Fair play for the workers

Front matter

"FOKTHE

WORKERS

PERCTvSTICRNEY- GRANT

Preface

The most unexpected result of the war is, perhaps, the enlarged influence of the working-classes, — an influence that after the war seems likely to increase. The people have recentlyemerged to new power in many countries, — in China, in Russia, in Mexico, in Great Britain, which is anxiously arranging for labor and government to proceed in closer accord, in India, to which Great Britain has sent a commission to prepare for some degree of native independence. Labor organizations in several countries communicated with each other in efforts to prevent war, or, since, to secure peace. A proposition by Socialists to hold a conference in Stockholm was considered important enough to be discouraged by the Allied Governments. The United States has appealed to the German people, over the heads of their rulers, and welcomes any sign of a revolutionary spirit. The President left Washington in war time to attend a convention of the American Federation of Labor, at Buffalo. Labor committees from Great Britain have visited us. The proletariat of most of the countries have taken a new part in war discussion and look forward to signal influence at the peace councils. This coming to the front of the workers of the world is the important news of our times.

vii viii PREFACE

The day of the proletariat has arrived, but America is not ready. I do not mean that anarchy, or even Socialism, is knocking at the door, or that plutocracy is packing up. A new and commanding influence to be exerted by the working-class has arisen. America is unprepared to meet the situation because it has failed, on the whole, to grasp the profounder concerns of the people's hopes and has given aristocratic status to its successful classes.

The object of this volume is to call attention to some of the consequences of our blindness to the world's deeper democratic activities and to the dawn of proletarian control. A review of a few subjects upon which the working-people have strong opinions, not well understood outside their class, may facilitate our passage from before-war to after-war times when labor will undoubtedly expect to exercise larger powers.

One reason for our plutocratic type of democracy is to be found in our religious and economic conservatism. Professor Ross discovers ^*wiir' to be the profoundest characteristic of the American colonists. American religion, politics, business, athletics are still run by ^^will" and its *^get there" representatives. But something more is necessary than will, as, for instance, science and sympathy. The time has come for America to create a new will compacted of knowledge and love as well as of dogged resolution.

PREFACE ix

So it comes about that the real tragedy of American life is that while we live in the midst of optimistic facts we are governed by inherited pessimistic theories: — Calvin's depravity of human nature; Malthus' theory that man is too prolific for nature; Adam Smith's laisses faire economics, with selfishness as a stabilizer of industry. Our job is to jettison these Jonahs and to catch up with present reality.

Besides our inherited pessimism as observed in religious and political motives, the generation that came over into the twentieth century was influenced by the pessimism of some of its greatest poets. Swinburne's incomparable lyricism nevertheless yielded a depressing picture of man :

"A silent soul led of a silent God, Toward sightless things led sightless. ' '

Even Matthew Arnold got no further than to cry out bitterly:

''But now the old is out of date, The new is not yet born."

Now the new is born and events are neither ' * silent ' ' nor ^ ' sightless. ' ' The day of the people has come : clarion voices proclaim it.

We have not dreamed what can be done to prevent human woe. ^'Prevention" must be as signal a word as "Salvation" has been. ** Alleviation, " the aim of so many religious and kindly people, is a timid and hopeless word. Again, we have been pessimistic. "Human life n PREFACE

must be some kind of a mistake, '' says Schopenhauer. Not a bit of it, but man had made the mistake of accepting his miseries as essential to existence and therefore permanent, or as the mysterious will of overruling supernatural powers.

The optimistic facts of life revealed to our generation are staggering in their splendor. Take, for instance, the statement of the warden of the Colorado State Penitentiary. ^'In my judgment 60 per cent, of the sane, able-bodied men now confined in the penal institutions, both State and Federal, of the United States, are trustworthy, and if properly handled can be made available for work anywhere in the United States. Our experience in handling honor men at the Colorado State Penitentiary proves this beyond question. Of course, there are the other 40 per cent, who are mentally defective and truly dangerous from whom society must protect itself.''

