New Tendencies in Union Struggles and Strategies in Europe and the United States, 1916–1922
David Montgomery
“For the men who really had the capacity and the organizing power, the men who exercised leadership . . . over the working class in the authentic sense of the term, were the union chiefs,” wrote Paolo Spriano of Italy’s 1920 factory occupations. “The men of the party, however much they might want . . . to direct the masses toward a violent rupture of the established order, . . . lacked the levers of command, experience, cadres, a rapport with the class which permitted effective leadership.” Union leaders, however, even those of the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGL) who had traveled to Moscow earlier that year to discuss the formation of a revolutionary international of unions, shared “a very rigid conception” of trade unionism, “which erected centralized organization—the discipline, authority, contractual power of the union—into a kind of fetish.” They had “fought their most formative struggles against anarcho-syndicalism,” so their “natural tendency towards a bureaucratic perspective” on union activity “had been reinforced by their wartime experience.”1
What was true of Italy was most definitely true of the United States, where the leaders of the American Federation of Labor, having repudiated socialism for decades, had collaborated fully in the government’s war mobilization.2 In the United States as elsewhere, wartime experience confirmed the bureaucratic lessons officials had learned from the upsurge of mass strikes during the decade preceding America’s entry into the war. Despite the distinctly minority status of the unions within the working class, no other organization had enjoyed an organizational network or experience among workers comparable to theirs. Moreover, the membership of American unions had almost doubled between 1913 and 1920, rising to some 5,000,000 workers. That rate of growth (92 percent) was matched by the unions of Great Britain, which rose from 4 to 8 million members, overshadowed by those of France (143 percent, from 1 to 2.5 million) and Germany (188 percent, from 4.5 to 13 million), and dwarfed by that of Italy (609 percent for the CGL alone, from 327,000 to 2,320,000).3
By 1920, therefore, the union, with its unique ties to the routines and needs of working-class life and its distinctive style of operation, was everywhere a power to reckon with. Its growth, however, had taken place in the context of the consolidation of corporate enterprise, imperialism, war, and revolution. That context had generated new forms of local and workplace organization, which often exhibited a “rapport with the [working] class” more intimate than that established by national union officials. Unlike prewar direct actionists, the new militants were as much concerned with building durable governing bodies of workers’ delegates in and around the workplace as they were with waging strikes. They thus made a more lasting impression on trade unions and the industrial relations policies of business than had the earlier activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Unlike the national union officials, however, these local activists had no agency to coordinate their struggles. Their militant but parochial organizations were viewed by AFL leaders as violations of union discipline to be suppressed, by management as a force to be harnessed to company unionism, and by government as a menace to be destroyed.
In order to explore the new tendencies in union strategies and struggles, this paper will focus on the United States between 1916 and 1922 and attempt to determine in what ways patterns of workers’ activity there compared with those in England, Italy, Germany, and France. It will examine, in turn, the relations linking business, unions, and the state; new strategies of union leaders; and novel forms of organization at the base. In conclusion, it will attempt some comparisons between the rhythm of evolution of postwar struggles in America and those in Europe.
May 1st allowed me to participate in a real working class Labor Day movement in Minneapolis [reported organizer James Henderson of the International Association of Machinists in 1920,] but as this was an international labor day[, ] the object of the meetings the world over expressed the same human greetings. There were 17,000 marchers in line. Machine guns and armored cars, and the State militia mobilized in their armories, made the scene worthy of a moving picture drama. The Department of Deportation agents were everywhere. . . . The parade was led by the World War Veterans, an organization that stands for working-class principles. W. F. Dunn[e], one of the fearless leaders of the Northwest Labor movement [and a founder of the Communist Labor Party, D.M.] . . . was the principal speaker. . . . A mule in the parade carrying a greeting to “openshoppers” received much applause, [and] the banner declaring “The Kaiser lives in a palace in Holland, but Gene Debs lives in an American prison” brought out the true feeling. . . .4
The militancy and internationalist spirit that pervaded the ranks of these marchers in a small city previously free of labor organizations typified the labor struggles of postwar years, as did the glowering presence of troops and the reminders of incarcerated comrades. The American government had mobilized for war in the midst of the most extensive and long-lasting strike wave in the country’s history. Every year from 1916 through 1922 more than one million workers had participated in strikes, and in 1919 the number had surpassed four million.5 During 1916 strikes were especially widespread in the munitions industry, just as they were in Britain, Germany, and France. Somewhat of a crescendo of strike activity was reached between April and September 1917 (after the United States had declared war), when machinists, miners, and other workers in extractive and processing industries were especially active. Moreover, there were even more strikes (67) involving over 10,000 workers apiece in 1917 than there were in 1919.6
Labor’s militancy in America was fueled by many of the same causes that have been identified for Europe: inflation, full employment, and the long-term dilution of skilled crafts and consolidation of working-class neighborhoods. Inflation played a critical role, not because American workers suffered the stark deprivation experienced by their German counterparts in 1918–19 but rather because, as James Cronin argues, it made wage struggles chronic, upset customary standards of comparison of relative earnings (lathe operators turning shells on piece work, for example, often earned more than skilled tool and die makers), and triggered consumers’ struggles over the high cost of housing and food, among them the bloody food riots of 1917 in New York and Philadelphia.7 The labor shortage of 1916–18, though not as acute as that in France or Germany, nevertheless allowed workers to change jobs freely and frequently in search of better earnings, while putting in many more days of work and many more hours of overtime than in normal years. Thus, the largely unskilled workers of Chicago’s meat packing plants enjoyed a steady increase in their real earnings from 1916 through the middle of 1919, while the extraordinary rise in the wages that the industry offered women induced thousands of housewives to join their husbands in the packing houses. Only in the year after June 1919 did the cost of living rise noticeably faster than those workers’ earnings.8
The congested neighborhoods adjacent to the Chicago stockyards stirred with such enthusiasm that 90 percent of the immigrant workers enrolled in the AFL, and the head of the most important fraternal order, the Polish Falcons, provided the union with its most influential leader (John Kikulski). During the major strikes of 1918–22 in textiles, clothing, munitions, and metallurgy, neighborhood benevolent societies of Italians, Poles, Jews, Croatians, and Lithuanians time and again provided bases from which efforts to unionize the factories were launched and sustained.9 Conversely, the efforts of streetcar and laundry workers to unionize generated such community support as to produce general strikes in Springfield, Illinois, Kansas City, Missouri, Waco, Texas, and Billings, Montana, between September 1917 and April 1918.10 The vast working-class neighborhoods could make life unbearable for scabs, mobilize massive funerals for slain strikers, and involve various members of the same families in marketplace, as well as workplace, struggles.
