Labor Historians and Their Contributions to an Understanding of Labor Struggles in United States History, Past and Present
The labor movement has moved forward in this country against great obstacles. It has moved forward organizationally, in terms of the growing size of unions, large strike funds, sizable and expensive union halls, and full-time organizers on the union payroll. Better working conditions have been won through strikes, and higher rates of pay achieved in contracts. Professional labor historians have played a major role in documenting and interpreting class struggle in American history.
From the fiery speeches of union leaders— like Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, William Sylvis, Terence Powderley, Samuel Gompers, John Mitchell, John Lewis— and from statistics on low wages and long hours, such labor historians have been able to present a very accurate picture of early labor struggles in the 19th century, as well as their continuation in our own century.
Some of the labor historians looked at this quarter include Doris B. McLaughlin, Jeremy Brecher, Anthony Bimba, Paul Nyden, Philip S. Foner (one of the deans of labor historians), Irving Werstein, and Henry Pelling. The picture they present is sometimes grim, sometimes optimistic. Grim, in the sense that an extensive, documented look at working conditions for the past 150 years is full of dismal stories regarding the brutal wage exploitation of workers.
Optimistic, however, in that nearly all of these authors are committed to the view, well-justified by historical research, that labor struggles have improved conditions for the laboring class. Compared to general history texts which ignore or minimize the lives of ordinary working people, these books are excellent summaries of how the vast majority of the population fared in U.S. history.
The authors do not pull punches; they base their observations and opinions on a wealth of statistical information. Their arguments are often cogent and persuasive, despite presenting a contrary view to the overly-rosy view of prosperity as the dominant theme of American social development among conservative historians, bourgeois journalists, etc. The books themselves are part of the labor movement’s overall efforts to be heard and understood; the authors’ sympathies run deeply towards people who perform the physical toil of the nation.
Nevertheless, the scholarly quality is of the first order, and there is no doubt that such historians are respected in their fields, and have achieved a fair amount of influence as regards historical interpretations. That the labor movement had to fight for its existence, to survive and prosper, is hardly a point of dispute anymore.
In 1806 (according to Werstein’s The Great Struggle), a trial of 8 Philadelphia cordwainers (shoemakers) occurred, and their attempts to form a union were declared to be a “criminal conspiracy”; they were found guilty by a jury composed of 12 businessmen. The unions remained illegal (or at least potentially so) until 1842, when Chief Justice Memuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court held that unions were legal and not “conspiracies.”
Union organizers had to face the dismal prospects of blacklisting, beatings, the hardest jobs in mine and factory, employer hostility, prosecution in the courts, and persecution in the press. Court injunctions, yellow dog contracts, and occasional frame-ups were all episodic features of labor struggles in the U.S. repeated over and over.
The organizers were motivated to form unions to oppose grave injustices: terrible living and working conditions, such as long hours (10, 12, and 14 hour days), low wages, crowded slums, etc. These have invariably been the principal demands of the movement: higher wages and shorter hours, and better conditions. As well, recognition of the union itself has been an integral demand of such agitation. Workers were sometimes paid in scrip, rather than cash, and thus forced to shop at company stores (with prices much higher than elsewhere).
Miners had to pay for the use of tools, and often were paid only for mining and not the work that precedes the mining (such as digging and shoring up mine shafts). Cars for carrying coals in the mines were enlarged by the owners; meant to carry a ton, some carried as much as 3,700 pounds, though the worker was not paid for the additional coal he had dug and loaded. Furthermore, such cars could be run across the weighing station at full speed, which again lessened the weight of the coal thus recorded. Naturally, then, a demand of coal miners was to hire their own checkweighman.
In this fashion, demands could vary considerably from region to region, industry to industry, mine to factory, and so on. Workers in mines beset by poisonous lead fumes, or workers in silk mills suffering from lead, zinc, and tin added in the manufacturing process (called “dynamiting”), of course expressed concern for the immediate hazards they faced on the job. Workers in factories operating machinery fought for safe equipment, with guards (as in stamp presses used for cutting metal, where fingers were amputated as machinery wore out).
The major labor historians can document an endless amount of abuses in industry after industry. Without going into all the specifics, it is easier to focus on general and long-term demands most unions have in common: higher wage, shorter hours, safer working conditions, and union recognition (plus, increasingly, “fringe benefits,” such as paid vacations, medical insurance, and so on).
