The Labour Movement in the United States of America – Part 17-18

17 – The “Progressive Era”

At the beginning of the century, the US economy, now fully recovered from the “Great Depression” of the 1890s, was heading towards a long period of expansion destined to end with the boom of the years of the First World War. In the forty years after the Civil War, the country had transformed itself from a predominantly agricultural and largely unexplored nation into a major industrial power. The victory over Spain in 1898, in the war for dominion over Cuba, and the subsequent annexations of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, had shown the world that the young American imperialism should now be considered as one of the protagonists of the international scene. If the sanction of American political-military power would come only with the world conflict, the recognition of its economic strength was now a given.

Even before the end of the nineteenth century, industrial production had reached very high levels. The United States had surpassed Great Britain in the production of steel and cast iron in 1890, and coal in 1895. At the beginning of the century, the United States accounted for 30.1% of the world production of manufactured goods, rising to 35.8% in 1913, far above the levels reached by the other great industrial powers, Great Britain and Germany. Also in 1913, the USA obtained the definitive statistical sanction of its economic supremacy: in that year, in fact, its gross national product per capita exceeded even that of Great Britain, until then the first among the industrialised nations. But, perhaps even more importantly, the United States excelled above all because of the rate of growth of its economy, consistently higher than that of the other industrial powers. In the period between 1870 and 1913, the annual growth rate of production per employee was 1.9%, compared to 1.6% in Germany, 1.4% in France, 1.0% in Great Britain and 0.8% in Italy. During the same period, the annual growth rate of the gross national product per capita was 2.2%, well above the 1.7% of Germany, l.4% of France, 1.2% of Great Britain and 0.7% of Italy.

The development of the US economy in the second half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a vigorous growth of presence on international markets, especially after the crisis of the 1890s. The value of exports increased fivefold in the fifty years between 1860 and 1910, from 400 to 1,919 million dollars: but in the following five years it grew by 50%, reaching 2,966 million dollars in 1915. Since the 1890s, in fact, there has been a sharp increase in the attention paid to foreign markets. Entrepreneurs, financiers, and political leaders saw in commercial expansion, in the conquest of new markets, the indispensable solution to the dilemmas posed by growth. The end of the process of internal colonisation, the so-called “closing of the frontier”, induced the ruling class to look abroad for new spaces for the placement of surplus goods and capital. On this basis, the young American imperialism took its first steps: first, by consolidating its economic and political dominance over the two Americas, and secondly by trying to extend its influence over the Pacific area and the Far East. The “open door doctrine”, enunciated by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 with regard to China, provided this expansionist drive with a “general strategy”, based on the pursuit of economic penetration in new markets rather than on the classic colonial practice of territorial conquest. At the beginning of the new century, therefore, the United States entered decisively into the international competition between the great powers. Twenty years later, at the end of the First World War, they were already in a position of clear predominance.

While big capital led this epochal advance, a newly formed working class was amassing in the cities, whose characteristics were continually modified, and even disrupted, by the continuous waves of migration from Europe. The differences produced by the different experiences at home intersected and overlapped with religious, cultural, and ethnic divisions. The latter became particularly relevant towards the end of the century and in the first fifteen years of the 20th century. The migratory flow reached the highest peaks, touching the average of almost one million arrivals per year, in the period between 1900 and 1914. Above all in this period, the influx of emigrants of Slavic or Latin origin from the Mediterranean or eastern areas of Europe became by far predominant, while in the 19th century the immigrants were mostly of Anglo-Saxon, German or Scandinavian origin. As land became more and more expensive, and the possibility of leaving Europe with even a small amount of capital became more and more rare, there were no other possibilities open to immigrants than life in a poor quarter of the city, working in a factory, or in a remote mining village. In the urban areas all the tensions deriving from the impact between an extremely composite and differentiated working class and an industry that was growing and changing its characteristics under the pressure of mechanisation and the search for maximum efficiency were concentrated.

In the course of what was called the “Progressive Era” all social components underwent a rapid evolution. The large corporation in a position of quasi-monopoly certainly represented the antithesis of the previous ideals of American democracy of a rural kind, whose central figures, the farmer and the small independent businessman, had given life to the culture, and the myths, of individualism. The organisation of the trusts constituted, on the economic level, a mortal threat to that culture, because their ability to control the market and prices eliminated every possibility, and even semblance, of free competition. In the political field, the concentration of wealth offered the possibility of corrupting and controlling public affairs on a scale hitherto unthinkable. For this reason, the fight against trusts had already constituted, in the last decades of the 19th century, one of the battle horses of rural populist agitation. Particularly rooted in the agrarian states of the Midwest, the populist movement had demanded, and in part obtained, around 1890, public control over railroad tariffs (Interstate Commerce Act) and measures to control respect for the rules of competition (Sherman Act). But the agitation against the trusts continued to remain, at least until the beginning of the World War, one of the central themes of the American political scene. The anti-monopoly controversy became, in fact, one of the battle horses of the “progressive” reform movements.

Exponents of the old ruling elites such as Theodore Roosevelt, intellectuals, professionals, merchants, generally the most open-minded members of the middle and upper classes, reacted openly in the face of the pressing radical change of status that threatened them. While on the one hand they saw the rise of the new, arrogant power of financiers and industrialists who, at the head of great economic empires, accumulated an enormous power of conditioning on the life of the country, on the other hand they felt the threat of a growing working class that tended to the organisation of strong unions and, at least potentially, to the construction of a socialist alternative.