Opposition to the war itself often reverberated through these neighborhoods. The Socialist Party of America, like the Italian and Serbian parties, refused to endorse its country’s entry into the war. At its Emergency Convention of April 1917, it denounced the government’s declaration of war and called for “an even more vigorous prosecution of the class struggle” to protect living standards and civil liberties and to rouse the people against war and conscription. A referendum of the membership upheld that position by almost ten to one, in preference to a minority report that would have recognized the war as a fact and committed the party to seizing “the opportunity presented by war conditions to advance our program of democratic collectivism.” The party’s firm stand was influenced by the recent departures of socialist ministers from governments in France and Germany, the mounting protests of workers in Europe against the war and conscription, and the revolution in Russia. Moreover, it was rewarded in municipal elections of 1917 from Elwood, Indiana, to New York City with the largest votes the party had ever received. Through the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace, Socialists gathered considerable support for a program that demanded immediate peace on the basis of no annexation and no indemnities, self-determination for all nations, and the conscription of wealth rather than of men.11
The confluence of antiwar agitation and unprecedented strike activity prompted the government to devote special attention to labor in its war mobilization measures of the fall of 1917. New espionage and sedition laws were already on the statute books and the first draft calls had already been levied by August and September, when the strike wave reached its peak, and the National Industrial Conference Board (representing all major employers’ organizations) called on President Wilson to establish an agency with broad powers to settle industrial disputes. As the government worked out its policy over the ensuing months, it elaborated two basic principles. First, it would solicit the cooperation of the existing unions. Second, it would demand that both industry and labor refrain from using the crisis to “change existing standards.” These decisions were based both on lessons drawn from the British experience, where the 1915 Treasury Agreement to suspend union rules and shopfloor practices had opened the door to a militant shop stewards’ movement, and on the consistent support that Samuel Gompers and the Executive Council of the AFL had offered to defense mobilization agencies since 1916. Although the Executive Council had repudiated Gompers’ adherence in April 1917 to the ambiguous formula of no efforts to “change existing standards” and refused to take a no-strike pledge, it did agree to contribute union representatives to mobilization agencies and to cooperate with those agencies in preventing strikes. Moreover, in August Gompers and AFL Secretary Mathew Woll joined with pro-war Socialists in forming the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy to combat the pacifist activities of the People’s Council. The fury of the final round of offensives on the Western Front dampened antiwar protest in America, just as it did in France and Germany, and left the labor patriots facing little effective opposition by the summer of 1918.12
Working in close cooperation with Labor Secretary William B. Wilson, a former vice-president of the United Mine Workers, union leaders developed a relationship to the state that was much closer in practice than it was in any formal policy pronouncements. For example, when the IWW led a strike movement among Arizona copper miners in July, local authorities herded 1,186 strikers onto cattle cars at bayonette point and shipped them off into the New Mexico Desert. Secretary Wilson rushed an adjustment commission to the scene, and it ordered the reinstatement of all strikers except those guilty of seditious utterances or who belonged to an organization that did not recognize union contracts (i.e., the IWW). It also established grievance committees at each mine and provided for AFL participation in those committees. Simultaneously in the Pittsburgh region a federal mediator reported to Washington that a local Council of National Defense had been formed in response to “Socialist agitators” at the Westinghouse and other machine-building plants, “making speeches against the Government and everyone else.” Organizer Andrew McNamara of the Machinists’ union and vice-president Philip Murray of the Mine Workers were among the union officials who expressed their willingness to serve on the Council, along with the executives of the Westinghouse company, Mesta Machine, and the adamantly antiunion Pittsburgh Employers’ Association.13
In both these instances the employers involved subsequently resisted unionization of their own employees despite the government’s prodding and the unions’ patriotic role. To them, as to most business leaders, the principle of “no change in existing standards” meant that open shop factories and cities would remain that way. Unlike the French and German governments, the United States did not require its suppliers to bargain with unions. Nevertheless, most union officials vigorously supported the war effort. Among them were former Socialists such as Secretary-Treasurer E. C. Davidson of the Machinists, who received a “Tax the Rich to Pay for the War” circular from the People’s Council in the mail and forwarded it instantly to the government in case it might prove useful to the state in “breaking up schemes of this kind.”14 Another was John H. Walker, President of the Illinois district of the mine workers, who wrote Secretary Adolph Germer of the Socialist Party: “I want you and your like, who want to bring about improvements for the working people through making the German Kaiser the Emperor of the WORLD . . . to know that there isn’t anything I can think of or do, that I won’t do, to prevent you from accomplishing your purpose.” Indeed, Walker’s union agreed to place in the contract covering the highly unionized Central Competitive Field a provision automatically fining any miner who participated in a work stoppage, in order “to protect the great majority of the mine workers against the radical and indifferent element among the employees. . . .”15
There was, consequently, little political space in America for anything like England’s War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, which linked supporters and opponents of the war in the defense of workers’ liberties and living standards. Royden Harrison has depicted the majority of that committee as “intelligent patriots,” offering reluctant support to the war effort but resisting chauvinism and political repression. Activists who assumed that posture could certainly be found in the United States. Samuel Lavit in Bridgeport and William Z. Foster in Chicago, for example, promoted militant unionism and the sale of Liberty Bonds simultaneously. The only public cause that found everyone from the Wobblies and Gompers on the same side, however, was the struggle to save Tom Mooney from execution. Mooney, a San Francisco syndicalist charged with bombing a 1916 Preparedness Day parade, was also a local officer of the Iron Molders’ Union. Even though the AFL’s leaders vigorously opposed the 1919 movement for a general strike on Mooney’s behalf, they never ceased appealing for his freedom.16
This is not to say that AFL leaders asked nothing in return for their loyalty. Quite the contrary. Government arbitration mechanisms stimulated the thorough unionization of Chicago’s packinghouses, and after the government took possession of the railroads virtually all employees, except those Blacks whom several union constitutions barred from membership, became unionized. A growth of membership of 111 percent between 1915 and 1920 made transportation the most highly unionized sector of American industry. Unions also expanded their membership by 67 percent in the building trades, 113 percent in clothing (where leaders of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers both spoke against the war and cooperated with war agencies), 280 percent in metal fabricating, and 368 percent in textiles.17 Moreover, leaders as conservative as William Hutcheson of the Carpenters and James O’Connell of the Metal Trades Department urged aggressive use of this newfound strength to improve conditions. Addressing the Boilermakers’ convention in September 1917, O’Connell advised:
Now I want you to get it into your heads . . . to talk about dollars, not pennies. . . . The opportunity is presented for the first time in the history of the United States Government, practically a union contract signed between the government and the officers of the [Metal Trades] Department . . . requiring that the shipbuilders of America come to Washington and put their feet under the tables with labor leaders to settle their troubles. . . . Uncle Sam is paying the expenses of union committees to come to Washington and meet the employers. Isn’t that a pretty good union agreement? That is only the beginning. . . . We will come out after the war is over bigger and greater and grander and better understood than ever we were before.18
This prospect frightened the leaders of American business as much as it delighted O’Connell. There was no Stinnes-Legien agreement in America because American business feared unions more than it feared revolution. With the defeat and collapse of the imperial government, Jakob Richter of the Union of German Iron and Steel Industrialists (VdESI) had observed: “Allies for industry could be found only among the workers; these were the unions.”19 The situation confronting American industrialists was totally different. Their program of dismantling government regulatory agencies and deflating prices and wages as rapidly as possible, while encouraging the rationalization of industry through scientific management and through voluntary self-organization (called “associational activities” by Herbert Hoover), had been enshrined in the platform of the Republican Party and strongly endorsed by the electorate in 1918 and 1920. Like their French and British counterparts (and unlike the Italian and German business leaders), American corporate executives were encouraged by the results of postwar elections to dig in their heels against union aspirations. Moreover, the American unions, for all their new power, were hardly to be compared in membership, experience, or apparent unity to the British labor movement before “Black Friday” of 1921—i.e., while it could still brandish the threat of the Triple Alliance.