Or, turn to the subject of industrial accident, where it has been thought that the human element was possibly more responsible than any other and could not be controlled.

** Spend enough upon the engineering problems and serious and fatal accidents will be very largely eliminated. What is the limit of reduction in severe and fatal cases? The possibilities of improvement in physical conditions are almost unlimited. It is possible to conceive industry conducted under conditions so safe that the occur-

PREFACE xi

rence of severe injury will excite the same surprise that its absence now does.'' *

Two-thirds of the insane in the country need not have been insane. One-half the sick in the country need never have been brought to their beds. Much of what we have called crime is found to be due to physical and mental defects, and of the 300,000 defectives in the country, perhaps one-half of them can be greatly improved. Psychotherapy, as seen in Christian Science, the Emmanuel Movement, Psychoanalysis, and in other mental healing, has opened a sunlit door. The ancestry of many of the fears and superstitions which worry and weaken human nature is now so plainly revealed that they should be easily removed. The power of environment is discerned with increasing and fresh illustration. For instance, the Insurance Act in England is not meeting full expectations because whatever may be the better medication or sanitorium treatment of the sick poor, they have to return to housing and neighborhood conditions that largely undo the result of their medical treatment, while the agricultural laborers of England, whatever their economic misfortunes, are physically the best.

Speaking of modern welfare work Jane Addams says: ^^The moral basis of all these movements is the excellence of human nature under decent conditions." Captain F. J. Moore, writing to the

* Monthly Review of the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, August, 1917, p. 15.

xii PREFACE

London Nation about religion in the trenches, says that the war has revealed to the world at large, and not least to the men themselves, that goodness, and not evil, is the *' original'' thing in human nature. '^No matter how they drink or how they swear, or whatever they do, there is a nobler self beneath it all capable of a sacrifice like the cross.'' The Literary Digest (September 15, 1917) sums it up: ** Original sin has been replaced by original goodness." (Exit Calvin.)

Professor Patten proves that we are living in a surplus, not in a deficit civilization. Lester Ward shows that production increases as the square of the hands employed. (Exit Malthus.)

We find that changed social ideas produce changed economic theories. In our time, democratic common sense is deciding that human personality must be built up, not destroyed, by economic processes ; that wages must serve individual welfare and social need. (Exit Adam Smith. Enter Jesus.)

In the midst of this optimism of fact, this opulence and self -curing power of nature, how pitiable those lugubrious but convenient economic theories by which men strengthen themselves in tyrannies over their fellows or justify riding upon their backs! *^Life," says Nietzsche, ^4s that which must ever surpass itself." May I dare to offer as the method by which life is able to surpass itself, the impulse to clarity — to know the meaning of things — as the pledge of progress.

Contents

OHA.PTKR PAOB

Pbeface vii

I Domestic Pkoblems and Foreign- War 3

Chapter I Domestic Problems And Foreign War

ONE of the significant cartoons produced by onr declaration of war represents Uncle Sam, in the costume of a frontiersman, taking down from over the chimney-piece his musket and powderhorn, as he remarks: ^*Gosh! I had so many other things to do!''

These ^* other things'' are home things — Uncle Sam's dream of domestic happiness; for he has near-by and pressing matters, has Uncle Sam, which concern the prosperity and contentment of his people.

Perhaps he was thinking of the exodus of the negroes from the South that in volume and economic moment may rank with the great migrations of history.

Or, he may have been brooding on the battle raging in San Francisco between the labor unions and the business interests with their $1,000,000 war fund — a conflict illuminated by the threat of the workers that labor leaders condemned to death shall not die.

Uncle Sam may have had in mind his neglected farms, * * Where four-fifths of the area of the large holdings/' one of his commissions tells him, *4s being kept out of use by their 50,000 large owners, while 2,250,000 farmers are struggling for a mere existence on farms of less than fifty acres,'* and only a little over half of the land on farms is improved.

Or, was Uncle Sam worrying about a wasteful nation going to war, adding military destruction to its economic destruction which is equal annually to the capital of all its banks?

