There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Rank and file began to depart the Knights. It increasingly appeared that their huge membership, erratic leadership, and inability to focus on the needs of a specific trade were a poor means of carrying forward the struggle for better hours. From a membership of seven hundred thousand prior to Haymarket, the Knights lost members steadily after 1886, until it could claim only seventy-five thousand members in 1893, the year Powderly was deposed. Unfortunately his replacement, James Sovereign, also signed on to gradual reformist programs that had come to be seen by many as chimerical. Like Powderly, Sovereign seemed willing to ignore the fact that the Knights’ remarkable growth had come not through programs involving manufacturing cooperatives or land reform, but from standing up to Jay Gould and other employers on the basics of wages and hours.

  The U.S. labor cause has always been an extended conversation between ideology and pragmatism, and in the wake of Haymarket, pragmatism spoke the loudest and clearest. “No more powerful blow was ever struck for capitalism than when that bomb was thrown on Haymarket Square,” lamented a Socialist journal in 1909, causing the labor movement “to come definitely under the control of its most conservative element.”99 With the Knights in decline and Socialists and anarchists hobbled by their association with so traumatic a series of events, a new spirit asserted itself in American unionism epitomized by the 1886 founding of Gompers’s American Federation of Labor (AFL). Gompers’s group harbored no illusions about shaping a new world more favorable to the proletariat; it focused instead on wages, hours, and working conditions, and the effective power of trade unions fighting for these goals within the industrial status quo. It followed a philosophy that many workers found reassuring, one “based upon wage consciousness rather than class consciousness,” with “no idea of trying to change the economic system, let alone seeking to overthrow it.”100 As a federation spokesman had famously stated in testimony before Congress in 1883, “We have no ultimate ends…. We are fighting only for immediate objects that can be realized in a few years. We are opposed to theorists…. We are practical men.”101

  While there were occasional efforts to create bridges of respect and friendship between the Knights and Gompers’s federation, the groups became increasingly distrustful of one another, particularly as the latter surged to greater national prominence. It probably didn’t help that the organizations’ leaders were of opposite dispositions. The devout, temperance-minded Powderly took exception to Gompers’s obstreperousness, his love of saloons, stogies, and beer; he once referred to him as a “Christ-slugger.”102 Powderly had in turn angered Gompers with the Knights’ effort to make the Cigar Makers’ International into a group more embracing of unskilled immigrants.103 Gompers thought the movement was simply not ready for the large-scale organizing of immigrant workers, men and women who knew little or no English and brought alien beliefs from across the Atlantic. Unions, Gompers believed, “survived only where the public would tolerate them, in the small shops and in artisan trades where craft unions seemed to uphold American individualistic values.”104

  Gompers was himself an immigrant, of Dutch-Jewish heritage, born in London in 1850, and brought to America as a child, arriving with his family in 1863. As a young man he followed his father’s trade as a cigar maker, a proud craft tradition unique in that it was performed in quiet, not in the proximity of pounding machines. Cigar makers’ workrooms famously served as informal schools for workers; young Sam was often assigned the job of reading from books and newspapers to the other cigar makers as they worked. Precocious and socially adept, Gompers was groomed as a future leader in the Cigar Makers’ International, headed by Adolph Strasser and Karl Ferdinand Laurrell; both were Socialists who had wearied of the endless bickering and dogmatism between various cells and belief systems; they impressed upon young Sam Gompers the importance of sticking to the hard business of trade unionism, with a minimum emphasis on Socialist politics. “Go to their meetings, listen to them and understand them, but do not join the Party,” Laurrell warned him. Gompers later called Laurrell “my mental guide through many of my early struggles,”105 and all his life was fond of quoting Laurrell’s words of admonishment: “Study your union card, Sam, and if the idea does not square with that, it ain’t true.”106

  One can imagine how valid Laurrell’s words must have sounded to Gompers by the time he presided over the founding of the AFL. William Sylvis with his iron molders and the NLU had frittered away precious organizational resources on political causes, cooperation, monetary reform, women’s issues; Terence Powderly had offered inconsistent leadership; the Knights of St. Crispin had railed in vain to preserve skilled labor and the craft tradition. Gompers, in contrast, had absorbed these and other valuable lessons. Having once joined an unsuccessful strike against the introduction of a newfangled cigar-rolling device, he came away believing that one could not strike effectively against technological progress; one could only adapt to it, safeguarding workers’ interests in the transition as best one could. Another observation he made was that strikes against wage cuts rarely worked if carried out in tough economic times, for management simply turned to scabs and strikebreakers. Strikes had a better chance where employers were doing well and workers’ demands could be linked to overall profitability, and where work disruptions would have a more telling effect. So strongly did Gompers feel about inappropriately timed strikes that when he ran the Cigar Makers’ local in New York he was known to discipline wildcat strikers by helping to provide employers with replacement workers. This could be perceived as a nasty bit of double-dealing, but as he liked to say in defense of his tactics, “The trade union is not a Sunday School.”107

