chapter 8
Progressive Era
By the mid-1890s, the United States was the leading manufacturing nation in the world, and by 1900 it had entered the ranks of the major powers in world politics. And yet, the tremendous industrial development that had made this possible created immense social problems which worried some of the more farsighted business and political leaders. There were more and more exposures of and protests against a vast accumulation of evils and injustices: unsafe and unsanitary workplaces and communities, outright political corruption on an unprecedented scale, the enhancement of big business profits through large-scale environmental destruction, generalized fraud and cheating at the public expense, the widespread adulteration and pollution of consumer goods, innumerable and unavoidable manifestations of poverty side-by-side with conspicuous consumption by the wealthy, shocking realities of child labor, etc. Theodore Roosevelt favored the growth of big corporations and what he viewed as their positive contributions, but fretted: “I do not like the social conditions at present. The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men, their greed and arrogance . . . and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the popular mind, which shows itself in the great increase in the socialistic propaganda.”
Reformers and Socialists
Such people concluded that if “progress” was to mean change for the better, then the government would have to play a more active role in society. Mainstream Progressive politicians such as the Republican Roosevelt and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson (elected president in 1912) rejected the old-time laissez-faire economic policies, favoring instead bold government intervention in the economy. They didn’t want to overthrow the power of the big corporations, but instead to set limits on and establish regulations for that power. At the same time, they favored major social reforms to eliminate some of the worst of the problems created by the previous decades of industrialization. They even adopted a policy of encouraging the more “responsible” and moderate union leaders—such as the AFL’s Samuel Gompers—who would help advance such reforms while at the same time drawing workers away from socialists and other radicals.
Nonetheless, there was great ferment, and movements for a variety of social reforms proliferated. Pro-labor activists found that it was possible to push forward an agenda that would benefit the working class in a variety of ways. Advocates of women’s rights focused especially on securing the right to vote for the female half of the population. Advocates of African American rights mounted antilynching campaigns in the South and pushed for equality before the law throughout the country. Middle-class reformers reached out for an alliance with the labor movement to bring about political reforms—direct election of senators, the right of referendum and recall, etc.—that presumably would make democracy more of a reality.
Some of the more radical Progressives—such as Wisconsin’s Republican governor and then senator “Fighting Bob” LaFollette—were especially militant in their call for political and social reforms, and in their pro-labor attitudes, and (unlike Roosevelt and Wilson) they did want to break the power of big business corporations for the benefit of workers, farmers, and small business people.
The furthest left fringe of Progressivism, however, was occupied by those attracted to the Socialist Party of America. Marxist ideas that had influenced many labor radicals down through the years were blended, among these Progressive-era leftists, with other influences as well. There was the influence of the best-selling utopian novel Looking Backward, whose author Edward Bellamy noted that “true and humane men and women of every degree are in a mood of exasperation, verging on absolute revolt, against social conditions that reduce life to a brutal struggle for existence.” There was the influence of the Social Gospel of such radical Christians as Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch, who insisted that “the force of the religious spirit should be bent toward asserting the supremacy of life over property,” and that “it is unchristian to regard human life as a mere instrument for the production of wealth.” And there were influential leftist renderings of John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy (according to William English Walling, “the great social revolution as it appears in the world of thought”) which insisted, as Dewey put it, on the need for concentrating “all the instrumentalities of the social arts, of law, of education, economics and political science upon the construction of intelligent methods of improving the common lot.”
Socialists—led by former American Railway Union leader Eugene V. Debs—won a base of members and supporters numbering in the hundreds of thousands, especially among workers, and even wider influence throughout society, becoming a primary force for social reform, an inclusive and militant trade unionism, and expanding democracy. Debs became widely known and loved for the personal warmth and expansive idealism with which he explained his party’s program: “The Socialist Party as the party of the exploited workers in the mills and mines, on the railways and on the farms, the workers of both sexes and all races and colors, the working class in a word, constituting a great majority of the people and in fact THE PEOPLE, demands that the nation’s industries shall be taken over by the nation and that the nation’s workers shall operate them for the benefit of the whole people.”
Many remarkable people were drawn to this movement, such as the pioneering social worker Florence Kelley, the black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois who led the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), best-selling writers Jack London and Upton Sinclair, the poet Carl Sandburg, and others. There was the daughter of the Kansas working class Kate Richards O’Hare, who had “teased, coaxed and cajoled the men” into letting her become a skilled machinist, and then went on to become one of the Socialist Party’s leading agitators: “The working class is not pleased with the actual administration of things. Their interests are not served. Actual democracy has not been practiced.” As with many Socialists, her ideals were flavored by her earlier religious upbringing, as she called for “co-operation instead of competition, a world where greed, and vice, and avarice have been replaced by brotherhood, and justice and humanity.” An outspoken advocate of women’s suffrage, she saw most women as part of the working-class majority: “We want to use our ballot to peacefully bring about the social revolution which shall eliminate wage slavery and establish the collective ownership and democratic control of the collectively owned means of life.”