Faced with the social upheaval resulting from the rapid growth of an industrial economy, the agitation of a “progressive” nature chose the dual path of denunciation in front of public opinion and the political battle at local and central level. In the early years of the century became famous journalists nicknamed muckrakers (shovelers of manure): they brought to light numerous scandals, abuses, episodes of corruption in the public life of the cities. It spread with them a publicity of denunciation first, and then analysis of the social plagues produced by the boom in industry and urbanism: dilapidated neighbourhoods, poverty, child labour and women in appalling conditions, accidents at work. But while attacking monopoly big business, they never lost sight of the danger posed by the working class, whose uncontrolled union organisation and growing presence of socialism and related ideologies were feared above all.

Big business had clear objectives: stability of the financial system, predictability of market trends, elimination of the harmful effects of competition, elimination or reduction of labour conflicts.

For this reason, the major reforms, especially at federal level, ended up being supported, and often designed and managed, by the most politically “enlightened” exponents of big financial and industrial capital. Thus, the reorganisation of the banking system, implemented in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act, was directly inspired by the bankers, who created a more elastic and efficient credit structure. Similarly, the regulation of competition in the railways, the new Clayton law on trusts, the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission (responsible for the supervision of any monopolistic activities), the modification of protective tariffs, were all reforms launched with the consent of large industrial capital. The men of the large corporations participated directly in the conception and planning of reforms that were presented as an attempt at public control over certain aspects of the economic structure. And they were the ones called upon to be part of the federal commissions charged with administering and applying the reform laws. In this way, the control of major economic interests over politics was realised, the use of political instruments to rationalise the economic system, defined as “political capitalism”. It was a question of institutionalising the guidance of politics operated by capital, which is inseparable from the capitalist system of production, but which the bourgeoisie always tries to hide, so as not to highlight the class character of the state; and which only appears in the light of day when the bourgeoisie is forced to resort to the authoritarian solution.

The reforming thrust of big capital also had as its primary objective the pursuit of a “rational” and “efficient” harmony between classes, to prevent the emergence of an aggressive and organised working class, with all the dangers that this would entail.

Reformism, an antidote to the class struggle

It was the latter, a far from remote or fantastic possibility in the early years of the century. The years of economic expansion that followed the crisis of the ’90s had seen a dizzying multiplication of strikes and workers’ unrest. The number of officially registered strikes went from 1,098 in 1898 to 1,839 in 1900; it then rose to 3,240 in 1902 and arrived the following year at an “all-time high” of 3,648, which would only be surpassed in the years of World War I. Trade union members, which at the end of the 1890s did not exceed 500,000, reached one million in 1901 and exceeded two million in 1904. They were still low values, however, when viewed in relation to total industrial workers. In fact, the percentage of union members in the total labour force was 12.3% in 1904, the year with the most favourable ratio. In the following period it would fluctuate around 10-11%, only to rise again during the conflict. However, this was a considerable and very rapid progress compared to the percentages of the previous years: 3.5% in 1897, 4.4% in 1899, 7.4% in 1901, 11.3% in 1903. But three-fourths of the members belonged to the unions belonging to the AFL, that federation of which we have already spoken at length, and whose leaders were fundamentally convinced that the welfare of labour was inevitably connected with that of capital.

On the whole, the attitude of the entrepreneurs was divided along two distinctly different political lines. A large part of the companies gave life, starting in 1904, to a real campaign, coordinated nationally by the National Association of Manufacturers, to remove all union representation from the companies and hit the root of the strength of the unions. It was a real generalised offensive, which used all possible repressive instruments, both state and private, to re-establish the total control of the employers in the companies.

Other industrial sectors, however, tried to follow a different line. Some exponents of the major corporations, starting with those linked to the financial house Morgan, began to think that social stability, outside and inside the factory, could be more solidly guaranteed through the recognition of conservative unions as representatives of the workers, the establishment of a regular collective bargaining, the creation of bodies for mediation and arbitration of labour conflicts.

To this end, in 1900, the National Civic Federation (NCF) was born. We have spoken previously of the birth and activities of this structure that brought together exponents of various social components, with a clear anti-working-class purpose and class collaboration. It symbolised the reform movement’s aspiration to social harmony, and in particular that of the most conscious sectors of big capital; it pushed the AFL to embark decisively on the path of cooperation; it favoured the formation of political balances of reformist orientation on labour issues.

In 1912, the reformist orientations of a large part of the country also imposed themselves on the political level, with the victory in the presidential elections of Woodrow Wilson, on a program, called the “New Freedom”, with a clear progressive approach. The Socialist Party, which was born in 1901 from the convergence of the Social Democratic Party of America with elements of the Socialist Labor Party, obtained its best success, approaching one million votes. In the following two years, the structural reforms we mentioned above were enacted. But, above all, the affirmation of the Democrats and the establishment of the Wilson administration changed the state’s attitude towards the working class. Faced with growing conflict, the need to develop a comprehensive policy of social stabilisation led the government to adopt the line of cooperation between capital and workers’ organisations. At first in an uncertain and sporadic way, then gradually with greater organicity and determination, the co-responsibility of the AFL and of the conservative unions for the maintenance of social peace and the increase of productivity became an explicit political choice of the administration. The World War, with the multiplication of state control over the economic and social sphere of the country’s life, saw the full affirmation of this policy. The repression of conflict, and in particular of its most radical expressions, was accompanied by the spread of collective bargaining, the recognition of union standards both in the field of wages and regulations, and the integration of union leaders in the structures of conciliation of labour conflicts.

