A SHORT HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT CHAPTER I NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT Labor movement-definition.-Every modern industrial country has a labor movement; that is, an organized and continuous effort on the part of wage earners to improve their standards of living over a national area. The outward and visible signs of this movement are trade unions, national federations, strikes, boycotts, lockouts, labor leaders, labor conferences and programs, injunctions, legal battles, prosecutions, co-operative societies, labor and socialist parties, a labor press and labor propaganda, the participation of labor in partisan politics, labor lobbies in legislatures, and labor colleges and educational experiments. Considered as a state of mind, the labor movement is marked by growing sympathy among all crafts, trades, and classes of workers— an increasing belief that their cause is, at bottom, one cause. The origin of the labor movement.-The origin of the labor movement lies in self-defense-in attempts of workers to protect themselves against the worst ravages of the industrial system as it proceeded step by step to transform the agricultural or feudal society of the eighteenth century into the urban and industrial society of the twentieth century. Attempts to trace modern labor organization back to the guilds of the middle ages have been vain. Not until the rise of the merchant capitalist, the factory system, the growth of great industrial cities, mining, and transportation on a large scale did the modern workingclass movement emerge. Peculiarities of the American labor movement.— While they have the same origin, the labor movements of the various modern nations differ in their membership, structure, policies and leadership. The American movement has had a distinct character on account of the peculiar political and economic conditions prevailing in this country. Although in early times we had a great planting aristocracy in the southern states, and a landed aristocracy in New York, feudalism never got a stronghold in America. There never was a powerful landed nobility and clergy to dispute the growing power of the bourgeoisie and labor. Our national history therefore had a more purely economic coloring from the start. The independence of our nation originated in a trade and taxation dispute and in that dispute mechanics and artisans were keenly interested. They played a vigorous rôle in organizing opposition to British rule, in formulating revolutionary policies, and in waging war against royal armies on American soil.* Although there were, at first, property qualifications on thẻ right to vote, the suffrage was more widely extended than in England; and early in the nineteenth century the workingmen of the northern states were given the ballot without their having to wage a savage struggle against the ruling classes, such as was carried on in Europe. Many other forces gave a particular trend to the American labor movement. For more than a hundred years there was an abundance of cheap land in the West so that any laborer, with a little capital and some enterprise, who was discontented with his lot as an industrial worker, could readily become an independent farmer. Then the American workers have had to bargain over an immense market area, with extraordinary opportunities for speculation and personal gain. They have had to compete with an enormous and continuous stream of unorganized immigrants from all parts of the world. They have been compelled to carry on their work of organization in every known tongue and to surmount the *Becker, History of Political Parties in the Province of New York (University of Wisconsin Studies). almost insuperable obstacles of race prejudices, different languages, alien habits. They have been compelled to battle with gigantic business organizations known as trusts and combinations, commanding billions of dollars and monopolizing markets on a national scale. No industrial workers have had to face fiercer competition, a mightier money power, more temptations to desert the labor movement, and a heavier loss of leaders to politics and other causes. Finally, it may be noted that the long and terrible struggle over negro slavery, which occupied the political arena for more than thirty years and culminated in a fratricidal war of four years' duration, seriously checked the early labor movement and kept it many decades behind the movement in England. It was not until free land was nearly all gone in the early nineties and that avenue of escape closed to workmen that the American labor movement assumed the solidarity that characterizes the movement in other countries. The universality of the labor movement.-In spite of national peculiarities the labor movement has overleaped national boundaries. Economic conditions are swiftly becoming the same the world over. The steam engine and railway are making all nations industrial and, wherever mechanical industry appears on a large scale, there appears also a labor movement. As trade becomes international and the market a world market, the labor leaders in the sev eral countries tend to draw together to exchange ideas, work out programs for common action, and protect the workers of each country against the competition of other countries. International conferences of organized workers have been held at fairly regular intervals since 1864. The American labor movement was drawn into international relations five years later when it sent its first delegate to Basle in the hope that some way might be found to stem the tide of cheap immigrant labor pouring into this country, lowering the wage scale and thereby the standard of living for American workers. Such a powerful factor in the field of international relations had labor movements become in 1919 that the Peace of Versailles provided for an official international labor conference in an effort to equalize and stabilize working conditions throughout the world. The first of these official world labor conferences, composed of men selected by their respective governments, met in Washington, in October, 1919. Thus the strongest governments take cognizance of the international character of labor relations, forced upon the attention of the world by the efforts of organized labor. For a long Significance of the labor movement. time this wide-spread labor movement was almost entirely ignored by everybody save those who took part in it or were in sympathy with it or at least intellectually curious about it. Members of the pro |