The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  In the wrong place at the wrong time

  Germans stranded in the United States were held in prison camps for the duration.

  Gregory could have given a simple answer to the president’s question: of course the APL could have been stopped. The Justice Department had created and in effect licensed it; it could (and after Gregory left office, it would) shut it down. But the attorney general wanted to expand rather than stop it, and evidently the president was satisfied; he did not intrude again. It has also been argued that Gregory and his lieutenants in the Justice Department saw strict enforcement of the Espionage Act, including the work of the APL, as necessary to keep private citizens from taking the law into their own hands. Actually, this is not as absurd and self-serving as it may seem. The department was scorned editorially for the vast numbers of subversives it was supposedly not sending to prison, and its alleged timidity was not infrequently used to defend mob attacks on suspected traitors.

  The ultimate irony is that despite all the things done officially and unofficially to save the nation from enemy subversion—the rampages of vigilante gangs, the reptilian scheming of agents provocateurs, spying by citizens on their fellow citizens, the harassment and the lynchings—not one spy was ever charged. A small number of Germans attached to their country’s embassy, men involved in espionage and even sabotage, were sent packing before intervention caused the embassy to be shut down. But the whole apparatus of which the APL was such a prominent part served chiefly to make trouble for people of whom the self-appointed patriots did not approve, and to make the war an excuse to attack the marginal, the vulnerable, and the disreputable even when such persons were connected in no discernible way to national security or what was happening in Europe. That it did not accomplish more raises questions about how much in the way of real spying was actually going on in the United States. Months before the end of the war, The New York Times, rarely less than one of the Wilson administration’s most dependable supporters, was examining past reports of German espionage and sabotage and reporting that few if any were credible.

  Background

  ____

  Three Faces of Labor

  The United States of America and organized labor had always been an awkward coupling. Organizations that we would recognize as unions did not exist at the time of the republic’s birth. Generations later, when industrialization gave rise to gigantic railroads, factories, and mines, the idea that their equally gigantic workforces might band together to make demands seemed alien, threatening, and deeply wrong. It seemed to jeopardize not only the rights and profits of employers but what was unique about the American way of life.

  These fears were shared by government at all levels, and by the courts. As early as 1805, when a small group of Philadelphia shoemakers attempted to organize, they were indicted for mounting “a combination and conspiracy to raise wages.” The Charleston Mercury was reflecting the passions of the Civil War when it declared in 1861 that “slavery is the natural and normal condition of the laboring man,” but its opinion, if expressed in less abrasive terms, might not have offended the North’s industrial elite.

  After the Civil War, hostility to workers’ attempts to organize was aggravated by the fact that what Karl Marx would have called America’s new “industrial proletariat” was made up increasingly of immigrants from the Old World—people penniless and not uncommonly illiterate, prepared to work like beasts for subsistence wages because the alternative was starvation. Many of them came from places where socialism was intellectually respectable and becoming politically important. (In 1912 socialist candidates received more than a third of votes cast in a German national election.) There was no easy way to fit such people into the Jeffersonian vision of America as the land of autonomous farmers and craftsmen, or make them acceptable to Hamiltonian Brahmins. Unionism was alien to both traditions.

  Even in 1914, by which time the United States was largely an urban and industrial nation with only about a third of the workforce engaged in agriculture, labor organizations were commonly seen as incompatible with American values. For many of the native-born, they appeared to be a kind of infection. They reeked of the new smokestack cities, the grime of the factories, the dark filth of the mines, the slums in which the newcomers insisted on clustering, and their contemptible religions.

  And there hung over them an aura of violence. A magazine of the time reported that during a thirty-three-month period ending in 1904, 198 strikers and strike sympathizers were killed in the United States, 1,166 were injured, and more than six thousand arrested. That this particular magazine cast the strikers as victims rather than perpetrators mattered little; either way, unions were trouble.

  The struggle to organize was big, bitter, and bloody enough to amount to domestic warfare: the make-or-break strike at Andrew Carnegie’s huge steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania; the murderous years-long battle between the coal mine operators of the Northeast and the Molly Maguires, et cetera. The strikers almost always ended up losing, partly because armed force—the U.S. Army as well as state militias and local law enforcement—was repeatedly used against them. Viciously exploited, under relentless pressure and unable to get relief in court or elsewhere, groups of workers were easily pitted against one another. The robber baron Jay Gould was not far off the mark when he boasted that “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”

  Even those among the well-off who acknowledged the plight of the laboring classes often thought them incapable of helping themselves, or even of knowing what kind of help they needed. The president of the Reading Railroad seemed to many to be speaking simple common sense when he declared, in 1902, that “the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian gentlemen to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.” That was comparatively benign, especially when contrasted with Social Darwinism, which still had many adherents among the middle and upper classes. It denied that the workingman had any rights or any interests deserving of representation in the political arena. It held that the common good required that the economy be governed by the law of the jungle, and that to interfere with the strong for the benefit of the weak was against nature and would lead to dire consequences. From both perspectives, that of the gentlemanly Christians and that of the Darwinists, allowing the unions to have anything to say about wages or working conditions seemed a shameful display of weakness, an injury to the social fabric.

