Labour in politics; or, class versus country, considerations for American voters

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Dedication to Press Writers of America . vii

I Gist of this Book i

Foreword To Third Edition

To THE WOMEN and THE LEGION

Before passing on to my subject, let me first appeal to the new voters of 1920, especially the women and the young men of the American Legion, men and women keenly alive to their new powers and responsibilities, to study and value, severally and for themselves, the facts presented here.

I put the women first, because ( 1 ) it is the family at home that suffers first and most from loss of wages and privation entailed by strikes — oftentimes called by Labor autocrats who themselves suffer not a cent's worth meantime; also because (2) it is the wife and children of the nonunion man against whom is turned the meanest and deadliest weapon of trades-unionism, — social ostracism among neighbors, the odious word " scab " shouted at women and children in the streets and at schools; and finally, because (3) in all history the women, once roused, have shown themselves more heroically and sometimes more bitterly partisan than their husbands.

It is therefore fit and inevitable that the women should have their say in matters so nearly concerning the family; and it is particularly desirable that their conscience and intelligence should be wide awake now, at the beginning of their political power. It is vital to the family that women as voters should

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stand for sound economics and unselfish trades-unionism. It is the family that most needs the protection of the courts, and gains most by freedom of the law of supply and demand. No duty rests more squarely upon the new women-voters than the defence of the family; first by their own right thinking, and afterwards by its enactment into law.

I address myself also in the same spirit to the new voters of the American Legion, because they are just now particularly exposed to the temptation, dangled before them by politicians who are fishing for their votes, to put class before country in the matter of bonus-legislation; to their own sure demoralization and the injury of free government. Inasmuch as this book more particularly concerns Organized Labor, however, the affairs of the Legion are touched upon thus briefly here, only because its members cannot consistently condemn class politics, as I urge them to do, on the part of the Federation of Labor or the Farmers' Non-Partisan League, while themselves pushing their own class interest. The splendid principles for which the Legion stands will doubtless in themselves suffice to govern the votes of its members, as occasion to cast them arises; so it is in confident reliance on those principles that I urge the Legion's new voters to vote as they shot, for liberty and the common good — not for the class advantage of any group, least of all their own.

Let the men of the Legion beware always of the pension agents; of the politicians, who are always willing to plunder the public treasury in order to curry favor with a few men, and buy a few votes for themselves. Let not these grafters repeat the pension grabs that have continuously, since the close of the Civil War, as the long lines of veterans in the Annual Parade of the Grand Army grew short and

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i FOREWORD TO THIRD EDITION

shorter still, called ever for more and more millions ; until today, alas, but a few old men remain alive to account for a colossal pension roll, that always grows and never dies. Let the country found no more huge fortunes of pension agents at Washington.

O]

OR

CLASS versus COUNTRY

Chapter I Gist Of This Book

As I am addressing myself in the first instance to you, gentlemen of the press, I will follow your fashion of giving at the outset the gist of my story, hoping that it may interest you enough to carry you on through the mass of detail that must follow, to support my contentions. Here it is, in brief :

There can be no hope of reasonable relief from "Labor Unrest" so long as four or five million laborers can be fooled into paying fifty million dollars a year to a hundred thousand professional agitators that call themselves by the sounding title of " Organized Labor," only to bedevil their own employers, cripple their own jobs, cut down their own output, and minimize their own earning power. Now these mischief-makers are openly going into our politics.

Mr. Gompers last February served notice on the country, which the June Convention of the American Federation of Labor at Montreal has just confirmed, of "nonpartisan" entry of Organized Labor into the coming political campaign, with but a single purpose in view, namely, the class advantage of Organized Labor itself. This action is taken because the national and state administrations have for the past two years, in marked contrast with past subserviency to labor, taken notice of growing popular revolt against the principles, aims, and methods of the trades-unions. In so doing, Mr. Gompers has put both the great political parties between the devil of the labor vote and the deep sea of uncertainty as to public opinion; which last certainly ran for years with the general current of the stream of hostility to Wall Street and the Trusts against Capital, and in favor of Organized Labor as humanitarian in purpose and effect — but of late seems to grow wisely jealous of Labor too, as merely another trust.

