Moral rights and duties formed upon the relations of man to man are applicable to all situations, and to deny this applicability to a difficult case, is to beg the entire question. The consequences do not stop there, for we all know that to deny the validity of the moral principle in one relation is to sap its strength in all relations.
Employers often resent being obliged to have business relations with workingmen, although they no longer say that they will refuse to deal with them, as a woman still permits herself to say that she “will not argue with a servant.” They nevertheless contend that the men are unreasonable, and that because it is impossible to establish contractual relations with them, they must be coerced. This contention goes far toward legitimatizing terrorism. It therefore seems to them defensible to refuse to go into the courts and to insist upon war because they do it from a consciousness of rectitude, although this insensibly slips into a consciousness of power, as self-righteousness is so prone to do. But these are all the traits of militant youth, which in the teamsters’ strike was indeed borne out by the facts in the case.
The Employers’ Association of Chicago was largely composed of merchants whose experience with trades unionism was almost limited to the Teamsters’ Union which has been in existence for only five years and, from the first, has been truculent and difficult. Had the employers involved been manufacturers instead of merchants, they would have had years of experience with unions of skilled men, and they would have more nearly learned to adjust their personal and business relations to trades unionism. When an entire class in a community confess that without an appeal to arms they cannot deal with trades unions, who, after all, represent a national and international movement a hundred years old, they practically admit that they cannot manage their business under the existing conditions of modern life. To a very great extent it is a confession of weakness, to a very great extent a confession of frailty of temper. To make the adjustment to the peculiar problems of one’s own surroundings is the crux of life’s difficulties. “New organizations” and “new experiments in living” would not arise if there were not a certain inadequateness in existing organizations and ways of living. The new organizations and experiments may not point to the right mode of meeting the situation, but they do point to the existence of inadequateness and the need of readjustment. Changes in business methods have been multiform during the past fifteen years, and Chicago business men who have made those other adjustments would certainly be able to deal with labor in its present organized form if they were not inhibited by certain concepts of their “group morality.”
In the meantime the public, which has been powerless to interfere, can only point to the consequences of grave social import which are sure to result from a prolonged period of disturbance.
First, there is the sharp division of the community into classes, with its inevitable hostility and misunderstanding. Capital lines up on one side, and labor on the other, until the “fair-minded public” disappears and Chicago loses her democratic spirit which has always been her most precious possession. In its place is substituted loyalty to the side to which each man belongs, irrespective of the merits of the case—the “my country right or wrong” sentiment which we call patriotism only in war times, the blind adherence by which a man is attached against his will, as it were, to the blunders of “his own kind.”
During the first week of the strike, I talked with labor men who were willing to admit that there were grounds for indictment against at least two of the officers in the teamsters’ locals. During the third week of the strike all that was swept aside, and one heard only that the situation must be taken quite by itself, with no references to the first causes, that it was a strike of organized capital against organized labor, and that we could have no peace in Chicago until it was “fought to a finish.”
Second, there is an enormous increase in the feeling of race animosity, beginning with the imported negro strike-breakers, and easily extending to “Dagoes” and all other distinct nationalities. The principle of racial and class equality is at the basis of American political life, and to wantonly destroy it is one of the gravest outrages against the Republic.
Chicago is preëminently a city of mixed nationalities. It is our problem to learn to live together in forbearance and understanding and to fuse all the nations of men into the newest and, perhaps, the highest type of citizenship. To accept this responsibility may constitute our finest contribution to the problems of American life, but we may also wantonly and easily throw away such an opportunity by the stirring up of race and national animosity which is so easily aroused and so reluctantly subsides.
Third, there is the spirit of materialism which controls the city and confirms the belief that, after all, brute force, a trial of physical strength, is all that counts and the only thing worthy of admiration. Any check on the moral consciousness is paralyzed when the belief is once established that success is its own justification. When the stream of this belief joins the current of class interest, the spirit of the prize fighters’ ring which cheers the best round and worships the winner, becomes paramount. It is exactly that which appeals to the so-called “hoodlum,” and his sudden appearance upon the street at such times and in such surprising numbers demonstrates that he realizes that he has come to his own. At the moment we all forget that the determination to sacrifice all higher considerations to business efficiency, to make the machine move smoothly at any cost, “to stick at nothing,” may easily make a breach in the ethical constitution of society which can be made good only by years of painful reparation.
Fourth, there is the effect upon the children and the youth of the entire city, for the furrow of class prejudice, which is so easily run through a plastic mind, often leaves a life-long mark. Each morning during the long weeks of the strike, thousands of children at the more comfortable breakfast tables learned to regard labor unions as the inciters of riot and the instruments of evil, thousands of children at the less comfortable breakfast tables shared the impotent rage of their parents that “law is always on the side of capital,” and both sets of children added to the horrors of Manchuria and Warsaw, which were then taking place, the pleasurable excitement that war had become domesticated upon their own streets. We may well believe that these impressions and emotions will be kept by these children as part of their equipment in life and that their moral conceptions will permanently tend toward group moralities and will be cast into a coarser mold.