Consequently, the representatives of industry at President Wilson’s 1919 Industrial Conference rejected outright the idea of collective bargaining with unions. They also opposed any role for the state in social insurance (though on this point they were largely supported by the AFL). Although both employee representation and welfare programs to benefit the workers might be desirable, business representatives argued, these should be carried out at the level of the enterprise, with no “outside interference” from unions or government.20 With the war’s end, therefore, business demanded the quick end of fuel and price regulations, the return of the railroads to private ownership, and the dismantling of the National War Labor Board. Quite in contrast to the summer of 1917, when the National Industrial Conference Board had wanted such an agency as a defense against strikes, even the business representatives on the Board itself now believed that it was encouraging the spread of unionism and threatening industry with bureaucratic regulations, such as national minimum wages. Furthermore, once private ownership of the railroads had been restored, the American Railway Executives Association, in the face of almost 90 percent unionization of their employees, endorsed the principle of no contracts with labor organizations and abrogated the existing national agreements.21
Another tribute to the relative weakness of American unions is found in the failure of American businessmen to forge their own centralized leadership in the way their counterparts in England, France, Germany, and Italy had all done by the end of 1920. The most representative of all employers’ associations, the National Industrial Conference Board, had played a major role in the selection of business representatives on wartime government agencies, but after the war, when those agencies were dismantled, the NICB’s role became that of a research and publicity agency. Both the NICB and other national industrial associations, save those in bituminous coal and clothing, avoided negotiating with unions on behalf of their members. Each firm jealously preserved its autonomy. Even the Special Conference Committee, formed in April 1919 by ten of the country’s largest corporations to discuss questions of labor policy, remained a theater for informal consultations; it made no binding decisions, and it certainly never commissioned its influential secretary, John Hicks of the Rockefeller interests, to enter into contract negotiations with Samuel Gompers.22
Corporations and sectoral employers’ associations developed their own strategies for combatting unions with little government interference (especially after the dissolution of the National War Labor Board in June 1919). They were greatly assisted by the public policy of deflation, however, and by the repression of radical activities and a governmental strategy of postponing decisions in the face of major confrontations with labor. Wartime restrictions on speech and public assembly remained in force for years after the armistice. By 1921 only 11 of the 88 leading cities of America had removed their wartime bans on street meetings. Post Office censorship of revolutionary publications continued openly until May 1921, and Italy’s Avanti was still barred from American mails the following August.23 After the notorious raids and deportations against radical aliens in 1919–20, the Immigration Bureau of the Department of Labor settled into routine scrutiny of foreign-born workers in cooperation with employers, detective agencies, and patriotic societies. In fact, more than three-fourths of the employees of the department dealt with immigration and deportation after 1920, and the number of people they expelled annually rose to more than 38,000 by the end of the twenties.24
Presidents Wilson and Harding shared with Lloyd George and Giolitti the talent for delaying decisions when confronted by powerful union demands. Government and business executives alike were convinced that the high prices of 1919 would soon collapse and that to concede wage increases or power to unions would inhibit business’ ability to cope with the coming deflation. The art of politics, therefore, became that of postponing the settlement of major disputes from the period of inflation and union strength to the period of depression and union weakness, which began in the summer of 1920 and lasted through 1922. Just as the depression allowed western European businessmen to defy union challenges, so it placed their American counterparts in a position to open a general offensive against unions in meat packing, textiles, railroads, and coal. In the four years following the end of 1920, German unions saw previous gains wiped out and lost more members than the AFL had ever had, French unions shrank to the feeble position they were to know until 1936, and Italian unions were pounded by the squadristi. Membership in British unions declined by 34 percent (a loss of 2,842,000) by the eve of the 1926 General Strike. In this context the American loss of roughly 1.5 million members (or 30 percent) was not unusual; but among those lost to the American movement were virtually all the new recruits of the war years. The AFL found itself again shut out of basic industry.25
Union Strategies
Rapid growth during the war tempted American unionists to venture into uncharted paths and simultaneously confronted their sense of “discipline, authority, [and] contractual power” with serious challenges from their own membership. Paradoxically, those officials most extensively engaged in innovative forms of struggle—men such as William Johnston, John L. Lewis, Warren Stone, Thomas McMahon, and Sidney Hillman—also wielded disciplinary sanctions against rebellious members most frequently and most draconically. These leaders of coal miners’, railroad workers’, machinists’, and clothing and textile workers’ unions were the “progressives” of the labor movement, and their organizations experienced the most spectacular rise and decline of members between 1916 and 1923.
The establishment of the Workers’ Education Bureau of America in 1921 (in direct imitation of its British predecessor) was intended to coordinate the many union educational departments and some fifty trade union colleges and schools, which flourished during these years. Its effort to institute formal training of union cadre drew prominent academics, such as Charles and Mary Beard and Paul Douglas, into the service of the unions. Union journals under progressive editorship, most notably the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Journal, were filled with essays by prominent intellectuals discussing workers’ control, labor parties, imperialism, and union strategies.26 Britain’s movement provided the favorite model for these authors. But some activities of progressive unionists moved in peculiarly American directions, most notably labor banks and union brokerage of trade with Russia and Mexico.
The International Association of Machinists (IAM) led the way into banking, forming the Mount Vernon Savings Bank in 1920 with the dues of its 350,000 members, which providing a year’s revenues of $1,728,000. It soon used the bank’s funds to induce a Norfolk firm to break ranks with the employers’ association and bring a long strike to a successful conclusion for the union. The locomotive engineers followed suit and came to own fourteen banks, eight investment companies, a printing company, and two skyscrapers. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers similarly created seven banks and investment companies, and the Russian-American Industrial Corporation. The last was a truly American form of international solidarity with revolutionary Russia. The Russian-American company served as the primary route for remission of funds between the U.S. and Russia until the 1930s, and it even established several clothing factories in the land of the NEP.27
The Machinists also ventured into trade with regimes under the ban of the government, but with less success than the Clothing Workers. The union’s trade mission to Russia was turned back at the Polish-Russian border, and an elaborate arrangement with the Mexican government for the purchase of union-made machinery was rudely undercut when the notoriously antiunion Baldwin Locomotive Works outbid the union for the task with an offer to the Mexicans of $2,500,000 credit. More successful were the Machinists’ efforts at a commercial alliance with farmers. In the spring of 1921 the IAM encouraged the founding of the All American Cooperative Commission to promote “direct trading between farmer producers and city consumers” and led a movement for union purchase of state bonds of North Dakota, which had been shunned on the stock exchange after that state had created its own state bank and grain terminals.28
Working from this imposing institutional base, the progressives sought to convert the AFL to a program including public ownership and worker operation of railroads and coal mines, trade with Soviet Russia, repeal of repressive wartime legislation and release of political prisoners, affiliation with the Amsterdam International Federation of Trade Unions, and collaboration with the British Labour Party on social and international policy.29 This was a formidable task, because the AFL was essentially a council of national union executives, most of whom supported Gompers in his resistance to this program, and because major progressive leaaders, like Stone of the Locomotive Engineers and Hillman of the Clothing Workers, were not affiliated with the Federation. Although there were 577 delegates at the 1919 AFL convention, 65 union executives among them could cast 82 percent of the votes. Consequently the most dramatic moment of that convention, the address of Margaret Bondfield (the first woman ever to appear as “fraternal” delegate from the British Trades Union Congress) describing the prospects of the Triple Alliance, the shop stewards, the cooperatives, and the Labour Party for replacing Britain’s moribund capitalism with a democratic social order, brought the delegates to their feet roaring approval. However, it had no influence on the program enacted by the convention.30
During the next two years, however, a close though informal alliance of coal miners, railroad workers, and metal workers lent strength to the progressive program. This coalition overwhelmed the opposition of Gompers at the 1920 convention to commit the AFL to government ownership and democratic control of the railroads (not specifying the Plumb Plan by name, but following a rousing speech by Glenn Plumb to the convention).31 That was the most that the progressives were ever to win. When Lewis embraced their program and challenged Gompers for the AFL presidency at the 1921 convention, he was easily outmaneuvered. Gompers allied himself with powerful miners’ leaders from Illinois and Kansas, whose rebel movements Lewis had tried to crush; wooed the Ladies’ Garment Workers away from their fellow Socialists, who backed Lewis; and unceremoniously dumped two trusted colleagues from his slate for Federation officers in favor of leaders of railroad unions, thus shattering the progressive front. From the platform Gompers’s supporters alternately denounced Lewis’s cowardice in abandoning strikes that had been declared illegal by the governments of the United States and Kansas, and charged his backers with secretly favoring “One Big Union and IWWism.”32
Nothing like Britain’s Triple Alliance appeared in the United States. No successful general dockers’ and laborers’ union conquered American seaports, and the discussions of alliances that were held among miners and railway workers’ unions never bore fruit. Quite the contrary, national craft unions beat back all proposals for treaties of mutual support or even structures for joint campaigns, except the 1920 “wage movement” alliance of railway unions. In their prewar battle with anarcho-syndicalism, the leaders of national craft unions had learned to denounce any proposal for amalgamation of unions or for formal alliances as “IWWism.” The various departments established within the AFL before the war—the metal trades, building trades, union label, and railway departments—had been designed to appease members’ desire for unity among crafts without limiting or overriding the exclusive authority of each national union over the craft it represented. The only serious challenge to this principle had been the rise of system federations, or regional alliances of railroad repair shop workers, which had been fiercely fought by railroad management and national union executives alike.
