American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  For many women the only recourse was to form their own organizations, but this required able and militant leadership—and here above all women were disadvantaged. They could not find such leadership in the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers, who was as conservative toward unionizing women as he was toward organizing blacks and the unskilled. The AFL did oppose discriminatory pay for women, in order to protect all workers from cheap labor, but this policy harmed the millions of unskilled women whose only hope of a job was one with low pay. The Federation had only one female organizer in the 1890s; when she left to be married, Gompers waited until 1908 before appointing another, Annie Fitzgerald. It was not until working women organized militantly in the Lawrence textile strike of 1912 that the AFL paid much attention to them.

  Women workers had only the leadership they could mobilize from their own ranks; there was no Jane Addams or Frances Willard of female trade unionism. Brilliant leaders arose from the movement, especially in the conduct of strikes, as with the textile operatives of Chicopee and the clothing makers of Chicago. Twenty thousand New York shirtwaist makers walked out, over the opposition of their male leaders. Certain unions like the hat and cap makers generated their own activists, most notably in the person of the fiery organizer Rose Schneidermann. But typically women’s leadership hardly rose above the level of “shop chairladies.”

  It was in this connection that the National Women’s Trade Union League assumed special importance. Its goal was to enable women of social influence and progressive ideas to join hands with activist women in the trades. The former would supply creative ideas and leadership, the latter practical experience and information. Founded in 1903 at an AFL convention in Boston, the NWTUL became strong enough to help produce a peak organizing period for women between 1909 and 1915. Its platform called for organization of all workers into trade unions; equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex; the eight-hour day and forty-four-hour week; a “living wage”; full citizenship for women.

  Effective though it was, the Women’s Trade Union League could not wholly overcome the old class barriers. For “middle class feminists outside the WTUL,” according to Robin Miller Jacoby, “class identity outweighed their rhetorical commitment to the ideal of cross-class female solidarity.” It was the society women within the NWTUL whom Schneidermann had labeled the mink brigade. Women of all classes, however, could unite in the pursuit of two goals—woman’s suffrage and social legislation—and the NWTUL plunged into both battles. Even so, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt could not help observing, “I am a good democrat in theory, but my faith weakens when it meets bad air, dirt, horrid smells, the democratic odor diluted with perfumes of beer and uncleanliness.”

  Women could also unite as consumers, under the leadership of Florence Kelley, general secretary of the National Consumers’ League. But Kelley was interested in far broader matters than consumer problems. Living at the Henry Street Settlement, she fought for the legal protection of women against long hours and unhealthful conditions; she was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; she organized sixty or more local Consumers’ Leagues pledged to boycott companies that employed child labor. She was so active and effective that years later a Supreme Court justice would call her “a woman who had probably the largest single share in shaping the social history of the United States during the first thirty years of the century.” By expanding the concept of consumerism to cover the social price of making goods and not merely the money price in the stores, Kelley transcended some of the old conflict between low-income women factory workers and middle-class women consumers.

  Whatever the differences among women leaders, they were minuscule compared to the conflicts that cut through the ranks of working people.

  After vanquishing the remnants of the militant Knights of Labor in the late 1880 s, the American Federation of Labor had come to hold a commanding place in the organization of skilled workers. By 1904, it was boasting a membership of over a million and a half. Under its founding leader, Samuel Gompers, now a burly, bespectacled gentleman usually attired in dignified clothes and carrying a cane, the Federation continued to practice business unionism—jealous guardian of the skilled crafts, protector of labor against injunctions and other hostile governmental action, critic of immigration. The AFL rejected socialism, radicalism, government welfarism, independent political action. While AFL unions often fought hard-line employers with strikes, boycotts, and other weapons, the AFL had become an essential buttress of the business system—conservative in outlook, restrictive and monopolistic in economic tactics, transactional in leadership, bargaining and competitive in its relationship with business. The Federation’s membership rose and fell with the business cycle; it joined with business and government in the National Civic Federation founded in 1900 to “unite” labor and capital; President Gompers supped with the mighty, including magnates and Presidents.

