had never known economic hardship, nor been a laborer or run a business, but by the time he entered the White House, after serving two terms as governor of New York, he had come to possess qualities of resolve, reasonableness, and calm before adversity that proved a tonic to a suffering nation.

  What marked Roosevelt’s New Deal from the start was its willingness to challenge the moneyed interests, “the economic royalists,” as the president called them, and to put the U.S. government to work solving the problems of everyday people. Rejecting the Social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century, Roosevelt recognized that the level to which men and women ascend is often due not to their nature or even their own efforts, but to social and economic factors beyond their individual control. Progressivism had articulated this view as it exposed society’s inequities, although it was the unique predicament thrust upon the nation by the Depression that made reform essential. No one doubted capital’s ability to drive markets, spark innovation, and provide jobs, but the notion that it could function freely, as though its actions did not impact or concern the public interest, would have to be met and conquered. “The power of the few to manage the economic life of the nation,” Roosevelt would tell Congress, “must be diffused among the many or be transferred to the public and its democratically responsible government.”17