Labour legislation

These measures were more necessary than ever for the bourgeoisie, since the years 1912 and 1913 were the years in which the radical clash between the working class and the bosses emerged most explicitly in the most industrialised states of the East. These are the years in which the most de-qualified sectors of the working class, those of more recent immigration from Southeast Europe, express with greater force their claims and their insubordination to the high rates of exploitation that the rationalisation of production brings with it. To mention only the best known, in 1912 there was the textile strike in Lawrence, in 1913 those in the silk industry in Paterson, in the rubber industry in Akron and in the car industry at Studebaker in Detroit. This was the culmination of a whole cycle of determined struggles that worried the industrial bourgeoisie, which understood that it was necessary to take action, no longer relying solely on direct confrontation, now incapable on its own to keep in check the most desperate strata of the class, especially because on the horizon, from 1914, there was the involvement in the great war, and the movement for preventive rearmament, called “preparedness”.

The reformist response to the workers’ struggles, and more generally to social unrest, managed to take shape in various legislative measures in the course of these years thanks to a political situation now quite clearly oriented in a “progressive” sense. So much so that the Democratic Party in its pre-electoral convention not only warmly welcomed the delegation of the American Federation of Labor, but practically left to the latter the task of writing that part of its electoral platform concerning the world of labour. The situation immediately appeared extremely favourable to those sectors of big capital that constituted the direction and soul of the “progressive” movement, even if in a very discreet and sometimes hidden way. The NCF, in fact, often constituted a true centre of elaboration and conception of those reform projects that were most dear to the big corporations, and one of the most important instruments through which they intervened in the debate and in political action. Gompers himself wrote in his autobiography that in the session of Congress immediately following the elections, “the union proposals received unprecedented attention”.

To this picture must be added the remarkable success obtained by the Socialist Party, whose candidate for the presidency, Eugene Debs, obtained about 900,000 votes, just under 6%, the highest result in the history of the party. This affirmation obviously sounded threatening to big business and all other defenders of the economic and social system, and therefore helped to stimulate reformist tendencies and attempts at rationalisation.

It should not be thought, however, that there were no obstacles or difficulties in the face of the push for reform. The most important of these were the more openly reactionary and decidedly anti-union forces in the employers’ camp. They were organised in hundreds and hundreds of local associations, starting with the chambers of commerce, and in numerous trade organisations, but above all they had a strong national organisation, the National Association of Manufacturers which, originally created to give weight at state and government level to the employers’ need to expand foreign trade, then built its fortunes on a rigid and decisive anti-union position. The NAM was responsible for directing and organising the violent reaction of hundreds of entrepreneurs to the workers’ struggles and for creating national campaigns for the open-shop and against what they liked to call “immoral class legislation”. At the institutional level, the NAM used its power of pressure, which reached the most blatant corruption, at the local level, through powerful lobbies; the same happened at the federal level, with the creation of special organisations; a custom that the bourgeoisie has not abandoned, on the contrary, it has institutionalised it.

But it was the control of the courts that constituted the main institutional obstacle to the development of the reform initiative, and it was precisely their attitude towards social and industrial questions that aroused popular discontent. Because the law placed “private property rights above personal and social rights”, as Robert Hoxie, a well-known reformer of the time, complained, the courts very often struck down laws that postulated any workers’ rights and declared them unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, the very one passed at the end of the Civil War to guarantee the rights and freedom of blacks! It stated that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law”, and this formula was used by the courts to invalidate any law that placed any restrictions on the freedom of the entrepreneur.

In the spring of 1917, with the war just around the corner, and when both the main capitalist sectors and the administration had by then definitively opted for a policy of openness to the moderate components of the workers’ movement, the Supreme Court finally sanctioned this changed attitude of the judiciary. In a very short time it issued a series of rulings declaring constitutional some of the most important measures passed in the field of labour legislation both at state and federal level.

Legislation aimed at regulating child labour was also very extensive, given that in 1906 43 states had already passed measures on the subject. Many of these measures were, however, very limited, if not formal and ridiculous: in South Carolina, for example, an article had been voted in which, after having established a limit of twelve years for child labour, exceptions were allowed if this imposed sacrifices on families!

Only an apparent victory

The eight-hour claim was supported by vigorous union campaigns and was at the centre of attention. This was also because the processes of restructuring and rationalisation of production directly involved the question of working hours, contributing to the opening of a discussion even in employers’ circles. However, the discussion was not much more than that, because if the introduction of the eight-hour working day at Ford’s factory chain dates back to this period, to the first months of 1914, the vast majority of industries would continue, at least until the war, to maintain much longer working hours, ten and often, as in the steel industry, even twelve hours.

