From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Segregation percolated everywhere. In 1906, the San Francisco School Board assigned Asian American children to a separate public school, an order rescinded after the Japanese government protested to President Roosevelt and agreed to restrict emigration to the United States. U.S. troops abroad carried Jim Crow with them; Cubans called it the Yankee “white fever.” When Afro-Antilleans were brought to Panama to dig the canal, Panamanian authorities segregated public facilities to please American sensibilities. Back in the United States, the Commissioner of Indians ruled in 1916 that people with half or more “Indian blood” were not legally competent unless they passed a government review.

  Philippine pacification was finally completed in 1914, and two years later Congress agreed to eventual independence. Aside from the purchase of the Virgin Islands in 1917, annexation had played out. Cuba proved a better model. Cubans got independence as promised in 1902. Their constitution—written under U.S. military occupation—gave the United States land for naval stations, a veto on Cuban foreign policy, and the right to send in troops at any time. American investment flowed into Cuba. This arrangement exemplified “dollar diplomacy”: foreign policy designed to expand and protect U.S. investments abroad.

  Military intervention backed up diplomatic initiatives. U.S. forces joined other imperial powers in suppressing China’s Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and stayed for almost thirty years. In 1903, U.S. warships backed a rebellion on Colombia’s Isthmus of Panama in order to create a government to sign a canal treaty already prepared by New York lawyers; the Panama Canal opened in 1914. To “protect American lives and property,” U.S. troops occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909 and again in 1917; Nicaragua almost continuously from 1912 to 1933; Mexico in 1914 and 1916–17; Haiti from 1915 to 1934; and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. When Major General Smedley Butler looked back on his Marine Corps service in the Americas and China, he concluded, “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

  The empire needed workers as well as soldiers. No one described this requirement better than Elbert Hubbard in his essay “Message to Garcia.” Just before the war with Spain, U.S. Army lieutenant Andrew Rowan had gone alone into Cuba’s mountains to deliver a letter from President McKinley to the rebel general Calixto Garcia. In the March 1899 issue of Hubbard’s magazine The Philistine, his tribute to Rowan became a meditation on the American worker. Employers, he wrote, could only be appalled by the average worker’s “inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and halfhearted work seem the rule.” Even worse was the malcontent, “absolutely worthless to anyone else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress him. . . . He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-soled No. 9 boot.” What civilization needed, Hubbard concluded, were diligent workers who would unquestioningly follow orders—workers who could “carry a message to Garcia.” The essay so inspired American businessmen that they printed some 40 million copies to distribute to their employees.

  THE LABOR MOVEMENT IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

  The labor movement reflected changing times. It coalesced around three organizational centers: the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party of America (SP), and a radical union known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The AFL—the first U.S. labor federation to survive a major depression—entered the twentieth century all the more committed to its “pure and simple” unionism based on craftsmen. Activists ignored or frustrated by the Federation gathered in the SP and IWW. The three competed to lead American labor, each with a different program for winning better working conditions, richer lives, and social justice.

  The American Federation of Labor focused on collective bargaining: contracts negotiated by professional representatives of well-funded unions of highly skilled workers, organized according to their separate crafts. The formula had weaknesses. In contrast to the Federation’s early years, craft unions now routinely crossed one another’s pickets and endlessly disputed jurisdictions. Salaried union officers and staff sometimes became grafters, offering employers sweetheart deals in return for bribes. Even squeaky clean craft unions ignored less skilled workers, the majority of the labor force. United Textile Workers president John Golden explained why his union set dues too high for all but the most skilled: “I find them the most intelligent and the easiest to organize . . . [and] more value to us than the unskilled.”

  To organize the unorganized, the AFL used “federal labor unions” (FLUs), originally conceived as a temporary stopping place for new recruits who would later join craft unions. After 1900, the Federation chartered thousands of FLUs, now as permanent organizations for workers who did not fit into the AFL’s craft structure. Samuel Gompers said of federal unions: “They extend the hand of fellowship to . . . every creed and color [and] give the lie to those who talk of A.F. of L. exclusiveness.” In fact, the very existence of permanent FLUs testified to the exclusiveness of the national craft unions—their neglect of women, immigrants, and workers of color as well as the unskilled.

  As of 1910, about 73,000 women workers—less than 1 percent of the female labor force—belonged to any union. To recruit women into the AFL, Boston labor activists and reformers came together in 1903 to found the Women’s Trade Union League, which subsequently spread to cities across the country. AFL leaders endorsed the project; but when national unions failed to charter locals organized by the League, the Federation’s Executive Council refused to press the issue or to charter the locals directly.

  In 1900, only about 30,000 African Americans belonged to unions, two-thirds to the United Mine Workers (UMW). In Birmingham, Alabama, black workers were active in the UMW, federal unions, and locals affiliated with national unions of barbers, plasterers, hod carriers, iron workers, and others. Birmingham was exceptional, however. In most cities the AFL had few or no black members.