  Working people had more than one way of responding, of course. Their simplest option was to submit, to accept whatever employers offered and try to make the best of it. Millions did exactly this—understandably, in light of the costs of resistance and the tiny chances of success. Another response was to be cooperative but firm, using whatever leverage workers had in the marketplace to win modest concessions. This was feasible for skilled tradesmen; their skills were their leverage, and they used them as a platform on which to build the nation’s only conservative and relatively respectable union, the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A third response, the hard and hated and sometimes heroic one, was to refuse to submit, to fight on in the face of everything employers and government could do.

  These different approaches were tried by a variety of labor leaders before and during the Great War. Among them were three men of historic significance: Samuel Gompers, Eugene V. Debs, and William D. Haywood. All three came from far down in the working class, and none had had much in the way of formal education. As they rose to become some of the best-known figures of their time, they became not friends but rivals, even enemies. Two became criminals, at least in the eyes of the U.S. government. The third made himself a buttress if not a pillar of the establishment, if not quite within it then certainly supporting it from the outside.

  Gompers, born in 1850 to Jewish parents in London, left school at age ten to become an apprentice in his father’s trade of cigar making. In 1863 the family immigrated to New York, where
young Sam became active in the cigar makers’ union and, at age twenty-five, president of his Lower East Side local. An aggressive organizer and activist, he was elected a vice president of the national union a few years later, and not long afterward he became prominent in the effort to pull a number of trade unions together in a single umbrella group. This led to the creation of the AFL in 1886, and Gompers’s emergence as its president. Step by cautious step, shunning all temptations to appear radical, he built the AFL into the most robust labor organization in the country. It received nationwide attention in 1890 by winning the eight-hour day for carpenters in thirty-six cities and the nine-hour day in 234 others. It showed its strength in the panic of 1893, becoming the first American union to survive a major economic downturn.

  Samuel Gompers

  The head of the “respectable” wing of the labor movement was unreservedly pro-war.

  Gompers himself was a practical man, focused on achieving tangible gains for his members—better wages, better hours, better conditions generally. He tried to avoid confrontations with employers except when victory was certain, and preferred boycotts to strikes. Both personally and strategically he was conservative, supporting the American war with Spain and tight restrictions on immigration. Because of the AFL’s exclusive focus on the skilled trades and on such noncentralized industries as construction, it represented a kind of blue-collar aristocracy and was capable of looking with disdain on the unskilled toilers of the factories and mines. Tough as he could be—he was once sentenced to a year in jail for refusing to obey a court injunction—Gompers had no aversion to respectability. In fact, he sought it for himself, and he made his organization a platform from which members could lift their families into the middle class. No one could have been surprised when, as the United States drifted toward intervention, he decided that the objectives of the AFL would be best served by unreserved support for the Wilson administration.

  Meanwhile Gene Debs had been following a markedly different path. Born in 1855 to parents who had emigrated from France, he left school early to take a job as a painter and cleaner of railroad cars. Later he became a locomotive fireman, an activist and official in the firemen’s union, and the founder, in 1893, of the American Railway Union (ARU), representing the kinds of unskilled and semiskilled workers in which the AFL had no interest. Just a year after coming into existence, the ARU staged a successful strike against the Great Northern Railroad, winning most of its demands. This victory so energized the members that, when not long afterward the Pullman Palace Car Company cut the wages of its workers by 28 percent, an ARU convention responded combatively. Members wanted to boycott Pullman, to refuse to handle cars built by the company and any cars attached to them. Debs urged caution, fearful that his fledgling organization was not ready for such a fight. The boycott was approved in spite of his concerns.

  What followed was one of the epic labor battles of the pre–Great Depression decades. The dispute spread from the Pullman factory outside Chicago to involve 150,000 workers in twenty-seven states. The company and its affiliated railroads refused to negotiate, establishing a publicity bureau to keep the newspapers supplied with exaggerated and often utterly false stories about the crimes of the striking rabble. They made use of a new and devastating weapon: the court injunction, by which judges could order unions to immediately do (or stop doing) whatever an employer wanted done or not done. An older, equally effective weapon also was brought into play: the use of army and National Guard troops. Resistance by union members led to increased disorder, to acts of sabotage, finally to the defeat of the boycott and the ruin of the ARU. The conflict had taken twenty-seven lives.

  At the crisis, with the outcome still in the balance, Debs asked Gompers to turn the conflict into a general strike by ordering his AFL membership to down tools. Gompers declined. When it was over, Debs was charged with contempt of court and put on trial. Clarence Darrow, until then a railroad lawyer, quit his job to conduct the defense. He was unable to save Debs from being sentenced to six months in federal prison. While he was serving his term, admirers sent Debs stacks of socialist and Marxist literature. He read it and was interested. He was visited by the socialist leader Victor Berger of Wisconsin, and that, too, had its effect.

  Eugene V. Debs

  Sentenced to ten years in prison for having the wrong opinions.

