This had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world. We became restless and infected Europe with our instability. We became optimistic and Europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. We enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and Europe sent us preachers of renunciation and the simple life. It became clear that, for good and evil, our character was departing from any European mold, and parts of Europe were tempted to join the Confederacy in 1861 or Spain in 1898 in the hope of destroying us.
Our Fifty Years of Class War
From about 1880 to 1930 we were moving into a new system of government; in the Midwest the children of New England and the children of Scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy—the system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on prosperity.
The constant radicalism of America, based on free land, frequent movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 1880's and for generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich and the poor (as it had been in Shays' time and in Jackson's). Our political education was won in this time, but Populism died under the combined effects of a war against Spain and a new process of extracting gold; it was revived under Theodore Roosevelt, under Woodrow Wilson, and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom tried to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself. Wealth had come into conflict with some other American desires, it had begun to limit enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a peasantry and a proletariat. With some feeling that Europe must not repeat itself in America, the people on three occasions chose liberal Presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 1880's the safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time.
We are a nation in which the Continental European class system has not become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal principles). According to radicals we are still governed by massed and concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain Congressmen we are living under a labor-dictatorship. Very little perspective is required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our capacity to change and improve not yet impaired.
Labor Troubles
The reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. We are hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America.
The forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all concerned: the Government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of labor too often unfit. Like other organized groups, labor unions did not always consult the public good and criminals were found among them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the labor unions.
The temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass, the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country backward in the habits of organized dealing between management and labor. The advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled principles—to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders.
Firm relations imply some permanence. The employer expected to retain his business; the worker expected to better it. Consequently, the basic American labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient wrongs. Nor does it represent fear. The disgraces of Memorial Day in Chicago and of Gate Four in Detroit will come again if the laws we create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of Americans have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of labor with its demagogues. These exist on the frontiers, where border clashes occur. The main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces capable of coordinated effort. Theodore Roosevelt was prepared to send the troops of the United States to take over the Pennsylvania coal mines, because the mine owners (with "Divine Right" Baer to guide them) refused to deal with the unions under John Mitchell; as soon as that was known, the possibility of creating a labor policy became bright, because Roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost when Cleveland sent troops to Pullman. The position of Government as the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the Government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the settlement of all disputes.