The Intellectual and the Labor Movement

Front matter

By GEORGE SOULE Director, Labor Bureau, Inc.

Copyright, 1923, by LEAGUE FOR INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 70 Fifth Ave., New York

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

It is now many years ago that Prince Peter Kropotkin wrote his famous appeal to young "intellectuals" to cast in their lot with the labor movement—to the poets, the painters, the sculptors, the musicians, who understood that their "true mission and the very interests of art itself" were with labor; to the physicians, who had become convinced that the causes of disease must be uprooted; to the lovers of pure science, to all "who possessed knowledge, talent, capacity, industry."

"And remember," declared Kropotkin, "if you do come, that you come not as masters but as comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for yourselves in a new life which sweeps upwards to the conquest of the future; that you come less to teach than to grasp the aspirations of the many; to divine them, to give them shape, and then to work without rest and without haste, with all the fire of youth and all the judgment of age, to realize them in actual life. Then and then only will you lead a complete, a noble, a rational existence. Then you will see that your every effort on this path bears with it fruit in abundance, and this sublime harmony once established between your actions and the dictates of your conscience will give you powers you never dreamt lay dormant in yourselves.

"The never-ceasing struggle for truth, justice and equality among the people, whose gratitude you will earn—what nobler career can the youth of all nations desire than this?"

This and similar appeals made before and since, and, most of all, the great, crying need of the times have, during the last hundred years, irresistibly aligned men and women of keen mind and fine idealism on the side of labor. A host of them we find in Europe alone—Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Galsworthy, Carpenter, Masefield, among the dramatists and poets; Tolstoi, Zola, Hugo, Turgieneff, France, Gorky, Wells, Rolland, Barbusse, among the novelists; John Stuart Mill, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Sorel, Lagardelle, Place, Lenin, the Webbs, the Hobsons, Gide, Cole, Kautsky, Hilferding, among the economists; Ruskin, Morris, Crane, Millet, Meunier, Wagner, among the artists and musicians; Alfred Russel Wallace, Lombroso, Ferri, Labriola, Frederic Harrison, Grant Allen, Bertrand Russel, Albert Einstein, among the scientists and philosophers; Lassalle, Jaures, Mazzini, Adler, the Liebknechts, Snowden, Vandervelde, Trotsky, Macdonald, Branting, Longuet, among the orators and the parliamentarians; Robert Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, among the Utopian writers; and men and women of rare attainments in every line of intellectual endeavor.

The great majority of these "traders in ideas," as Barbusse has it, have not only had a passionate desire to serve labor in its immediate struggles, but to assist the worker in his age long battle toward a worthier status—toward a higher order of industrial society.

In the early days of the labor movement, the intellectual was of chief assistance to the workers in interpreting labor to itself and to those outside its ranks; in inspiring the movement with confidence in itself; in assisting it to formulate its program for social change, to keep its idealism, its enthusiasm alive; in widening its vision of future possibilities.

In Europe today, particularly in countries such as Russia, where labor is in control, the prime present day need is for technical assistance in the administration of socialized industry. The indifference or opposition of many brain workers to the government has been a serious handicap to it. In other countries—Sweden, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, among them—labor has selected many "intellectuals" to voice its demands in the parliaments and in municipal councils, and to aid it in the cooperative, the educational and other movements.

In the United States, labor has for some time utilized lawyers to defend it in court—lawyers of the type of Clarence Darrow, Jackson H. Ralston, Morris Hillquit, Frank P. Walsh. It has gladly accepted the service of such university trained men and women as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, John B. Andrews, Owen R. Lovejoy, Henry R. Seager, John R. Commons, Lillian Wald, in its fight for better labor legislation. It has received aid—material and spiritual—from writers and speakers of the type of Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Wendell Phillips, Albert Brisbane, William Henry Channing, John Swinton, Edward Bellamy, and Henry D. Lloyd, at an earlier period; and, more recently, of Jack London, William D. Howells, Frank Norris, Edwin Markham, Charles Rann Kennedy, Mary Austin, Upton Sinclair, Vida D. Scudder, Sinclair Lewis, Louis Untermeyer, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Poole, Frederic C. Howe, Arthur Gleason, Lincoln Steffens, among writers, poets and dramatists; William James, John Dewey, Charles P. Steinmetz, among the philosophers and scientists; Lester F. Ward, Robert H. Hoxie, Carlton Parker, Thorstein Veblen, E. A. Ross, Franklin H. Giddings, Charles A. Beard, among political scientists; and John A. Ryan, Walter Rauschenbusch, Bishops Spaulding and Williams, Harry F. Ward, Judah L. Magnes, and John Haynes Holmes, among religious leaders.