The question of working hours remained, therefore, in these years entrusted to the direct confrontation between the working class and the employers, and even the legislative measures which were voted, at the federal level, for some categories, had their origin, as we shall see, in the need for the government to intervene in order to settle some important open disputes.

This extensive development of labour legislation in the second decade of the century was due to complex and often diverse reasons, which reflected the different tendencies and movements that animated the country on the social level. However, we can try to identify the basic reasons that gave rise to this phenomenon.

The most important, and above all the most urgent, was the need to contain the impetuous development of social unrest and the workers’ struggle. More precisely, there was a need, on the part of the most conscious sectors of capital and the ruling class as a whole, to divert the development of social agitation from class and anti-capitalist tendencies, exemplified not only by the fighting behaviour of large sectors of the working class, but also by the growth of a revolutionary organisation such as the Industrial Workers the World and the fortunes of the socialist party.

On the other hand, many of these laws had a rather relative effectiveness, and their function often did not go beyond propaganda. The Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, for example, had no power whatsoever to force employers to apply the minimum wage it had established: it could only publish lists of renegade employers for public disapproval, but nothing more. In other situations, where the law was obligatory, its effectiveness was reduced to a minimum by the fact that the levels set were not linked to price changes, so that in times of rising costs of living, the quotas set soon became lower than the wages actually applied. To this must be added a final factor, that of the action that employers could exert in each state, either through pressure on legislative bodies, or through the presence of their representatives in the commissions charged with setting minimum wage levels, in order to impose minimum levels low enough not to substantially modify the situation. After that, it is clear that the entrepreneurs were able to exploit the political and propaganda aspects of the legislation in their favour without having to pay particularly high costs or be forced to introduce major changes in their companies.

In the field of labour and social legislation, the problem for capital was, therefore, to prevent radical solutions, without opposing the reform movement, but, on the contrary, being part of it and trying to influence it, to direct it towards solutions suited to their needs. The case of workman’s compensation (i.e., guarantees and indemnities in the case of accidents at work) is extremely indicative in this sense. Many large companies, even those that were fiercely anti-union, had already launched accident insurance programs, both because it was a measure that could no longer be avoided, on pain of giving a further reason for social unrest, and in order to increase the worker’s loyalty to the company. Legislation took note of this, extending it to all companies and, above all, relieving companies of the relative burdens.

A very meaningful parallel can be made between these interventions, even of a social nature, and the measures taken by European authoritarian regimes a few years later: an example is the claimed defence of the family, which had been seriously weakened as an agent of social reproduction in the 19th century; hence the attempt to regulate female and child labour, and the valorisation of domestic work and the role of the housewife.

On the whole, the various measures of social and labour legislation, while drawing their origin from the growth of workers’ struggles, from the threat that they constituted for the entire social order and from the pressure of a reformist character of large sectors of the middle class, ended up being realised, and determined in their content, precisely by the action of the most conscious sectors of big capital.

The attitude of the AFL towards labour legislation was always well-differentiated, depending on the interests of the union store. Its leaders in fact saw the reform action from above as an emptying of the role of the unions “good”, and therefore as their dis-empowerment. Thus, the AFL tended to remain entrenched in the ideology, and practice, of “pure and simple” unionism on which it had based its successes. This meant that the federation’s line on labour legislation was initially determined by a fairly simple mechanism: reject any measure that would intervene in problems or sectors of the working class where unions were present or expected to be able to organise workers. This meant rejecting almost all laws aimed at regulating in some way the working conditions of adult male workers, i.e., the sector on which the trade unions were based and to which they addressed themselves. For example, they were openly opposed to laws limiting working hours for men, because they wanted this issue to be resolved solely and exclusively by direct bargaining with employers, by the union struggle. On the contrary, they favoured, and often directly committed themselves to the promulgation of laws to regulate working conditions in those sectors where they could not reach with the organisation of the unions or where they believed they had to operate to limit the competition brought to the labour market by the workers they organised: thus the federation committed itself so that public employees, among whom the prohibition to strike made it impossible to have a strong union presence, obtained the eight-hour schedule, minimum wages and workman’s compensation through special laws of Congress. The battle for the regulation of child labour also saw the AFL fully engaged and active, since its spread was a very effective tool to keep wages low and exert more forcefully the blackmail of unemployment on adult workers. In the field of limiting working hours for women, the AFL was always in the forefront, and even came, as in California, to promote the bill itself. There were several reasons for this attitude. First, the unions did not organise, nor did they intend to organise, women, particularly the great mass of unskilled women workers at whom the legislation was primarily aimed. Moreover, on the part of the leaders of the unions and the federation, there was a certain ideological and political convergence with the capitalist projects of limiting women’s work and reconstructing and consolidating the family structure. A traditional opposition to the development of women’s work was rather rooted in the trade workers’ organisations, and there had been numerous battles against the hiring of women in the factories.

With regard to the establishment of minimum wages for women, however, the AFL was in opposition, or merely gave formal support to the movement: this was because they were convinced that minimum wage levels for women would call into question the union tables and weaken the unions, something that officials were not at all happy about because of the danger it could pose to their chairs.

