There is Power in a Union

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by Philip Dray

123 U.S. Strike Commission Report The Chicago Strike of June-July 1894 (1895), p. 76.

  124 Ray Ginger, Bending Cross, pp. 109–10.

  125 Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 45.

  126 Ray Ginger, Bending Cross, p. 156.

  127 U.S. Strike Commission Report: The Chicago Strike of June–July 1894, pp. xlvii–xlviii.

  128 Ibid., pp. lii–liv.

  129 Leyendecker, Palace Car Prince, p. 264.

  130 The Reading had fired Gowen in 1886 for poor financial management. Dismissing rumors he’d been murdered by vengeful Mollies, his relations said that he’d been “acting queerly for some time and that there was a strain of hereditary insanity in the family.” See James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett, The Pinkerton Story (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 158–59.

  131 Leyendecker, Palace Car Prince, p. 258; the preparations were finalized none too soon: Pullman succumbed to a heart attack in fall 1897 at the age of sixty-six.

  132 Ray Ginger, Bending Cross, p. 151.

  133 See In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895).

  134 Eugene V. Debs letter to his father, Jan. 1, 1895, in Papers of Eugene V. Debs, Tamiment Labor Archives, New York University.

  135 Ray Ginger, Bending Cross, pp. 176–78; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 23, 1895.

  136 U.S. Strike Commission Report: The Chicago Strike of June–July 1894, p. 163.

  CHAPTER FIVE: INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

  1 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 184.

  2 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 177.

  3 Ibid., p. 205n.

  4 Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 6.

  5 Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 240–41n.

  6 Louis Adamic, Dynamite!: A Century of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Books, 1934), p. 131.

  7 Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 240.

  8 Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 10–11.

  9 Ibid., p. 13.

  10 Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 50.

  11 Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 55.

  12 Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management and Shop Management (London: Routledge, 1993; originally published 1911), p. 11.

  13 Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 175–76.

  14 Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), p. 307.

  15 Ibid., p. 308.

  16 Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation, p. 185.

  17 Ibid., p. 54; Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation, pp. 182–83, 185–86.

  18 Morris, Tycoons, p. 309.

  19 Ibid., p. 298.

  20 Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 120–21.

  21 Robert H. Wiebe, “The Anthracite Strike of 1902: A Record of Confusion,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 48, no. 2 (Sept. 1961).

  22 Elting E. Morrison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 515.

  23 McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 125.

  24 Ibid., pp. 119–20.

  25 Adamic, Dynamite! p. 134.

  26 Selig Perlman, A History of Trade Unionism in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 177.

  27 Wiebe, “Anthracite Strike of 1902.”

  28 Frederic W. Unger, “George F. Baer: Master-Spirit of the Anthracite Industry,” American Monthly Review of Reviews, vol. 33 (1966), p. 545.

  29 American Federationist, vol. 12 (1905), p. 221, quoted in Jerome L. Toner, The Closed Shop (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), p. 6.

  30 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 191; in 1905 Baer would again offend the labor movement with a biblical allusion, remarking, “Strikes began with Genesis…. Cain was the first striker, and he killed Abel because Abel was the more prosperous fellow.” See Unger, “George F. Baer: Master-Spirit of the Anthracite Industry.”

  31 Wiebe, “Anthracite Strike of 1902.”

  32 New York Times, Oct. 3, 1902.

  33 The resolution by the Reverend Thomas Slicer was quoted in the New York Times, Oct. 4, 1902.

  34 Theodore Roosevelt letter to W. M. Crane, Governor of Massachusetts, Oct. 22, 1902, in Morrison, Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 3, p. 360.

  35 New York Times, Oct. 4, 1902.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 192.

  39 Roosevelt had also managed to elbow aside the powerful Hanna, whose presidential ambitions never picked up momentum (indeed, “Dollar Mark” contracted typhoid fever and died prematurely in February 1904).

  40 Boston Herald, Dec. 5, 1902, in Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 105.

  41 Henry James, Richard Olney and His Public Service (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 61.

  42 Olney quoted in Gerald Eggert, Richard Olney: Evolution of a Statesman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), pp. 157–58. Another jurist associated with the Pullman Strike, Peter Grosscup of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, published an article in McClure’s Magazine in 1905 against weighting the struggle between labor and capital too much on the corporate side. He worried that making it impossible for the common man to acquire property would stunt the country’s moral growth and that “the loss that republican America now confronts is the loss of individual hope and prospect—the suppression of the instinct that … has made us a nation of individually independent and prosperous people.” See Peter Grosscup, “How to Save the Corporation,” McClure’s Magazine, vol. 24 (Feb. 1905), cited in Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 223–24.