During the war, however, several unions involved in the attempt to organize Chicago’s packinghouse workers had combined efforts in and subordinated their local authority to a Stockyards Labor Council. Their success inspired the most important nationwide coalition of the age: the National Committee to Organize Iron and Steel Workers. Thirty-five unions contributed organizers and funds to this committee, which enrolled steel workers under its own name, deliberately postponing the question of craft jurisdictions until after recognition had been won from the companies, and ultimately directed a strike of 350,000 workers under the authority of the Committee itself. Its secretary and guiding spirit was William Z. Foster, who had earlier led the Stockyards Labor Council. After the defeat of the steel strike, however, national executives quickly reasserted their authority and formed a new alliance of crafts in which the independence of each union was scrupulously defined. Moreover, in 1921 the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen broke up the Stockyards Labor Council and put in its place a new structure that rigidly upheld craft autonomy—the structure that went down to defeat in the strike of 1921–22.33
The same spirit of unity that had brought the National Committee to Organize Iron and Steel Workers into being was also evident in the negotiations undertaken by the United Mine Workers and the officers of the Big Four railway unions (engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors) during the early months of 1920. None of the unions involved, however, was willing to commit itself to strike in support of its allies. The sixteen unions representing railway workers were not even willing to make that pledge to each other, and indeed during the bitter nationwide shopmen’s strike of 1922, members of the Big Four kept on driving trains.34 As far as the national craft unions were concerned, the much vaunted unity of miners, railwaymen, and metal workers was, at best, unity for electoral struggles and around a new program for the labor movement.
Local Militants and Unity from Below
Unity for strikes and joint bargaining did develop at the base, however, and assumed three forms: the revitalization of city central labor unions, the leadership of local metal trades’ councils, and shop committees within the workplace. American labor had no institution like the Italian camera del lavoro or the French bourse du travail, whose distinctive coupling of municipally sponsored hiring hall and other services with leadership of local workers’ struggles implied a life quite distinct from that of the national trade unions. Between 1890 and 1910 the AFL had compelled central unions to exclude all groups not belonging to the Federation, while insisting that affiliated locals adhere to the rules and discipline of national unions when contemplating strikes or boycotts. The function of sending workers out to available jobs, which was important mainly for unions in the building, maritime, and printing trades, was executed by each union separately. Consequently, central labor unions were squeezed out of the role of local working-class leadership, which they had exercised from the 1860s to the 1880s, with a few notable and defiant exceptions like the Chicago Federation of Labor.35
Starting with the Philadelphia general strike of 1910 and the attempted general strike of 1916 in New York City, however, central labor unions began to reassert themselves. In both these instances strikes of tram drivers had roused such class loyalties that the central labor unions called out other workers in sympathy. The five general strikes of 1918 also manifested citywide support of embattled groups of workers. In Kansas City, Missouri, for example, 146 locals belonging to thirty different unions and enrolling more than 20,000 workers struck in violation of their contracts, in order to assist laundry wagon drivers win a raise and women laundry operatives win recognition of their union.36
The most famous strike of this type occurred in Seattle in February 1919. When shipyard workers struck for a wage increase, the Central Labor Council conducted a referendum among all the city’s union members (in flagrant violation of national union constitutions), then called 110 unions out on strike for five days. A committee of 300 delegates, with an executive council of fifteen, organized community kitchens at twenty-one locations around the city, decided which telephone exchanges, dairies, and hospitals might remain open, and instituted collective butcher shops and laundries. Clearly a network of effective leadership had been created that enjoyed far greater prestige and rapport with Seattle’s workers than did the national unions. The city was charged with excitement and as war veterans enrolled by the strike committee patrolled its streets, shipyard workers insisted that pay scales must be not only raised but equalized (the greatest raises going to the lowest paid) and the strike committee boasted loudly that the workers were “learning to manage.” The sense that there was no limit to what workers could do appeared often in Europe between 1917 and 1920, but was fully unleashed in America only in Seattle. Its legacy could still be felt in May 1923, when despite the closing down of many shipyards, police raids on Socialist and IWW halls, and threats and expulsions by national unions, the Seattle Central Labor Council had to be admonished by the AFL Executive Council to rescind its endorsement of Soviet Russia, to deny credentials to anyone attending conventions of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern), and to stop referring AFL communiques on politics to the state farmer-labor party.37
The shipyard workers of Seattle had been called on strike by a metal trades council, which was comprised of delegates from twenty-one craft unions in the yards. Such councils initiated joint actions so often in 1919 that the Metal Trades Department of the AFL directed a formal warning to all of them:
There seems to have grown up a most serious error in the minds of the delegates making up the local metal trades councils that these councils have the right to order strikes or to approve of them without the laws of our Department and of our affiliated national and international organizations having been complied with. . . . [The constitution of the Department specifies] that no local metal trades council can order a strike unless the local unions affiliated first have received sanction or permission of the internationals . . . and any attempt on the part of any local councils . . . to force a sympathetic strike in any locality is in violation of our general laws.38
To prove its point, the Department intervened at the Baltimore shipyards of the Bethlehem and American shipbuilding companies, where metal trades councils were threatening to strike for recognition, and arranged for contract negotiations between the companies and five national unions. Shop committees were reorganized along the lines of craft and no committees that crossed craft lines were allowed.39
The desire for unity was often so strong that attempts to repartition workers into crafts under the control of national unions served only to drive them out of the AFL or to contribute to the success of the companies’ battles against unionization. To cite but one example out of dozens, under the leadership of a metal trades council the workers at United Shoe Machine Co. had secured recognition of their unions and a 44-hour week in 1919. At the end of the year, however, the company began circulating individual contracts among the workers under which those who agreed to quit their unions and work on the terms specified by the company were evidently guaranteed a year’s employment. In March 1920 the metal trades council struck, with the strong support of the International Association of Machinists. Although some 2,200 workers out of 3,300 left work, the strike was in difficulty from the start. Massachusetts courts ruled the individual contracts legal and a strike against them illegal coercion. Second, the national unions of molders and pattern makers, which had just signed contracts with the company, ordered their members to remain at work. AFL organizer Frank McLaughlin telegraphed Samuel Gompers at the AFL’s Montreal convention: “Situation critical. Three thousand men to leave the A.F.L. Outlaw movement strong.” The only remedy, McLaughlin advised, was for the Metal Trades Department to order the molders and pattern makers out. That the Department would not do, and the machinists supported the strike alone for four months, until they agreed to return to work on the company’s pledge not to coerce anyone to sign an individual contract. By September depression conditions were allowing the company to “reward” its most faithful workers with individual contracts and return to a 50-hour week, while others were discharged.40
In short, the initiative of metal trades councils was strangled. Indeed, the Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers Union was expelled by the AFL in 1918 for defying the jurisdictions of other unions and organizing on an industrial basis. That socialist-led union, strong among trimmers and painters in New York, Buffalo, and Detroit, gave plant committees authority to run their own affairs and in general eschewed written contracts. It was one of many small industrial unions of metal workers that flourished before the depression of 1920–22. Among the major AFL unions, however, not one encouraged or utilized the local initiative of the workers as was done, for example, by the Italian Metal Mechanics (FIOM) in the wage struggles of 1920.41
Workplace Organization
Hallmarks of workers’ struggles in the epoch of World War I were the council of workers’ delegates and the slogan of “workers’ control.” Workplace organization had been nebulous even among unionized workers before the war, and it was resisted as adamantly by American employers as it was by their European counterparts. “Well, we should not have a committee or what they call a steward, an official of the union, in our place to represent the union among our employees,” thundered the President of the Western Electric Company in 1900. “We should not have it.”42 Craft workers were expected to enforce union work rules by personally refusing to violate them or to work in the presence of those who did. Walking delegates toured construction sites ready to call all men out if they saw anything wrong. Ad hoc committees of workers often approached employers about grievances, and they would expect the union to come to their defense if they were fired for doing so. The shop committee, in the sense of a body of delegates recognized by the management as speaking on behalf of all its employees, was basically an innovation of the war years.