In the years of Wilson’s first presidency, however, the attitude of the federation slowly began to change. It tended more and more to support all those laws that concerned sectors of workers where there had never been any practice of collective bargaining, where the unions had never been able, or had never wanted, to develop their own organisation. It is important to note that this logic was based on the fact that the unions based all their strength, and their very existence, on their ability to exercise almost monopolistic control (hence the tendency to establish the closed-shop) of the labour market job by job, thus leaving out the enormous mass of unskilled workers. It was precisely the development of struggles and worker organisation in the unskilled sectors, in open antagonism with the AFL and the trade unions, that played a decisive role in making the latter change their position and accept the reformist logic of capital, in the common interest of cutting the grass under the feet of these struggles.

On the whole, however, there remained a fairly firm position against any legislative regulation of the main aspects of working conditions, first and foremost of working hours and minimum wages, with regard to adult male workers, that is, where there were, or could be organised, unions of skilled workers. In this case, for the union leaders, the existence and functions of their organisation came into play and it is therefore obvious that they were particularly opposed to those programs that could allow the government to compete for the trust of their members. The growing harmony between the AFL and the government came to fruition in 1913 with the calling to head the newly established Department of Labor of William B. Wilson, a former executive of the miners’ union whom Gompers had proposed for the position.

At this point, therefore, at a time when the start of the campaign for preparedness and, above all, the beginning of a cycle of large-scale labour struggles changed the political and social framework, relations between the federation and the government had matured to such an extent that the traditional distrust of the AFL leadership in the intervention of the state in labour problems had almost disappeared. In 1916 the shift became obvious and explicit. While the campaign of economic and ideological mobilisation of the country in view of a possible entry into the war consolidates the cooperation between unions and government, the spread of a massive wave of strikes forces the administration to make clearer and more explicit choices in its labour policy.

The President intervenes

The outbreak of war in Europe had created enough demand in American industry to overcome the crisis of 1914 and, starting in the spring of 1915, to start a consistent economic recovery; at the same time, it had produced a vertiginous drop in immigration levels. The result of these two phenomena was a rapid disappearance of the traditional reserve of labour-power and a consequent strengthening of the bargaining power of the working class.

From 737 strikes in 1914, the number rose to 658 in the first half of 1915 and 675 in the second half. In 1916, the figures rose steadily: 111 strikes in January, 195 in February, 189 in March, 329 in April and 461 in May. It is a cycle of struggles that will last until the United States enters the war and, albeit under different conditions, even during the war itself, expressing a strength and often a unity between different categories of workers, between immigrants and non-immigrants, between skilled and unskilled workers, that tends to overcome old divisions.

In this climate, in the summer of 1916, the administration was faced with a dispute opened by the four Brotherhoods, which organised more than 350,000 railroad workers, with all the companies to obtain an eight-hour schedule, a maximum daily distance of 100 miles and the payment of overtime at 50% more than the normal hourly wage for all freight train personnel. Faced with the companies’ refusal and the union decision to call a strike that would paralyse the entire transportation network, Wilson personally intervened with his own mediation plan. But the companies refuse the plan and the Brotherhoods, as a result, start the organisational machine that must prepare for the strike, set for September 4. At this point the president, having no other means to prevent the paralysis of transportation that would result from the strike, goes directly to Congress, on August 29, asking the Congressmen to decide immediately to 1) restructure and enlarge the Interstate Commerce Commission, the administrative body that presided over the regulation of the railroad system, 2) establish an eight-hour basic schedule for all interstate railroad workers, 3) to establish a commission of inquiry into the results and costs of implementing the basic eight-hour schedule, 4) to give its consent to a reconsideration of railroad freight rates by the ICC after the introduction of the eight-hour schedule, 5) to amend existing laws so as to make inquiry into labour disputes on the railroads mandatory before strikes or lockouts could be legally declared, 6) to give the president the power to control the railroads and to organise the staff in case of military necessity. The president’s pronouncement in favour of the eight hours is clearly the most important aspect of the whole proposal, although it should be noted the search, explicit in point 5, for a model of labour relations extremely controlled from above. In the face of criticism from the more conservative circles, Wilson replied: “It seems to me, considering the subject of the dispute, that the whole spirit of the moment, and the evidence of recent economic experience, speak in favour of the eight-hour day”, where “spirit of the moment” probably means the strength of the movement of struggles underway in the country and “recent economic experience” means the experiences, now anything but negligible, of productive rationalisation that involve, at times, the reduction of working hours. In short, it is the first important anticipation of the labour policy that the administration will adopt during the war, based on the efficient restructuring and the full inclusion of the union in a mechanism of collective bargaining controlled from above. Haste forced Congress to deal only with the problem of working hours, and the president’s proposal was accepted, with the establishment of the basic eight-hour schedule. Thus the strike is averted and a period opens in which government and state intervention in labour matters will not only become constant and regular, but will be accepted if not demanded by the trade unions. The AFL, which at the beginning of the dispute announced its solidarity with the Brotherhoods by asserting that “the power” that would institute the eight hours on the railroads would be that of the “labour movement”, accepted the law without flinching, satisfied with the administration’s pro-union orientation.

The federation leadership, at this point, was ready to welcome, and to urge, the standardisation of working conditions and wages that the government would conduct, in the course of the war, with their active participation. Yet barely three years had passed since Gompers still peremptorily asserted, “I hope that the time will never come when it will be the authority and power of the government to fix the minimum wages, or the maximum hours, at least for male workers, on the face of the earth”. But Gompers had made so many such volte-faces that one was no longer surprised.

