Out of a combination of the principles of individual rights, individual self-determination, equality of opportunity, and political equality enumerated and suggested in the Declaration, arose the first and most persistent American labor philosophy. This philosophy differed in no wise from the philosophy of the old American democracy except in emphasis and particular application, yet these differences are highly significant. Labor read into the Declaration of Independence a condemnation of the wage system as a permanent economic régime; sooner or later in place of the wage system had to come self-employment. Americanism to them was a social and economic as well as a political creed. Economic self-determination was as essential to the individual as political equality. Just as no true American will take orders from a king, so he will not consent forever to remain under the orders of a "boss." It was the uplifting force of this social ideal as much as the propelling force of the changing economic environment that molded the American labor program.
We find it at work at first in the decade of the thirties at the very beginning of the labor movement. It then took the form of a demand for a free public school system. These workingmen in Philadelphia and New York discovered that in the place of the social democracy of the Declaration, America had developed into an "aristocracy." They thought that the root of it all lay in "inequitable" legislation which fostered "monopoly," hence the remedy lay in democratic legislation. But they further realized that a political and social democracy must be based on an educated and intelligent working class. No measure, therefore, could be more than a palliative until they got a "Republican" system of education. The workingmen's parties of 1828-1831 failed as parties, but humanitarians like Horace Mann took up the struggle for free public education and carried it to success.
If in the thirties the labor program was to restore a social and political democracy by means of the public school, in the forties the program centered on economic democracy, on equality of economic opportunity. This took the form of a demand of a grant of public land free of charge to everyone willing to brave the rigors of pioneer life. The government should thus open an escape to the worker from the wage system into self-employment by way of free land. After years of agitation, the same cry was taken up by the Western States eager for more settlers to build up their communities and this combined agitation proved irresistible and culminated in the Homestead law of 1862.
The Homestead law opened up the road to self-employment by way of free land and agriculture. But in the sixties the United States was already becoming an industrial country. In abandoning the city for the farm, the wage earner would lose the value of his greatest possession—his skill. Moreover, as a homesteader, his problem was far from solved by mere access to free land. Whether he went on the land or stayed in industry, he needed access to reasonably free credit. The device invented by workingmen to this end was the bizarre "greenback" idea which held their minds as if in a vise for nearly twenty years. "Greenbackism" left no such permanent trace on American social and economic structure as "Republican education" or "free land."
The lure of "greenbackism" was that it offered an opportunity for self-employment. But already in the sixties, it became clear that the workingman could not expect to attain self-employment as an individual, but if at all, it had to be sought on the basis of producers' cooperation. In the eighties, it became doubly clear that industry had gone beyond the one-man-shop stage; self-employment had to stand or fall with the cooperative or self-governing workshop. The protagonist of this most interesting and most idealistic striving of American labor was the "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," which reached its height in the middle of the eighties.
The period of the greatest enthusiasm for cooperation was between 1884 and 1887; and by 1888 the cooperative movement had passed the full cycle of life and succumbed. The failure of cooperation proved a turning point in the evolution of the American labor program. Whatever the special causes of failure, the idealistic unionism, for which the ideas of the Declaration of Independence served as a fountain head, suffered in the eyes of labor, a degree of discredit so overwhelming that to regain its old position was no longer possible. The times were ripe for the opportunistic unionism of Gompers and the trade unionists.
These latter, having started in the seventies as Marxian socialists, had been made over into opportunistic unionists by their practical contact with American conditions. Their philosophy was narrower than that of the Knights and their concept of labor solidarity narrower still. However, these trade unionists demonstrated that they could win strikes. It was to this practical trade unionism, then, that the American labor movement turned, about 1890, when the idealism of the Knights of Labor had failed. From groping for a cooperative economic order or self-employment, labor turned with the American Federation of Labor to developing bargaining power for use against employers. This trade unionism stood for a strengthened group consciousness. While it continued to avow sympathy with the "anti-monopoly" aspirations of the "producers," who fought for the opportunity of self-employment, it also declared that the interests of democracy will be best served if the wage earners organized by themselves.
This opportunist unionism, now at last triumphant over the idealistic unionism induced by America's spiritual tradition, soon was obliged to fight against a revolutionary unionism which, like itself, was an offshoot of the socialism of the seventies. At first, the American Federation of Labor was far from hostile to socialism as a philosophy. Its attitude was rather one of mild contempt for what it considered to be wholly impracticable under American conditions, however necessary or efficacious under other conditions. When, about 1890, the socialists declared their policy of "boring from within," that is, of capturing the Federation for socialism by means of propaganda in Federation ranks, this attitude remained practically unchanged. Only when, dissatisfied with the results of boring from within, the socialists, now led by a more determined leadership, attempted in 1895 to set up a rival to the Federation in the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, was there a sharp line drawn between socialist and anti-socialist in the Federation. The issue once having become a fighting issue, the leaders of the Federation experienced the need of a positive and well rounded-out social philosophy capable of meeting socialism all along the front instead of the former self-imposed super-pragmatism.
By this time, the Federation had become sufficiently removed in point of time from its foreign origin to turn to the social ideal derived from pioneer America as the philosophy which it hoped would successfully combat an aggressive and arrogant socialism. Thus it came about that the front against socialism was built out from the immediate and practical into the ultimate and spiritual; and that inferences drawn from a reading of Jefferson's Declaration, with its emphasis on individual liberty, were pressed into service against the seductive collectivist forecasts of Marx.