The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

This new relation between a workman and an impersonal, soulless corporation which hires him, is one that he does not readily grasp. And, for the sake of meeting the new relation, this “fusing all the skirts of self” and merging individuality into an organization which attempts to regulate the hours of labor, and its wages, and for whom one shall work, and for whom not, is a thing abhorrent to him.

“Why,” he said to me, “I give up my independence, and I’m no better than the worst carpenter of the lot. We all get union-wages alike. There’s no incentive for a man to do his best. He ain’t a man any more, anyway; he’s only a part of a machine. Why, such work as some I see done here, I’d be ashamed to do by moonlight, with my eyes shut. But it don’t make no difference in the union, you’re all on the same level, as near as I can make out.”

Finally I proposed to him that we should go together, on some Sunday afternoon, to the meeting of the Central Labor Union, where he could become acquainted with some of the members and learn at first hand the objects and ends of organization and something of its actual working. The members whom I particularly wished him to know were some of the Socialists there, who seemed to me to have a considerable knowledge of Trades-Unionism, and who took, I thought, a judicial view of it.

As an unskilled laborer I was not eligible to membership in any union, but I was admitted freely to the central meetings, to which I sometimes went in company with Socialists who were delegates of their respective orders. Under their tutelage, I was shown the operation of an exceedingly complex system, which, seen without guidance, would have appeared to me hopelessly chaotic. I was seeing it, I realized, from the point of view of the Socialists, and I was interested immediately in learning their attitude.

They are, I found, most ardent supporters of the principle of organization among workingmen. They regard the fact of the organization of wage-earners as among the most significant developments in the evolution of a socialistic state. But they are very impatient of the slow rate of progress in Trades-Unionism. The ignorance of the great mass of workers of how to further their own interests is, to the Socialist, the most discouraging feature in labor-organization. “Why,” they ask, “when we working people already have so strong a nucleus of organization for economic ends, do we not direct it at once into the field of politics, and secure immediately, by our overwhelming numbers, the legislation which we need, and so inaugurate a co-operative commonwealth?”

Nowhere have the walking-delegates and the general agitators of their class sincerer foes than among the Socialists who, more than to any other active cause, attribute the comparative ineffectualness of unionism to the influence of these men. Very readily they believe them purchasable, and that often they are little else than the paid agents of the capitalists. Their great influence over workingmen is used, the Socialists seem to believe, chiefly in their own interests and particularly for selfish political ends.

This habit of mind serves to illustrate what eventually appeared to me to be highly characteristic of the general attitude of Socialists. The key to their mental processes in considering things social, lies, I am quite sure, in the idea of existing conditions as being maintained by a vast capitalistic conspiracy. At all events this clew has cleared up for me the mystery which at first I found in many of their ways of thinking.

However natural may have been the social order in some of its historic phases, they evidently regard it at the present as largely artificial. There is no real vitality, they contend, in the political issues upon which the great national parties are divided. The party cries of “free trade” and “protection” and the like, are manufactured by professional politicians who are in the employ of the capitalists. The purpose is to divert the minds of the working classes by these sham contentions and so keep them about evenly divided politically, and thus prevent their coalescing in overwhelming force in political action for their own interests. Nothing seems to anger a Socialist more than the spectacle of workingmen roused to enthusiasm by the crowds and speeches and processions and brass bands of the usual political campaign. They see in them then only the ridiculous dupes of the capitalists, who have contributed to the campaign funds for the very purpose of thus befooling their employees, and who look with about equal indifference upon the momentary triumph of one party or the other so long as no labor party is in the ascendant.

However free in the past the play of purely natural evolutionary forces may have been in determining social development, and however free may be their course again in moulding a future state, their operation is checked for the present to the Socialists’ vision by the active intervention of the capitalists, who, in some way, have succeeded in effecting a social structure which is highly favorable to themselves, and for whose undisturbed continuance they unscrupulously employ all the resources of wealth and craft and dark conspiracy. The idea appeared at its plainest, perhaps, in their more vindictive speeches, where the strong undercurrent of feeling was—“There is cruel injustice and wrong in society as it is, and someone is to blame for it, and unhesitatingly we charge the blame against the capitalists.”

It was with this interpretation in mind that I took Mr. Ford with me one afternoon to the meeting of the Central Labor Union. I was curious to see the effect of the gathering upon him. A child of another age in his experience of certain economic relations, he was an interesting phenomenon in the sudden contact with modern industrialism.