During the past few years organized labor on the economic field has developed a number of constructive features. It has entered the field of labor education, labor banking, labor health, cooperation, labor politics, and these developments have led to an increasing need for university trained technicians. In some ways service as expert advisers in these fields of trade union activity furnish the most fertile field today for the trained student who wishes to devote his energies to the strengthening of the labor movement.

How can the young intellectual be of service in this field? In what spirit should he approach the task? What pitfalls should he avoid? What should be the attitude of the trade union leaders toward the technicians?

George Soule, of the Labor Bureau, Inc., has attempted to answer these questions. After suggesting some answers, he has asked for comments from others working in the same field. These comments are, in large part, embodied in the text of the pamphlet, in footnotes and in the appendix. The pamphlet thus becomes, in a real sense, a cooperative venture.

The pamphlet does not attempt to persuade students of the importance of the labor movement in the life of today and tomorrow. It assumes that importance. It does not attempt to cover the whole field of intellectual activity surrounding the movement. It is confined largely to the opportunities of the technician, in the broader sense of that term, in the present day trade union movement.

The League counts itself as particularly fortunate in securing this contribution from Mr. George Soule and his colleagues. A graduate of Yale University, 1908, Mr. Soule has been a thorough student of the labor movement for many years past. Since 1918, he has served on the staffs of the New Republic, the Nation and the New York Post as a special writer on labor problems, is the author of a report on the industrial service section of the Department of the Secretary of War, and more lately has devoted his entire time to the Labor Bureau, Inc., as one of its directors. He is co-author with J. M. Budish of "The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry," a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a writer for various scientific journals.

The pamphlet is the third of a series on social problems published by the League. It will not have been published in vain if it helps any young idealist to find his niche in the labor movement and to assist in the onward march of this movement toward a nobler civilization.

HARRY W. LAIDLER.

The Intellectual and the Labor Movement

THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT

By George Soule

IT IS a pity there is not some other word than intellectual with which to describe the type of person about whom this pamphlet is written. "Brain-worker”" will not do; it is an ugly and meaningless term which implies that a college graduate has a better mind and employs it more than a manual laborer,. although the contrary is often the case. "Educated person" is an unwarranted assumption; not many really are educated in the true sense. "Technician" would be more accurate for some; yet, alas, how few intellectuals have technical skill of any sort!

The word is made necessary by the fact that there are some trades, largely consisting of those whose hand-tools are not heavier than a pencil or more difficult to operate than a typewriter or an adding machine, which are not yet well organized in trade-unions. The usual apprenticeship for these trades is long and expensive. This is so, however, largely through social custom rather than because such a long training is necessary to produce the average level of ability of the journeyman in question. These trades are largely recruited from the children of Mr. Babbitt and his friends. They include writers of fiction, of poetry, of criticism, of political and social articles—though not the humdrum newspaper man. They include many social workers, researchers, and officials and employees of philanthropic and liberal societies. They include some professors and teachers, And, a much larger class, they include many who do not have even so definite a trade as these, but feel vague aspirations to be of service some day in one or more of them. One trait all these persons have in common. They believe that the whole world and its problems are their province; they are not satisfied to be intellectually limited to one round of duties or to one enterprise, such as a grocery store or a family. Exhibited with proper modesty, this trait is a good one.

WHY INTELLECTUALS ARE ATTRACTED TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT

Now a person of this sort is likely to be discontented with the human scene as it is, ready of imagination and sympathy, experimental, and somewhat contemptuous of the standards immediately about him. He feels the need of a vital and refreshing force in the world which may upset it more or less, which may lead it into regenerative paths. He likes dramatic conflicts and great events. Looking abroad, he searches for an historic current which seems important enough for him to throw himself into. And soon the labor movement, as reflected in strikes, in manifestoes and prophecies, fills his eye. Here are a multitude of people who also feel discontent, who have a worthy cause, whose onward march is massive and continued enough to bear a sort of grandeur, especially in distant perspective which obscures details and confuses colors. For him the immensely complex British Labor Movement becomes the famous and inspiring Nottingham program of the Labor Party. The early speeches of Trotsky or Lenin stand for the gargantuan upheaval in Russia. He is fired with the spirit of words like "comrade" and "brother," and in moments of dramatic imagination pictures himself sacrificing his share of this world's. goods, and perhaps, if need be, life or liberty as well, in the cause of humanity.