Philadelphia unions formed a central union council by 1827, called the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations, the first city-wide union of its kind in the world. In less than a decade, some 13 cities in the U.S. had followed suit. Philadelphia workers also formed the Workingmen’s Party: its demands were for free and equal public education, the restriction of child labor, the universal 10-hour day, and abolition of imprisonment for debt. In 1852, a National Typographical Union was formed, the first permanent national union (in six states: the N.T.U.), with a national strike fund to its credit.
A National Iron Molders Union was not long in forming (1859), though it lasted only a few years and withered away by 1863. A National Labor Union was formed in 1866, advocating an 8 hour day (along with “Eight Hour Leagues” as well):
“The federation (N.L.U.) came out for organizing unskilled workers, backed land reform laws, called for a boycott of goods made by convict labor, demanded repeal of the contract labor law, urged international labor unity and pledged to help women workers and Negroes.”[1]
William Sylvis, the N.L.U.’s leader, urged the members to join Marx’s First International, indicating its radical bent. In 1869, a National Colored Union came into existence and the Knights of Labor was formed secretly, with Uriah S. Stephens at its head. It gained 50,000 members in the next ten years, came out into the open, and then experienced a dynamic period of expansion in the 1880’s as 600,000 workers rushed to join it. This was one of the first great waves of union popularity and growth but such development has not always been steady.
There have been periods of slow growth and retrogression where numbers fell off; but the 1800’s was one of great vitality (as was, 50 years later, the 1930’s), and overall union membership has increased. The 1886 Haymarket Affair tragedy came as a huge setback to the union movement; the conviction of Anarchists for a bomb-throwing at a Chicago evening rally created an image of the labor groups as prone to violence. The charges were false and Governor Altgeld later pardoned the Anarchists sentence to jail (four were hanged outright).
In this brief overview of the origins of the labor movement we have come to a fork in the road; in 1881, the American Federation of Labor was formed and “business unionism” became its philosophy. One then had two wings of the labor movement: one, reform-oriented, interested in bettering the lot of skilled workers, hiring business agents to negotiate for them (the A.F.L.) and the other, more hostile to the system of wage exploitation in general, though still amorphous. The Molly Maguires, The Western Federation of Miners, and the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1875-1915 period represented three such fairly militant groups, to say nothing of the newfound Socialist Parties, etc.
During the Great Depression, a veritable wave of union organizing occurred, with some 6 to 8 million new members signing up. Belonging to a union became respectable and has remained so until this day; there are some 20 million union members today but of course that leaves tens of millions of working men and women unorganized.
Conditions have improved in some very noticeable and significant ways; the 8 hr. day is standard in most places, wages for skilled and semi-skilled workers have gone up; unions are recognized as bargaining agents for workers; many kinds of fringe benefits have been drawn up; safety has become a recognized necessity; child labor has been outlawed, and the special problems of women given attention (maternity leave); discrimination against women and racial minorities has been outlawed.
Thus, the improvements are many and major. Yet, the question also remains, the fundamental relationship of owner and worker has not been touched, the rates of profit are high and wages seldom compare to the fabulous salaries of top executives; class divisions remain, with millions of people doing the actual physical labor of the nation, at fixed hourly rates, while the owners, industrialists, bankers, financiers and the like continue to pile up the most extravagant fortunes imaginable.
(Lundberg’s America’s 60 Families gives a good account of this plutocracy; though written in the 1930’s, it provides an extensive account of the families of great wealth in the U.S. which is a needed and helpful eye-opener when compared with the exhaustive labor histories documenting the abysmal wages of workers).
The labor historians— Brecher, Bimba, Foner, Werstein, Pelling— all sympathize fully with the working class’ predicament. Most of them have a strong sense of outrage at class exploitation in the past and by and large they carry over their class analysis into the present. A few of the authors have actually contributed to this process of labor struggle engaged in against great odds; Haywood, Debs, Joe Hill, Helen Keller, and Paul Robeson (to mention the 5 biographies on the reading list) were courageous labor leaders of friends of labor.
The other historians documented the struggle in books written during the last decade or so but both direct participant and historian have joined their talents over the years to give the labor movement strength organizationally and a voice philosophically. The general bourgeois press has often been anti-labor but these scholars provide excellent documentation for the grievances of workers that must be read and evaluated by all fair-minded persons today.
All the books have certain themes in common: they focus on the decades of bitterest class struggle in American history and are invariably and overwhelmingly sympathetic to the plain, ordinary, everyday working people of this country. The writers themselves are sometimes outstanding scholars with impressive academic credentials (most notably Foner, DuBois, McFarland, McLaughlin, Brecher, Nyden, etc.). A small but vigorous part of the academic community has devoted itself to documenting labor struggles in this country.