  As it fought off challenge after challenge to its power, the AFL left millions of workers unorganized, politically adrift, and ready to be led. The next threat to the Federation came less from the unorganized masses of the urban East than from the embattled workers in the West. There the pugnacious Western Federation of Miners had conducted a running and often bloody war with equally pugnacious mine and railroad owners. In the bloody Coeur d’Alene area of Idaho, mine workers thwarted by antiunion bosses had dynamited a company mill, leaving two men dead; the governor promptly obtained federal troops to round up strikers by the hundreds and throw them into bull pens. The WFM was everything the AFL was not—eager to organize the unorganized, including immigrants and even blacks, and totally opposed to capitalism and capitalists. And it had a new young leader, William D. Haywood, who was everything Gompers was not.

  Son of a Pony Express rider who died when he was three, Big Bill had been raised in a mining camp, put to work at fifteen as a hardrock miner, and then drifted through the West as a prospector, cowboy, surveyor, and miner again, before joining the WFM. With his huge frame, a “dead eye” lost in a childhood mishap, and a “dead hand” crushed in a mining accident, Haywood intimidated bosses and union rivals alike.

  But the western miners desperately needed allies. In 1905 Haywood and other WFM leaders, along with delegates from Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and individual socialists like Eugene Debs, gathered in Chicago to establish the Industrial Workers of the World, with the aim of uniting all workers, of all skills, races, and national origins, ready to use strikes, boycotts, and sabotage, if necessary, to realize their grand objectives of a socialist, classless, egalitarian society.

  The “Wobblies” scored some organizing successes with western lumber workers and farm laborers and eastern textile workers. Haywood exercised brilliant leadership of a mass walkout against pay cuts in the Massachusetts textile town of Lawrence. As his picket lines held firm, he dramatized police brutality and won a great public-relations coup when striking parents sent their children to outlying towns to be fed. His strikers finally won in Lawrence in that year of 1912 and gave the union’s organizing drives a big boost. But the IWW’s victories—and Big Bill’s—were ephemeral. The Wobblies fought among themselves, with the AFL, with their socialist and syndicalist friends. They purged De Leon’s socialists, but they could not make a dent in the skilled ranks of the AFL. The WFM’s metalworkers could not even establish unity with the AFL’s coal miners. After a time the WFM pulled out of the IWW, leaving the Wobblies with a shrunken core.

  It was a poignant state of affairs. Labor was producing its own luminaries in the progressive era—Gompers the labor “statesman” and executive, De Leon the doctrinaire syndicalist, Victor Berger the socialist politician, Eugene Debs the propagandist and election campaigner, Haywood the direct-actionist, and a host of others of almost equal talents. Yet these men could not work together for more than brief intervals. They preached unity above all else, but they could not practice it. They were not simply th
e victims of their own competing egos and ambitions. They were the victims too of conflicting ideologies, some imported and some homegrown, of nativist-immigrant tensions, of ethnic and racial rivalries, of an individualistic and competitive ethos that even penetrated radical labor, of capitalist opposition and divisiveness, of the sheer space and variety and regionalism of America.

  And off to the side stood Emma Goldman, watching the radicals’ Virginia reel with mingled concern and contempt. She believed in activism, not organization. Following McKinley’s assassination, she was arrested, given the third degree, and then released for lack of evidence against her. Later she founded an anarchist monthly, Mother Earth, welcomed Berkman on his release after fourteen years in prison, became a friend and lover of Ben Reitman, the King of the Hobos. She scorned marriage as an institution that made wives the private property of their husbands. She scorned woman’s suffrage as tending to co-opt them into the political status quo. She scorned unions as instruments of the capitalist system. Above all, she came to oppose war. But, cut off as she was from parties and unions, she could serve only as a gadfly, albeit one with a sharp sting.