Precedents had appeared on the eve of the war, with clear syndicalist inspiration, as in Britain or Italy. During 1910, shopmen on the Illinois Central Railroad formed joint committees representing all the metal crafts, clerks and laborers, to combat the introduction of time study and incentive pay. When the railroad’s executives ordered supervisors not to treat with such committees, workers sent delegates to Memphis, where they organized a “system federation,” then called 16,000 workers out on strike to compel the railroad to deal with the federation rather than with the craft unions separately. The strike dragged on for almost four years before the national craft unions were able to call it off.43
During the same years pit committees of anthracite miners began to combine forces into general grievance committees, made up of United Mine Workers’ members, but independent of the union. Starting with the negotiation of local wage supplements to the 1912 UMWA contract, they were soon carrying grievances from scattered mines of the large corporations to their main offices and circumventing the elaborate arbitration machinery of the contract. Local strikes under their leadership became common in 1913, prompting the union’s district officers to try to suppress the committees and negotiate a more effective grievance machinery under their own control. The strength of the IWW among Italian laborers in the anthracite fields in 1915 and 1916 helped wrap debates over the authority of the miners’ delegates in ideological controversy over the basic purposes of the workers’ movement.44
Starting with the plan of employee representation instituted by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company among its miners in 1916, employers began to experiment with shop committees under their auspices to combat labor unions. It was the government, however, and especially the National War Labor Board, that encouraged the spread of shop committees. The October 1917 report on works committees presented by England’s Whitley Committee to Lloyd George provided the guidelines for the American Board’s efforts (though by this time, of course, the governments of France, Germany, and Italy had also formalized systems of works committees). Works committees were envisaged by the Whitley Committee “as the means of enlisting the interest of the workers in the success both of the industry to which they are attached and of the workshop or factory where so much of their life is spent.” Its purpose was not, Whitley added, to “discourage Trade [union] organization.”45
During the spring and summer of 1918 the War Labor Board supervised elections for many shop committees in important centers of war production, especially metal and munitions works. Delegates were usually elected by the department in which they worked, rather than by craft, and union membership or nonmembership was scrupulously ignored in the process.46 The tension between the objectives of representing the workers and interesting them in the factory’s success provided the central theme of the drama of shop committees during the next four years.
The AFL convention of 1918 welcomed the establishment “in all large permanent shops” of “a committee of workers” to “regularly meet with the shop management to confer over matters of production,” and to carry “to the general manager . . . any important grievances which the workers may have with reference to wages, hours, and conditions.” Such organization, in the Federation’s view, should be based both on “team work . . . for solving industrial problems” and on “collective bargaining” by workers free “to organize and make collective agreements.” The next year’s convention, however, at the insistence of the National Committee to Organize Iron and Steel Workers, denounced collective bargaining without recognized union involvement and agreements as “a delusion and a snare.”47
During the intervening year many militant unionists had worked within the framework of shop committees, putting themselves forward as candidates and using metal trades councils to coordinate the efforts of craft unionists within the shop committees. This strategy not only linked government-sponsored workplace organization to multi-craft union coalitions (often with revolutionaries prominent in leadership) but also had the great advantage of encompassing many more women than the unions had enrolled (or, in many cases, wanted to enroll), reaching out to unskilled laborers and operatives, and even enlisting office workers. Thousands of stenographers, bookkeepers, and typists had joined AFL federal unions in 1918 and 1919. At the Schenectady works of General Electric, more than 900 office workers were union members by the summer of 1919; they elected delegates to the shop committee, and they participated in the metal trades council.48
The case of General Electric illustrates the contradictory tendencies within the movement for shop committees. The company had 57,500 workers in 1917, 40 percent of them in Schenectady and the rest unevenly divided among Lynn and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Schenectady had long been a union and Socialist stronghold, while the other plants had been kept open shop until the war. The War Labor Board had intervened in strikes at Lynn and Pittsfield during 1918, setting up shop committees. Metal trades councils unified the crafts (especially the machinists and electricians) at all the plants, while their delegates on frequent missions to Washington to confer with the War Labor Board opened communication with representatives of other GE plants who were there for the same purpose. Within two weeks of the armistice, the company invited works’ representatives from all its plants to Schenectady to form an Electrical Manufacturing Industry Labor Federation in opposition to the AFL. The several metal trades councils convened a rival gathering in Erie on the same day, and formulated demands for recognition of committees elected under union auspices, a 44-hour week, reinstatement of workers at Erie who were being laid off in large numbers, the planned sharing of available work, the release of all political prisoners, and half of every country’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference to be constituted of workers. When the Erie management refused to deal with the metal trades council and rushed ahead with elections for a company-sponsored works council, the Erie workers struck. By the end of December workers at Schenectady, Pittsfield, and Fort Wayne had closed their plants in support of the Erie strikers.
At this point the War Labor Board intervened to end the strike. It threatened to revoke the wage increase and Whitley Council type of organization that had been awarded by the Board to GE workers in Lynn after a local strike in July 1918, if they joined the national strike. It then notified workers at Pittsfield and Schenectady that it would not consider their grievances while they were on strike, just as the company announced it was replacing strikers with returning servicemen. By mid-January the strike had ended amid War Labor Board pledges to send examiners and strengthen shop committees at all the plants. General Electric subsequently declared that there was “no emergency” requiring it to submit to the Board now that the war was over, and that its Federation met all the standards of the Board for collective bargaining and was the only agency with which the company would deal. The company systematically drew into its plan of representation those union activists it termed “the more liberal minded” but withal respected by the workers, while taking advantage of the depression to cut wages and break down workers’ defenses against the intensification of work. By 1926 it could truly boast to visiting correspondents that its plan of employee representation had long since ended all union agitation. The General Electric plan had as its sole purpose to enlist “the interest of the workers in the success both of the industry to which they are attached and of the workshop . . . where so much of their life is spent.”49
In brief, shop committees provided a theater within which struggles for workers’ control based on all-grades organization at the point of production clashed with employers’ efforts to exclude unions from their works and with the government’s quest for a mechanism to mediate industrial disputes and increase productivity. In just the same pattern that Gilbert Hatry discerned at the Billancourt Renault works, the workers first elected as workplace delegates under government plans to mediate and calm industrial disputes included the most militant individuals in the plants. And, as Carmen Sirianni observed, throughout Europe workplace organizations tended to be dominated by skilled male workers who had extensive experience in struggle and who were or had been involved in some revolutionary grouping. Yet those activists came to emphasize the needs and involvement of all the workers, rather than the sectoral needs of their crafts.50 Moreover, in the public rallies to which they summoned workers, they spoke as much of political questions (freeing Tom Mooney and other prisoners, the Russian Revolution, and combatting the militarization of America, for example) as they did of workplace grievances.