There are seldom “neat” or simplistic views here; the struggles were long and hard, took decades, were fought on many fronts, waxed hot and heavy one year and fell back the next. Advances in one place could be offset or undone by defeats elsewhere. Progress was sometimes slow and haphazard, though gradually a steady improvement was made and definite victories secured.
These historians are of the strength and spirit of the labor movement; they are almost of the blood and guts of it. They are not satisfied to be dry, dusty scholars but involve themselves with the most controversial social problems of the eras they survey. They are not apologists for the dominant economic system when it is guilty of victimizing the working class, the creators of the wealth of the land. The scholars do not think of their own advancement first or of bending the truth or of compromising their principles with a flashy but false rose-colored view of American history.
Instead, they exercise continuously and generously a large and genuine concern for laboring people; they take the blinders off chauvinistic American history texts which do not own up to the widespread poverty, exploitation, brutality, and racism in the 19th and 20th centuries in U.S. history. If a historian’s primary function is to be truthful, labor historians such as these are writing some of the most accurate accounts of American history yet seen.
If multi-volume works by John R. Commons and Philip S. Foner are too difficult for the average layman to read, then there are short volumes— brief but penetrating— by Werstein and Pelling to consider. These authors recapture a disappearing past to prove conclusively that the class divisions, extremes of wealth, the abysmal working and living conditions for millions, was just as bad as earlier polemicists had maintained; the street corner soap-box orator, the pamphleteer, the radical union leader, find their angry words to be not in vain but stunningly confirmed by professional historians who devote exhaustive research efforts into these very same questions.
Though they have achieved PhD’s “through the system,” such authors have not sacrificed a basic democratic commitment to working people, the majority of the population, and who, in a democracy, deserve the greatest attention, respect, and proper chronicling of their lives.
Perhaps the best book on the list of twenty-four was the Autobiography of William D. Haywood, in some ways as precedent-setter in the field of literature for honest, hard-hitting retrospectives of radical labor leaders. The book expresses tremendous passion and dedication to the working class, and the writing style reflects the strong traits of concentration associated with Haywood and his complete devotion to the cause of workers.
The book balances episodes from his early life with an increasing amount of his later political philosophy: from a disgruntled worker himself seeking for answers to one of the most famous and colorful of all labor figures later on as leader of the Western Federation of Miners (founded 1893) and the Industrial Workers of the World (founded 1905). “Labor philosophy” might be a better way to express it— as Haywood was disgusted with the abuses and hypocrisy of the existing political system and did not put much faith in it, although he did not repudiate political action entirely, as his critics sometimes charged.
He was no stranger to hard work; even as a boy, he had to work on a farm for a $1.00 a month plus board. He saw a lynching as a youngster that shocked him and made him ask how such injustices could occur. He grew up in Utah, where the Mormons had tremendous power, defied the federal government, and were responsible for the Meadows Massacre (Haywood, born 1869, could remember people talking about the Massacre, in which 100-150 wagon-train pilgrims from Arkansas and Missouri, former persecutors of the Mormons, were murdered by them).
He went to work in a mine by the age of 15 and later worked in a lead mine where lead poisoning was a common problem. There are amusing “Old West” anecdotes in his book: how Dutch Jake’s burro found a lead ore mine; how he sat down to a poker game with three other men and it turned out each of them had lost an eye (a boyhood accident, in Haywood’s case); how a worker agreed to put a copy of the Constitution of the W.F.M. and Haywood’s membership card under the cornerstone of the new Caldwell, Idaho courthouse (while Haywood was in jail); how he was arrested in Yakima, Washington for smoking cigarettes; how the W.F.M. voted him $500.00 for a vacation, but which he never got, having to serve 18 months in prison instead— quipping that the time in jail was his vacation; how after one of his arrests the jailer let him out and use the deputy’s desk as an office for Haywood’s union activities; how on a berth in the hold of a ship on his way to Europe, a steward and I.W.W. sympathizer helped get him decent food.
While the anecdotes, personal remembrances, and unusual episodes of Haywood’s life make fascinating reading, the book’s major theme centers on the terrible working conditions for miners in the West and Haywood’s steady move up the union hierarchy, serving in various capacities until he was a leader of the W.F.M. and later the I.W.W. The most famous incidents associated with Haywood would include his 1906 trial for “murder,” a transparent frame-up that fell through, with the help of famed attorney Clarence Darrow; Haywood’s founding, with others, of the militant I.W.W. in 1905; and his expulsion from the Socialist Party in 1912 for refusing to repudiate direct action, sabotage, etc.