  While cautious about strikes, Gompers nonetheless defended the right to withhold one’s labor; strikes were a “sign that the people are not yet willing to surrender every spark of their manhood and their honor and their independence.” He liked an analogy of a strike as a natural release of energy, like a thunderstorm. “No man would think of trying to invent some machine by which the thunderstorms could be abolished,” Gompers asserted, for they are “the result of noxious gases or different gases in the atmosphere that come together and crush, and they simply purify the atmosphere, and make us feel reinvigorated and with renewed hope.”108 Picking its battles carefully paid off for Gompers’s Cigar Makers’ union; it received 218 applications for strikes from its locals between 1881 and 1883 and approved 194 of them, winning about 75 percent of the time.109

  Gompers also placed great value on fat strike funds and the high dues required to sustain them. Once employers knew his cigar makers had an ample purse and could hold out in case of a strike, they became more inclined to treat worker demands seriously. “There is not a dollar which the working man or woman pays into a labor organization,” he often said of his dues policy, “which does not come back a hundredfold.”110

  Gompers had joined the Federation of Organized Trades at its founding in 1881. The influence of the group remained slight until 1886, when the power of the Knights began to wane and Gompers and his allies saw their opening. At a federation gathering in Philadelphia at the end of May 1886, just after Haymarket, many of the delegates had gone out of their way to appear in conservative garb, “a silk hat and a Prince Albert coat,” Gompers later recalled, the better to emphasize their dignity and self-respect as trade workers.111 This conclave led to a gathering at Columbus, Ohio, that fall at which trade union representatives of 150,000 workers from the Cigar Makers, Iron Molders, Carpenters, Mine Workers, and others founded the AFL and elected Gompers its president.

  Haymarket’s aftermath played a role in Gompers’s later inclination to keep electoral politics at arm’s length. In fall 1886 he backed the candidacy of Henry George for mayor of New York City on the United Labor Party ticket. George was a movement literary celebrity, having in 1879 published Progress and Poverty, a seminal account of the impact of industrialization in which he linked the growing gap between affluent and poor in America to the disproportionate ownership of land by a
handful of individuals and corporations. George suggested a “single tax” that would address this imbalance. The amount of available land in America was shrinking steadily, he pointed out, an observation that had a chilling effect on readers’ faith in the ideal of land for all and of an ever-westward growing nation. Gompers campaigned hard for George, who won almost a third of the vote in a three-way race, but ultimately lost to Abram Hewitt, who as an ungracious winner had the cheek to describe Gompers and other George supporters as “anarchists.”

  The next year George disappointed his followers by denouncing clemency in the Haymarket case. He had initially criticized the trial’s unfairness, but either to protect his political ambitions or out of pique at Socialist associates, he was by October 1887 recommending that the ruling of the Illinois Supreme Court rejecting the Haymarket defendants’ appeal be respected.112 Bitter over George’s failure at the polls and at the changeable nature of the candidate’s views, Gompers ever after tended to regard immersion in party politics as a waste of one’s efforts, efforts better directed toward the actual workaday needs of labor. His federation might advance a legislative program, but tended to steer clear of any fixed alignment with political parties. It would swing support to politicians who aided its causes and deny support to those who offended it on a case-by-case basis.

  The AFL offered well-defined independence to its individual trade unions, yet a central leadership that was run like a smart company, carefully controlling policy, benefits, dues, and the flow of funds to distressed locals. Gompers provided much of the energy for the operation of the AFL in its earliest days—writing and answering correspondence, handling the organization’s accounting, and running its headquarters with the help of his son Henry, who served as office boy for $3 a week. He was adamant about knowing personally the details of the work in which he was engaged; once, when the Cigar Makers were preparing an appeal to the state legislature about the need to regulate tenement workplaces, Gompers had gone door-to-door through the tenements of the Lower East Side pretending to be a salesman of the collected works of Charles Dickens, in order to get a firsthand view of existing household cigar factories.113 Where an effective labor organization succeeded, he recognized, was in such thorough awareness and control—not necessarily in bold undertakings like strikes; what mattered was the day-to-day routine of negotiating small matters with disparate unions and labor councils, examining grievances, administering benefits–actions that did not make headlines but were the real building blocks of labor justice and peace.

  Gompers recognized that industrialism was not an aberration; it was rather the logical result of history’s advance. Thus, defeating industrialism outright was unlikely, particularly through the pursuit of utopian fantasies. The earth was not going to revolve backward to a simpler time of small artisan businesses and the family farm. He thus shied away from visionary fixes like currency reform, land programs, and cooperation that had spellbound the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, as he chucked aside the naive notions that laborers everywhere would rise up as one against authority or were likely even to share a single unifying national purpose. Workers might curse bosses and “property beasts,” but most believed firmly in their own eventual ascendance, in property rights, and in the rule of law. Far from disrespecting capital, they were faithful to the promise of individual attainment. “There is a certain principle inborn in every man…. That principle is hope,” one AFL official told the Alarm. “Men must be permitted to better their condition by individual exertion or civilization will perish of dry rot.”114