A significant force throughout the twentieth century’s first two decades, the Socialist Party of America polled 6 percent of the total presidential vote (with Debs as the candidate) in 1912, actually electing 1,200 candidates in 340 municipalities throughout the country, including 79 mayors in 24 states. There were hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of readers for the party’s 323 English and foreign-language daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals—the nationally distributed Appeal to Reason alone having a weekly circulation of more than 761,000. With 5,000 local branches throughout the country, the party had a dues-paying membership of about 120,000. Some of the most dedicated activists in the labor movement were identified with it. “Within the short period of twelve years the Socialist Party has grown from a state of insignificance to the importance of a serious factor in the national life of the United States,” commented labor lawyer Morris Hillquit, who concluded with an optimistic flourish: “It is safe to predict that in another dozen years it will contend with the old parties for political supremacy.”
Industrial Workers of the World
It has been estimated that about one-third of the AFL was Socialist in this period, but many Socialists joined with other militant workers to establish a radically new labor organization in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World. IWW leader “Big Bill” Haywood—coming to the organization from the Western Federation of Miners—described its founding meeting in Chicago as the “constitutional convention of the working class.” Disgusted with the moderation and exclusiveness of the AFL, the IWW pledged to organize the entire working class on an industrial basis regardless of race, sex, or occupation into “One Big Union.” Nicknamed the “Wobblies,” these radical labor activists sought to create a revolutionary union that would fight for immediate gains as steps designed to lead eventually (preferably sooner than later) to a general strike by the entire working class that would bring the entire capitalist economy and government to an absolute halt. With power in the hands of the working-class majority, the economy would then be owned, organized, and run by and for the working class.
AFL leaders accused these labor radicals of “dual unionism,” a cardinal sin in many labor circles, while the Wobblies criticized the AFL for siding with the bosses against workers who were ready to struggle under the IWW banner. And many workers responded to the radicals’ efforts.
The Wobblies reached out to timber workers on the West Coast, harvest hands on the Great Plains, textile workers in New England, steelworkers in the Midwest, and many more. One Wobbly was an immigrant from the Philippines named Philip Vera Cruz, who later helped to organize the United Farm Workers. The IWW organized black and white timber workers in a united struggle in Louisiana. The organization proved willing and able to organize the “unorganizable,” such as the thousands of immigrant textile workers who struck in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, where the eloquent Wobbly orator Elizabeth Gurley Flynn joined with other skilled organizers such as Arturo Giovannitti and Carlo Tresca to mobilize workers and their families, leading them to victory. Flynn explained the IWW conception of “a labor victory” by insisting that strikes must help workers “gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory.” She elaborated:
For workers to gain a few more cents a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to have achieved a temporary gain and not a lasting victory. For workers to go back with a class-conscious spirit, with an organized and determined attitude toward society means that even if they have made no economic gain they have the possibility of gaining in the future. In other words, a labor victory must be economic and it must be revolutionizing. Otherwise it is not complete.
In his opening remarks at the founding convention of the IWW, proclaiming the intention of “emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism,” militant leader “Big Bill” Haywood castigated the AFL for failing to represent the entire working class, noting that “there are organizations affiliated . . . with the A.F. of L. which in their constitution and by-laws prohibit the initiation or conferring of the obligation on a colored man; that prohibit the conferring of the obligation on foreigners. What we want to establish at this time is a labor organization that will open wide its doors to every man that earns his livelihood either by brain or muscle.” Like the organization he led, Haywood seemed to embrace the entire working class. “He actually loved to spend time with the workers, to talk with their women and children,” recalled tough-minded anarchist Carlo Tresca of the hulking, battle-scarred organizer. “He went to supper with strikers nearly every night. . . . He would sleep in the houses of Italians, Syrians, Irish, Poles, Letts. People were all brothers to him.”
Such feelings were translated into practical organizational realities. From 1913 to the early 1920s, for example, a largely immigrant and black local of the IWW controlled Philadelphia’s docks, led by Ben Fletcher, an African American. “The organized labor movement has not begun to become a contender for its place in the sun, until every man, woman and child in industry is eligible to be identified with its cause, regardless of race, color or creed,” Fletcher argued in 1923. Noting that “organized labor for the most part be it radical or conservative, thinks in terms of the white race,” he emphasized that this would be changed only when black workers themselves organized “to generate a force which when necessary could have rendered low the dragon head of race prejudice, whenever and wherever it raised its head.” The militant union he led showed how this could be done, leading to black-white unity and consequent gains for all workers.