Did he have before his eyes the vision of additions to his huge list of incapacitated — before the war a daily **sick list'' of three million out of which come half the outcries of American destitution?

Without doubt the race question, the labor question, the land question, conservation and the health question, are some of the ** other things" that war seemed at first glance to postpone.

Not only do home matters slide out of minds absorbed in the war zone; but patriotic citizens feel that domestic problems ought to be forgotten during the war as a measure of the nation's sacrifice and also as a means of necessary concentration for overseas success.

But we cannot, if we would, leave our domestic problems behind us when we join our allies. What we are in Europe depends upon what we are in America. A foreign war reveals domestic weaknesses. Every man on the firing-line requires from four to six persons behind the firing-line to keep him supplied. The army is the whole people. If we forget or postpone home problems we become bad soldiers in the field.

The fact is that during the war we must paymore attention than ever to home conditions. Every fighting nation has been weakened by labor difficulties, and has found itself forced to deal inopportunely with the most fundamental social and economic questions. By anticipating the claims of our own internal problems we may save ourselves fatal weakness in a world crisis.

Without a positive social polity, we shall, at any rate, be the victims of reactionary attack. Already under the guise of war-need the old crew which fruitlessly fought liberal laws have besieged legislatures to destroy recent safeguards thrown around the workers. The hours of labor for men, women, and children are attacked; the length of the school year; the full crew bill; the La FoUette Seaman's Act. In the State of New York by the permissive shortening of the school year the Empire State actually mobilized child labor before it mobilized its army.

Gains in social legislation must not be lost ; they are national assets, not class advantages ; they are **good business.'' For the labor question is not merely an irritating militancy between employer and employee, in which the worker occasionally wins privileges — recovered perhaps later by the bosses — but having no permanent public significance, no general gain or loss.

The labor question is concerned with human conservation and race effectiveness. The triumph of labor is the triumph of humanity in its very flesh and blood. A relapse now in labor legislation is war^s home harvest in flesh and blood — war's preventable losses behind the firing-line. Consequently, any retreat during the time of war into older and restricted economic usages, is not only a matter of dangerous precedent to labor— the setting aside perhaps for years of its hardwon verdict — but it is a dangerous prerogative resumed by capital upon an utter misunderstanding of the labor problem.

Centralization Demands Transformation

There are other reasons why during the war we cannot escape the consideration of domestic problems. The centralization necessary in war time for intensive national life means automatically much domestic tr.^sformation, especially in an individualistic country like America. To accomplish successfully this socializing of our citizens will demand sympathetic and profound study of the domestic situation. Secretary Lane's remark to coal operators in Washington, in June, 1917, is not to American ears axiomatic and will require elucidation and cogitation. *^To be an American citizen today is not to have the right to make a million dollars, but the right to live up to the demands of democratic ideals, and to sacrifice for iV

Shall we not also discover like the other fighting nations that the minds of the soldiers at the front turn backward upon the domestic situation ? They have time in the trenches to think. Their thought on the whole has been revolutionary. The men who are fighting in France are asking searching questions about religion, politics, business — about their own futures, — which forebode social reconstruction. They are revolving fundamental problems. Such mental ferment among the soldiers themselves, prophesies domestic change.

Two of our allies, Russia and France, are probably more advanced than we are in democratic ideals. A new light upon home problems is likely to dawn upon American soldiers when they learn from observation the radical economic views of the French, to say nothing of the more influential political position held by the English working-classes. Our armies will return home more critical of our way of doing things than when they left our shores. Won't it be well for us — the home-stayers — to try to keep pace in our development with the men at the front?

There is also the reflex action upon industrial and political organization of the new relationship between officers and men in our proposed gigantic armies — a more democratic relationship. In the

English army Donald Hankey saw a new democracy developed from the confidence that officers and men learned to have in each other. He believed that a better spirit between employers and employees will be produced as a result of this war-time experience. The ordinary labor conditions in which the employer complains of his men as being ungrateful and the men are suspicious of their employers as being exploiters, may be modified in the future by a new human relationship of mutual sympathy and dependence, like the confidence and pride felt for each other by officers and men in the face of a powerful enemy.

