American Experiment (182 page)

And then “she come smashing straight through the raft.”

The voices of protest against mushrooming industrialism—the voices of reformers like George and Bellamy, of social critics like Adams and James, of radicals like Phillips and Peabody, of novelists like Twain and
Norris—were even more mixed and diverse than those of the defenders of capitalism. Most of the critics themselves were of middle-class or even upper-class origin. Could a more coherent and unified voice arise from the workers themselves—from a class that was experiencing the ills of industrialism firsthand? From a class that needed both liberty
and
equality—needed freedom from the boss and the foreman and long hours and wage labor, needed more economic and social equality as well as political, needed equality of women with men and of blacks with whites?

Had not the Declaration of Independence promised both liberty and equality? The Declaration, declared Daniel De Leon, was the product of its age’s “experience and learning,” promising a “future of freedom” requiring the “collective society in America” to assume the “duty of guaranteeing to the individual a free field—
EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.”
This kind of individual liberty—guaranteed to the individual
by
the state, rather than simply protected for the individual
against
the state—had a far more egalitarian and radical thrust than the individual liberty preached by the Social Darwinists.

Yet working-class unity of doctrine depended in large part on workers’ class-consciousness, which Marx and others found lacking in the United States. The American labor market, Marx said, was repeatedly emptied “by the continuous conversion of wages laborers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The function of a wages laborer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave in a longer or shorter term.” Others observed that the workers, like other Americans, were “infected” by Social Darwinism and domestic Algerism. And by the late 1860s the American working class itself was fundamentally divided between socialists calling for radical economic and political efforts to transform or replace capitalism, and trade unionists trying to improve their economic conditions within the existing system.

Orthodox Marxists expected that American workers would go through a period of trade unionism; then, bamboozled or broken by the bosses, the trade unions would convert into a socialist movement. Rather, the reverse happened. Militant socialism had its heyday during the seventies and eighties and then gave way to a bread-and-butter “business unionism” that was the bane of all good Marxist socialists.

To many Americans in these years, socialism was not a new idea. The communitarianism of Robert Owen and the futuristic utopianism of Charles Fourier had excited the avant-garde in the East and had helped stimulate the founding of socialistic and egalitarian communities, especially in western rural areas. In the East, socialist ideas had taken root among sections of the working class. Germans and other Europeans
fleeing from the repressions after the unrest of ’48 had brought radical ideas across the Atlantic. By the 1870s, German socialists and trade unionists, swelled by arrivals now escaping from Bismarck’s antisocialist laws, were organizing “Educational and Defensive” associations to protect themselves against police and employer repression.

European radicals brought a good deal of experience and sophistication to American socialism, but they tended to be hopelessly divided over philosophy and doctrine. Marx and Engels transferred the International Workingmen’s Association from London to New York in 1872, not to find richer proletarian soil but to kill it off, for the first International had become, in their view, fatally infected with Bakuninist anarchism. Marxian socialists, under the leadership of Marx’s American lieutenant, Friedrich Sorge, pursued two political strategies, forming the Socialist-Labor party in 1877 but also operating through sections of the trade union movement, notably Adolph Strasser’s cigar-makers. Both Marxists and anarchists in turn jousted with Lasallean Socialists, followers of the great German revolutionary and romantic, who had been killed in a duel over a love affair in 1864 but whose belief in political action profoundly influenced his German-American followers.

In the tiny cauldrons of left-wing dispute, in the saloons and beer gardens and union halls of Chicago and St. Louis, of New York and Cincinnati and a dozen other cities, Marxist ideas collided and coalesced with these and other rival doctrines. Not only did Marxists compete with bread-and-butter trade unionists, with communitarians pursuing their dreams of brotherhood and sisterhood, with populists seeking relief for farmers, with native-grown socialists, with evangelical radicals, syndicalists, utopians of every hue, but these rival groups also divided among themselves over means if not ends—over political action versus economic, peaceful tactics versus violent, third-party tactics versus major-party collaboration, over internal organization and external propaganda, over questions of timing, leadership, money, secrecy, discipline.

Not only did many socialist battalions tend to be dominated by their talented German chieftains, thus alienating Irish, native Americans, and other groups, but they also attracted cranks, fanatics, charlatans, and polemicists. Doubtless the controversial Woodhull sisters were hardly socialism’s greatest asset in the early seventies, though they had earned their salt by publishing in
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly,
for the first time in the United States, the
Communist Manifesto.
But socialism at this point scarcely needed the nostrums spouting from their editorial page—Pantocracy (universal government), Universology (universal science), Alwatol (universal language), cooperation of the Spirit-World with the Mundane Sphere, and
“The Universal Formula of Universological Science—
UNISM, DUISM
and
TRUISM
.”

During these years, thousands of American workers were pursuing a dream of their own—organization into one great national union that could face powerful corporations on its own terms. In the late 1860s, fearing both the concerted opposition of employers and the competition of immigrants, leaders of machinists, carpenters, and other national brotherhoods organized the National Labor Union, which focused on local producers’ cooperatives and on national political action. The NLU helped win the eight-hour day in several states and for federal government laborers and mechanics. In 1872, the NLU had the audacity to convert itself into the National Labor Reform party and even to nominate Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s old crony, for President; Davis’s withdrawal doomed both the union and the party.

Labor organization, especially national, was still fixed in an old pattern: trade unionism—especially “business” unionism—seemed to thrive during good times, and then collapse in the face of depression as union members faded away along with their jobs. Many socialists, Marxists or otherwise, not only expected this but welcomed it, for workers must learn not to be so dependent on capitalism. Indeed, let “wage slavery” go on, they urged, let it expand so far as to leave wealth to “only two or three capitalists out of the millions of workers,” and then a large and united workers’ movement would take over. But most of the millions of workers preferred bread-and-butter unionism, step-by-step improvement.