The change, as we can see, is quite radical and finds its reasons not only in the danger posed to the AFL by the development of workers’ struggles and class organisations that threatened its very existence, but also in the government’s changed attitude towards the unions and their demands. A policy that had now openly chosen the path for which for years the men of the NCF, union leaders and the most conscious exponents of big business, had been fighting. That is, the path of the division of the workers’ movement, of the recognition and integration of its moderate and conservative components, of the development of an orderly and “constructive” practice of collective bargaining, of the isolation and repression of anti-capitalist behaviour and organisations expressed by considerable sectors of the working class. In the years between Wilson’s rise to the presidency and his entry into the war, this line was progressively adopted by the administration and the other structures of the state, up to the Supreme Court, and inspired the basic features of labour legislation. The same opposition of employers to these choices, exemplified by the NAM and similar organisations, was modified, and formal acceptance of social legislation was affected, with the consequent exploitation of the propaganda advantages that this entailed, while boycotting its practical effects.

The new attitude of the most evolved part of the big bourgeoisie shines through in the speeches for the election of 1912, in which he exposes his program defined “New Freedom”. There Wilson appears as a champion of the defenceless worker against big business.

The attempt was to cope with the growth of workers’ struggles through the establishment of a system of cooperative relations between capital and the moderate sectors of workers’ organisations. That is, a system that would make possible orderly, predictable and controllable relations between workers and companies, based on collective bargaining constructively aimed at efficiency and increased production.

It was an opportunity for the AFL to see the reforms it had been presenting to Congress since 1906, the “Bill of Grievances”, come to fruition.

It included a call for comprehensive eight-hour legislation for all government employees, some measures to restrict immigration, a bill to protect workers from the competition of forced labour, and various measures to improve working conditions for seamen that would later be incorporated into the La Follette Seamen’s Act; but its main points concerned issues related to the right of workers to organise collectively and to take action to fight.

In fact, the first part of the Bill called for a law to prevent the use of injunctions by the courts against workers’ struggles or other union activities, and another part called for the tightening of the legislation on trusts while excluding its application to workers’ organisations. In the first case, it was a question of taking away from the courts the main instrument of repressive intervention against workers and their organisations; in the second case, it was a question of preventing the use against workers of a law created to punish every restriction and limitation of trade, and on the basis of which the major repressive operations against workers and against the unions themselves had been built. The injunctions were orders of a judge that imposed on those to whom they were addressed to refrain from some action when it could result in “irreparable damage” to property; failure to comply with this order led to charges of contempt of court and immediate imprisonment.

There were three types: the temporary restraining order which was issued by a judge, without any hearing or notice to the party in question, on the basis of a simple complaint; the temporary injunction which required prior notice and could also be preceded by a hearing; and finally there was the permanent injunction which was issued only on the basis of a hearing.

But it is clear that the most important, and most feared by the workers, was the first type of injunction: it was not only issued on the basis of the opinion of the entrepreneur and his version of the facts, but also had the advantage of a very rapid procedure, so as to be a formidable instrument of intervention against a strike or other action of struggle from its very beginning. In this way, an enormous amount of power was concentrated in the hands of judges whose conservative and pro-patron positions cannot be doubted: it is enough to think, for example, that in the federal courts alone, in the period between 1901 and 1921, the magistrates granted an injunction at the request of the entrepreneur 70 times and refused it only once! So what was supposed to be an “extraordinary remedy” under common law quickly became the “usual legal measure” in the attack on workers’ struggles and their organisations, and in fact it was used on the most diverse occasions.

The other measure requested of Congress, namely the exclusion of workers’ organisations from the repressive measures of the law against trusts, which tended to strike at any form of limitation or restriction of trade, was of equal and perhaps even greater importance and urgency: that law, in fact, the Sherman Act of 1890, had been used far more to strike at workers’ organisations than to prosecute and dissolve trusts. In the period between 1892 and 1896, for example, of the five cases brought by the government for violation of the Sherman Act against trusts, only one was won, while of the five brought against labour organisations, four were won and only one was lost. The mechanism was quite simple: the federal courts had in fact the power to prosecute the leaders of the workers’ organisations every time they saw in some action of struggle an undue limitation of trade and competition, and this obviously meant, thanks to the generality of the law, an immense power.

In the first months of 1914 the AFL launched a great propaganda and pressure campaign to put an end to the anti-union use of the Sherman law and to take away from the courts the weapon of the injunction with which unions are fought. In every issue of the “American Federationist” there are articles that, in addition to illustrating the countless abuses committed by the courts, try to convince moderate public opinion, and especially the political circles and the dominant forces in them, of the need for a more liberal legal discipline towards workers’ organisations. In fact, it is no coincidence that the most frequently used argument is the threat of a strong growth of radicalism and worker unrest if the unions continue to be weakened and persecuted. The AFL, stressing how the repression of “responsible” and “constructive” unions fuels workers’ distrust of the democratic system and cooperation for economic development, thus openly offers itself as the organisation that can guarantee social stability and develop mass consensus for the current economic organisation. Gompers, with impressive frankness, wrote: “if you do not grant the full right of association to the working masses of our country, you will have to deal with other elements that will not let you sleep so peacefully and with so few worries”.