Schooled by war this new working democracy which embodies discipline and authority, which at all hazards must create efficiency, mutual help, and high spirit, may make a decided contribution to the industrial peace of the future when armies, so inspired, are again scattered through the nation's economic organization.

America Is in the Rapids of Social. Revolution

But it is a waste of time to marshal reasons for paying special attention during the war to domestic conditions, as though what is done in America depended upon argument. As a matter of fact, social revolution has overtaken the domestic affairs of the warring nations. Mr. Stephen McKenna, nephew of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in an interview in

New York the middle of May, 1917 : '^ England has had changes amounting in effect to a social revolution as the result of the war and America will probably experience much the same thing.''

America by going to war has entered the rapids of social revolution and must eventually come out into the intense liberalism of awakening Europe. Who knows! If America makes haste to learn what Europe can teach, she may perhaps be saved dislocation of her own.

The difficulty with radical change in America is that it has not been foreshadowed by general sympathetic attention. We have not had the same historical or pressing reasons that Europe has had for social analysis and criticism. For instance, we have not in America experienced in an impressive way the feudal system, or since our independence had a hereditary ruler. We have not had the problems incident to powerful political neighbors with boundless national ambitions to force us either to farsighted diplomacy or to an internal defensive organization. We have not had serious social or religious disturbances; or we have blindly or good-naturedly ignored them.

Even the problems that we share in common with Europe have been largely banished as incredible in our idealistic republic. We have claimed to have no class distinctions. We have treated capitalism as a finality, not as a stepping stone on the road of general progress. We have supposed political democracy to be the limit of democracy and we have fancied America Jiors concours in any exhibit of free institutions. Any criticism of America's brand of democracy is resented as an insult to the flag. Any suggestion as to betterment seems a slap in the face to the successful American — his courage, his initiative — and consequently merely a scheme for putting beggars on horseback.

Nor are we prepared to sympathize with Europe's awakening liberalism, by parallel economic studies of our own. In our war preparation, so far, we have gone against American individualistic traditions because we have largely followed France and England. In so doing we are governed by practical considerations and do not understand the economic implications of our war socialization. We cannot, therefore, be too well informed about our domestic problems or consider them too much at this time. Not only are they very much a part of our war success, but at the conclusion of the war, social readjustments can only be accomplished smoothly by a new intelligence as to their principles and bearing.

The National and Social Conflicts

We must finally remember that there are two conflicts going on at the same time — a conflict of nations and a conflict of classes — the international conflict and the social conflict. The social conflict will not call a truce during the national conflict because it cannot. This social conflict is not projected by a nameless unrest but by the vital urge of existence in the actual affairs of daily life which demands of every man that he secure for himself and his family all possible opportunity for growth, which will be his contribution to race progress.

On deeper analysis it will be found that these two conflicts — the social and the national — are one; that they are at bottom economic and have to do with ideals for larger human betterment. Feudalism, autocracy, militarism, imperialism, democracy, are methods of organization for securing human advantage. America is backing the proposition that in the world of today democracy is of wider, richer advantage to mankind than preceding forms of racial or national organization. We are further undertaking to prove that, after all, the highest loyalty is not a man^s loyalty to the person of a prince, but his loyalty to his brother-man and to the principles of fellowship.

We cannot keep the inner and the outer apart in government any more than we can in people. Attention to domestic problems becomes more excited in times of war, which is like the hand on a kaleidoscope, turning things as we look, into new arrangement. Run over in your mind for a moment some of the internal changes the war has produced.

A change in the modern industrial system has been supposed to be so infinitely difficult and hazardous that it could only be compassed slowly and even if soon begun could only after generations be consummated.