  “New immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe were rarely skilled workers, and many AFL leaders considered them unfit for union membership and even admission to the United States. The Federation lobbied Congress to test immigrants for literacy, which would, according to Gompers, “shut out a considerable number of South Italians, and of Slavs, and other[s] equally or more undesirable.” AFL opposition to Asian immigration and hostility to Asian American workers continued unabated. In 1903, sugar beet workers in Oxnard, California, formed the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA), won a strike against a wage cut and applied for AFL membership. Gompers agreed to issue a charter, but only if the union would henceforth exclude Asians. When the JMLA refused to comply, he broke off all relations.

  The Federation did charter a number of Latino locals in the Southwest. In California, AFL organizer Juan Ramírez helped migrant farm workers near Long Beach and San Pedro form La Unión de Jornaleros Unidos (FLU No. 13,097) in 1911. An independent union of Tejano railroad workers in Laredo became FLU No. 11,953 in 1905. In El Paso, Texas, Anglo and Mexican American workers organized integrated locals of the Typographical Union, the Painters’ Union, and the Brotherhood of Carpenters; but these locals did not include Mexican immigrants.

  If prejudice begat AFL exclusiveness, so did thoughtful calculation by the Federation’s leaders. They believed that craftsmen could make steady headway with narrow craft unionism—“the line of least resistance,” as Gompers once called it. As the age of empire dawned, the AFL experienced a growth spurt that seemed to confirm that formula’s wisdom. By 1904, the Federation reported about 1,676,000 members in 120 unions, up from 265,000 members in 58 unions in 1897. Some national unions won contracts with employers’ associations: the Machinists with the National Founders’ Association; the Typographers with the Newspaper Publishers’ Association; the Mine Workers with bituminous coal companies in the Central Competitive Field (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois).

  The AFL also gained respectability by participati
ng in the National Civic Federation (NCF), founded in 1900 to enlist employers, labor leaders, and prominent public citizens to promote industrial peace. Gompers and United Mine Workers president John Mitchell were charter members, along with industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Charles Schwab of U.S. Steel. The “public” was represented by university presidents, Episcopal and Catholic bishops, and retired U.S. President Grover Cleveland, now a trustee for the New York Life Insurance Company.

  When 144,000 anthracite coal miners in the UMW went out on strike in 1902, the NCF swung into action. Gompers and Mitchell stymied bituminous coal miners’ plans for a sympathy strike, and NCF businessmen blocked the coal companies’ efforts to secure intervention by federal troops. Theodore Roosevelt (who had succeeded to the presidency with McKinley’s assassination in 1901) ordered arbitration, which ended in a compromise that raised pay but did not meet the strikers’ demands for union recognition and the eight-hour day. While many miners protested the settlement, Gompers and Mitchell hailed it as a vindication of “responsible” unionism.

  Even as they signed union contracts and hobnobbed with labor leaders in the NCF, employers never stopped searching for methods to contain and weaken unionism. One increasingly popular method was “scientific management,” pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor at the Midvale Steel Works in eastern Pennsylvania. The eccentric son of a wealthy Philadelphia family, Taylor had left prep school to do industrial work at factories owned by friends of his parents. In the early 1890s, he became gang boss of Midvale’s machine shop and set out to make it the most productive operation in the factory, indeed the world. The key, he decided, was to control workers’ every move. First, he carefully analyzed the machinists’ labor, dividing each task into a series of simple motions, all of which he timed with a stopwatch. Then he decreed the “one best way” to perform each motion and demanded that workers strictly follow his decrees. Those who complied got higher pay; resisters were punished with fines, wage cuts, or dismissal. In 1895, Taylor began to publicize the Midvale experiments, and by the early 1900s, his scientific management system was winning a following among industrial employers.

  What most attracted them was Taylorism’s potential to marginalize craftsmen and their unions. Once craft labor was broken down into routine steps, the lion’s share of industrial production could be reassigned to less skilled workers at lower pay, and craftsmen could be relegated to ancillary roles. Under old managerial systems, skilled men had dominated production. Their detailed mastery of the labor process let them determine work methods and output quotas for themselves and their less skilled helpers. They could shut down their shops at will. But when craftsmen were isolated from semiskilled fabricators and assemblers and confined to tasks such as machine repair or tool and die work, they and their unions could hardly slow down production, much less bring it to a halt.

  As scientific management undercut unions’ clout on the shop floor, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) tried to wipe them out with the Open Shop Drive, a “crusade against unionism” launched in 1903. Within a year, the NAM established a Citizens’ Industrial Association that worked with 247 employers’ associations to distribute antiunion literature and compile blacklists of labor activists. The NAM worked also with the American Anti-Boycott Association, which specialized in taking unions to court. State and federal judges issued hundreds of injunctions against strikes, organizing drives, and other union activities. The U.S. Supreme Court extended the reach of these injunctions in 1908, when it ruled that members of the Hatters Union of Danbury, Connecticut, were individually liable for financial damages to a hat company the union had slapped with a boycott.

