American Experiment (183 page)

The American Federation of Labor was founded in December 1886 in Columbus, Ohio, by twenty-five labor groups representing perhaps 150,000 members, mostly skilled workers. Its origin lay in a remarkable craft union, the Cigarmakers’ International, which numbered many Germans of the “old schools,” both socialist and unionist. In part because the cigar-makers had to face new technology, such as cigar molds and bunch-breaking machines, that threatened their jobs, in part because they lived amid philosophical debate and indeed liked to make their cigars while someone read aloud from the classics, this union had to face all the urgent questions of organization, discipline, centralization, political action, craft exclusiveness that had challenged trade unionism from the start. Arguing bitterly, some stuck to their craft union, some joined the Knights of Labor. The cigar-makers were lucky to have leaders able intellectually to meet this challenge.

One of them was Adolph Strasser, a Hungarian immigrant who had proved a resourceful organizer of New York City cigar-makers. Strasser was all practicality, which he defined as advancing the interests of cigar-makers through patient negotiation, limited goals, and ample union benefits such as insurance. At a Senate committee hearing in 1883 on labor-capital relations a senator asked him:

“Do you not contemplate, in the end, the participation of all labor and of all men in the benefits of trades unions?”

“Our organization does not consist of idealists,” Strasser answered. “We do not control the production of the world. That is controlled by the employers. I look first to cigars.”

“I was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends,” the senator persisted.

“We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are
fighting only for immediate objects—objects that can be realized in a few years.”

At first, Samuel Gompers too looked only to cigars. Born in a London tenement in 1850, the son of a Jewish cigar-maker, at thirteen he had emigrated with his family to New York’s Lower East Side, where he and his father resumed cigar-making. Breathing in the heady New York atmosphere, he attended lectures at Cooper Union, read aloud, listened, and argued in the cigar-makers’ workrooms. At first, Gompers spouted “wild plans for human betterment,” as he recalled much later, but on the advice of a former Marxist who told him, “Study your union card, Sam, and if the idea doesn’t square with that, it ain’t true,” he veered toward business unionism. Chosen head of his local, he, with Strasser, centralized control, boosted membership dues, and organized unemployment, strike, sickness, and accident benefits.

It was these ideas that Gompers carried into the organization of a new national federation. A sturdy, outspoken man of inexhaustible enthusiasm and energy, he articulated better than any of his comrades the philosophy of pragmatic labor organization and action. He wanted practical results: wages, hours, safety, benefits. From such advances, workers could progress further in economic and moral education and in their understanding of ultimate ends. The first step was to improve conditions of work and life. “The more the improved conditions prevail, the greater discontent prevails with any wrongs that may exist. It is only … the enlightenment begotten from material prosperity that makes it at all possible for mental advancement.” This idea sharply separated Gompers’s strategy from the Marxists’.

Gompers, indeed, was almost a neo-Social Darwinist in his ideology. He accepted industrialization and free enterprise. Capitalism was progress, and profits were necessary to capitalism. As corporations and trusts gained more power, labor must do the same—through solidly based organization. In the organization of business unions, Gompers believed that, in order to protect the adult male wage, unskilled as well as skilled, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites, ought to take part, though on a subordinate basis. These were “practical” views, for he believed not that blacks were equal to whites but that they could take over white jobs and hence must be organized. The same applied to women and immigrants. All this was crucial to the ability of organized labor to compete with organized capital.