The result so far is, that the Republican Party platform adopted at Chicago largely sidesteps the labor issue, though Governor Coolidge was named for the Vice Presidency because he stood up against the Boston police strike; while the Democrats, at San Francisco, though not quite so definitely, rather sidestep too. The general question of class entry into politics for class advantage is meantime a very broad and vital one in our democracy, that will last in all probability over several campaigns. The politicians will not dare take a stand upon it, for obvious if not very magnificent reasons. The people will have to make up their own minds, as so often before on serious public questions, and show the politicians unmistakably the way the wind of opinion blows, before the party weather vanes will swing the legislative mill sails into the breeze and the latter will begin to turn. This little book is intended to help in the formation of public opinion by condensation of the facts into convenient form, and by their presentation in not too ponderous diction. Here they are as I see them:

GIST OF THIS BOOK

There has grown up among us, ostensibly for self-protection against capitalism and exploitation, huge organization of labor; with enormous income, — nearly fifty million dollars per annum, — contributed by a membership of over four millions, perhaps half of them voters. Four fifths of this great income goes for salaries and expenses of a labor bureaucracy numbering perhaps one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand men and women; whose main business is enlarging the organization, getting and keeping members and collecting their dues, and whose secondary business is distributing union benefits and managing occasional strikes. The excellent livelihood and the personal careers of this bureaucracy depend upon its success in creating " industrial unrest " ; and on the strength of it recruiting ever vaster armies of working men and women, centralized and massed as a fighting force against Capital — carrying the impression and indeed the reality of formidable power, industrial and political.

From the standpoint of the able and ambitious men who have for forty years built up this great machine, it is a vast success. It has attained the great size and income aforesaid, has stirred up discontent everywhere, has caused some seventy thousand recorded strikes, has cut down the productivity of our labor fully one third, has largely contributed to double our cost of living, and has perhaps permanently injected a class issue into our politics.

By virtue of colossal losses already inflicted on industry and the community, and by threat of worse yet to come, the great labor leaders, such as Messrs. Gompers, the late John Mitchell, W. B. Wilson, Stone, and others, have made themselves well off, powerful, and world-famous personages. Naturally, they are pretty sure to go right on running their huge mill, grinding out its daily grist of strikes and dollars. It may be, too, that they sincerely believe in their own mission.

Then there is a smaller group among us, of savers and investors, collectively known as Capital but unorganized; ^organized, on the contrary, by war-aftermath, strained by present and doubtful of future conditions, political and economical, it has as yet formed no solid front in its own defense against labor, government, or public opinion. As the English statesman, Winston Churchill, said last December: " Capitalism does nothing to establish its own moral basis, though abundantly capable of defense. The press is afraid of it; the politicians are afraid of it; and its case goes by default." So in this country, too, Capitalism, half dazed, says little in its own justification.

Finally, there are the other nongrouped one hundred millions of us, — the people generally. Most of them have been in favor of the so-called Labor Movement until just now, as humanitarian.

In fact, however, that movement, which is my subject here, is far from humanitarian. It is based on the lying premise of capitalistic oppression and class struggle; it appeals to the worthless motives of selfishness and sloth; it formulates the dishonest purposes of monopoly and coercion; it uses the lawless means of combination in restraint of trade, and violation of constitutional liberty and right. Moreover it utterly fails to benefit its votaries — its rank and file. It is an increasing injury and menace to all of us, in cost of living, industry, and finance. It saps our national virility, poisons our politics, and prostitutes democracy to class service. We now at

GIST OF THIS BOOK

last suddenly recognize its great centralized militant organization as a menace to free institutions, whether considered as striking or voting machinery. Thus far, apparently, it has benefited no one in any large way except its leaders, especially Mr. Gompers and his confreres; though they have benefited enormously, and dream of greater benefit still — while their principle of entire irresponsibility to their country remains unchanged.

We Americans have always been jealous of centralized power, the logical remedy for which is decentralization. There is, too, a natural law of centrifugal force that tends to limit the value of centralized control; a tendency to disintegration and decay that makes overgrowth break down under its own weight and weakness. As the German proverb puts it, " Things are so ordained that the trees do not grow into the heavens." The increasing failure of colossal centralization to help labor is therefore perfectly natural and to be expected. It is along the line of decentralization that the American voter is likely to urge the labor movement now and hereafter. The " right to organize, to strike, and to bargain collectively " — all three of them forms of centralized power, — what these rights are or ought to be, and what Mr. Gompers would make of them, I shall try to show ; but I think that most Americans already agree with Governor Coolidge, that "there is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, any time."