FINDING THE REALITY OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

Such an attitude is not only creditable, it is also enjoyable and, to a certain extent, useful. Many of the leaders of the trade unions themselves have it at times, and it is one with which everyone may be touched in a crisis such as a war or a strike. But it is not anyone's habitual attitude; assumed too consistently and too long it may become a posture which is cramping and even inhuman. At any rate, the intellectual who has a romantic picture of the labor movement should remember that the rank and file of those who compose it approach it from a different ground and with a somewhat different purpose. To a manual wage-earner the movement may be a spectacle, a drama, but it is also something more immediate and intimate. It is likely to be presently embodied in a trade-union. This union may have won his allegiance on the plea of high aims and brotherly principles, but it may also have kept his membership because it has proved itself capable of raising his wages twenty-five cents a day or shortening his working week from fifty-two to forty-eight hours. He may have joined it just as many business men join a prosperous church—because it contains most of the prominent workmen of his trade and is able to lead him to a job. It may mean to him the sort of vested interest represented to many others by an insurance company. The officials of the union may be idealists, but they may be practical men as well, who think not merely about the ultimate interests of the rank and file who elect them, but also about the amount and regularity of their salaries, and hence about the conservative type of policy which will insure a continual flow of "per capita" into the union treasuries.

To a common or carnal mind such motives and details appear proper and reasonable, the essential texture of any large fabric, but to a man looking for a marching army of sacrifice, which is on its way to create a new heaven and a new earth, they often seem so petty as to be nearly criminal. The intellectual who actually works with the labor movement is a bit inclined to scoff at the unions' emphasis on more wages and hours. He may oppose insurance funds and similar projects on the very ground that they are likely to lead to conservative policies. He may think every great strike is "the" revolution, and may be bitterly disappointed when it is compromised on the basis of half the gains which he thinks it might have won. He watches the indomitable expression of resolution in the speeches, followed by a weakening of the rank and file and the temporary satisfaction with small victories. He may discover scattered instances of graft and other dishonesty. He sees what looks like ingratitude on the part of the crowd, their susceptibility to meaningless factional struggles, their supineness in the face of intolerable outrages, their unwillingness or inability to think, their fail to support causes which might help them. And in the end he is likely to become as discouraged as in the beginning he was ardorous. Disillusionment and bitterness set in; he cannot find a way to be useful, the labor movement is slow and tortuous and he will have none of it. At the same time he may find himself incapable of making even the sacrifice involved in living from year to year on the same income as the average skilled wage-earner, to say nothing of losing his liberty and life in the Cause.

WHAT LABOR SOMETIMES EXPECTS OF THE INTELLECTUAL.

Naive members and officers of the unions sometimes have as exaggerated expectations of the intellectual as he has of them. Here is an educated man come to help them. He has been to college and hence knows everything. He knows what is the matter with the world. Give him power and he can do away in a jiffy with poverty and oppression. He has written for a newspaper, and so he can see that the newspapers at last print the workers' side of the case in full. His influential friends can bring pressure to bear on the employer and make him reasonable. They can contribute enormous sums of money for relief funds and benefits.

No intellectual can do these things, most intellectuals cannot do any part of one of them. Here is disillusionment also. Through long and bitter experience many trade unionists have sworn off from "brain-workers." Three-quarters of the people who come from other economic classes to help them have their own axes to grind. The other quarter are ineffectual fools. They lead the rank and file off on impractical wild-goose chases. They spoil union discipline and create dissension. Their attitude is intolerably patronizing. They find comfortable berths for themselves and then from their security preach to the wage-earner with a wife and family on the necessity of sacrificing all in warfare against the established order. Labor can fight its own battles without these college upstarts.

When one considers the situation, it is easy to understand the rift which often appears between the intellectuals and the labor movement.

Numerous intellectuals who have read this pamphlet complain that the preceding sections underestimate the role of the intellectual and his high purpose, and are likely to dampen the fine enthusiasm of youth concerning the labor movement, which is the most vital and significant current in the modern world. One suggests that I should use Barbusse's definition of the intellectual—one who deals in ideas. Another says that I should string through the matter a red thread of hope and courage.

It is significant to me that no trade unionist who has read the pamphlet expresses such an opinion. The tone of this introduction has been deliberately unflattering, since one of its objects is to discourage an inflated and surface enthusiasm which usually wreaks as much harm as it does good. Unless the inner spirit of a man is robust enough to bear such a matter-of-fact analysis, his courage and enthusiasm certainly will not endure through an experience of the reality. I am confident that a deep fire of conviction can and must be capable of a straight look at the facts and will be willing to prove itself in the unromantic drudgery necessary to accomplishment. There is no discouragement for those who have such a spirit in what I have tried to say.