The Wobblies became well-known for the many songs they produced and popularized. Swedish immigrant Joe Hill—with the clever and biting humor of such compositions as “Casey Jones” and “The Preacher and the Slave”—was one of the most popular of the agitating songwriters, even more so after his 1915 martyrdom, but the most famous IWW musical contribution to the labor movement was the stirring anthem “Solidarity Forever,” which became known by millions of workers for more than eight decades after 1915, when it was written by Ralph Chaplin:
When the Union’s inspiration through the workers blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the Union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever,
For the Union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn,
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever,
For the Union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the Union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever,
For the Union makes us strong.
One Wobbly organizer, James P. Cannon, critically reflected on strengths and weaknesses of the organization years later. The strengths continued to revitalize and influence the labor and radical movements for many decades after the Wobblies ceased to be a significant force. The weaknesses, he felt, could be traced to the mixing together of two different functions: that of a trade union with that of a revolutionary party. For the core of militant working-class activists drawn to its banner, the IWW became “their one all-sufficient organization—their union and their party; their social center; their home; their family; their school; and in a manner of speaking, their religion, without the supernatural trappings—the faith they lived by.” Yet this undercut the organization’s ability to function as an effective trade union. While calling for strong industrial unions in the new mass-production industries, “in all the most militant years of the IWW the best it could accomplish in modern mass production industry were localized strikes, nearly all of which were defeated. The victorious Lawrence strike of 1912, which established the national fame of the IWW, was the glorious exception. But no stable and permanent union organization was ever maintained anywhere in the East for any length of time—not even in Lawrence.” Seeking to maintain ongoing militancy at the workplace, without signing any contract with the employer that would limit the workers’ right to strike any time they saw fit, undermined the Wobblies’ ability to secure stable union recognition. (No less decisive in the eventual defeat of the IWW, of course, was the severe repression by employers’ private “security” forces, as well as by—at various times—local, state, and national governments.)
Cannon, a lifelong revolutionary socialist, valued highly the IWW “as an organization of revolutionists, united not simply by the immediate economic interests which bind all workers together in a union, but by doctrine and program” proclaiming—in the words of the IWW 1908 constitutional preamble—that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common” and that “between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.” Yet while revolutionaries can help to build strong and effective unions to advance the workers’ interests, such an organization of revolutionaries—Cannon concluded—cannot itself function as a trade union, which must include masses of workers, many of whom may not (at least for some time) understand or agree with the revolutionary program.
The Coming of the First World War
The IWW by no means had a monopoly on militant struggles. New York City’s needle trades continued to employ tens of thousands of recent immigrants: children, women, and men. In 1909 a protest meeting in the Cooper Union auditorium drew an overflow crowd of 3,000 shirtwaist workers, mostly young women. Exasperated with the appeals for caution from male union leaders, a five-foot tall, twenty-year-old worker named Clara Lemlich rose from the audience with the challenge: “I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am one who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move we go on a general strike!” And she led them in the Hebrew oath as her coworkers raised their right hands: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.” Under the banner of the Garment Workers union of the AFL, more than twenty thousand workers, the vast majority of them women, struck for higher wages and safe workplaces. Despite a small strike fund and seemingly overwhelming odds, the strikers galvanized a broad sector of labor activists, feminists, and much of the public and won significant gains.
Moderate (and mostly male) union leaders—including the AFL’s Gompers—then forced a compromise settlement, over the objections of many of the most active female strikers. Not long after, some of the strikers paid a terrible price for their leaders’ moderation: 146 workers died when a fire broke out in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which had locked the factory doors to keep workers from “stealing” breaks or produce. Rabbi Stephen Wise thundered: “The disaster was not the deed of God but the greed of man.” But one of the owners was acquitted, the other fined twenty dollars. There were massive protests, and the anger over this tragedy and injustice burned brightly among union activists for years to come. Many prominent female garment workers from this period, such as Rose Schneiderman of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, became widely known in other reform efforts as well, including the women’s suffrage movement. But her primary commitment remained the labor movement:
The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the “fire-proof” structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire. . . . The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are burned to death . . . I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.