The socialist strategy met a sharp testing in the mid-seventies. Only nine of thirty national unions survived the panic-induced depression of ’73; union membership was decimated, reaching a low point of 50,000 members in 1878. The aftermath was not an enlarged and united socialist movement turning to political action in order to transform society, but despair, demoralization, unrest, protest, violence, and terrorism. In Pennsylvania the “Molly Maguires,” an outgrowth of the anti-landlord Ancient Order of Hibernians in Ireland, terrorized the coalfields, systematically killing railroad bosses who ran the mines. Then, in 1877, wage cuts on the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and other railroads brought a phenomenon few had expected in the United States— a “general strike” of railroad and other workers. As violence spread across the nation’s railways, America for a time seemed on the brink of revolution. Railroad strikers and others seized junctions and depots, burned hundreds of freight cars, looted stores, exchanged fire with troops, even tried to
stop a militia regiment in Baltimore from sallying forth from its armory.

The response was quick and harsh. Federal troops crushed the strike in Pittsburgh, after twenty-six persons had been killed. The army “restored order” in Martinsburg, West Virginia. State legislatures revived their old anti-strike laws. Found guilty of murder on the testimony of a secret Pinkerton infiltrator, ten Molly Maguires were hanged. Capitalists of diverse views seemed to unite against labor. Earlier, when railroad engineers had struck the Boston & Maine, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had called for decent wages and conditions for railroad workers, but since the lines were public utilities, he wanted strikes to be outlawed and militant strikers fined and jailed.

Then, out of this suffering and violence, there developed perhaps the grandest effort American workers ever made to build a nationwide union, militant yet responsible. It was an organization that called itself noble—the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. Founded as a clandestine society at a tailors’ meeting in Philadelphia in 1871, the Knights shed their secrecy a decade later, opening their ranks to skilled and unskilled, men and women, immigrants and blacks—to all except saloon-keepers, gamblers, stockbrokers, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. Organized into local and district assemblies embracing workers of diverse crafts and skills, the Knights were a highly centralized but democratic organization, with their assemblies made responsible to the general executive board and to the Grand Master Workman. At last workers had “one big union.”

The Knights, responding to a deep economic and psychological need among workers, rose like a meteor from about 100,000 members in 1885 to almost 700,000 a year later. Under its longtime Grand Master, Terence V. Powderly—“part idealist, part politician, part mountebank,” in John Garraty’s view—the Knights favored the eight-hour day, the graduated income tax, prohibition of imported contract labor, consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives, an end to the monopoly power of railroads and banks. Officially the Knights were opposed to labor violence, class conflict, and socialism. “I hate the word ‘class,’ ” Powderly said, “and would drive it from the English language if I could.” But their language was often radical and their songs militant:

Toiling millions now are waking—

See them marching on;

All the tyrants now are shaking,

Ere their power’s gone.

Chorus:
Storm the fort, ye Knights of Labor.

Battle for your cause;

Equal rights for every neighbor—

Down with tyrant laws!

While Powderly was still preaching cooperation, education, and reform, workers within the Knights of Labor and outside began striking in response to depression wage cuts and other ills. Thousands of unorganized workers walked off their jobs and joined the Knights. In the “great upheaval” of 1884, railroad union locals struck the whole southwestern system, controlled by Jay Gould. After the governors of both Missouri and Kansas backed up the strikers, Gould retreated. Wounding this capitalist dragon emboldened thousands more workers to join the noble order.

As the Knights of Labor burgeoned in numbers, however, it slackened in discipline. More strikes broke out, beyond the control of the Grand Worthies now running the organization. The Knights’ decline seemed as fleet as a falling star. In the fateful year of 1886, the Knights again struck the “blood-sucking corporations” of Gould’s southwestern system, only to give up the effort, amid violence and arrests, when the financier refused even to arbitrate. A general strike in Chicago for the eight-hour day collapsed. And the Knights suffered from the public hysteria following an incident in Chicago during the general strike.

This was the Haymarket Massacre. In origin it had nothing to do with the Knights, and involved a strike at the McCormick Harvester plant begun months before the general strike. After a violent clash at McCormick’s, a small group of anarchist revolutionaries put out a flammable circular in English and German charging that “your masters sent out their bloodhounds—the police—they killed six of your brothers” (one had been killed) and calling for a protest meeting in Haymarket Square. The much-advertised “revenge” meeting was a flop: the crowd was disappointingly low, the speeches turgid, the weather rainy. The last speaker, his beard dripping, had just told the few hundred people still lingering that his was the last speech and “then we’ll all go home,” when a phalanx of 180 policemen swung into the square. Their captain ordered the crowd to “peaceably disperse.” “Why, Captain,” said the speaker, “we
are
peaceable.”

There was a moment of tense silence, then a bomb burst among the police. Amid their dead and stricken comrades, the police re-formed ranks and opened fire on the crowd; workers fired back, then dragged their dead and wounded to friends’ homes. Seven policemen died, seventy more were wounded, workers’ casualties could never be calculated but doubtless were higher. Later, eight alleged anarchists were convicted on the charge of conspiracy and four were hanged.

1886 was a decisive year for American labor. Although the Chicago Knights of Labor denied any sympathy or connection with the “cowardly murderers” who had caused riot and bloodshed, the whole organization was tainted and its decline began. The battle brought the first major “red scare” in American history. It led some workers to abandon force, turned others into ardent revolutionaries. It created, in Henry David’s view, “America’s first revolutionary martyrs.” Reactions to Haymarket brought the drive for the eight-hour day temporarily to a halt.

1886 was also the year in which a whole new national labor organization was founded, an old economic and political strategy revitalized and broadened, and the socialist and other radical trade unions outflanked.