Although experienced skilled males provided the most prominent activists in shop committees and metal trades councils, it was the unskilled workers, immigrants, and women who often took command of the streets during the strikes they called. Typical were the crowds of Lithuanians, Poles, and Italians who waged daily battles against the police in Waterbury, Connecticut, during June 1919, in an effort to force the brass companies to recognize their shop committees. Or the torrents of marchers who filed day afrer day through the streets of Lawrence, Paterson, and other textile centers in early 1919 in support of new industrial unions.51 Neighborhood solidarities supported workplace organization among these immigrants, just as they did among Chicago’s packinghouse workers. It was for this reason that the leaders of the AFL’s United Textile Workers (an amalgamation of craft unions) had refused to organize foreign-born workers where, in the words of President John Golden, “they work in a community in large numbers and especially where they are of one nationality.” To do so, he explained, was simply to provide recruits for the IWW. The militants from Lawrence, Paterson, and Passaic who met after their 1919 strikes to form the radical Amalgamated Textile Workers of America envisaged such immigrants as their proper constituency.52
One strategic objective of company-sponsored employee representation plans was to separate shop committees from such community support and from union involvement as well as from issues other than immediate company affairs (and also from the arbitration of the National War Labor Board before it ceased operations in June 1919). Such plans developed rapidly in heavy industry between 1919 and 1922. Goodyear, Pullman, International Harvester, Westinghouse, and many other firms simply announced dates for the election of representatives from the various departments of their establishments and declared that they would thereafter discuss grievances only with representatives chosen in this way. Commonly they specified that representatives had to be American citizens and have worked in the plant some specified period of time (often a year). Lines of craft were studiously ignored by these plans, and the economist William Leiserson observed that the movement “from the outset was making its greatest strides” among the unskilled and semiskilled who had been neglected by the AFL. Union members, however, were systematically discharged or coopted into the plans, as the postwar wave of labor struggles subsided. By 1924, when the National Industrial Conference Board surveyed 814 plans involving 1,177,037 workers, it found that representatives tended to be married, male, senior employees who were property owners and native Americans. Some managers even complained that they were inclined to “err on the side of being ultraconservative.”53
Shop committees organically linked to the union movement survived mainly in the garment industry and in railroad repair shops. In both settings the economic crisis of 1920–22 significantly transformed their functions. The depression cast these progressive-led unions into a war for survival, highlighted by the successful Amalgamated Clothing Workers strike of 1921 and the disastrous railroad shopcrafts strike of 1922. It also broke the upsurge of strike activity, which had encompassed so much of the working class in 1919 and 1920, leaving the progressive unions still strong but isolated. Their lonely, defensive battles tied the shop committees loyally and ardently to the discipline of the unions themselves. But they also made the unions’ leaders vividly aware of the vast gap between the wages and hours their members enjoyed and those prevailing in nonunionized sectors of the same industry, let alone in the economy as a whole.
The formula to which the embattled progressives turned for salvation was scientific management. Shop organization, they argued, could be used as a basis for increasing the efficiency of unionized firms so that they could compete successfully with low-wage open shops. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers had turned in this direction as early as September 1919, when shop committees throughout the industry were still battling independently for supplementary wage increases and to ease the intensity of work. Hailing a new agreement with the National Industrial Federation of Clothing Manufacturers for joint councils of management and workers to supervise the terms of work, President Hillman said: “Our organization has demonstrated that labor has nothing to gain by withholding production; on the other hand labor has everything to gain by aiding in increasing production.”54
As G. D. H. Cole had observed in England during the war, “the existence of comparatively strong workshop organization enabled dilution to proceed more smoothly than it would otherwise have done.”55 Effective workplace organization may have plagued management on the big questions of operating the enterprise, but it had provided a handy vehicle for resolving little ones. Moreover, the revolutionaries who were so prominent in the committees themselves considered many craft practices archaic, and were eager to show, in the words of Clothing Workers’ secretary Joseph Schlossberg, that they could “establish order in the industry in the place of the chaos created by the employers when they had things their own way.”56
Of course, such productivist inclinations were linked to the belief that the industry soon would belong to the workers. When that prospect faded from view, however, and economic crisis threatened the very survival of those companies that had been unionized, the “plant patriotism” implicit in the progressives’ thinking flowered. The Ladies’ Garment Workers negotiated a far-reaching joint productivity agreement in New York, in order to fend off the spread of piece work and subcontracting in 1921, and the next year actually got a court injunction to force the employers to live up to the agreement. The Clothing Workers promoted time studies and overrode protective craft practices wholesale, even when that led to the dismissal of large numbers of cutters and other skilled workers. The Machinists led other railway shopcrafts into the famous Baltimore and Ohio Plan, under which the structure of system federations was linked with management representatives at every level of command, with the aim of increasing productivity and stopping the railroad from sending repair work out to non-union shops.57
Conclusion
The leaders of America’s unions in the postwar years had at their disposal those levers of command, experience, cadres, and rapport with the daily patterns of working life that Spriano found put their CGL counterparts in the decisive role in Italy’s labor movement. To American business, however, these attributes appeared not as bulwarks against radicalism but as an intolerable menace to the power of the enterprise to maneuver in an economy characterized first by wartime inflation, then by economic crisis and deflation. AFL leaders liked to depict themselves as fighting a two-front war against reactionary industrialists on one side and mindless revolutionaries who threatened to tear down the “house of labor” by flouting its “tried and true ways” on the other. Indeed, revolutionaries of various persuasions were engaged in revitalizing central labor unions, in developing metal trades councils, and in enrolling all grades of workers into new styles of workplace organization. Their efforts challenged the rigid conception of contracts, discipline, and authority held by union leaders, but they lacked a coordinating center, which might have directed their local activities toward national power. Moreover, they lacked even unionists of national prominence and authority who were prepared to utilize their initiatives in the struggle for national objectives. Only the Amalgamated Clothing Workers mastered the art of tapping the energy and resources of the local radicals rather than attacking them.
Can a pattern of development be discerned amidst all this conflict? Perhaps so. Between the fall of 1918 and early 1920, workers seemed to attack on all fronts at once. Bold organizing campaigns, which spurned the cautious traditions of craft unionism, swept millions of workers into unions in steel, textiles, meat-packing, and metal-fabricating plants. They were joined by typists, telephone operators, government clerks, teachers, policemen, and firemen. Where unions already existed, rebel movements not only mobilized local strikes in defiance of national officers but also struck for freedom for Tom Mooney and an end to arms shipments to Russian counterrevolutionaries. Striking Illinois miners who left the job for Tom Mooney in 1919 then struck again to protest company fines for the first strike and called for the election of worker delegates to an industrial congress, “there to demand of the capitalist class that all instruments of industries be turned over to the working class.”58 Earlier in the year in Pennsylvania a mine union leader reported that anarchist Carlo Tresca had spoken “and aroused the workers so that they would not heed the warnings of . . . the President of the District.” Italian miners marched “defiantly through the city bearing the Red flag,” infuriating the native-born residents, and then “sent a committee of their own choosing and not composed of union officials, demanding of the company to equalize output at all collieries so that all workers will have some work.”59 Immediate grievances and ambitious political objectives blended in the everyday struggles of workers during these years, and what leadership was evident usually took the form of informal alliances of revolutionaries of varied persuasions and affiliations, rather than the concerted initiative of any one organization. Union authority, discipline, and contractual relations were held in very low esteem.