Despite such passionate militancy among rank-and-file workers, however, many AFL union leaders saw strikes as a greater detriment than oppressive conditions at the workplace. Strikes bled the union treasury and sharp confrontation could generate tough employer resistance, hostile newspaper coverage, injunctions from pro-business judges—ultimately destroying unions (and union officials’ jobs). A better approach, it was felt, involved cultivating better relations with more reasonable elements in the business community. Reaching out to prominent Progressives in the Democratic and Republican parties, AFL President Gompers also urged cooperation with “enlightened” employers who were members of the National Civic Federation.
Despite both militant and moderate strategies, substantial inequities persisted. In 1915 the richest 2 percent of the population had 50 percent of the nation’s wealth, the middle 33 percent had 35 percent, and the bottom 65 percent had only 5 percent of the nation’s wealth, according to U.S. government figures cited by former South Dakota Senator R. F. Pettigrew.
During World War I, which the United States entered in 1917, Gompers’s strategy of cooperation seemed to pay off. The AFL supported the war effort and encouraged its members not to strike while the government of Woodrow Wilson set up arbitration systems in wartime industries in which the moderate and “patriotic” union leaders were given significant influence. Membership in AFL unions increased, with about 19 percent of the nonagricultural workforce holding union cards by the war’s end. By 1919 Gompers was able to comment with satisfaction about how the AFL majority had been able to keep “organizing and plodding along toward better conditions of life,” with “its face turned toward whatever reforms, in politics or economics, could be of direct and obvious benefit to the working classes,” while turning away from those who “preach and pursue that will-o’-the-wisp, a new society constructed from rainbow materials—a system of society on which even the dreamers themselves have never agreed.” The left-wing “dreamers” at whom Gompers scoffed certainly hadn’t fared well during the war years.
The IWW opposed the war, as did a majority of Socialists, because they saw it as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” that would pit workers of various countries against each other for the benefit of their “capitalist masters.” The government harassed them at every turn. In 1917, government agents arrested over 2,000 Wobblies and for the next several years, vigilante groups beat and sometimes lynched “traitorous” IWW members including war veteran Wesley Everest and the part-Cherokee Wobbly leader Frank Little. By the war’s end, the entire IWW executive board were in prison, as were such outspoken Socialists as Eugene V. Debs and Kate Richards O’Hare, for violating vaguely worded “sedition” laws. The leadership of the AFL did little to protest, and some currents in the AFL gave active assistance in the government’s “patriotic” repression of radicals. By 1920, thousands of left-wing workers had been jailed in the “Palmer Raids” (named after U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer).
The repressive “red scare” was in part a reaction to recent events in Russia—a working-class revolution. “The rank and file of the Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Councils are in control, with Lenin and Trotsky leading,” reported eyewitness journalist John Reed in the New York Call, the Socialist Party’s daily newspaper, in November 1917. “Their program is to give the land to the peasants, to socialize natural resources and industry and for an armistice and democratic peace conference.” Radicalizing workers throughout the world responded enthusiastically as V. I. Lenin and his Communist followers predicted the spread of socialist revolution to other countries. In the United States the AFL leadership around Gompers was hostile to this development, but the International Ladies Garment Workers Union spoke for other labor currents in hailing “the first truly democratic Socialist republic” and in adding that “the fate of the first great working class republic in the world cannot but be a matter of prime concern to organized and progressive workers of all countries.” Naturally, such views were intolerable to U.S. business interests and governmental authorities, and they were determined to put down the threat by any means necessary.
Immigrant workers were especially targeted as a source of “un-American” influences—in some cases because they were political radicals, in some cases because they wanted unions, in some cases because they came from cultures that were different from the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant norms favored by self-styled “100 percent Americans.” Some immigrants were even deported in the “red scare” hysteria. Justice was rare in the inflamed atmosphere, and two Italian American radicals, shoemaker Nicola Sacco and fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti, despised in court for their anarchist opinions and their foreign accents, were convicted of robbery and murder in a blatantly unfair trial which came to symbolize the postwar antilabor repression. The case caused international working-class protests in a vain effort to stop their eventual execution.
Postwar Upsurge—and Defeat
Nonetheless, unprecedented strikes took place in 1919 and 1920. President Wilson had claimed that the World War was waged to “make the world safe for democracy,” and many workers were hoping—after the wartime victory—to move forward to an expansion of democracy at home. Most surprising, perhaps, was the Boston police strike (whose crushing defeat constituted a decades-long blow to public sector unionism), but textile workers in a number of cities, coal miners in West Virginia, steelworkers from Pittsburgh to Chicago, and many others found themselves swept into a struggle for a better future and what some agitators referred to as “industrial democracy.”