WHAT THE INTELLECTUAL MAY EXPECT OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

It is not true that the high mutual expectations of the intellectual and labor are entirely unfounded. The picture which the enthusiast forms of the onward march of labor is not false, it is only immensely fore-shortened and romanticized. If he will but remember that workmen are people, very much like other people, and that their organizations and collective habits are institutions, very much like other institutions, he will save himself much needless chagrin. Most people are interested in petty things, most of them prefer roundabout alleys and sideshows to straight progress along the main highroad. Heroic moods are not stable. The labor movement moves, but sometimes more like a glacier than like a race-horse, sometimes more like an eddy than like a cataract. It is historic, not in the sense of a carefully directed pageant, but in the sense of a highly varied and slow migration. Its institutions are just as liable to encrusted bureaucracy, to cautious protection of their vested interests, as are other institutions. They have, to be sure, merits of their own, but they are not the type of an ideal world. The fact that unions are concerned about wages and hours, about political factions, that they progress haltingly and clumsily, does not mean that the high-sounding manifestoes and programs are nothing but so much political bunkum. It means merely that like all words of man, they are too small and clipped to encompass more than the general direction and the finer spirit of the reality.

There is one aspect of the labor movement, moreover, which is likely to take by surprise the intellectual who is unfamiliar with it. He will probably be unprepared for the intricacy and difficulty of its daily functions, or for the technical skill demanded of its practical leaders. Seen closely, it is not chiefly an affair of meetings, strikes and speeches. A successful trade union is a complex organization with a highly developed government of its own, dealing with the life of industry in a hundred details. Its officials have an accumulated experience in organizing methods, in negotiating with employers, in the conduct of industrial warfare when that is necessary, in the administration of the affairs of large bodies of men; which places them on a level of practical intelligence at least as high as that of the average business man. The officialdom of the labor movement may, like most other officialdoms, be unduly conservative. It may for a time follow policies which prove mistaken in the long run. It may have much to learn about the conduct of its own business. All these faults are characteristic of almost any group of execu Yet a person who is unfamilar with the concrete machinery of trade-unionism, who has not wrestled with its problems at close range, and who has not understood the heavy responsibilities which rest upon the shoulders of a trade-union leader, is as venturesome in attempting to advise unionists about matters of policy as a raw college graduate would be in criticizing the technical aspects of management in a great industrial enterprise. No one who has not received a thorough education in the labor movement is fitted to assume any of the functions of technical trade union leadership. Any "intellectual" who attempts to do so is likely to meet with a warranted rebuff. If his talent for speaking or writing should gain him support in a section of the movement which is not itself experienced and has not developed its own leaders, he is likely soon to succumb to disaster, together with those who have followed him.

The intellectual, then, may expect of the labor movement a real significance in spite of all disappointments, and he may also expect of it, as of all significant institutions rooted in history, a tough fabric of custom and behavior to which the only fruitful approach is one of inquiring respect.

WHAT THE LABOR MOVEMENT OUGHT TO EXPECT OF THE INTELLECTUAL

The trade union movement may help the sympathetic intellectual to fulfill his true function by abandoning a wholly negative attitude toward him. It ought to cease holding exaggerated expectation of his ability. It may be compelled to discourage his ill considered attempts at interference. But it ought also positively to make clear that in certain respects the intellectual may be of distinct assistance.

When a unionist wants plumbing or carpentry done, he goes to a plumber or carpenter, not to an official of his own union. He recognizes that the man who has a trade, whose skill is dependent on an apprenticeship in his craft, is the man to be employed on a job in that trade or craft. To a limited extent he follows the same policy with regard to professional men. He visits a doctor when he is sick; he does not argue that the art of doctoring is the perquisite of a manual worker. When unions become involved in litigation, they naturally employ lawyers. But only recently has it occurred to union officials that when they are faced by difficult economic or industrial problems—as they are constantly, owing to the very nature of a union's activity—, when they have controversies with employers in arbitration proceedings or in the open arena, they might go to an economist or an engineer for technical counsel or representation.

The fact that they have not done so before is not the fault of the unions, but of the social scientists and technicians. Economics in the past has not been so much a science derived inductively from observed facts, developing principles on which an art of effective action may be based, as it has been a body of dogmatic doctrine serving the prejudices of one group or another in society. Engineers have usually been merely the instruments of employers in getting more work for less wages out of their employees. But unions have an opportunity to demand a useful science of economics, and a socially-minded and serviceable group of engineers. There are numerous other professions, the members of which are now chiefly employed by corporation and business executives, but which might be equally useful to labor. There are, of course, the newspaper and magazine writers and editors. There are the accountants, who can audit union books and set union records straight to much better effect than volunteer committees. There are the experts in preventive medicine and industrial hygiene, the architects, town planners who might design cooperative housing developments, the psychologists and the students of social and political science who might, if they had explored their own subjects sufficiently, give much aid in the development of social and political strategy. In fact, there is hardly a branch of science or technology which might not in the long run be made useful to any movement of such inclusive nature and large aims as the labor movement.