Then came the hour of union supremacy. Continuing inflation turned the workers’ strike militancy overwhelmingly in the direction of wage demands during the first six months of 1920, but that militancy often fueled huge rebellions against the slow-moving bargaining machinery of the national unions, most notably in the strike of railroad switchmen and yard workers that brought out well over 25,000 workers under their own informal leadership in April. It took more than threats and mass expulsions of members to restore the rebels to the union fold; a government board hastily opened formal negotiations for national agreements between the unions (now unified for a general “wage movement”) and the reprivatized railroad lines, and for substantial wage increases.60 As inflation gave way to depression, however, the national authority and discipline of unions became indispensable barriers against wage cuts and ultimate lines of defense of recently won shop committees and eight-hour days. The ranks closed, and experienced officers commanded the type of contractual battle they understood best. The novel element in this contest was the progressives’ new strategy: the unions’ commitment to make employers who recognized them more efficient, combined with electoral efforts to send friends of labor to Congress and publicity campaigns on behalf of legislation to nationalize the railroads and mines.
What had become of the revolutionaries? As in Europe, they were building parties. Their revolutionary objectives, Vittorio Foa has written, had been separated from the concrete struggles of workers and become entrusted instead to foreign developments: to the success of a socialist fatherland.61 Had they also been separated from the workers in the physical sense, as James Hinton and Richard Hyman found in England and Dick Geary found in Germany, by being discharged in vast numbers during the depression and living in the world of the unemployed rather than that of the factory?62 No research has been done to answer that question. We only know that, aside from the garment industry and some western Pennsylvania coal fields, Communists were effectively isolated from union struggles after 1922.
The differences between America and Europe were profound: the revolutionary fervor of Germany and Russia found no parallel in America, nor did the 1919 effort of British unions to use their economic power to win nationalization of the mines and railroads; no Red Guards bore arms at the behest of factory councils, nor, as I have observed, was there a FIOM, ready to project obstruction and factory occupations as the path to wage gains. These differences attest to the relatively secure position of American business and government, which had only been strengthened by the war.
For all those differences, the rhythm of developments was remarkably similar, just as many of the same forms of struggle appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. American workers may have been out of step with their European counterparts, but they were marching to the same drummer.
Notes
This essay was written on occasion of the conference in Turin November 20–22, 1981, organized by the Instituto Socialista di Studi Storici of Florence.
1. Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920, trans. Gwyn A. Williams (London, 1975), 34, 28; and A. Losovsky, The International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions (New York, 1920).
2. James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York, 1967); David Montgomery, “Labor and the Republic in Industrial America,” Le mouvement social 111 (Avril–Juin 1980), 201–215.
3. Monthly Labor Review 14 (Jan. 1922), 203–224.
4. Machinists Monthly Journal 32 (June 1920), 552 (hereafter cited as MMJ).
5. David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (New York, 1979), 91–112.
6. Labor Year Book 1919 (New York, 1919), 163–164.
7. James E. Cronin, “Labor Insurgency and Class Formation,” Social Science History 4 (Feb. 1980), 125–152.
8. James R. Barrett, “Work and Community in ‘The Jungle’: Chicago’s Packing House Workers, 1894–1922,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1981, 187. Alexander M. Bing, War-Time Strikes and Their Adjustment (New York, 1921), 203–209.
9. See, for example, the Anthony Capraro Papers (Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota) on Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Gladys L. Palmer, Union Tactics and Economic Change: A Case Study of Three Philadelphia Textile Unions (Philadelphia, 1932) on the Kensington neighborhood. Cf. the ambivalent image of the role of ethnic organizations in William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons (New York, 1920).
10. Bing, War-Time Strikes, 30n.
11. Alexander Trachtenberg, The American Socialists and the War (New York, 1917), 34, 39–45; Weinstein, Decline, 124, 127, 134–154; Advertisements of the People’s Council of America, R.G. 28, file 50206, National Archives.
12. Loyall A. Osborne to William H. Taft, May 31, 1918, Records of the National War Labor Board, R.G. 2, Administrative Files E 15, National Archives; James A. Emery, “War Labor Board for Increasing Production,” New York Times, April 14, 1918; Philip Taft, The A. F. of L. in the Time of Gompers (New York, 1957), 343–360. On France, see Gilbert Hatry, “Les délégués d’atelier aux usines Renault,” in Patrick Fridenson, ed., 1914–1918, l’autre front (Paris, 1977), 232; on Germany and elsewhere, see Cronin, 133.
13. Frank J. Warne, The Workers at War (New York, 1920), 29–30, 83–84; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (Chicago, 1969), 366–375, 384–391; Vernon H. Jensen, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferrous Metals Industry up to 1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950), 411–429. On Pittsburgh, see Clifton Reese to W. B. Wilson, Aug. 3, 1917, Dept. of Labor files, R.G. 280, National Archives.
14. E. C. Davidson to Post Office Department, Feb. 5, 1918, R.G. 28, file 50206, National Archives.
15. John H. M. Laslett, “End of an Alliance: Selected Correspondence between Socialist Party Secretary Adolph Germer and U.M.W. of A. Leaders in World War One,” Labor History 17 (Fall 1971), 579; Warne, 115. The penalty fine clause was to trigger the large rebel strike of 1919. See Sylvia Kopald, Rebellion in Labor Unions (New York, 1924), 74–75.
16. Roydon Harrison, “The War Emergency Workers’ National Committee,” in Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds., Essays in Labor History, 1886–1923 (Hamden, Conn., 1971), 211–259; Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford, Cal., 1968).
17. Calculations from statistics in Monthly Labor Review, 15 (July 1922), 167–169.
18. Boilermakers’ Journal, Oct. 1917, quoted in V. W. Lanfear, Business Fluctuations and the American Labor Movement, 1915–1922 (New York, 1924), 87–88.
19. Quoted in Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975), 59. Cf. Lozofsky, 56: “the bourgeoisie is strong . . . above all because it relies upon the workers’ organizations in its struggle against the workers.”
20. Haggai Hurvitz, “Ideology and Industrial Conflict: President Wilson’s First Industrial Conference of October, 1919” Labor History 18 (Fall 1977), 509–524; Marguerite Green, The National Civic Federation and the American Labor Movement, 1900–1925 (Washington, D.C., 1956), 441.
21. Alexander M. Bing, War-Time Strikes, 116–132; Federico Romero, Il Sindicato come Istituzione: la regolamentazione del conflitto industriale negli Stati Uniti, 1912–18 (Torino, 1981), 196–224. On the minimum wage question, see “Memorandum on the Minimum Wage and Increased Cost of Living” and related correspondence in C. P. Sweeney Files, NWLB, R.G. 2, National Archives. On the railways, see American Federation of Labor, Railway Employees’ Department, The Case of the Railway Shopmen (Chicago, 1922), 14, 35–37.
22. Clarence J. Hicks, My Life in Industrial Relations: Fifty Years in the Growth of a Profession (New York and London, 1941), 136–138. On employers’ federations in Europe, see Maier, 86; and also Eugene Rotwein, “Post-World War I Price Movements and Price Policy,” Journal of Political Economy 53 (1945), 234–257.
23. Editorial, New York Call, April 17, 1921; New York World, May 26, 1921; Avanti file, R.G. 28, Box 20, National Archives.
24. William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (New York, 1966), 181–272; Jonathan Grossman, The Department of Labor (New York and Washington, 1973), 23–26; United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1975), I: 114.
25. Maier, 311–315, 362–386, 427–430, 445–446, 556–572; Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Baltimore, 1963), 262.
26. George Soule, The Intellectual and the Labor Movement (New York, 1923); American Labor Yearbook 1919 (New York, 1919), 203–208; J. B. S. Hardman, ed., American Labor Dynamics in the Light of Post-War Developments (New York, 1928), 370–372; Harry W. Laidler and Norman Thomas, eds., New Tactics in Social Conflict (New York, 1926).
27. Laidler and Thomas, New Tactics, 39–41; Seattle Union Record, Jan. 19, 1921, p. 3; Mark Perlman, The Machinists (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 114; Harry W. Laidler, Recent Developments in the American Labor Movement (New York, 1923), 16–18; David J. Saposs, “Labor Banks and Trade Union Capitalism,” American Review (Sept.–Oct. 1923), 534–539.
