Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

If the great industrial changes could be considered as belonging to the community as a whole and could be reasonably dealt with, the situation would then be difficult enough, but it is enormously complicated by the fact that society has become divided into camps in relation to the industrial system and that many times the factions break out into active hostility. These two camps inevitably develop group morality—the employers tending toward the legal and contractual development of morality, the workingmen toward the sympathetic and human. Among our contemporaries, these two are typified by the employers associations and the trades unions.

It is always difficult to judge a contemporaneous movement with any degree of fairness, and it is perennially perplexing to distinguish what is merely adventitious and temporary from that which represents essential and permanent tendencies. This discrimination is made much more difficult when a movement exhibits various stages of development contemporaneously, when a dozen historic phases are going on at the same time. Yet every historic movement towards democracy, which constantly gathers to itself large bodies of raw recruits while the older groups are moving on, presents this peculiar difficulty. In the case of trades unions, certain groups are marked by lawlessness and disorder, others by most decorous business methods, and still others are fairly decadent in their desire for monopolistic control. It is a long cry from the Chartists of 1839, burning hayricks, to John Burns of 1902, pleading in the House of Commons with well-reasoned eloquence for an extension of the workingmen’s franchise. Nevertheless they are both manifestations of the same movement towards universal suffrage and show no greater difference than that between the Chicago teamsters, who were blocking commerce and almost barricading the streets in 1902 when at the same moment John Mitchell made his well-considered statement that he would rather lose the coal strike, with all that that loss implied, than gain it at the cost of violence. Students of industrial history will point out the sequence and development of the political movement from the Chartist to the Independent Labor party. They will tell us that the same desire burned in the hearts of the ignorant farmers which fired the distinguished parliamentarian, but they give no help to our bewildered minds when we would fain discover some order and sequence between the widely separated events of the contemporaneous labor movement.

We must first get down to the question, In what does “the inevitably destined rise of the men of labor” consist? What are we trying to solve in this “most hazardous problem of the age”? Is progress in the labor movement to come, as we are told progress comes in the non-moral world, by the blind, brute struggle of individual interests; or is it to come, as its earlier leaders believed, through the operation of the human will? Is it a question of morals which must depend upon educators and apostles; or is it merely a conflict of opposing rights which may legitimately use coercion? The question, from the very nature of the case, is confusing; for, of necessity, the labor movement has perfectly legitimate economic and business aspects, which loom large and easily overshadow the ethical. We would all agree that only when men have education, a margin of leisure, and a decent home can they find room to develop the moral life. Before that, there are too many chances that it will be crushed out by ignorance, by grinding weariness, and by indecency. But the danger lies in the conviction that these advantages are to be secured by any means, moral or non-moral, and in holding them paramount to the inner life which they are supposed to nourish. The labor movement is confronted by that inevitable problem which confronts every movement and every individual. How far shall the compromise be made between the inner concept and the outer act? How may we concede what it is necessary to concede, without conceding all?

We constantly forget that, in the last analysis, the spiritual growth of one social group is conditioned by the reaction of other social groups upon it. We ignore the fact that the worship of success, so long dominant in America, has taught the majority of our citizens to count only accomplishment and to make little inquiry concerning methods. Success has become the sole standard in regard to business enterprises and political parties, but it is evident that the public intends to call a halt before it is willing to apply the same standard to labor organizations.

It is clear that the present moment is one of unusual crisis—that many of the trades unions of America have reached a transitional period, when they can no longer be mere propagandists, but are called upon to deal with concrete and difficult situations. When they were small and persecuted, they held to the faith and its implication of idealism. As they become larger and more powerful, they make terms with the life about them, and compromise as best they may with actual conditions.

The older unions, which have reached the second stage that may be described as that of business dealing, are constantly hampered and harassed by the actions of the younger unions which are still in the enthusiastic stage. This embarrassment is especially notable just now, for, during this last period of prosperity, trades unions have increased enormously in numbers; the State Federation of Minnesota, for instance, reported an increase of six hundred per cent. in one year. Nearly all the well-established unions have been flooded by new members who are not yet assimilated and disciplined.

During this period of extraordinary growth, the labor movement has naturally attracted to itself hundreds of organizations which are yet in their infancy and exhibit all the weakness of “group morality.” This doubtless tends to a conception of moral life which is as primitive as that which controlled the beginnings of patriotism, when the members of the newly conscious nation considered all those who were outside as possible oppressors and enemies, and were loyal only towards those whom their imagination included as belonging to the national life. They gave much, and demanded much, in the name of blood brothers, but were merciless to the rest of the world. In addition to its belligerent youth and its primitive morality, the newer union is prone to declare a strike, simply because the members have long suffered what they consider to be grievances, and the accumulated sense of unredressed wrong makes them eager for a chance to “fight for their rights.” At the same time, the employer always attempts his most vigorous attack upon a new union, both because he does not wish organized labor to obtain a foothold in his factory, and because his chances for success are greater before his employees are well disciplined in unionism. Nevertheless in actual conflict a young union will often make a more reckless fight than an older one, like the rough rider in contrast with the disciplined soldier. The members of a newly organized group naturally respond first to a sense of loyalty to each other as against their employers, and then to the wider consciousness of organized labor as against capital. This stage of trades unionism is full of war phraseology, with its “pickets” and “battle-grounds,” and is responsible for the most serious mistakes of the movement.

The sense of group loyalty holds trades unionists longer than is normal to other groups, doubtless because of the constant accessions of those who are newly conscious of its claims.

Those Chicago strikes, which, during the last few years, have been most notably characterized by disorder and the necessity for police interference, have almost universally been inaugurated by the newly organized unions. They have called to their aid the older organizations, and the latter have entered into the struggle many times under protest and most obviously against their best interests.

The Chicago Federation of Labor has often given its official indorsement to hot-headed strikes on the part of “baby unions” because the delegates from the newly organized or freshly recruited unions had the larger vote, and the appeal to loyalty and to fraternity carried the meeting against the judgment of the delegates from the older unions.