Like most of the big corporations, steel companies had made enormous profits from government contracts, but the steel barons refused to bargain with any union. The AFL authorized a union drive among steelworkers. This was led by onetime IWW organizer William Z. Foster, who had enjoyed some partial successes in helping Chicago’s militant AFL leader John Fitzpatrick to organize packinghouse workers along industrial lines. Gompers allocated only a handful of organizers and a few thousand dollars, yet 400,000 workers, mostly immigrants, participated in the 1919 steel strike. One worker told a union rally why he risked his job: “Just like a horse and wagon, work all day. Come home—go sleep. Get up—go work in mills—come home. No know what the hell you do. For why this war? For why we buy Liberty bonds? For the mills? No, for freedom and America—for everybody. No more horse and wagon. For eight-hour day.” But such “hunkies” (an ethnic slur for eastern Europeans) were beaten on the streets by mounted “Cossacks,” as they called the Pennsylvania State Police, and by the steel companies’ own Coal and Iron Police. Some, including union organizer Fannie Sellins, were killed. With their picket lines and meetings broken up, with many native-born workers scabbing, and with the merciless redbaiting in the press (linking the steelworkers’ struggle to the Communist revolution in Russia), the strike collapsed.
One of the boldest struggles for industrial democracy took place in Seattle. The war had been unpopular, not just with the city’s numerous IWW members, but also among the 25,000 AFL shipyard workers. Throughout 1917 and 1918, first the Socialist Party and then the local AFL put out a daily labor newspaper which was critical of the war, wartime profiteering, and the vigilante justice meted out to IWWs. The paper was also supportive of the Russian Revolution and sharply critical of U.S. military attacks on the new regime there. In January 1919, a shipyard strike for higher wages quickly escalated into a general strike to protest against government indifference to working-class demands for union recognition and a decent standard of living. Workers began to reopen production (milk and coal deliveries) in order to learn to manage the economy themselves. The might of employers, the press, and the government—as well as hostility on the part of the AFL national leadership—combined to ensure the failure of the Seattle general strike.
The failure to build industrial democracy had destructive consequences. The working-class defeats of 1919 were to be felt for years to come, setting back labor’s cause for decades, but the immediate effects were no less devastating. Failed strikes and crushed unions meant that returning war veterans had no legal right to their old jobs and competed for fewer and fewer jobs with the wartime workforce, which had been filled in by the northward migration of thousands of Southern black workers. Frustration and fear combined with racism and led to some of America’s worst race riots in St. Louis and Chicago. There was a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the North as well as the South, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People found that it had an uphill struggle to defend rights for African Americans throughout the country. While women had finally won the right to vote by constitutional amendment in 1920 (thanks to mounting feminist pressure in the first two decades of the twentieth century), the savage destruction of labor’s strength had a chilling effect on all reform struggles, and few gains for women’s rights were to be made in the new atmosphere.
Some activists in the AFL during the early 1920s were drawn to William Z. Foster’s Trade Union Educational League, which like Foster became linked to the recently formed Communist Party (on its way to becoming the largest left-wing party in the country). Foster and his cothinkers were agitating for industrial unionism, a labor party, and good relations with Russia’s new Soviet Republic. But Gompers and other AFL chieftains did not tolerate such a development for long, utilizing severe restrictions and large-scale expulsions against the radicals. Somewhat more typical of the labor scene in this period was Frank Farrington of the United Mine Workers in Illinois, who “followed the Gompers philosophy of no-philosophy,” as Oscar Ameringer put it, adding: “His dominating thought was always centered on the contract. He had seen too many agitators take command of a tense situation, bring the workers out onto the picket lines with fiery exhortations—and leave them there. Leave them because the rarest thing in the world is the combination of effective agitator and competent negotiator.” In Ameringer’s opinion, “the noblest philosophy of brotherhood, solidarity and militancy is just so much baloney if it does not finally put into the worker’s hand a tightly drawn contract with his boss assuring him three square meals a day, decent working hours, and a pay envelope at the end of the week.” And yet even some of the most moderate elements in the labor movement did not feel able to accept the powerful pro-business conservatism that dominated the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties at this time.
In 1924 a broad array of unions (including the AFL), farmers organizations, radicals, and others sought to reverse the reactionary tide by organizing a Conference for Progressive Political Action and running the left-liberal Robert M. LaFollette for president against the Democratic and Republican candidates, advocating progressive social reforms and challenging the power of the big corporations. Although credited with a substantial 5 million votes, which might have been seen as a good beginning under other circumstances, the major forces involved were discouraged, and they subsequently abandoned this effort to push the political mainstream to the Left.
In the context of the collapsing reform efforts and rightward political drift, various forms of corruption that had existed in the labor movement for many years became dramatically more pronounced.