During and after World War I, the prosecutions of I.W.W. members for “criminal syndicalism” became widespread and long 10 and 20 year sentences were meted out to them, including Haywood. Having suffered already from health hazards on the job and from his time in jail on previous occasions, Haywood found he had a chance to gain passage on a ship heading to Europe.
Believing in the I.W.W. and the principles it stood for— fighting for the miners and lumberjacks of the West, the textile and unskilled workers of the East, the agricultural laborers— he took the chance and made his way to the Soviet Union, the world’s first socialist state. There he lived as hero and honored guest for a number of years, writing, being sought for advice on labor questions, and working with children until his death due to illness in 1928. His manuscript does not include an account of his years in the U.S.S.R., but a chapter was added by a friend describing his life there.
Haywood grew up working in the mines (suffered injuries of various kinds), began to see the need for unions, found himself propelled towards leadership roles by his fellow workers. For years he was a colorful, dynamic, radical labor leader who castigated the employing class and its shameless profits based on the misery of millions of working men and women. His book is in itself a sort of labor text, including the history of many strikes in the West, as well as an excellent account of the W.F.M. and I.W.W.
Both participant and writer, he knew his subject matter well and his information is virtually incontrovertible. He knew firsthand about sulphur and copper fumes (poisonous), wretched bullpens for arrested workers, deportations of miners into the desert without food and water, 11 hour days and longer (a 24 hour day at the end of 2-week shifts), a contract labor system, an 8-hour day passed in Colorado but not enforced by the authorities, beatings and murders of union organizers (and Haywood had many close scrapes of his own); one deported miner shipped himself back in a barrel! Haywood’s inspiration is the strength and courage of the miners; his commitment was to them, and to the unorganized workers of the West and East, in general.
The Free Speech Fights of the I.W.W. in the Northwest were legendary and while the I.W.W. suffered eventually for its uncompromising rhetoric and reluctance to disown militant tactics fighting the employing class, Haywood himself remains one of the larger figures of the labor movement in the 1890-1920 period. Class tensions were great; Haywood hoped to see the working class victorious. The impetus he gave to organizing unions in the face of the stiffest and most brutal opposition— his personal courage, his leadership in practical matters, and his theoretical abilities in knowing when to attack and when to hold— are impressive examples in the history of labor movement of men who became an irresistible force in their own right. The book contains a wealth of information but this brief synopsis must do for now.
In addition to Haywood’s Autobiography, there were four other books concerned with labor biography: Morais and Cahn’s Gene Debs: the Story of a Fighting American (1948), Foner’s The Case of Joe Hill (1965), Foner’s Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years (1967) and James Steele, To Live Like Paul Robeson (1977). The books are short but insightful and educational, nevertheless. Indeed, the authors know one need not write ponderous 500-page tomes to make a point, and that brevity may make for a wider reading audience than length.
By looking at the lives of these persons we learn a good deal about labor history. Gene Debs was one of America’s finest labor leaders and the stories that abound of his generosity, dedication, and wise speeches amaze one, for Morais and Cahn extract the essence of his selfless service on behalf of the working class.
That persons like Helen Keller and Paul Robeson are attracted to socialism should not surprise us; Helen Keller overcame her many handicaps to become a devoted Socialist and publicly so in the 1910-22 period. Robeson, a great Negro concert artist, was long associated with many labor and progressive causes. People like Haywood, Debs, Joe Hill (the I.W.W. song-writer framed for murder in Utah and executed), Keller, and Robeson experienced poverty firsthand or witnessed it at close range and its devastating effects on the lives of people.
Their superb writings raise the reader onto a lofty moral plane. They strove to break the bonds of fate, the older view that there must always be poverty, destitution, and suffering because God ordained it or the economic system demanded it, etc. They sought to organize, inspire, and instill in the working class a sense of its own strength.
Throughout such works the theme is always “in unity there is strength: organize!” Fight for what is right and fair to the toiling millions, fight for what is yours— the full value of the products made by the brawn and brain of the workers, by your own hands! The “fight” here does not mean with rocks and guns necessarily but fight with words and deeds and, above all, organizing through strength in the union.
However, these five labor figures were not shrinking wall violets, either; they understood the necessity for workers to fight with numbers and unity during hard-fought strikes as well! Their prose rises to the heights of moral inspiration; passages by Haywood, Debs, Hill, Keller, and Robeson read like some of the most impassioned appeals to humanitarian ideals ever conceived.