  By the time of his release, Debs had become convinced that reform of the economic system was going to require more than unionism. He transformed what remained of his broken union into an organization called the Social Democracy of America. This became the Social Democratic Party, which ran Debs as a candidate for president in 1900. He ran again in 1904, 1908, and 1912, never with the smallest possibility of victory, always on platforms that offended the sensibilities of polite society. By 1917 he was the best-known socialist in the country, and one of the Justice Department’s prime targets.

  Darrow said, “There may have lived some time, somewhere, a kindlier, gentler, more generous man than Eugene Debs, but I have never known him.” Nobody would ever have said anything of the kind about William Dudley Haywood, the hard-drinking, brawling, one-eyed six-footer who would become more notorious than Debs and live to regret it. Born in the Utah Territory in 1869, the son of a pony express rider who died when the future Big Bill was three, he went to work in a remote Nevada mine at age fifteen. Over the next decade he drifted, trying his luck as a prospector, cowboy, and farmer before again taking up employment in a mine in 1896.

  He found his destiny upon meeting an official of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in Silver City, Idaho. He joined up, soon became president of his local, then was appointed to the WFM’s national executive board. Finally he was called to Colorado to become secretary-treasurer. It was in the last capacity that, in Chicago in 1905, he presided at the gathering at which some two hundred socialist and labor leaders including Debs and the legendary Mary “Mother” Jones voted to create the Industrial Workers of the World—the IWW or Wobblies.

  Big Bill Haywood

  The driving force behind the trouble-seeking, and therefore doomed, Industrial Workers of the World.

  Haywood was by this time a hardened veteran of the WFM’s violence-ridden struggles to organize workers in the lucrative hard-rock metal mines of the West. He took for granted the kinds of contests in which employers were offered the services of state and federal troops, had the support of injunction-granting judges, used the spies of detective agencies such as Pinkerton’s, and sometimes resorted to what can only be called terrorism. Strikers, too, used violence and intimidation, and disputes about which side was most responsible for which outrage are unlikely ever to be resolved.

  Shortly after returning to Colorado from the Chicago gathering, Haywood was arrested (without a warrant) and swiftly and surreptitiously (so that there could be no appeal of extradition) carried off to Idaho. There he was put on trial, accused of responsibility for a bombing that had taken the life of a former governor. Darrow went to Boise to conduct the defense and made it so plain that Haywood was being framed that conviction became impossible. The case made Haywood a hero of the labor movement nationally. He returned to work and by stages became less active in the WFM than in the IWW.

  For better and worse, never in American history has there been an organization quite like the IWW. Reviled in its day as a conspiracy of murderers, terrorists, and subversives, it has continued to be depicted in those same dark colors ever since. Certainly it was involved in any number of disputes that descended into violence. The precise truth, however, is elusive, buried beneath the often dubious testimony of the union’s numberless and more respectable enemies. What cannot be disputed is that wherever working people were at odds with employers, the IWW was eager—sometimes foolishly eager—to get involved. And that its members, guilty or not (few of the charges against the union can be considered proved), were often not only bullheadedly courageous but good-humored and generous to an improbable degree. If they could be ruthless—and th
ey certainly could—they appear to have been as much sinned against as sinning.

  However powerless embattled working people might be, the IWW stood ready to help them organize. In the West in the decade after its founding, alongside its desperate struggles with the mining companies, it engaged in a long series of fights for free speech from which it stood to gain nothing. These fights erupted in places where local authorities had made it unlawful for people with unapproved opinions to give them voice. The IWW’s response was to have one person get up on a soapbox or stepladder and speak, send in a replacement as soon as the first speaker was arrested, replace the replacement and then the replacement’s replacement until the local jail was full and the officers of the law were unable to cope. The Wobblies became almost as famous for their songs and parades as for their strikes.

  Their most celebrated victory came in 1912. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, some 23,000 workers walked out of the town’s textile mills to protest a cut in wages. The nature of the workforce made a successful strike improbable: more than half of the strikers were women and children, and many were not only foreign-born but from twenty-seven different ethnic groups. Almost all were unskilled. But under Haywood’s direction, the strike turned into a weird mixture of mayhem and festival. Windows got broken and machines were smashed, strikebreakers were sent in and confronted, but through it all there were regular parades through the center of town, the paraders singing selections from the IWW songbook. Every day thousands of picketers and their families and supporters—as many as twenty thousand at a time—would encircle the mills.

  Tradesmen of the AFL, meanwhile, were still at work inside those same mills. Haywood asked Gompers to call them out, but like Debs in the Pullman strike he was rebuffed. There were the usual questionable arrests and harassment in a variety of forms, the military was called in, but the strikers stood firm. After nine and a half weeks, the owners gave up. They granted wage increases of up to 21 percent (those making the least got the biggest percentage gains), overtime pay, reinstatement of discharged strikers, and even (especially nice for the children involved) a reduction of the workweek to fifty-four hours. Only two people had been killed—a low body count for a major strike of the time. Mill owners in other New England towns, to avoid being targeted, gave their employees what the Lawrence strikers had won. One unhappy observer said that because of these concessions, a quarter-million workers “look with gratitude from the heart to William D. Haywood.” He viewed this as a calamity that “only years of educational effort can overcome.”