Marching separately, striking together

As usual, the bourgeoisie was not united on the relationship to be held with the trade unions: we have seen that the small and medium entrepreneurs were headed by the NAM and the Anti-boycott Association. The latter, in addition to opposing the overall project favoured by the government and large corporations, did not intend to deprive themselves of any possible tool for the repression of unions. On the contrary, the attitude of the most acute among the leaders of the corporations was probably already inspired by the idea of granting the unions the legal rights they claimed, precisely in order to bring them more and more onto a collaborative ground and to stimulate them to an attitude of responsibility towards the social order. But above all to guarantee themselves against the development of radical and class organisations of the workers, for which a widespread and solid presence of trade unions constituted a no small obstacle. These different policies derived not only from the greater foresight of the leaders of the corporations, but also from the fact that they could afford such an attitude by virtue of their economic and political strength, which allowed them to successfully fight the unions within their factories, while the small entrepreneurs had a greater need for the repressive intervention of the state in order to win their anti-union battles.

A law was finally passed in October 1914 (the Clayton Act), legitimising the existence of unions: the American Federation of Labor rejoiced at what it considered to be the greatest achievement of its legislative activity, and Gompers would define the Clayton Act as the “Magna Carta” of workers.

In reality, this was little more than a formal success, since the very vague law, even if it meant an open attitude on the part of the state towards the workers’ organisations, would certainly not have led to a decrease in repression against the unions, or better, against the strikers, when the political moment required it. So much so that proceedings against unions for violation of the Trusts Act ended up being greater in number in the twenty-four years after the enactment of the Clayton Act than in the twenty-four years before, when only the Sherman Act was in force. In practice, it was only the existence of unions that was declared legal, while any of their activities, such as boycotts or the publication of lists of anti-union employers, could easily fall into that category of actions aimed at restricting trade that the antitrust legislation intended to punish. Hot air, in short, that the AFL took for granted, but in the end the only real result was exactly what those corrupt organisations wanted.

It is symptomatic, in this regard, how Wilson himself had intervened in the summer of 1914 in two rather serious and almost simultaneous labour conflicts, shortly after the passage of the Clayton Act. On the occasion of a dispute between the Brotherhoods of the railroads and the railroad companies over wages and working conditions on 98 lines in the West, Wilson did not hesitate to intervene with the railroad executives, urging them to accept a mediation plan; their intransigence in fact, after a mediation attempt had failed, might have led to a strike. On this occasion, for the first time, the president appealed for responsibility for the national emergency caused by the war, and his intervention was successful, inducing the railroad companies to accept an arbitration that, however, would later prove to be largely unfavourable to the Brotherhoods on almost all points of the dispute

But a few months later, in November of the same year, when a struggle of Arkansas miners led by the United Mine Workers found themselves facing a federal court injunction against picketing (and what’s more, one of the mine owners was appointed as administrator of the court’s orders), Wilson acted quite differently. He had no hesitation in complying with the federal court’s request by sending troops to ensure that his order would be obeyed. He thus endorsed not only the injunction and its use, but above all the extreme anti-union behaviour of the magistrates, and to prevent the miners’ struggle from defeating the injunction, he ordered the federal troops to disband without hesitation every “illegal meeting” in the territory of the district. In short, the substance of the repression of proletarian struggles did not change, it was only delegated to the central organs of the bourgeois state, and taken away from the arbitrariness of the small or medium capitalist, who with his greed and narrowness can unnecessarily endanger social peace.

Thus the whole complex of refined instruments of anti-union repression, beginning with the injunction, continued to remain more than legitimate and available, ready to be used again in a different situation, and above all functional to always remind the yellow unions that their present power depended on their behaviour, on their willingness to cooperate, on their active participation in the work of stabilising the economic and social order in which big capital and the state were engaging.

18 – War: for Capital, a Panacea for all Ills

Wilson changes his line of conduct

We saw how the first Wilson administration (1913-1916) showed much more attention to the labour movement than previous administrations had done. In addition to the aforementioned interventions, the most tangible sign of this was the creation of the Department of Labor, at the head of which (not surprisingly) was placed William B. Wilson – a former member of the miners’ union – beginning a tradition of direct corruption of trade union leaders by the State (in commendable anticipation of the same phenomenon in Europe). The task of this Department was to reduce conflicts to a minimum, which was not exactly easy because of strong resistance on both sides: the IWW among workers, and sectors of the employers who believed only in the repression and destruction of workers’ organisations.

Another significant initiative was the creation of the Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR), a consultative body aimed at investigating the causes of social unrest, something which came to play an important political role. In practice it was almost an official consecration of the NCF; joining it were both AFL trade unionists and “moderate” representatives of the bourgeoisie. In short: the state committed to take over the function of regulating social conflict and the task of stimulating cooperation between labour and capital which had, until then, been carried out “privately” by conservative unions and exponents of bourgeois interests.

The commitment of the federal administration to making the unions play a role in containing the most radical pressures from the proletariat, and in regulating spontaneous social conflict, became increasingly clear in 1913. Moreover, increasingly large sectors of the bourgeoisie shared this attitude as well.