He was far more cautious in regard to political action. He fought off any involvement of the AFL with socialist parties, preferring to deal with the major parties on the basis of expediency. He gave clear priority to economic action over political. Workers should expect little from the government.
“The only desirable legislation for the workers,” as a group of scholars later summarized Gompers’s and the AFL’s position, “is that which offers protection to their labor market by restriction of immigration, and which restrains government activities, such as the courts and police, from encroaching upon or hampering such union activities as strikes, picketing, and boycotts. The workers ought not to demand more positive legislation from the government…. Therefore such legislation as they need can be obtained more readily by opposing or supporting candidates of the two large parties rather than by organizing a separate labor party.” Above all, no long-range, visionary programs or tactics should be used. Government hands-off—broker politics—gradual betterment: this was Gompers’s and Strasser’s response to the Social Darwinism of the day; this was their own Social Darwinism. During the capitalist boom, it was an idea that seemed to work. While the Knights declined in leaps and bounds, the AFL moved ahead in numbers as slowly—and as steadily—as the tortoise. Its tests would come with hard times and in a political situation in which both “large parties” were conservative, and labor might have to look for allies on the left. By the late 1880s, such a potential ally seemed to be rising in America’s South and West.

Somewhere in central Texas, sometime in the late eighties:

In the twilight splendor of the Plains, men and women march along dusty trails toward the glow of a campfire in the distance. Some walk; some ride horses or burros; some—whole families—jolt along on covered wagons or buckboards. With their creased, careworn faces, their poor gingham clothes, they might seem to be one more trek in the great western movement of American homesteaders. But not so. These people walk with hope and pride—even with exhilaration as they reach a hillcrest and see stretching for miles ahead and behind thousands of people marching with them, hundreds of wagons emblazoned with crude signs and banners. Soon they reach their encampment, not to settle down for the night but, in company with five or ten thousand comrades, to hear fiery speeches late into the evening.

These people will be part of an arresting venture in popular grass-roots democracy, part of the “flowering of the largest democratic mass movement in American history,” in Lawrence Goodwyn’s judgment. Ultimately they will fail—but not until they have given the nation an experiment in democratic ideas, creative leadership and followership, and comradely cooperation.

At first on the Texas frontier but soon in the South and Midwest, farmers
in the mid-1880s collectively sensed that something was terribly wrong. In the South, farmers white and black were shackled by the crop lien system and the plummeting price of cotton. In the West, homesteaders were losing their mortgaged homes. Grain prices fell so low that Kansas farm families burned corn for heat. Everywhere farmers suffered from a contracting currency, heavy taxation, and gouging by railroads and other monopolies. As farmers perceived the “money power” buying elections and public officials in order to pass class legislation, some agrarian leaders and editors wondered if the farm areas trembled on the brink of revolution.

The crop lien system, tight money, and the rest of the farmers’ ills—these seemed remote and impersonal to many an eastern city dweller. But for countless Southern cotton farmers “crop lien” set the conditions of their existence.

It meant walking into the store of the “furnishing merchant,” approaching the counter with head down and perhaps hat in hand, and murmuring a list of needs. It meant paying “the man” no money but watching him list items and figures in a big ledger. It meant returning month after month for these mumbled exchanges, as the list of debts grew longer. It meant, as noted earlier, that the farmer brought in the produce from his long year’s hard labor, watched his cotton weighed and sold, and then learned that the figures in the ledger, often with enormously inflated interest, added up to more than his crop was worth—but that the merchant would carry him into the next year if he signed a note mortgaging his next year’s crop to the merchant. It meant returning home for another year’s toil, knowing that he might lose his spread and join the army of landless tenant farmers. From start to finish it meant fear, self-abasing deference, hatred of self and others.

Above all, the system meant loss of liberty, as the farmer became shackled to one crop and one merchant—loss of liberty for men and women raised in the Jeffersonian tradition of individual freedom in a decentralized agrarian republic, in the Jacksonian tradition of equality of opportunity in a land free of usurious banks and grasping monopolies. Their forefathers had fought for independence; was a second American revolution needed to overthrow a new, an economic, monarchy? “Laboring men of America,” proclaimed a tract, the voices of 1776 “ring down through the corridors of time and tell you to strike” against the “monopolies and combinations that are eating out the heart of the Nation.” But strike how? “Not with glittering musket, flaming sword and deadly cannon,” the pamphlet exhorted, “but with the silent, potent and all-powerful ballot, the only vestige of liberty left.”