  43 Industrial Commission, Final Report of the Industrial Commission, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1902, House Document 380.

  44 See Slaughterhouse Cases, 16 Wall (83 U.S.) 36 (1873); see Paul Krens article on Lochner in Kermit L. Hall, ed., Oxford Guide to U.S. Supreme Court Decisions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 161–63. “Substantive due process” has proven something of a legal minefield, as critics allege it leads courts to usurp the privileges and power of legislatures, and that such “judicial activism” warps the original words of the Constitution to extend rights not articulated there. In addition to extending “freedom of contract” rights to employers and thus denying workers legislative remedies, substantive due process rulings have figured historically in cases related to the right to individual privacy as well as the disputed government “taking” of private property for regulatory purposes. See, for example, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) and Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

  45 See Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life, chap. 12, quoted in Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 246–47.

  46 U.S. Strike Commission Report—The Chicago Strike of June–July 1894, p. 203.

  47 See Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161 (1908).

  48 Richard Olney, “Discrimination Against Union Labor—Legal?” American Law Review (March–April 1908), quoted in James, Richard Olney and His Public Service, p. 69.

  49 Paul Krens article on Lochner in Kermit L. Hall, Oxford Guide to U.S. Supreme Court Decisions, pp. 161–63. See Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

  50 See
Loewe v. Lawlor, 208 U.S. 274 (1908).

  51 John Mitchell, Organized Labor: Its Problems, Purposes and Ideals and the Present and Future of American Wage Earners (Philadelphia: American Book and Bible House, 1903), p. 336.

  52 Lichtenstein, State of the Union, pp. 30–31.

  53 Walter Reuther quoted in Lichtenstein, State of the Union, p. 103.

  54 Mother “Mary Harris” Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles Kerr Publishing Co., 1990; originally published 1925), pp. 14–23.

  55 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955), p. 81.

  56 Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 135.

  57 Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones, pp. 80–81; see Gorn, Mother Jones, p. 137.

  58 Gorn, Mother Jones, p. 140; see also Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones, pp. 71–83.

  59 Sarah N. Cleghorn, Portraits and Protests (New York: Henry Holt, 1917), p. 75.

  60 Melvyn Dubofsky, “Abortive Reform: The Wilson Administration and Organized Labor, 1913–1920,” in Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925, ed. James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).

  61 Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering, 254 U.S. 443 (1921).

  62 Dubofsky, “Abortive Reform.”

  63 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 21.

  64 Ann Schofield, “The Uprising of the 20,000: The Making of a Labor Legend,” in A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike: Women Needleworkers in America, ed. Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).

  65 Collier’s, Dec. 25, 1909.

  66 Schofield, “Uprising of the 20,000.”

  67 New York Times, Nov. 5, 1909.

  68 Ibid., Nov. 6, 1909.

  69 Ibid.

  70 Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 167.

  71 New York World, Nov. 23, 1909; Greenwald, Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy, p. 32; see also Françoise Basch, “The Shirtwaist Girls at Home and at Work,” in The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, by Thersa Malkiel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

  72 Collier’s, Dec. 25, 1909.

  73 New York Times, Nov. 27, 1909.

  74 New York Times, Jan. 8, 1910.

  75 Quoted in Basch, “The Shirtwaist Girls at Home and at Work.” Perhaps no one illustrated the openness of the reform scene better than Rose Pastor, a young Jewish cigar maker who became known as “the Cinderella of the Tenements” after her marriage to Graham Phelps Stokes, a Yale-educated settlement house worker from an established New York family. Rose Pastor Stokes remained committed to the labor struggle. When asked by a reporter, “Are the strikers unreasonable in nothing?” Stokes famously replied, “My dear! The working people can make no unreasonable demand.” See Collier’s, Dec. 25, 1909.

  76 New York Times, Dec. 6, 1909.

  77 Ibid., Dec. 20, 1909.

  78 Greenwald, Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy, pp. 46–48.

  79 Strum, Louis D. Brandeis, pp. 108–9.

  80 American Cloak and Suit Review, Sept. 1911, cited in Strum, Louis D. Brandeis, p. 177.

  81 Strum, Louis D. Brandeis, p. 95.

  82 Ibid., p. 96.

  83 Ibid., p. 102.

  84 Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, p. 10.