English economists are surprised at the short time required to change their industrial organization from individual to governmental management and from industrial to military production. ^*In an extraordinarily short time/' says Professor Pigou, *^the business and industrial community has changed front and altered its formation in conformity with new conditions. '^

War has brought Europe greater efficiency in railroading by government management; it has made of production, conservation, and distribution, once a speculation, a mathematical problem; it has increased skilled labor and brought up into the ranks of thrifty toil classes thrown into crime by unemployment; it has shown clearly that long hours and bad sanitation for laboring men, women, and children lessen production, destroy physique, and are ^^bad business''; it has shown that the safety of the state depends upon the loyalty and intelligent co-operation of labor; it has put new value upon large families ; upon the working-class, and upon youth. In short, every function that nineteenth-century political liberalism claimed must be left to the individual in order to insure national well-being, has, during the war, been assumed and has been administered successfully by the state.

A notable aspect of the Great War is the extent to which the countries engaged are officially and unofficially making preparations for peace, — ^mercantile, industrial, political preparation — not in order to bring about peace but, when peace is declared, to start the race anew in better condition. While at war the nations are training for peace. In England innumerable committees, governmental and private, are canvassing the wages, organizations, and housing of labor and how to associate it with government as never before. In America we did not like the maxim ^4n time of peace prepare for war.'' Why not, then, adopt the new maxim **In time of war prepare for peace"?

II The Worker's Lost Status And His Unrest

"A nation habituated to think in terms of problems and of the struggle to remedy them before it is actually in the grip of the forces which create the problems, would have an equipment for public life such as has not characterized any people."

John Dewey, The New Republic, May 6, 1916, p. 16.

And therefore today is thrilling With a past day's late fulfilling;

And the multitudes are enlisted

In the faith that their fathers resisted. And scorning the dream of tomorrow.

And bringing to pass, as they may. In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,

The dream that was scorned yesterday.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

" In every government the laws of education ought to be in relation to the principles of that government."

Montesquieu, Democracy in America, Book IV.

" The more one sees of this war, the more one is inclined to the belief that its real significance lies behind the battle lines rather than on them."

" The inner significance of this war has to do with the emancipation of labor, just as the inner significance of that of a hundred years ago had to do with the emancipation of the shopkeeper — ^who has since become a plutocrat! "

From " Unrest Behind the Lines,"

Winston Churchill, N. Y. Times Magazine, December 2, 1917.

Chapter II The Worker's Lost Status And His Unrest

ONE danger that threatens our democracy is our ignorance about its problems. This dangerous ignorance is due to many causes. The eighteenth-century doctrinaire notion that democracy means a return to nature and therefore to a simpler and easier social organization: the misleading assumption from our Declaration of Independence, that the maintenance of personal political freedom is a sufficient aim of the state: our unwillingness to recognize economic necessity as an undercurrent in social and political matters : our obstinate insistence that America contained no classes when it is of the very nature of economic development to stratify society: the control of our press and its censorship of unpleasant industrial facts: the suppression in universities of economic liberalism: the absence among our student bodies of vital attention to current industrial problems, — all of these American characteristics have contributed to democracy's ignorance of its own problems.

There are, however, direct sources of fresh and reliable information from which the public should hear. One of these is the conservative labor press, which prints careful and full accounts of labor conditions, strikes, and court proceedings.* Another is the social worker, generally a college graduate, who is in and out of the families of the poor. Another is the missionary, who usually has years of experience in a special locality and is its expert. Another is the Open Forum, where eager-minded working-people — students of social problems — discuss them with a knowledge and an oratorical power which often paralyzes and silences their opponents of the educated classes. The condition and need of America as revealed by such sources of information are alarmingly different from the generally conceived picture; they largely account for the radicalism of social workers, many clergymen, and some college professors, as well as the secret revolt of many employees in the financial districts of our great cities.

