A History of Trade Unionism in the United States

by Selig Perlman

CHAPTER 14

WHY THERE IS NOT AN AMERICAN LABOR PARTY

The question of a political labor party hinges, in the last analysis, on the benefits which labor expects from government. If, under the constitution, government possesses considerable power to regulate industrial relations and improve labor conditions, political power is worth striving for. If, on the contrary, the power of the government is restricted by a rigid organic law, the matter is reversed. The latter is the situation in the United States. The American constitutions, both Federal and State, contain bills of rights which embody in fullness the eighteenth-century philosophy of economic individualism and governmental laissez-faire. The courts, Federal and State, are given the right to override any law enacted by Congress or the State legislatures which may be shown to conflict with constitutional rights.

In the exercise of this right, American judges have always inclined to be very conservative in allowing the legislature to invade the province of economic freedom. At present after many years of agitation by humanitarians and trade unionists, the cause of legislative protection of child and woman laborers seems to be won in principle. But this progress has been made because it has been shown conclusively that the protection of these most helpless groups of the wage-earning class clearly falls within the scope of public purpose and is therefore a lawful exercise of the state's police power within the meaning of the constitution. However, adult male labor offers a far different case. Moreover, should the unexpected happen and the courts become converted to a broader view, the legislative standards would be small compared with the standards already enforced by most of the trade unions. Consequently, so far as adult male workers are concerned (and they are of course the great bulk of organized labor), labor in America would scarcely be justified in diverting even a part of its energy from trade unionism to a relatively unprofitable seeking of redress through legislatures and courts.[106]

But this is no more than half the story. Granting even that political power may be worth having, its attainment is beset with difficulties and dangers more than sufficient to make responsible leaders pause. The causes reside once more in the form of government, also in the general nature of American politics, and in political history and tradition. To begin with, labor would have to fight not on one front, but on forty-nine different fronts.[107]

Congress and the States have power to legislate on labor matters; also, in each, power is divided between an executive and the two houses of the legislature. Decidedly, government in America was built not for strength but for weakness. The splitting up of sovereignty does not especially interfere with the purposes of a conservative party, but to a party of social and industrial reform it offers a disheartening obstacle. A labor party, to be effective, would be obliged to capture all the diffused bits of sovereignty at the same time. A partial gain is of little avail, since it is likely to be lost at the next election even simultaneously with a new gain. But we have assumed here that the labor party had reached the point where its trials are the trials of a party in power or nearing power. In reality, American labor parties are spared this sort of trouble by trials of an anterior order residing in the nature of American politics.

The American political party system antedates the formation of modern economic classes, especially the class alignment of labor and capital. Each of the old parties represents, at least in theory, the entire American community regardless of class. Party differences are considered differences of opinion or of judgment on matters of public policy, not differences of class interest. The wage earner in America, who never had to fight for his suffrage but received it as a free gift from the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic movements and who did not therefore develop the political class consciousness which was stamped into the workers in Europe by the feeling of revolt against an upper ruling class, is prone to adopt the same view of politics. Class parties in America have always been effectively countered by the old established parties with the charge that they tend to incite class against class.

But the old parties had on numerous occasions, as we saw, an even more effective weapon. No sooner did a labor party gain a foothold, than the old party politician, the "friend of labor," did appear and start a rival attraction by a more or less verbal adherence to one or more planks of the rising party. Had he been, as in Europe, a branded spokesman of a particular economic class or interest, it would not have been difficult to ward him off. But here in America, he said that he too was a workingman and was heart and soul for the workingman. Moreover, the workingman was just as much attached to an old party label as any average American. In a way he considered it an assertion of his social equality with any other group of Americans that he could afford to take the same "disinterested" and tradition-bound view of political struggles as the rest. This is why labor parties generally encountered such disheartening receptions at the hands of workingmen; also why it was difficult to "deliver the labor vote" to any party. This, on the whole, describes the condition of affairs today as it does the situations in the past.

In the end, should the workingman be pried loose from his traditional party affiliation by a labor event of transcendent importance for the time being, should he be stirred to political revolt by an oppressive court decision, or the use of troops to break a strike; then, at the next election, when the excitement has had time to subside, he will usually return to his political normality. Moreover, should labor discontent attain depth, it may be safely assumed that either one or the other of the old parties or a faction therein will seek to divert its driving force into its own particular party channel. Should the labor party still persist, the old party politicians, whose bailiwick it will have particularly invaded, will take care to encourage, by means not always ethical but nearly always effective, strife in its ranks. Should that fail, the old parties will in the end "fuse" against the upstart rival. If they are able to stay "fused" during enough elections and also win them, the fidelity of the adherent of the third party is certain to be put to a hard and unsuccessful test. To the outsider these conclusions may appear novel, but labor in America learned these lessons through a long experience, which began when the first workingmen's parties were attempted in 1828-1832. The limited potentialities of labor legislation together with the apparent hopelessness of labor party politics compelled the American labor movement to develop a sort of non-partisan political action with limited objectives thoroughly characteristic of American conditions. Labor needs protection from interference by the courts in the exercise of its economic weapons, the strike and the boycott, upon which it is obviously obliged to place especial reliance. In other words, though labor may refuse to be drawn into the vortex of politics for the sake of positive attainments, or, that is to say, labor legislation, it is compelled to do so for the sake of a negative gain—a judicial laissez-faire. That labor does by pursuing a policy of "reward your friends" and "punish your enemies" in the sphere of politics. The method itself is an old one in the labor movement; we saw it practiced by George Henry Evans and the land reformers of the forties as well as by Steward and the advocates of the eight-hour day by law in the sixties. The American Federation of Labor merely puts it to use in connection with a new objective, namely, freedom from court interference. Although the labor vote is largely "undeliverable," still where the parties are more or less evenly matched in strength, that portion of the labor vote which is politically conscious of its economic interests may swing the election to whichever side it turns. Under certain conditions[108] labor has been known even to attain through such indirection in excess of what it might have won had it come to share in power as a labor party.

The controversy around labor in politics brings up in the last analysis the whole problem of leadership in labor organizations, or to be specific, the role of the intellectual in the movement. In America his role has been remarkably restricted. For a half century or more the educated classes had no connection with the labor movement, for in the forties and fifties, when the Brook Farm enthusiasts and their associates took up with fervor the social question, they were really alone in the field, since the protracted trade depression had laid all labor organization low. It was in the eighties, with the turmoil of the Knights of Labor and the Anarchist bomb in Chicago, that the "intellectuals" first awakened to the existence of a labor problem. To this awakening no single person contributed more than the economist Professor Richard T. Ely, then of Johns Hopkins University. His pioneer work on the Labor Movement in America published in 1886, and the works of his many capable students gave the labor movement a permanent place in the public mind, besides presenting the cause of labor with scientific precision and with a judicious balance. Among the other pioneers were preachers like Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott, who conceived their duty as that of mediators between the business class and the wage earning class, exhorting the former to deal with their employes according to the Golden Rule and the latter to moderation in their demands. Together with the economists they helped to break down the prejudice against labor unionism in so far as the latter was non-revolutionary. And though their influence was large, they understood that their maximum usefulness would be realized by remaining sympathetic outsiders and not by seeking to control the course of the labor movement.