Debs and Keller, indeed, are well known for the brilliance of their prose; all five authors thoroughly refute the image of working class leaders as uncouth or crude. To the contrary, their words based on a basic love of justice have been incubating for a long time, though it has taken the resurrected efforts of a later generation of labor historians to prove the point. It may be instructive to look at the magnificent scholarly and literary efforts of Philip S. Foner, for example, the most obvious successor to Common’s crown as the greatest labor historian of American union struggles and class hostility.
In The Case of Joe Hill, Foner documents the well-known story of an I.W.W. song-writer who ran afoul of Utah mining interests, was tried for murder, and later executed. Examining all the information in the case in minute detail, Foner demonstrates the evidence against Hill to be extremely skimpy, if not downright contradictory and fraudulent. The beautiful melodies and lyrics of Hill’s songs make one question the likelihood of him committing a violent act. At the time of the trial, the papers blared he had been arrested elsewhere for serious offenses, which Foner shows to be untrue.
Hill’s courage at the time of his trial, his refusal to provide an alibi for himself because he said it might compromise the interests of a lady he knew, the strong words of his final days, his “Last Will and Testament,” all speak of a lofty moral inspiration that has nothing in common with a robbery/murder suspect. In the 1920’s, the classic song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” was composed; Hill appears by the bedside of a man still saddened by his death. “I never died says he / wherever workers strike and organize / it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.”
Foner synthesizes traditional faith in the innocence of Joe Hill with a carefully-developed examination of the severely-flawed character of the legal evidence against Joe Hill: “It takes more than guns to kill a man/ what they can never kill, went on to organize.” (And, appropriately enough to this paper, the greatest singer of this song was Paul Robeson, the subject of a short work by James Steele).
In Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years, Foner returns to document that the deaf, dumb, and blind girl who learned to read, write, and talk (mastering four foreign languages) was a convinced Socialist and added her eloquent pen and voice to many contemporary labor issues. She spoke out against industrial conditions (and prostitution) that produced blindness; against poverty and its terrible effects on people; for the rights of union people to organize and strike; for the right of the Soviet Union to exist following its 1917 Revolution, and so on.
She was quite the rage as a triple-handicapped girl who attended college and made great advances in her studies but when she spoke out against college curricula as a boring, dry study of a dead past, the bourgeois press lost interest in her. They accused the Socialists of taking advantage of her but one only need read her fiery replies to see what a fiercely independent, intelligent, and brilliant mind this woman possessed.
The Socialist movement possessed many such literary talents (Edward Bellamy, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, etc.) and it is not surprising that great minds gravitated towards socialism as a philosophy. Their love of mankind led them to adopt a socialist viewpoint as the best and only way of ending the cruel exploitation of capitalism. It is quite typical of education in this country that an excellent movie like “The Miracle Worker” (based on Helen Keller’s childhood) would neglect to mention she later became a Socialist.
This is a kind of pre-ordained Cinderella censorship in which American workers and others are said never to have been interested in socialism, on the basis of history texts which simply ignore all the evidence to the contrary. Foner, in The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Impact on American Liberals, Radicals, and Labor, shows conclusively how extensively developed was the movement to defend the Soviet Union’s right to exist as a new socialist state.
(Many labor historians chronicle, for example, that arms on the West Coast meant to be shipped to counter-revolutionary leaders in Russia were refused handling by dockworkers in Seattle and San Francisco and the same happened, on an even larger scale, in Britain. See Werstein, Brecher, Foner, Pelling, etc.).
In the three chapters read in Foner’s Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973, Foner documents the conditions of black workers in the 1930’s and the advances made in the labor movement regarding this most distinctively American problem, showing:
- conditions for Negroes were rock-bottom terrible in the 1930’s, worse even than what unemployed white workers had to face;
- the AFL constantly dragged its heels on taking action against racial discrimination in their unions; and
- the CIO, while not entirely free from some racist policies in certain of its unions, made enormous advances for black and white unity, a story that constitutes one of the grandest steps forward for the Black people since Reconstruction.
Foner supports all his arguments with such a wealth of statistics as to leave little room for refutation. If anything, his research and documentation is so exhaustive, the average reader at first may be put off with all the statistics adduced. Nevertheless, Foner is an eminently good stylist and one of the most enjoyable of scholars to read, sticking to measured statements substantiated by the evidence without giving up his basic commitment to chronicling the history of labor struggles (and abuses) in the U.S.
