Second, the immensity of our territory and the great diversity of interests and issues in the forefront of public attention in one section and another. Seldom, if ever, have the conditions which might have solidified any class been sufficiently widespread or synchronous to serve the purpose of united political sentiment or action. Add to this the fact that politicians of both the great parties, more or less intentionally, have managed always to frame the issues so as to encourage this diversity.
Third, the deliberate and long-standing policy of the most influential of the general leaders of the labor organizations—Mr. Samuel Gompers for the most conspicuous example—of keeping those organizations free from the entanglements and distractions of party politics, definitely preventing their acting as a political unit; by intention confining their activities to the industrial, the economic field. This alone, without regard to the fact that the higher-grade unions (using that expression solely with reference to skill) seldom see their interests to be common, so far as the ballot box is concerned. The radical agitation for the establishment of “One Big Union,” to include all classes of laborers as distinguished from capitalists, while it contemplates chiefly the exercise of industrial and economic power, includes the intention to concentrate political power as well.
Fourth, and most important, the fact that “labor,” in the sense in which most politicians, and virtually all of the public, use the term, means chiefly the unskilled workers who contribute muscle to industry. These are to a great extent unorganized, without any conscious unity of interest or purpose; their approach to both industry and political action is as individuals—individuals of more or less shifting residence and comparatively little feeling of political responsibility. Moreover, it is a matter of common knowledge that the great industrial concerns have fostered the existence of masses of unskilled labor, in excess of the actual needs of industry, in order to maintain an “overstocked” labor supply, for the purpose of constant wage-competition to keep down costs. This competition has the inevitable effect of discouraging united action of any kind. And, still further, we have found[162] that the unskilled laborer of foreign birth, on the average, is not available for political activity because he is not naturalized.
This body of the unskilled, industrially indispensable, but politically unassimilated, inarticulate, and unwholesome, consists almost entirely now, and must consist increasingly, of immigrants. Like any other mass of material in an organism, potentially digestible and useful but actually undigested and in the circumstances indigestible, it has clogged the process of assimilation and is infecting the body politic with dangerous toxins. The wonder is that we have got along with it so well. One of the reasons may be the very fact that its influences are not in the ordinary sense political.
Foreigners: the word is used advisedly. For out of the welter of prejudice and misinformation surrounding the subject has emerged clearly the fact that by the time the alien man reaches the point of applying for citizenship and the political power that goes with it, he has been in this country upward of ten years, has advanced materially in social and economic status, and the process of assimilation is far on its way, if not substantially complete. In a majority of cases, he has passed out of the category of what is usually known as “common labor.”
DIVIDED BY RACIAL TRADITIONS
Another thing, conspicuous here as in no other country where “labor” might be regarded as directly a political factor, is the fact that even had these thousands of men been individually available for prompt assimilation, or manageable in their groups as material for political manipulation, they have constituted such a hodge-podge of conflicting racial and national antecedents, prejudices, and inhibitions that any coherent political action by them always has been out of the question. Scandinavian and Slav, Austrian and Italian, British and German, Greek and Turk; Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentile—to say nothing of those smaller clan, village, and even family feuds, often of long-forgotten origin, within the racial groups ... at every turn some hoary animosity, born, perhaps, centuries ago out of historic or obscure conflicts of which the average native-born American maybe never heard in his life, has kept and doubtless long will continue to keep these racial groups apart and practically preclude any possibility of getting them to work together. The events and political by-products of the World War have only further confused and intensified these causes of disunion.
The Socialists alone, of all the considerable political parties, have tried to unite “labor” (chiefly meaning unskilled labor) by efforts to convince all the racial groups of a common political interest superior to any racial interest. They have almost completely failed.
Politicians, large and small, have been to some extent aware of this diversity of traditions and interests among the racial groups, based upon ancient or current controversies in old countries; but their approach to the subject always has been pragmatical and opportunistic, and usually unintelligent without real information about or understanding of the explosive matters with which they were meddling, or any but temporary or local concern about the consequences. The Fiume controversy, interesting both Italians and Jugo-Slavs; the Irish situation; the war between the Poles and the Bolsheviki in Russia; and conspicuously the whole stupendous question of the League of Nations—all are fine examples of international and interracial conflicts and emergencies of which American politicians of both parties have taken advantage for their own purposes without regard to consequences to the welfare of the world—or of their own country, for that matter.