  Thus, far more effectively than groups like the NLU or the Knights or the Socialists, which were in a sense organizations devoted to labor-related ideas, the AFL appealed to its members with the targeting of fundamental and achievable goals. “It endured not because it had a blueprint for a new world, or for a return to an old one,” notes Gompers’s biographer Harold Livesay, “but because it best managed to protect the cherished rights of its members against the inroads of the new industrial age.” It did this by confining itself “to economic and political methods sanctioned by the prevailing system.”115

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PULLMAN’S TOWN

  THE COMMANDER OF THE U.S. ARMY REGIMENT at Fort Keogh in eastern Montana peered through his binoculars, scanning the railroad track and the limitless prairie for any sign of movement. It was April 25, 1894, and he had urgent orders from Washington to stop the oncoming Northern Pacific freight train at all costs. This was no ordinary freight loaded with lumber or cattle, but a hijacked train carrying five hundred armed and angry men. They were the unemployed miners, teamsters, and rail yardmen of Idaho and western Montana, and had announced they would ride the stolen train, and carry their protest, all the way to the nation’s capital. Already they had used their superior numbers to beat back attempts by authorities to retake the train. At Billings, just hours before, there had been an exchange of gunfire and a bystander killed, but now there were no more sizable towns in Montana and the track looking east was clear. Up ahead, the soldiers from Fort Keogh crouched by the roadbed, unseen, readying their weapons.

  Only seven years shy of the twentieth century, such was the absurd character of the struggle for workers’ rights in America—desperate men on a hijacked train determined to cross the country to petition Congress for relief, and heavily armed soldiers waiting in ambush to stop them, prepared to shoot and kill their fellow citizens, if need be.

  Since the onset of a severe financial crisis the year before, the nation had entered the most precipitous economic depression in its history. Laboring men everywhere were in despair; farm income had dried up; the Union Pacific and Erie railways were in arrears; banks had closed, as many as four hundred in the West and South. While no official numbers of unemployed were kept, it was estimated there were as many as 200,000 without work in New York, 100,000 in Chicago; in Philadelphia, 62,500. In lieu of public assistance, private charities could do only so much. Families slept in public parks, parents improvising each morning a way to find food and milk for their children, while less fortunate urchins scrounged in the streets. Husbands left home in search of work, some never to be heard from again, joining the permanent ranks of jobless wanderers. There is “something wrong,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer lamented, “when such a large number of people are thrown up like driftwood on the shore, out of place, out of use.”

  If there was any silver lining in these troubles, it was that they reinvigorated reform efforts under way in the cities to address the conditions of slum dwellers, the jobless, and the poor. On the labor front, the struggles of recent years—the 1877 railroad strikes, the Haymarket affair, and now the 1893 economic crisis—had had the effect of honing a sharper, more pragmatic outlook among the large national organizations. The AFL, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, and the American Railway Union, recognizing the enormous sway of the corporations, were coordinating thousands of members and union locals. Public and official concern about the accumulating power of both capital and labor would soon bring the federal government and the courts into the fray; there was uncertainty as to what their role would mean for industrial society, but none as to its potential significance.

  CARNEGIE STEEL’S HOMESTEAD WORKS, America’s largest steelmaking complex, sat on the Monongahela River southeast of Pittsburgh, occupying fifty acres and containing three separate mills, a port, and a private railroad. Of the plant’s thirty-eight hundred workers, 750 skilled laborers most essential to the mill operations belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. They had a solid contract and enjoyed a say, through a multitude of negotiated rules and guidelines, in how the plant functioned and work was done. In 1889 the Carnegie Company had set out to defeat the Amalgamated, but the workers, surprising Carnegie with their degree of organization and resolve, formed an impenetrable human barrier around the plant and successfully drove away the company’s scabs and detectives. Faced with such unexpected solidarity—as well
as sympathy strikes at related Carnegie operations, including the railroads on which Homestead relied—the firm surrendered; it agreed to the work rules and set wages on a sliding scale to reflect the prevailing market price of steel products.

  Although the 1889 pact—good for three years—had bought both sides time, the company had not relinquished its aim of destroying the union. This contradicted the public statements of its president, Andrew Carnegie, who in two articles in Forum magazine in 1886 had expressed sympathy for the rights of workingmen. Carnegie, himself an immigrant to America, prided himself on knowing many of his German, Italian, and Bohemian workers by their first names, and encouraged them to be similarly informal toward him. “There can never be any hopeless troubles … as long as they call me ‘Andy,’ ” he liked to tell business colleagues.1 Carnegie’s avowed respect for his workers extended to their right to organize, and even to their distrust of scabs. “To expect that one dependent upon his daily wage for the necessaries of life will stand by peacefully and see a new man employed in his stead is to expect too much,” he’d written. But Carnegie was known to occasionally sacrifice truth in order to appear reasonable before the press, and in 1892, when the union contract expired and another showdown with the Amalgamated loomed, he had conveniently departed on an extended vacation to Aberdeen, Scotland, where he maintained one of his many homes. Bill Jones, a Carnegie manager who had traditionally handled employee relations and was popular with the workers—his benevolence included the introduction of eight-hour shifts at one plant—had unfortunately been killed not long before in a blast furnace accident.