A Republic Demands Omniscience

A republic, as a self-governing state, must demand of its sovereign citizens something of that omniscience we used to laugh about as impersonated in the Kaiser and Mr. Roosevelt. For an American citizen it is a moment of startled awakening when he becomes alive to the fact that

* For a list of labor newspapers, etc., see Appendix.

if the republic is to last he must in very truth be sovereign. This he cannot be without an education in the subjects upon which democratic security depends. For instance, he must be better educated in the history of economics if he is to reply successfully to those discontented voices heard asserting, since we published our idealistic reasons for going to war, that there is more democracy in Europe than in America.

The National Economic League's program for 1917 contained a list of subjects for special consideration arranged in an order of importance indicated by the preferential votes of its members. There were forty-one subjects and on an average half a dozen sub-topics under each head. Here, then, are two hundred and fifty subjects of imperative importance for Americans. Let me name a few to test the reader's readiness upon vital current problems.

1. National Defense (Preparedness (Military, Naval, Economic, Financial, Industrial, Commercial, Social). Universal Compulsory Military Training and Service. Limitation of Armaments. Disarmament, etc. The Peril of Militarism).

2. International Peace (Enforcement of Peace, International Organization to Maintain Peace, the League to Enforce Peace, Peace Terms, Promoting International Friendship, the True Basis of Lasting Peace, etc.).

3. International Relations (America's Foreign Policy, the Monroe Doctrine, Our Relations with South

America and the Orient. America's Rights and Obligations. The Problem of Mexico).

4. American Merchant Marine (American Shipping Laws).

5. Labor Problem (Relation Between Employers and Workmen, Labor and Capital, Strikes, Wages, Hours, Unemployment, Poverty).

6. Education (the Public Schools, a National System of Education. Ethical, Religious, Civic, and Moral Training in Public Schools. The Press. Motion Pictures).

7. Conservation (Conservation and Development of Natural Resources, Economic Wastes, Conservation of Human Life, Public Health, Industrial and Personal Efficiency, Conservation of the Public Interests).

8. Efficiency and Economy in Government (Reform of Federal Finance Through Budget Control. Excessive Appropriations for Post Office Buildings. Preparedness).

9. Administration of Justice (Law Reform. The Judiciary. The Encroachment of the Legislative upon the Judicial Department of Government. Separation of Politics from the Judiciary).

10. Taxation and Tax Reforms (National, State, Municipal, Taxation of Land Values, Incomes and Inheritances, etc.).

How many high school boys, or even college graduates, could secure a mark of fifty per cent, if examined on these questions ?

The National Economic League's study program for 1918 is even more difficult.

Employers '* Forget'' the Human Element

Little attempt seems to be made by employers in America to understand either the human element or the economic problems involved in the labor movement. The whole matter is ** unrest'' ; the only way out is for capital to stand pat. Mr. Theodore Shonts, President of the Interborough Railroad Company of New York, addressed as follows the students of Drake University, Iowa, June 12, 1912:

*'The spirit of unrest is abroad. It is a universal sign of the times. Nor is it confined to this land alone ; it is world-wide. That country is no longer considered the best governed which governs the least. The cry is for universal governmental activity. Whether it be called socialism, collectivism, communism, municipal operation, or government ownership, the result is the same. The community itself must run the individual and provide for his wants while the individual sinks into a helpless unit, incapable of upholding the stability of the very government wMch he designs to nourish his common wants."

Members of the State Factory Investigation Committee of New York openly declared from public platforms that ^4n the factories of the city and State the human element is pretty much forgotten. ' ' But this is just the field labor wishes to control — not the mercantile but the human.

An astounding illustration of the forgetfulness by business men of the human side of their undertakings came to light in connection with our shipbuilding program. Hundreds of millions of dollars were appropriated; great contracts were signed; shipyards were built or enlarged — but no ships were forthcoming. Those responsible for all this outlay, it was discovered, had not thought it worth while to provide housing for the laborers who were to give life to this enormous stagnant investment.

The significance of labor's unrest is far-reaching. It does not mean merely that labor believes itself entitled to a larger share of production and to better sanitary shop and home conditions; labor's unrest means that modern industrial life was organized without taking into account what the worker had to say about it and that in consequence we have a broken-winged industrial machine and a deceptive political order.