The early union struggles rarely had such scholars as these to support them; union leaders were seldom college-educated and had not the time nor inclination to prove “with data” what was visible as a daily reality right before their eyes: low wages, long hours, tired backs, unsafe conditions, industrial accidents— while the profits for the owners and dividends for the stockholders kept getting higher. Foner is not a detached scholar but one whose works in themselves intend to help advance the cause of future efforts of workers to improve their working and living conditions (and the same can be said of McLaughlin, Nyden, Werstein, Pelling, etc.).
This is history-writing with a lively on-going passion, which can help make history as well as describe it. Foner has shown the way of how persons concerned with such issues can contribute on an academic level and how, in effect, the labor movement and American society can benefit from a more truthful presentation of class relationships in American history, especially episodes of conflict that are not presented in the standard high school and college text books.
The fight continues on many levels: to improve the standard of living for millions, to eliminate poverty and racism, to develop a greater measure of American democracy at home, to make the “two-party” system less an instrument of the ruling class and more responsive to the interests of the working people themselves. The educational system cannot be used indefinitely as a source of apologetics for the status quo; Foner and others have helped crack open the door; they have introduced in scholarly works the very arguments of class analysis that were so “taboo” for the popular press of an earlier day.
Not only hasn’t Joe Hill died (according to the song) but there are still people asking, what powerful economic interests framed him and wanted him dead? How do people expose and strip such economic royalists of their abusive power? This is admittedly polemical, but for a purpose: radical political movements and union struggles seldom have gotten a fair shake in the popular press (often capitalist-owned) in the past but these scholars have not been silenced. Indeed, they are creating a minor renaissance of interest in a history of working people in the U.S. that pulls no punches; they seek the hard facts and the hard truths, however unpleasant and irritating they might seem to conservative business interests.
All the books on the reading list— from Haywood’s 1929 Autobiography to James Steele’s 1977 To Live Like Paul Robeson— share this common humanistic impulse, this dedication to people and the popular element as the most important aspect of history–and not details limited to the lives of Presidents and their wives, etc. Though the authors are from different eras and vary considerably in profession, personality, and philosophy, they join their combined efforts to demand a better life for working people.
They support workers demanding better working conditions, benefits, and salary, to be achieved primarily through their own efforts and “strength in numbers”. They support the workers’ efforts to improve their unity and organizing to create unions that cannot be broken.
There is a far greater wealth of information here— lively presented, with humor, pathos, and understanding— that can hardly be duplicated in long, dusty histories that take the life out of these very real labor struggles. And that, too, should not surprise us; this is another contribution of “labor historians,” to make history real to us and immediate; to make us realize that all people are part of American history and not just high-salaried government officials; to make us realize the thoughts and hopes, dreams and actions of workers and “ordinary” people, are not lost but become the paving blocks on a road of a better tomorrow.
The fight for unions, for democracy, for justice, do not disappear, cannot be obliterated through neglect or lies; it is common knowledge for millions of Americans though it deserves greater coverage and popularizing by a new generation of competent labor historians.
The owners of the means of production have stolen millions and billions of dollars from the muscles of the working masses; it behooves us to insure that they never have a chance to steal our history, our heritage, our struggles, our sufferings in poverty. They must not be allowed to ignore or ridicule the labor movement’s tentative steps forward, the workers’ advances both slow and rapid. To the contrary, all future generations of young Americans should have a chance to read and appreciate a real slice of their country’s history, shorn of myths and deceptions.
It is a history that should make us all proud and the more carefully we document it, the more certain it is we can prevent repetition of the worst tragedies: slave labor, imprisonment for debt, contract and convict labor, child labor, underpaid wages for women and children. The working class of America has had to put up with wages so low and conditions so terrible it defies the powers of the imagination.
It is difficult to conjure up that reality of destitution and hopelessness that was once so commonplace; it is challenging to describe how millions of workers put up with the extreme poverty and squalid living conditions for so long. Somehow they managed to survive it, in part because they saw the necessity and wisdom of organizing unions to defend their collective rights.
They went on to build a strong labor movement that has become an integral part of the American scene and one that can never be denied again.