  Such assaults destroyed the AFL’s momentum. Contracts lapsed and strike losses mounted. Unions all but disappeared from steel, meatpacking, and Great Lakes shipping. AFL membership fell by about 222,000 between 1904 and 1906, and the loss was not fully recouped for another half decade. Shrinkage exacerbated internal divisions. Jurisdictional disputes between AFL unions grew all the more acrimonious. Defending core constituencies, AFL headquarters and national unions abandoned those at the Federation’s margins; multitudes of FLUs collapsed along with all of Birmingham’s black locals. More and more critics of pure and simple craft unionism squared off against the AFL conservatives.

  The dissidents called for political action in conjunction with the Socialist Party and for campaigns to organize industrial unions—unions that welcomed all workers in a particular industry regardless of occupation or skill. The AFL already had some industrial affiliates—the United Mine Workers, the United Brewery Workers, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers, and a few others.* The sentiment for change was strongest in these quarters but also grew in craft unions such as the Typographers, the Machinists, and the Carpenters.

  While AFL headquarters fought dissent tooth and nail, it also modified its policies to allow for political action in the two-party system. In particular, the Federation sought to exempt labor from the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), whose ban on conspiracies to restrain free trade provided the foundation for most legal assaults on unions. In 1908, AFL spokesmen brought their cause to both the Republican and Democratic conventions. The Republicans recoiled; the Democrats gave it a lukewarm endorsement; and the AFL backed a presidential candidate for the very first time—Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who lost to the Republicans’ William Howard Taft. Four years later, the AFL would back a victor as Democrats and a liberal Republican faction vied for labor’s support.

  This upturn in the Federation’s political fortunes was closely linked to the McNamara case, the most dramatic episode in the annals of the Open Shop Drive. The National Erectors’ Association had joined the drive in 1906, confronting the AFL’s Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. The Iron Workers had fought back by dynamiting some eighty-seven steel structures built by nonunion labor. On October 1, 1910, twenty workmen died in an explosion that leveled the printing plant of the Los Angeles Times, a tireless champion of the open shop. The following spring, two Iron Workers—James B. McNamara and his older brother John J., the union’s national secretary-treasurer—were indicted for murder in connection with the blast. The brothers pled not guilty; and every branch of the labor movement, from archconservatives to revolutionaries, rallied in their defense. Then, on December 1, 1911, the McNamaras suddenly changed their pleas. Some said Gompers wept when he heard the news.

  Many in the upper reaches of both the Democratic and Republican parties worried about the stability of a society in which unionists like the McNamaras—members of the AFL mainstream—resorted to violence. Running for re-election in 1912, President Taft denounced unions for “lawlessness in labor disputes.” Liberal Republicans broke away to form the Progressive Party and run Theodore Roosevelt on a platform that called for workplace safety standards, old-age pensions, an eight-hour day for women and teenagers, and other labor reforms. Democrat Woodrow Wilson endorsed workers’ right to organize and carried the election with backing from the AFL.

  Wilson’s first year in office went badly for labor. Congressional bills to exempt unions from antitrust law were repeatedly blocked. The Justice Department indicted the United Mine Workers for “conspiracy” to organize the entire coal industry. Meanwhile, in southern Colorado, union miners launched a strike against Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron (CFI). In September 1913, over 11,000 strikers and the families left CFI camps and set up tent colonies. Cheering them on was the veteran labor organizer “Mother” Mary Jones, then in her seventies and fresh out of jail for assisting a coal strike in West Virginia. The CFI battle wore on for months, with company guards and the state militia escorting scabs to work and harassing strikers. On April 20, 1914, all hell broke loose. Militiamen and guards machine-gunned and torched the tent colony at Ludlow; twenty-one people were shot or burned to death, including eleven children. As the news spread, armed trade unionists poured into the region to defend the miners. Federal troops finally stopped the fighting in May, by
which time sixty-six miners or their family members had been killed. The strikers held out until December, then returned to work in defeat.

  In the wake of the Ludlow massacre, Congress debated and eventually passed the Clayton Act. It stated that labor organizations should not be “construed to be illegal combinations in restraint of trade under the antitrust laws,” and it barred injunctions against “peaceful and lawful” strikes. President Wilson signed the Act into law in October 1914. In the next issue of the American Federationist, Gompers called it “the industrial Magna Carta upon which the working people will rear the structure of industrial freedom.” Prudent political action had apparently proved its value.

  The political alternative shunned by the AFL was the Socialist Party, founded in 1901 by veterans of the Knights of Labor and the Peoples’ Party and by leaders of socialist organizations based mainly among German and Russian-Jewish immigrants. The SP aimed to use the ballot to build a new social order based on public ownership of industry and thoroughgoing democracy. Eugene Debs, former leader of the American Railway Union, was the Party’s chief spokesman and perennial presidential candidate. He had become a socialist while serving prison time for his role in the Pullman strike.