I find only two groups of rebels against democracy who view with favor this knock-down-and-drag-out fight for the open shop. I might call them roughly Bolshevik employers and Bolshevik employees.
As I travelled about the country I found that the active advocates of the open shop frequently referred to it as “the American plan.” The employers’ association which is pushing it also has a way of ostentatiously flying the Stars and Stripes. This is particularly noticeable in the mining communities where there are large bodies of foreign laborers. At first I could not understand how one group of Americans came to have the temerity to arrogate to themselves the word “American.” Then I discovered it was a survival of the war period. In fighting the Prussian we have adopted some of the Prussian’s disagreeable characteristics. The war is over, but we have licked militarist blood. What surprises me most is how few people recognize the danger of it. The phrase “American plan” has been allowed to stand without protest, though it practically says to union men who are just as good Americans as the members of employers’ associations that they are not Americans if they persist in their union ideas. It is not difficult to imagine how this is misused in the daily contact between workman and boss. It cannot help but do harm.
In Butte I was walking along the street with some labor leaders, bound for their headquarters. Thinking we had reached it, I started to turn into a building over which the Stars and Stripes were flying. “That’s not it,” said one of them. “Don’t you see the flag of the American plan?”
No Serious Bolshevism Here.
And yet there is no serious Bolshevism in the United States, I have been looking for it, and I have not been able to trace a consistent effort at a Bolshevik movement. There are no doubt enough people who believe in Bolshevism who would like to start a Bolshevik movement—but they have not been able to do it. At least they have not succeeded in starting it among wage-paid workmen, and there is no other place to start it.
There is, however, something which is called Bolshevism, and, as it is also rebellious against the existing order of society, it has been labelled Bolshevik, but it is really something different. I refer to the rather crude and unscientific but active, anarcho-syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World.
The two have been confused even by some of the leaders of the I. W. W., so it is not surprising that the general public, not to mention the Red squads of the police, have not always been able to make the distinction; but the difference is there and is of sufficient importance to prevent the growth of Bolshevism.
Bolshevism, by which is ment the idea that lies behind the Bolshevik Government in Moscow, is a long way from the One Big Union—the effective idea behind the I. W. W. Bolshevism has proved to be state Socialism in action. The I. W. W. is anarcho-syndicalism trying to make headway in industry.
But even the I. W. W. is not getting anywhere. It may some day, because it has a broader philosophy than Bolshevism behind it and because it is aiding in the movement toward industrial unionism, which is making some headway. But as an immediate revolutionary movement the I. W. W. is powerless before the powerful forces that oppose it.
Chief of these is the American Federation of Labor. The I. W. W. has never even had a chance to play a serious role in the United States because the A. F. of L. has fought it consistently since its inception fifteen years ago.