A History of Trade Unionism in the United States

by Selig Perlman

For nine years the Order remained a secret organization and showed but a slow growth. In 1878 it was forced to abolish secrecy. The public mind was rendered uneasy by the revolutionary uprising of workingmen of Paris who set up the famous "Commune of Paris" of 1871, by the destructive great railway strikes in this country in 1877 and, lastly, by a wave of criminal disorders in the anthracite coal mining region in Eastern Pennsylvania,[13] and became only too prone to attribute revolutionary and criminal intents to any labor organization that cloaked itself in secrecy. Simultaneously with coming out into the open, the Knights adopted a new program, called the Preamble of the Knights of Labor, in place of the vague Secret Ritual which hitherto served as the authoritative expression of aims.

This Preamble recites how "wealth," with its development, has become so aggressive that "unless checked" it "will inevitably lead to the pauperisation and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses." Hence, if the toilers are "to enjoy the blessings of life," they must organize "every department of productive industry" in order to "check" the power of wealth and to put a stop to "unjust accumulation." The battle cry in this fight must be "moral worth not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness." As the "action" of the toilers ought to be guided by "knowledge," it is necessary to know "the true condition of the producing masses"; therefore, the Order demands "from the various governments the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics." Next in order comes the "establishment of cooperative institutions productive and distributive." Union of all trades, "education," and producers' cooperation remained forever after the cardinal points in the Knights of Labor philosophy and were steadily referred to as "First Principles," namely principles bequeathed to the Order by Uriah Stephens and the other "Founders."[14]

These idealistic "First Principles" found an ardent champion in Terence V. Powderly, a machinist by trade and twice mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on a labor ticket, who succeeded Stephens in 1878 to the headship of the Order. Powderly bore unmistakably the stamp of this sort of idealism throughout all the time when he was the foremost labor leader in the country. Unlike Samuel Gompers, who came to supplant him about 1890, he was foreign to that spirit of combative unionism which accepts the wage system but concentrates on a struggle to wrest concessions from the employers. Even when circumstances which were largely beyond his control made Powderly a strike leader on a huge scale, his heart lay elsewhere—in circumventing the wage system by opening to the worker an escape into self-employment through cooperation.

Producers' cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the Order of the Knights of Labor expected to lead the American wage-earning class out of the bondage of the wage system into the Canaan of self-employment. Thus the Order was the true successor of the cooperative movement in the forties and sixties. Its motto was "Cooperation of the Order, by the Order, and for the Order." Not scattered local initiative, but the Order as a whole was to carry on the work. The plan resembled the Rochdale system of England in that it proposed to start with an organization of consumers—the large and ever-growing membership of the Order. But it departed radically from the English prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive establishments which were to follow. Consumers' cooperation was to be but a stepping stone to producers' self-employment. Eventually when the Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society—so the plan contemplated—it would control practically the whole market and cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception. So far, therefore, as "First Principles" went, the Order was not an instrument of the "class struggle," but an association of idealistic cooperators. It was this pure idealism which drew to the Order of the Knights of Labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like Dr. Richard T. Ely[15] and President John Bascom of Wisconsin.

The other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union movement grouped around the Cigar Makers' Union, was neither so purely American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently idealistic. On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and "pragmatic." The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies, particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen's Association, the "First Internationale," which was founded by Karl Marx in London in 1864. The conception of economic labor organization which was advanced by the Internationale in a socialistic formulation underwent in the course of years a process of change: On the one hand, through constant conflict with the rival conception of political labor organization urged by American followers of the German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, and on the other hand, through contact with American reality. Out of that double contact emerged the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor.

The Internationale is generally reputed to have been organized by Karl Marx for the propaganda of international socialism. As a matter of fact, its starting point was the practical effort of British trade union leaders to organize the workingmen of the Continent and to prevent the importation of Continental strike-breakers. That Karl Marx wrote its Inaugural Address was merely incidental. It chanced that what he wrote was acceptable to the British unionists rather than the draft of an address representing the views of Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of the "New Italy" and the "New Europe," which was submitted to them at the same time and advocated elaborate plans of cooperation. Marx emphasized the class solidarity of labor against Mazzini's harmony of capital and labor. He did this by reciting what British labor had done through the Rochdale system of cooperation without the help of capitalists and what the British Parliament had done in enacting the ten-hour law of 1847 against the protest of capitalists. Now that British trade unionists in 1864 were demanding the right of suffrage and laws to protect their unions, it followed that Marx merely stated their demands when he affirmed the independent economic and political organization of labor in all lands. His Inaugural Address was a trade union document, not a Communist Manifesto. Indeed not until Bakunin and his following of anarchists had nearly captured the organization in the years 1869 to 1872 did the program of socialism become the leading issue.

The philosophy of the Internationale at the period of its ascendency was based on the economic organization of the working class in trade unions. These must precede the political seizure of the government by labor. Then, when the workingmen's party should achieve control, it would be able to build up successively the socialist state on the foundation of a sufficient number of existing trade unions.

This conception differed widely from the teaching of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassallean socialism was born in 1863 with Lassalle's Open Letter to a workingmen's committee in Leipzig. It sprang from his antagonism to Schultze-Delizsch's[16] system of voluntary cooperation. In Lassalle's eagerness to condemn the idea of the harmony of capital and labor, which lay at the basis of Schultze's scheme for cooperation, he struck at the same time a blow against all forms of non-political organization of wage earners. Perhaps the fact that he was ignorant of the British trade unions accounts for his insufficient appreciation of trade unionism. But no matter what the cause may have been, to Lassalle there was but one means of solving the labor problem-political action. When political control was finally achieved, the labor party, with the aid of state credit, would build up a network of cooperative societies into which eventually all industry would pass.

In short, the distinction between the ideas of the Internationale and of Lassalle consisted in the fact that the former advocated trade unionism prior to and underlying political organization, while the latter considered a political victory as the basis of socialism. These antagonistic starting points are apparent at the very beginning of American socialism as well as in the trade unionism and socialism of succeeding years.

Two distinct phases can be seen in the history of the Internationale in America. During the first phase, which began in 1866 and lasted until 1870, the Internationale had no important organization of its own on American soil, but tried to establish itself through affiliation with the National Labor Union. The inducement held out to the latter was of a practical nature, the international regulation of immigration. During the second phase the Internationale had its "sections" in nearly every large city of the country, centering in New York and Chicago, and the practical trade union part of its work receded before its activity on behalf of the propaganda of socialism.