One course seemed clear—people must organize themselves as powerfully against the trusts as the trusts were organized against them. But organize how? Economically or politically? Experience did not make for easy answers. Farmers had plunged into politics with Greenbackers and laborites and ended up on the short end of the ballot counts. The answer of the recently founded Farmers’ Alliance in Texas was to try both economic and political structures, but more intensively and comprehensively than ever before. Built firmly on a network of “suballiances”—neighborhood chapters of several dozen members meeting once or twice a month to pray, sing, conduct rituals, debate issues, and do organizational business—the state Alliance experimented with several types of grass-roots cooperatives, including stores, county trade committees to bargain with merchants, and county-wide “bulking” of cotton.

The key to Alliance power was not organization, though, but leadership—and not the leadership merely of a few persons at the top but of dozens, then hundreds, of men and women who were specially hired and trained to journey across the state visiting suballiances, helping to form new ones, and above all teaching members graphically and in detail about the complex political and economic issues of the day, both national issues like money and finance and local ones like the building and expanding of co-ops. These were the famed “lecturers,” who in turn were responsible to a state lecturer. The Alliance’s first state lecturer was William Lamb, a rugged, red-haired, thirty-four-year-old farmer. Born in Tennessee, he had traveled alone at sixteen to the Texas frontier, where he lived in a log hut until he could build a house, raise children with his wife, and learn to read and write at night.

Lamb soon emerged as one of the most creative and radical of Alliance leaders. When the Great Southwest Strike erupted against Jay Gould’s railroad early in 1886, Lamb defied the more conservative Alliance leaders by demanding that the Alliance back a Knights of Labor boycott. Though suballiances gave food and money to striking railroad workers, the strike collapsed. The Knights continued on their downward slide, but the Texas Alliance continued its phenomenal growth, with perhaps 2,000 suballiances and 100,000 members by the summer of that year.

Lamb and other lecturers also look leadership on another critical issue facing the Alliance. Wracked by scorching drought, crop failures, and increasing tenantry, Texas farmers by 1886 were meeting in schoolhouses and clamoring for a new strategy—
political
action. They were impatient with the old shibboleth that the Alliance must steer clear of politics because politics would kill it. The decisive turning point in the agrarian revolt came at the Alliance state convention in Cleburne in early August 1886. A
majority of the disgruntled, rustic-looking delegates from eighty-four counties “demanded” of the state and federal governments “such legislation as shall secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and arrogant corporations”—legislation including an interstate commerce law and land reform measures. A conservative minority, opposing a proposal for greenbacks that defied the Democratic party, rejected the demands, absconded with the treasury, and formed a strictly “nonpartisan” Alliance.

At this critical moment Charles Macune, another leader fresh from the grass roots, stepped into the fray. Settled on the Texas frontier at nineteen after early years of poverty and wanderings, Macune had married, studied law and medicine, and practiced both. Developing into a skillful writer, compelling speaker, and innovative thinker, Macune had become well versed in farming matters and active in his county Alliance. And now this tall, magnetic physician-lawyer-farmer, buoyed by the rising militance of the delegates, proposed an ingenious compromise that was also a creative act of leadership.

Persuading the conservatives to give up their rival Alliance and the radicals to tone down their drive toward partisan politics, he proposed an expansion that was both geographic and functional. In his dazzling vision, a national network of state Alliance “Exchanges,” starting in Texas, would collectively market cotton and buy supplies and farm equipment. This giant farmers’ cooperative would not only achieve higher, more stable prices, but would provide the credit to free all farmers from the furnishing merchant and mortgage company. Thus, he proclaimed, mortgage-burdened farmers could “assert their freedom from the tyranny of organized capital.” At a statewide meeting at Waco in January 1887 the farmer delegates enthusiastically adopted Macune’s grand strategy, decided on merger with the Louisiana Farmers’ Union, and chose Macune as first president of the National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union. The state Alliance built a huge headquarters in Dallas even while doubling its membership and preparing a small army of lecturers to proselytize the South during mid-1887.