  The wide split between Gompers-style and Haywood-style unionism had its counterpart in a deep political and philosophical chasm among black Americans—and the opposing black leaders were as remarkable a set of adversaries as the two unionists.

  Booker T. Washington, born a slave on a Virginia plantation a few years before the Civil War, emerged out of conditions that might have made a white man either an Andrew Carnegie or a flaming radical. Washington remembered growing up in a small log cabin with earthen floor and glassless windows, eating with hands and fingers out of the family pot of cornbread and pork, going to work after Emancipation in a salt-packing factory, where he might labor seventeen hours straight. Illiterate and forbidden by his stepfather to attend school, Booker developed a fierce desire to read, prompted by his curiosity over figures on salt barrels and the gift of a Webster’s spelling book from his mother. He managed to take night lessons, then to attend day school, and finally to make the long trek to the Hampton Institute, where he served as both student and janitor. Invited to run the Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school, he set out with white patronage to convert it into a major enterprise with 1,400 pupils and thirty trades. From this base he fought his way to immense power and prestige.

  The turning point for Washington came with a speech he gave in Atlanta in 1895. At a time when almost half of American blacks were illiterate, he urged schooling and more schooling. Speaking to a racially mixed audience, he in effect proposed a great transaction—that blacks acquiesce in social subordination and political inequality in exchange for economic opportunity and advancement; in time, the latter would end the former. Agitating “questions of social equality,” he said, was the “extremest folly.” His message—learn, work, earn, win respect—won a chorus of praise from Southern whites and many blacks.

  Washington himself rose to great social eminence, dining (once) with the Roosevelts in the White House, receiving audiences with kings, consorting with philanthropists like Carnegie and Rockefeller. He gained political power too, as he used his Tuskegee work as a base for the “Tuskegee machine”—a personal political organization through which he placed hundreds of blacks in governmental and academic posts throughout the nation. He offered advice to Roosevelt and Taft, in exchange for which he muted criticism of their treatment of blacks. But when Taft left office, Washington’s patronage power left with him.

  William Edward Burghardt Du Bois seemed almost a polar opposite to Washington—born of an established mulatto family in western Massachusetts, graduate of Fisk University, student for two years at the University of Berlin, the first Negro to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard (for a notable thesis on the African slave trade). He moved on to an illustrious career as a sociologist, historian, and novelist. With success, however, Du Bois became more and more militant. He could not accept Washington’s brokerage and accommodationism. On the death of his first son, Du Bois buried his anguish in anger: “Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.”

  Du Bois came to oppose virtually everything Washington stood for. He chose militancy over cooperation, protest over patronage, black and trade-union resistance over endless deference. At a demonstration at Harpers Ferry, he and his fellow militants, in what Du Bois called some of the plainest English ever spoken by American blacks (Du Bois used the words Negro, black, and colored interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence), demanded immediate full mankind suffrage, the end of segregation in railways and streetcars, the right “as freemen” for Negroes to walk, talk, and socialize with whites as well as blacks, and the enforcement of laws against rich as well as poor, capitalist as well as laborer, white as well as black. After two blacks were lynched and scores burned out of their homes and stores in Springfield, Illinois, forty-nine white progressives and socialists issued a “call” that gave birth to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Du Bois was the only black among its first set of top officers.

  Conflict intensified between the militants and accommodationists. Washington fought the NAACP and Du Bois with bribery and espionage, and Du Bois responded with burning attacks on the Tuskegee machine. Both sides sought to control black organizations, the Niagara Movement founded by Du Bois, the NAACP, the black press, access to white philanthropy. In place of Washington’s transactional leadership—which ultimately might have served as a crucial transitional leadership—Du Bois proposed black struggle in the United States and in Asia and Africa and the “islands of the sea.”