I hope to show such Americans that it is time to meet not only the criminal menace of Labor with the law, but to face its political menace with the ballot, in coming and future campaigns, until the bogy of class politics is laid, for the time anyway:

Also that we should divorce labor and politics, and set free the impartial laws of supply and demand to determine social justice :

Also, as practical men of sense and for the common good, that we should cut loose the labor troubles of every employer from those of all the others, and should not assist Organized Labor's largely successful program of tying all industry and labor in one inextricable tangle, of centralized quarreling, bargaining, mediation, and arbitration, compulsory or otherwise; but should on the contrary set each employer free, and each laborer, according to the guarantees of the Constitution, to prosecute his lawful business, under maintenance of law and the public peace; that we should shun collectivism; should bar the general and sympathetic strike and the boycott; and finally that we should deny the right to strike against the public welfare, as Governor Coolidge says, by anybody, anywhere, any time.

Nevertheless, I hold that we should accomplish these things by law only in so far as it proves to be impossible to accomplish them by voluntary change of heart and purpose of Organized Labor; for every good American recognizes the great and benevolent possibilities underlying the trades-union principle of brotherhood and cooperation.

The education of Labor itself is a consummation devoutly to be wished and seriously undertaken by every lover of his country. Better ethics, better economics, and better industry would pay workingmen far better than the present cult of war against the capitalist oppressor; there can be no doubt of that.

Decentralization, Least Government, Education, — these are the preachments of this book.

Chapter II The Issues And The Point Of View

I have chosen "Class versus Country" as the subtitle for this book partly because it is short, alliterative, and "carries a punch," but more because it exactly states an important question that confronts this country now and in future.

President Gompers, who seems to constitute Labor — as President Wilson constituted the Democratic Party — is openly out to control Congress and the presidential election, and incidentally to plunder the nation for the benefit of labor*

It is not the first time. In 191 6, just before the last presidential campaign, he took control of the President and Congress, passed the Adamson Law, and actually did plunder the people for the benefit of the railway workers. We all stood for it, too; partly because we were too busy with the Kaiser just then to bother with Gompers, and partly because the latter caught us off guard with his coup d'etat.

Nevertheless a shock of surprise and a wave of wrath swept over the country, to be followed by others, till the Seattle strike, the Steel, Boston Police, Longshore, Coal, and a hundred other strikes, with the Plumb (or plunder) Plan, backed up by talk of a general railway strike, one after the other brought conviction to many million free Americans that, having done with the Kaiser, the next autocrat in line for the clippers is Mr. Gompers. Ole Hanson and Governor Coolidge started the revolt; Senator Cummins, Congressman Blanton, and others, are following it up ; the President, as usual playing both ends against the middle, slips behind the camouflage of his Industrial Conferences; while Gompers, driven to bay, foams at the mouth, and threatens this poor little nation and its Congressmen with the wrath of Organized Labor.

Well, it is an excellent thing to wash our family linen clean and hang it out to dry. Clean washing is mainly a matter of plenty of hot water, strong soap, vigorous handling, good eyesight, and thorough exposure to the light. The American people is ready to turn Organized Labor inside out, look hard at it, and do the needful scrubbing uncompromisingly. Something not so very different from the Bolshevist pitch has been sticking to our shirt.

When I was a boy in Vermont the old farmers used to say, " Work hard and save your money, and by and by a hired man will do the work for you." But times have changed. I am living again in a New England university town — Cambridge — and find to my surprise an almost Bolshevist cult among my perfectly honest and Christian neighbors. None of them ever created an industry, risked a dollar in active production, or found a job of work for even a few laboring men; yet they have very decided though not very clear views as to how Rockefeller and other greedy capitalists who do all these things ought to democratize industry; ought to save and risk all the capital, pay all or nearly all the profit to their employees, and moreover ought to take their orders whenever they choose to give them.

These same neighbors, many of them, do not seem to democratize their own domestic industry. They keep servants and incline to say to them, each to his man or her maid, " If you take my wages, you

ISSUES AND POINT OF VIEW

must also take my orders " — and they are quite right. But they rather remind me of certain Pharisees denounced in the Gospel of St. Matthew, who " say, and do not. For they bind great burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers." Perhaps in the aureoled enthusiasm of " the new order " (whatever that may mean) they will label me as reactionary, undemocratic. But let me deprecate your doing the same, gentlemen of the press; for I am seriously asking you to look at facts and human nature as they are, not putting too great a strain on either.