28. MMJ 33 (Jan. 1921), 49–50; MMJ 33 (Sept. 1921), 759–761, 769. On the IAM’s experiences with and changing attitudes toward Soviet Russia, see MMJ 33 (Jan. 1921), 18–19; 33 (Sept. 1921), 739–743; 33 (Oct. 1921), 834–839; 33 (April 1921), 293–295; Seattle Union Record, March 9, 1921, p. 3.
29. Seattle Union Record, Jan. 25, 1921, p. 3.
30. American Federation of Labor, Report of Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Convention . . . 1919 (Washington, D.C., 1919), 269–278. On the voting power of certain delegates and the response to Bonfield, see American Labor Yearbook 1919, 150–151.
31. AFL, Proceedings . . . 1920, 399–420; JCL, “The A.F. of L. Convention,” Socialist Review 9 (Aug. 1920), 88–89.
32. AFL, Proceedings . . . 1921; Seattle Union Record, June 21, 1921, p. 1; June 25, 1921, p. 1; June 27, 1921, p. 8.
33. Foster, Steel Strike; report of William Hannon, MMJ, 32 (Feb. 1920); David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 276–278; Barrett, “Packing House Workers,” 296–317; William Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970), 114–142. On the AFL departments before 1914, see Taft, 213–224; Helen Marot, American Labor Unions (New York, 1914), 84–111.
34. Labor Age 11 (March 1922), 24; David J. Saposs, Readings in Trade Unionism (New York, 1926), 135–138. On the 1922 shopmen’s strike, see Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, History of Labor in the United States, 1896–1932 (New York, 1935), 515–524.
35. Little has been written on the subordination of central labor bodies to the AFL, but see the provocative insights in Jacques Rouillard, Les syndicats nationaux au Québec de 1900 à 1930 (Québec, 1979), 66–84. On France, see Peter Schöttler, “Politique sociale ou lutte des classes: notes sur le syndicalisme ‘apolitique’ des Bourse du Travail,” Le mouvement social 116 (Juillet-Septembre 1981), 3–20. Vittorio Foa depicts a subordination of horizontal to vertical organizations in Germany and England, but an unsuccessful effort by the Italian CGL to follow the German model before the war. See Foa, “Corso di storia sociale contemporanea,” unpublished manuscript, 50–55, 75.
36. Montgomery, Workers’ Control, 95. Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst, Mass., 1968), 126–151. On Kansas City, see NWLB files, R.G. 280, National Archives.
37. History Committee of the General Strike Committee, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle, 1919), esp. 5; Locomotive Engineers’ Journal 57 (July 1923), 558.
38. MMJ, 31 (March, 1919), 233.
39. John R. Commons et al., Industrial Government (New York, 1921), 353–355.
40. U.S. Department of Labor, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service records, R.G. 280, file 170/1035, National Archives; MMJ, 32 (April 1920), 352, 366–367; MMJ, 32 (Aug. 1920), 722–723, 725–726.
41. Jack W. Skeels, “Early Carriage and Auto Unions: The Impact of Industrialization and Rival Unionism,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 17 (July 1964), 566–583.
42. Quoted in Montgomery, Workers’ Control, 120.
43. Ibid., 134–135; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York, 1980), v: 164–181.
44. Edgar Sydenstricker, “Settlement of Disputes under Agreements in the Anthracite Industry,” in John R. Commons, Trade Unionism and Labor Problems, Second Series (Boston, 1921), 495–524. On the IWW, see Patrick Lynch, “Pennsylvania Anthracite: A Forgotten IWW Venture, 1906–1916,” M.A. thesis, Bloomsburg State College, Pennsylvania, 1974.
45. Memorandum, Lieut. F. H. Bird, Office of the Chief of Ordnance to Dr. Lucien W. Cheney, n.d., NWLB, R.G. 2, Administrative File B 56, The Whitley report is in G. D. H. Cole, ed., Workshop Organization (Oxford, 1923), 152–155. On the continental countries, see Carmen J. Sirianni, “Workers’ Control in the Era of World War I: A Comparative Analysis of the European Experience,” Theory and Society 9 (1980), 42–49.
46. See, for example, the elections in Bridgeport. Montgomery, Workers’ Control, x. According to a survey by the National Industrial Conference Board, 110 of the 225 works’ councils established during 1918 and 1919 were instituted by government agencies (86 by the NWLB), and 105 set up by companies independently. Bing, War-Time Strikes, 164n.
47. Commons, Trade Unionism and Labor Problems, Second Series, 345–348.
48. American Labor Yearbook 1919, 188–189.
49. Employees v. General Electric Company, Erie, Pa., Docket No. 20–127, NWLB, R.G. 2, Administrative Files Box 56; Department of Labor, R.G. 28, file 33/1702 (National Archives); Charles M. Ripley, Life in a Large Manufacturing Plant (Schenectady, N.Y., 1919), 43; New York Call, Feb. 20, 1919; MMJ, 31 (Jan. 1919), 35; “The 1918 Strike at Erie General Electric,” UE 506 News, Jan., 1980; Robert W. Bruère, “West Lynn,” Survey 56 (April 1, 1926), 21–27, 49; [Catherton Brownell] to Owen D. Young, “Report of an investigation into industrial conditions in the several plants of the General Electric Company, together with recommendations of a plan to improve them” [1920], Owen D. Young Papers. I am indebted to Ronald W. Schatz for this document.
50. Hatry, 221–235; Sirianni, 74–75. Cf., Cecelia F. Bucki, “Dilution and Craft Tradition: Bridgeport, Connecticut, Munitions Workers, 1915–1919,” Social Science History 4 (Feb. 1980), 105–124; James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1973).
51. Cecelia F. Bucki, Metal, Minds and Machines: Waterbury at Work (Waterbury, Conn., 1980), 77–79. On Patterson, see NWLB, R.G. 2, Case File 1123, National Archives. On Lawrence, see David Goldberg, “The Lawrence Strike of 1919,” M.A. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1979.
52. Interview with John Golden, Thomas F. McMahon, and James Starr, Feb. 25, 1919, David J. Saposs Papers, Box 21, file 11, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. A. J. Muste, “Sketches for an Autobiography,” in Nat Hentoff, ed., The Essays of A. J. Muste (Indianapolis, Ind., 1967), 80–150.
53. Laidler and Thomas, New Tactics, 96–111; Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism (Chicago, 1970), 131–133. The quotation from Leiserson is in Hicks, 83.
54. Survey 42 (Sept., 1919), 843–846. The quotation is on p. 844.
55. Cole, 55.
56. Quoted in Evans Clark, “The Industry Is Ours,” Socialist Review 9 (July 1920), 59.
57. On the Ladies Garment Workers, see Jesse T. Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 1910–1967 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), 323. On the Clothing Workers, see Steve Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal: Shopfloor Insurgents, Political Elites, and Industrial Democracy,” in Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America (Urbana, Ill., 1983). A fine account of the B & O Plan may be found in H. Dubreuil, Standards: le travail américain vu par un ouvrier français (Paris, 1929), 350–388.
58. Kopald, 74–75.
59. Interview with Peter Furrara, Ex. Bd. Member, Dist. No. 2, United Mine Workers, in David J. Saposs Papers, Box 21, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
60. Kopald, 124–177; Warne, Workers at War, 161–166; “Report of Proceedings in Connection with 1919–1920 Wage Movement,” MMJ, 32 (March, 1920), 226–240.
61. Foa, 101.
62. James Hinton and Richard Hyman, Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the Early British Communist Party (London, 1975), 12–14; Dick Geary, European Labour Protest, 1848–1939 (London, 1981), 150–155; Geary, “Radicalism and the Worker: Metalworkers and Revolution 1914–1923,” in Richard Evans, ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), 282–286.