  85 Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908).

  86 Greenwald, Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy, p. 70.

  87 New York World, March 27, 1911.

  88 “The Triangle Fire,” speech by Rose Schneiderman in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Triangle Fire, March 25, 1936. Rose Schneiderman Papers, Tamiment Labor Archives, New York University.

  89 Stein, Triangle Fire, p. 21.

  90 Ibid., p. 168.

  91 Shaw quoted in Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, Between Earth and Sky: How CFCs Changed Our World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 43.

  92 Robin K. Berson, Marching to a Different Drummer: Unrecognized Heroes of American History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 283–84.

  93 Ibid., p. 284.

  94 Greenwald, Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy, pp. 151–52.

  95 John F. Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Labor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 13.

  96 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

  97 Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 24.

  98 Daniel Berman, Death on the Job: Occupational Health and Safety Struggles in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 19–20.

  99 David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), p. 207.

  100 Florence Kelley, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1911.

  101 Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), pp. 22–23; see also Greenwald, Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy, p. 174.

  102 Greenwald, Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy, p. 161.

  103 Hamilton quoted in Cagin and Dray, Between Earth and Sky, p. 41.

  104 Greenwald, Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy, pp. 218–20.

  CHAPTER SIX: WE SHALL BE ALL

  1 Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, abridged ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 81–83.

  2 Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 12–13.

  3 William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (New York: International Publishers, 1929), p. 73.

  4 Anne Huber Tripp, The IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 6.

  5 American Federationist, no. 12, Aug. 1905, in Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, p. 10.

  6 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 90–91.

  7 Len De Caux, The Living Spirit of the Wobblies (New York: International Publishers, 1978), p. 16. The IWW acronym itself invariably became, in the hands of the organization’s critics, “I Want Whiskey,” “I Won’t Work,” and, when the Wobblies were accused of furthering the enemy’s agenda during the First World War, “Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors.” See Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 1–2.

  8 Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 3.

  9 Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, p. 1.

  10 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 87–88.

  11 Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, p. 3.

  12 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 50.

  13 Louis Adamic, Dynamite!: A Century of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Books, 1934), pp. 126–27.

  14 De Caux, Living Spirit of the Wobblies, p. 31.

  15 John Reed, “War in Paterson, June 1913,” The Masses, June 1913.

  16 Helen C. Camp, Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), p. 28.

  17 Outlook quoted in Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 248.

  18 Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 200.

  19 Adamic, Dynamite! p. 149.

  20 Ibid., p. 151.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 210.

  23 Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the A
merican Dream (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 95.

  24 Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 215.

  25 Independent, vol. 74, Jan. 9, 1913, in Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, p. 132.

  26 Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book, p. 223.

  27 Adamic, Dynamite! p. 185.

  28 Tripp, IWW and the Paterson Silk Strike, pp. 9–10.

  29 American Mercury, Dec. 1926.

  30 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, p. xxiii.

  31 De Caux, Living Spirit of the Wobblies, p. 21.

  32 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955),p. 51.

  33 Ibid., pp. 54–55.

  34 Ibid., pp. 53–54.

  35 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, pp. 10, 15.

  36 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 103.

  37 Camp, Iron in Her Soul, pp. 23–24.

  38 Adamic, Dynamite! p. 210.

  39 Ibid., p. 216.

  40 Ibid., pp. 229–30.

  41 San Diego Tribune, March 4, 1912, in Renshaw, Wobblies: Story of Syndicalism, p. 89.

  42 Goldman had met Czolgosz briefly on one occasion and had not conspired with or instructed him to target McKinley; the assassin, however, had told authorities of his admiration for her—hence the source of the rumor of her complicity. It was peculiar that Goldman’s complicity in Alexander Berkman’s assault on Henry Clay Frick had been overlooked, while the far less accurate Czolgosz allegation stuck to her for the rest of her life.

  43 Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 110.

  44 Ibid., pp. 106–8.

  45 The Lawrence struggle became famous in labor movement lore as “the Bread and Roses strike” for its emphasis on the fundamentals of decent pay and humane hours of work, as well as the large role played in the strike by both women and children. The phrase “bread and roses” had originated as a labor movement term in a poem written the year before the strike by James Oppenheim: “As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day / A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray / Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses / For the people hear us singing, ‘Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.’ ” See James Oppenheim, “Bread and Roses,” The American Magazine 73 (Dec. 1911).

  46 Watson, Bread and Roses, pp. 74–75.

 

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