OTHER SOURCES
To summarize briefly in annotated form a few of the other books read:
In McFarland’s book, Roosevelt, Lewis, and the New Deal, 1933-1940, we have a fine historian describing the relationship of the two men in its New Deal context, the period of friendly feelings during 1932-36 turning to suspicion and bad feelings in FDR’s second administration as Lewis became miffed over the absence of new labor legislation. McFarland gives a fair sense of the major bones of contention between them, the colorful personality of Lewis (his fisticuffs on the floor at the 55th A.F. of L. Convention), FDR’s generally pro-labor views, and how personal relationships between the two experienced many ups and downs in the 1930’s.
The book is a model for those interested in writing short, concise biography. It’s a bit weak in treating the two men as “personalities” and not spokesmen for broader historical movements; the early comment of McFarland’s that Lewis was born in a “dirty coal-mining town” (Lucas, Iowa) and FDR in Hyde Park luxury is not merely an incidental fact; Lewis fought his way forward from firsthand knowledge of the coal mines.
The two men were hardly equal in “personality” and influence, certainly not initially. It is somewhat misleading of the author to discuss mass movements in terms of what these two men did, though at times McFarland does use his dual-biography approach as an excellent springboard for discussing the social history of the 1930’s in its own right.
I read one chapter of Doris B. McLaughlin’s book, Michigan Labor: A Brief History from 1918 to the Present— Ch. 5, “Labor Marches Sitting Down,” the story of the sit-down strikes in the automobile plants in Detroit. It is a succinct presentation of the highlights of such struggles with comments on the historical origins of the sit-down strike as a tactical weapon, and focuses on the successes the auto workers had as one major auto company after another gave in to union demands for recognition.
Likewise, I read 3 chapters of Foner’s book on Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (already discussed); indirectly, a companion piece to such a study might be Paul Nyden’s Black Coal Miners in the United States, a 1974 monograph for the American Institute for Marxist Studies, headed by Dr. Herbert Aptheker.
Nyden’s book gives the history of black coal miners in the U.S., especially in the five Appalachian states, where their numbers were considerable, and a fairly high percentage of the miners of those states overall (as much as 25%). He discusses discrimination against the black coal miners; the exaggerated myths surrounding their use as strikebreakers; the racism of the coal mine owners and even of some of the unions; and how their numbers have declined over the last few decades, due to mechanization and discrimination, especially in hiring and promotion policies wherein white workers got jobs before black workers.
The latter worked at the hardest jobs of physical toil; they might be used to train motormen on coal cars in the mines but the jobs then went to white miners, not blacks. The Negroes were used as shovelers and perhaps brakemen and for a long time seldom anything higher. Nyden shows some unions have made breakthrough and black union officials have increased in number. An insightful work, it shows yet another way in which black people have contributed considerably to American labor and thoroughly refutes the racist myths of black workers a “lazy,” inept, etc.
In this respect, another book that shatters myth about black people in American history is W.E.B. DuBois’ superb 1924 work, The Gift of Black Folk. It is loaded with information as to the many amazing contributions of black people to American history. Space does not permit exhaustive summary of DuBois’ countless gems dug up from his intensive research efforts, though one passage is worth quoting for its general import and highly rational, eloquent character:
“Negro labor has played a peculiar and important part in the history of the modern world. The black man was the pioneer in the hard physical work which began the reduction of the American wilderness and which not only hastened the economic development of America directly but indirectly released for other employment, thousands of white men and thus enabled America to grow economically and spiritually at a rate previously unparalleled anywhere in history.
“It was black labor that established the modern world commerce which began as a commerce in the bodies of slaves themselves and was the primary cause of the prosperity of the first great commercial cities of our day. Then black labor was thrown into the production of four great crops—tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton . . . . Black labor, therefore, beneath these crops became an important part of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . . . .
“The Negro worked as farm hand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it, would have been impossible.[2]
Wise, prophetic words from the scholarly pen of DuBois, written in 1924, some forty-to-fifty years before “Black History Week” and the “Black Pride Revolution” rediscovered many of the “unknown” contributions of black people to American history, already discussed and researched by Prof. DuBois. As to his prose— we should all write so well. The book is a scholarly study, though the first chapter on the potential number of black explorers accompanying the “discoverers” of the New World struck me as somewhat speculative (not so the rest of the book which contains a wealth of information, much of it seldom seen in conventional texts).
Books by Brecher, Werstein, Bimba, and Pelling, alluded to earlier, are all solid, traditional labor histories. The extensive use of statistics on wages and hours., strikes and industrial hazards, speaks for itself. With books by McLaughlin, Foner, DuBois, and Nyden, these authors form the nucleus of straight “labor history” on the reading list.