In the fields of trained technical assistance labor ought to expect much of the intellectual, and by expecting much it will help the sympathetic intellectual to educate himself properly to render a genuine professional service. The intellectual can better aid the union by doing his own job well for the union than by trying to do the union’s job for it.

THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE RANK AND FILE

Here again I must record dissent on the part of a number of intellectuals. The best way to understand the labor movement and to help it, they say, is first to become a manual worker and to join a union as a member of the rank and file.

A small number of intellectuals have done this with great profit to themselves and have subsequently been able to interpret labor's attitude with much more sympathy than they could otherwise have done. Manual labor is salutary for anybody, whether he is to work with the labor movement or not; and any intellectual worker will derive benefit from an occasional vacation from his desk and typewriter. As a preparation for professional service this course has much to recommend it.

I am doubtful, however, whether any but the most exceptional individual should aspire to officialdom and leadership in the labor movement itself by this route. After all is said and done, a man with a totally different background and training cannot easily make himself over into a true representative of the rank and file by a few years in a shop or mine. He is more likely to be the college man posing as the labor leader than the authentic spokesman.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

In a large sense and in the long run all professions and sciences benefit the community as a whole, and whatever benefits the community benefits labor, which forms such a large part of the community. In this sense there is an almost unlimited scope for service in the professions by those who are sympathetic with the labor movement. Certainly nobody is fitted to undertake important work in any social service unless he does understand the labor movement, and unless he participates to a high degree in its aspirations.

Nevertheless, the opportunity for direct professional connection with labor organizations themselves is not at present wide. Trade unions are still, and necessarily, organizations which must use collective economic power or the threat of it frequently in order to protect their elementary rights and interests, since they are not yet recognized as essential parts of the body politic either by public officials in general or by certain large groups of bankers and employers. The funds of-some labor organizations are ample, but the number of strong unions is small indeed compared with the number of successful business firms. Technicians and professional men have not yet gone far in adapting their knowledge to the use of unions under these conditions. Promising beginnings have been made, and both sides are rapidly learning how to make such contacts fruitful, but the total number of labor technicians is still small, and a comparatively few persons can do not the work which should be done, but the work which it is now practicable to undertake. These persons must be peculiarly suited to their calling in order to be happy and successful in it. While there are intensely interesting and useful positions open for such exceptional individuals, the great majority of those interested in the labor movement will have to be content with some secondary connection. Among the present professional opportunities to cooperate with the labor movement, including those which demand merely part-time work, may be listed the following:

Economic and engineering research and counsel,

Publicity and editorial work,

Accountancy,

Labor law and bill drafting,

Labor banking,

Work in the cooperative movement,

Teaching in labor classes and schools,

Labor health work.

Work like economic research, law and accountancy can only be done through professional connection with unions; some of the other occupations, such as teaching or lecturing may be done through extra-official agencies for labor education which have sprung up in various important centers.

In any such work, the intellectual will do well to adhere to certain practical maxims of action, He must, of course, have a broad understanding of the movement and a large amount of sympathy with its aims. But he should not for a moment make the mistake of assuming, as a professional man, any of the duties or responsibilities of labor leadership. The political functions belong with the elected officials. They are the ones to assume responsibility for policies, they are the ones to take action. The technician's business is to arrange and interpret facts, to give advice, to practice his own profession. He can, in doing so, accept as much, but no more responsibility than a professional man would. accept in working for a corporation. So far as his science is concerned, his duty is complete scientific detachment.

Another desirable aspect of the relationship between labor and the technician is that the latter should be adequately paid for his services. There is nothing labor dislikes more than philanthropy. There is nobody whom the union official despises more in his heart than the "parlor socialist" who is so anxious to help that he will do so for nothing, and whose help is so valueless that it is not worth paying for. Fair professional fees symbolize a sound relationship between the union and the technician—they establish the fact that the technician is there to serve, not to patronize, the union, and thus have a salutary effect on both parties. This does not mean, of course, that unions can or should pay the large salaries and fees that may be earned by professional men from private businesses. Technicians who work with the labor movement must often do so at a considerable financial sacrifice. But it does mean that the technical and professional functions of the labor movement can operate in health, and can grow as they should, only if labor pays the technicians wages commensurate with their skill and training.