  And off to the side stood the most extraordinary leader of all, Mary Harris Jones. Above all an individualist with a dislike for doctrine, Mother Jones had one simple strategy—to travel hundreds of miles to help whatever children, women, or men needed help, whether child laborers, persecuted Wobblies, jailed union leaders, women garment workers on the picket lines. This simply dressed, grandmotherly-looking woman symbolized the capacity of women leaders, to a far greater extent than men leaders of the time, to transcend small differences and unite behind humane, progressive goals. It was grimly ironic that the cadre of leaders best equipped for the struggle to broaden democracy in America were the very ones who, with their female constituencies, were denied the stoutest democratic weapon to extend democracy, the right to vote.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Modernizing Mind

  “I KNOW HISTORY ISN’T Thrue, Hinissy, because it ain’t what I see ivry day on Halsted Sthreet,” said Mr. Dooley, the ruminative barkeep. Historians were like doctors, he went on, either making the wrong diagnosis or making postmortem examinations. The latter type “tells ye what a counthry died iv. But I’d like to know what it lived iv.”

  If life and action and excitement were what Finley Peter Dunne’s favorite bartender was wanting, he could find them in turn-of-the-century Chicago, and in the nation during what came to be known as the progressive era stretching from the mid-nineties to World War I. And if these were retrogressive times as well as progressive, of “intriguing interplay” of old and new ideas, in Lewis Gould’s words, it was also one of the most creative and innovative periods in the nation’s history.

  Nothing had symbolized the past and the future better than the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. On the lakeside, a dreary stretch of plain and swamp had been transformed into a site for gleaming white buildings of shimmering domes, lofty arches, and Greek columns. The Queen of Spain sent reproductions of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. Models of primitive ships and trains stood side by side with those of grand Pullmans and ocean liners. Alexander Graham Bell opened the New York–Chicago telephone circuit. For the 12 million visitors who entered the Court of Honor, the fair was “the first popular demonstration of the beauty of orderliness, of proper proportions, of classical lines”—a demonstration that would influence American architecture, furniture, and
decoration for years to come. Even Henry Adams was impressed.

  The fair, it was said, helped bring into vogue Charles Dana Gibson’s black-and-white drawings of the tall, aristocratic, smartly dressed woman and the square-jawed, clean-shaven, well-groomed young man—drawings that put the Gibson girls up in rude mining cabins and helped take mustaches off men of fashion. Women’s fashions were changing too. The turn of the century brought a “shirtwaist vogue” duly recorded by the Ladies’ Home Journal. The new fashions, however, had to accommodate another vogue—bicycling. The dangerous early “wheels,” consisting of a huge hoop topped by a saddle and connected by a curved backbone to a tiny rear wheel, had given way to two wheels of equal size, but skirts were raised and split a bit to prevent entanglement with gears and spokes

  Bicycles were but one phase in the ceaseless quest for ever new forms of transportation. The Sears, Roebuck catalogue of 1900 carried sixty-seven pages of ads for buggies, harnesses, saddles, and the like, but already hansoms, victorias, sulkies, phaetons, and buggies were giving way to electric “runabouts” and gasoline-fueled cars. And in December 1903 the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot ran a headline across the front page, FLYING MACHINE SOARS 3 MILES IN TEETH OF HIGH WIND OVER SAND HILLS, with a subhead explaining NO BALLOON ATTACHED TO AID IT. The Pennsylvania Railroad launched the “fastest long-distance train in the world,” eighteen hours between New York and Chicago.

  By 1900, Americans could boast that they produced more than half the world’s cotton, corn, copper, and oil; more than a third of its steel, pig iron, and silver; and perhaps a third of its coal and gold. But Americans wanted to boast of their cultural progress too, and they were proud that their own authors like Winston Churchill (the American Churchill), Hamlin Garland, and Owen Wister were replacing Englishmen like Rudyard Kipling as best-selling authors. Most music was still imported, but black Americans were developing an indigenous musical culture with their “spirituals”;