The competence is of the first magnitude and the amount and quality of evidence is staggering for its precision and eye-opening enlightenment, even for those already familiar with arguments of class strife and worker exploitation. Short, supporting monographs of these traditional themes would be works by Barthwell, Cronon, Newcomb, and the Northwest Regional Conference.
Dunn’s The Palmer Raids documents the immense amount of hostility and prosecution aimed at radical and labor groups in 1919-20; he views the Palmer Raids as clearly unconstitutional on at least half a dozen grounds.
Huberman’s book studies the use of spies against the labor movement and thus constitutes a study of another way the “defeats” of strikes and union struggles were not always accomplished by legitimate means, to put it mildly.
Lundberg’s work, mentioned previously, is helpful in that it focuses on the immense wealth of the richest families in America, and his statistics certainly boggle the mind repeatedly.
Sidney Lens has devoted a volume to the question of poverty in the United States and how to deal with it; his main theme is that large-scale poverty is an on-going problem that no one has effectively solved yet in this country. I think he fails to distinguish between poverty of the 19th century and that of the modern era as having become less harsh and less widespread in recent times.
On the other hand, he shows that the problem does continue, and seen in the long-term historical perspective he provides (going back to England), his investigation poses thorny and unpleasant questions: why can’t America eliminate or reduce substantially (through social programs) poverty and its attendant social evils?
All these books provide excellent insights into class struggle in American history. They show how bitter and fierce these labor battles were in the past. Most of the works tend to assume that such class antagonisms carry over into the modern era, mainly by pinpointing the on-going use of strikes by unions to secure a better deal for themselves.
They are strong in this orientation, whether implicit or explicit (Foner, Brecher, Werstein, etc.) However, an argument could be made that union struggles of the 19th century are not the same as those of today, in substantial ways.
The degree to which social conditions have improved, material standards of living have advanced, and previous reforms have been successful and remain in effect (8 hr. day, most obviously)—these are serious matters requiring careful consideration. One cannot assume class struggle continues on unchanged through the years. For the moment, it is perhaps more important to realize what a tremendous job of scholarship these many authors have performed in “writing down” the labor struggles of the past.
They have shown how desperate conditions once were for workers, how sharp the struggle, how long the fight. It was the determination to organize unions that led to the many improvements in the lives of the workers. The authors are right in so jealously guarding this history and in believing that the struggle always continues, must be further documented and supported, must be further advanced, in books of scholarship as well as in union hall and on the picket line.
There is little tendency (with the exception of Pelling, a British historian) to move towards a reformist viewpoint: i.e., that there has been so much progress, conditions have improved so much, future labor struggles will be “sweet” and mild by comparison to the past. To the contrary, most of them have a certain unstated understanding of (and sympathy with) the labor movement’s commitment to win the larger, long-term struggle for social and class justice, to create a new society and not just mere day-to-day economic reforms.
(Brecher considers in the last part of his work the ways in which workers and unions have to develop a new base of power in the U.S. through co-operatives, etc.).
Reputable scholarship can also be partisan; the labor leaders discussed in these books, and many of the authors themselves, have devoted their lives to bettering the lot of the working man and of the American people in general; they cannot be faulted for this selfless dedication to the lives and happiness of others. The battle has been fought on many fronts, not the least of which are “books of truth” which break through the myths and lies of the capitalist system to document extensively the real conditions of the working class in America, past and present.
If these writers are not prone to a reformist view of “peaches and cream” for everyone today, this is readily understandable in the light of the ferocity, extent, and death-grip struggles of so many earlier chapters in labor history. It is hard to break old habits of class analysis, assuming for the moment post-World War II capitalism is sufficiently modified to arouse less hatred of it on the part of workers (A problem wrestled with further in my dissertation, needless to say). This is, as I say, only an “assumption,” and not necessarily a correct or proven point of view.
There is some validity to the reformist point of view, I think, but when one considers what formidable proponents of a more militant view one has to face— Foner, Brecher, Werstein, Nyden, Barthwell, Steel, Lens— then the debate will be long and hard and not likely a certain vindication for reformism. It is at least a pleasure to see such views debated openly and forthrightly, to see labor historians of various persuasions break through the “media suppression” of an earlier day.
For with the power of the pen, the struggle goes forward in academia–as well as in the factory and mine–as nearly all of these authors have proven time and again with immensely informative, valuable, and thought-provoking works of the first order.
[1] Irving Werstein, The Great Struggle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1965), p. 78.
[2] W.E.B. DuBois, The Gift of Black Folk (New York: Washington Square, 1924), pp. 13-14.