To begin and end with, I believe in good hard honest work, in manly pride in doing one's level best up to the point of healthy fatigue ; not only for the pay envelope — which will always be the fullest — but for the health and happiness of the worker, and the stimulus that his energy gives to the whole community. Wise men of all ages from Solomon down, and the common sense of the common people everywhere and always, will agree to this creed, though most men do not live entirely up to it. It is a truism, hardly needing iteration.

Of course, I despise and denounce the lazy, useless, contemptible song sung by Mr. Gompers (see A. F. L. Report 1920, inside cover),

" Whether you work by the piece or work by the day, Decreasing the hours increases the pay,"

and his dishonest gospel always to demand " more, more, more" for less, less, less labor. I despise the mule's trick of balking — of doing the least possible work, under threat to do nothing at all if asked to do more. No more demoralizing poison could be instilled into the mind of man than the above, which in the short space of forty years has transformed our virile, cheerful American craftsmen by hundreds of thousands into flabby, grouchy shirkers, always quarreling with their own bread and butter, and getting less of it.

To me the finer, more human, more American gospel is that of the biggest day's work for the biggest day's pay within my powers. If some other fellow can do a bigger day's work than I can, then let him also get so much bigger pay. If he can outstrip me, I would not be so small as to hold him back. If, moreover, he can pay for and coordinate the work of a thousand men like or better than himself, and get far more than a thousandfold the result, let him go ahead, and God bless him. Great be his reward for doing with them all what they cannot do by themselves. He cannot lead the crowd without drawing them after him, at least part way.

Let me reassert my point of view, that of a pragmatist, as I said before; a man who believes in things that work and endure, who accepts broad and universal social and economic phenomena that persist through all human history as ipso facto based upon natural law and human need, satisfying both. For when they do not do so, they do not last! I would apply the same test to the phenomena of economics and politics as to hydraulics or mechanics. If things spring up and endure, they must accord with the law of life. If they fail, it is because that law is too strong for them; they are against nature. One of these things that must conform to law in order to endure is Capital.

There is nothing in history more certain than this, that where life and property are most secure, where those who sow can also reap and keep, there general prosperity is greatest, poverty is least, and standards

ISSUES AND POINT OF VIEW of living are highest. There those who work harder, save faster, risk more, rightly gain and keep more; while those who not only work and save hardest, but who also create work for others besides themselves, rightly gain most of all. Service rendered, in the way of work done, directly or indirectly, is the natural measure of reward, and has been throughout all history, in accord with natural law.

So long, then, as we Americans conform to natural law as established by history, just so long those who do most in this world will fare the best. If our country is prosperous and the average man is well off, the exceptional man will be better off. There never has been great general prosperity without large private fortunes, from the dawn of history down to date. They appear and disappear with the exceptional men who create them, — for this world's goods in themselves are perishable, — but while they last the great modern industrial fortunes, unlike the hoarded gold and gems of oriental despots, are far more useful to the laborers than to their owners, paying to the former far more year by year in wages than to the latter in dividends. The pestilence-andf amine-free security of our humblest toilers in America compared, say, with the precariousness of savage life in Darkest Africa, or even in Bolshevist Russia, is built upon the firm foundation of our railways, factories, and banks.

Another human phenomenon, even more constant under peaceful conditions than creation and accumulation of capital, is propagation of the race and abundance of labor. The poor ye have always with you, saith Holy Writ. Statesmen and economists need seldom worry about race suicide: there will always be plenty of labor, in times of peace at least. What they ought to worry about, as patriots, work-

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ing for the common good, is abundance of capital. They should stand for that economical and political system which has actually best created and conserved capital, and endured the test of time and place. Granted abundance of capital, there is always abundance of, and for, labor. Without abundance of capital, there is seldom abundance of anything human, except want.

A great change seems to me long overdue in American public opinion, and is perhaps under way already. Of late years millions of us have refused to accept the phenomenon — universal in all times and countries — of wealth for the few, livelihood for the many, and extreme poverty for again a few, as what we call " Social Justice." It is true that before the day of the modern commercial or industrial fortune — the just reward of service rendered — great private wealth was often the odious result of political or military spoliation, taken from the many by taxation or force and pocketed by the few; and that even in America we bear against the earned fortune of the Rockefellers a traditional grudge that relates back to the stolen fortunes of the Caesars. Although nowhere should the enormous usefulness of capitalism be so well understood as in this fortunate land, many thousands of good Americans have not outgrown the hatred and envy of wealth as "privilege," inherited from centuries of its association with autocracy and robbery. The " moral basis of capitalism," its beneficence, its democracy, its social justice, has not yet been established in our public opinion. Yet it is time we realized that capitalism is an invaluable by-product of political and economic liberty that should be at home and welcome in America. Common sense will admit that democracy should not insist on uniform poverty, and

ISSUES AND POINT OF VIEW

sense of justice will confirm Theodore Roosevelt's expression of the square deal for every man, namely : " Equality of opportunity? — Yes! Equality of reward? — No; an iridescent dream! "

We have had enough of demagogy. In Abraham Lincoln's caustic words : You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Most of us now ask to hear plain truth.

If you gentlemen can see and will say that there is nothing necessarily fundamental or spontaneous in "Labor Unrest"; that it has been deliberately worked up for years by demagogues for the sake of the power and cash in it; that "organization" has cost "Labor" say four hundred million dollars in dues, plus the cost of seventy thousand strikes, say eight hundred millions of lost wages in forty years; that nevertheless union wages lag behind both nonunion wages and cost of living in respective increase, and are bound to lag more and more behind as union labor gives less and less production under union rules — you will be doing us all, laborers included, a service.

Laborers are not fools, and probably would laugh at you if you ask them to point out just how they are " oppressed," or made " wage slaves." They know well enough that the more employers (oppressors) the merrier; that "Capital" no matter how greedy, has never managed to grind American labor down below the level of the best paid and best fed wage workers on the face of this earth, and apparently has never tried to do so. It would make them and the rest of us, and perhaps some of yourselves, gentlemen, more content and optimistic of the future of our country to accept unreservedly our wonderfully fruitful modern American capitalism as

(with rare exception) the legitimate offspring of liberty and law; morally right, socially just, economically and politically invaluable — especially to that vast multitude of good honest citizens who are absolutely dependent for work upon the captains who have the brains to create and the following to finance it.

Fortunately for America the Reds in Russia, and in Europe generally, are trying out before our eyes the experiment of robbing and killing off those who work and save, those who employ men who can't employ themselves. They are repeating on a scale more colossal than ever before attempted the tyranny and waste of the state as sole employer. The foreign cables a few days ago reported that the Soviet Government in Russia has just announced a loss in operating the industries taken over by the state of so many billion roubles for the past year as to make the staggering losses of the Wilson Administration in operating the railways and wires, and commencing the airplane, shipping, nitrate, and other production, look like " thirty cents," as the phrase goes. Long before we are likely to be called to the polls to substitute state ownership for the individual enterprise reserved to us by the Constitution, we shall be pretty sure of a magnificent object lesson in noting just how far Lenine and Trotzky succeed in correcting the mistakes of the Almighty, who chose to make men differ in achievement and in reward.

When that moment arrives, if ever, I am optimist enough to back the common sense of the average voter to heed the proverb, " Let well enough alone."

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Chapter III

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR. GROWTH AND INCOME

The most obvious characteristics of Organized Labor just now are size, wealth, and aggressiveness; all of these emphasized by the partnership — perhaps a bit shaky — between the two presidents, Messrs. Wilson and Gompers. For a while it seemed as if the firm style should read the other way, — Presidents Gompers and Wilson.

The foregoing diagrams, borrowed from the A. F. L. Annual Report for 19 19, tell the story at once of the great size, rapid growth, and completely centralized control of Mr. Gompers' life work, the American Federation of Labor. No financial statement is given to show the total income and expenditures of the 33,852 unions existing last year — now said to number over thirty- four thousand; but an estimate may be hazarded as follows:

Inquiry from various union men of different trades around Boston, typical of building construction, factory work, railroad and public service, operation and construction, indicates that union dues average at least a dollar a month per capita. If so, the 3,260,068 paying members of the A. F. L. must have paid in for the year 19 19 around thirty-nine million dollars. The Report says they got back in union benefits (sickness and death mainly) $6,705,- 000 (strike benefits appear to be paid by special assessment, and not to come out of dues). This would indicate a net outlay for " organization " for that year of over thirty-two million dollars, paid by the A. F. L. alone. A colossal outlay indeed!

Besides this, the four Railway Brotherhoods, which number some four hundred and fifty thousand members, probably pay in somewhere between five and ten million dollars more. It would not be excessive to guess that during the last fifty years at least four hundred and fifty million dollars have been paid in by these two groups of working men (not to mention the Knights of Labor, I. W. W., etc.) for dues alone.