A typical example is that of the IWW-led 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, where an ill-fated AFL-led scab recruitment campaign was openly encouraged by conservative newspapers to strengthen the AFL. Its motivation: to help it attain the influence necessary to mediate the conflict (something which could not be done insofar as the leadership remained in the hands of the Wobblies). The traditional trade union movement was no longer necessarily seen as an implacable enemy; in moderate and well-organised forms it could become the stable interlocutor of capital, able to speak for and thereby control the spontaneous and local forms of workers’ representation.

Alternatively, the employers also supported the company’s trade union. The most significant project in this realm was launched by Ford with the establishment of the eight-hour working-day and $5 daily pay for assembly line workers. To quote William Haywood, it was “an insurance against unrest” which not only aimed to prevent the collective organisation of workers in the factory, but – as part of a larger plan including a profit-sharing project and other welfare measures (insurance, credits, recreational associations, etc.) – tended to develop an ideology and a way of life based on the relationship between the individual worker and the company (as opposed to relationships between classes). These experiences were still very limited in terms of extension and incidence, limited to sections of the most advanced industrial sectors; nevertheless, they demonstrated the urgency to face the growth of worker’s struggles and general social instability with means that were no longer limited to direct repression (including repression of union organisation). With this purpose in mind, it pointed to a developing trend that would fully assert itself in the 1920s.

There was a passage – in some cases – from brutal and repressive methods to forms of corporate paternalism. One example of this is the Colorado Coalfield War, a long and very violent strike lasting from September 1913 to December 1914. After the usual actions by bosses and government, with gunfights, casualties, militia and (eventually) federal interventions, the solution, favourable above all to the mining companies, was mainly the effect of the government’s efforts to persuade the AFL-affiliated United Mine Workers union (UMW). The Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the most important of the companies involved, after having cleverly dragged the strike out to the point of exhaustion, was quick to understand that it could not continue with its old strategies. Once it had established order in the mines (which would continue to be guarded by the federal army until early 1915) and averted the danger of union resistance, its management quickly set up a workers’ representation project that became famous under the name of the Rockefeller Plan.

The project envisaged the election of workers’ representatives in each mine and in each district and entrusted them with the task of meeting periodically with the company’s various management bodies to resolve any disputes. Additionally, mixed committees of workers’ and company representatives were set up to study and solve problems related to safety, health, hygiene, housing, and “recreation and education” of employees. This was accompanied by the announcement of the establishment of the eight-hour working day and an unspecified company commitment to increase wages sometime in the future. In short, it was a real alternative to collective bargaining with regular workers’ organisations. Of course, the company still had total power to hire and fire at any time.

At the same time as the Rockefeller Plan was being implemented (accepted by the workers via vote in October 1915), important innovations in the administration of labour issues were being introduced at the state level; in particular, an Industrial Commission was established to deal with the enforcement of labour laws and conduct investigations of working conditions where a strike was threatened in order to prevent any interruption of production. Moreover, the Commission also constituted the arbitration authority to which companies and workers had to turn after failures to reach agreement during negotiations.

With such a mix of welfare measures and constant relations with the company management, and with the establishment of the Industrial (also called Walsh) Commission at the state level, the corporations established an organic structure for governing relations with the workers, which at the same time could keep the unions out of the mines and prevent new explosions of workers’ struggles. The Rockefeller Plan was thus one of the first examples of company unions: yellow unions that would become a central element of the post-war capitalist counteroffensive

The Colorado affair also brought to light some interesting elements with regard to the federal administration’s policy: it showed that if the government was in favour of collective bargaining, it did not necessarily have to implement it through unions.

The work of the Commission on Industrial Relations was concluded in 1915, with the presentation of a report signed by only 4 of its 9 members (the union representatives and the president), while the others presented two other reports. The main report provided for reasonable working conditions, in addition to more progressive taxation, control of monopolies, and union rights; the other two, although less concerned about the conditions of the working class, still made proposals aimed at avoiding conflicts.

The conclusion of the work of the Commission also touched on another fundamental point of the debate in those years: that of the labour market and of its control. All of the social and economic problems connected with the labour market policy pursued during the final decades of the 1800s were beginning to appear. Based on massive immigration of unskilled workers from Europe – in particular from the poorest rural areas of southern and eastern Europe – the policy aimed at providing industry with a steady reserve army of labour; expressly conceived for the purpose of strangling workers’ struggles, it was intended to allow for the rationalisation of work organisation and of its accentuated mechanisation via the use of large masses of unskilled workers in order to destroy the control that labour unions exercised over the production process. Much to the chagrin of capital, however, immigrant workers had become protagonists of the hardest and most important strikes of recent years and the social base of revolutionary organisations like the IWW; they had become the main factor of social instability inside and outside of the factory.

In fact, although unemployment caused a weakening of struggles and workers’ organisations, on the other hand it caused considerable agitation in the most affected sectors or in those in the most danger of being affected, so much so that it even led to organisation and struggle of the unemployed.

It was thus proposed that the government set up a special fund to be used for public works during times of crisis in order to absorb part of the unemployed to prevent the movement from spreading (it could not, of course, do away with unemployment entirely since it resulted from the need to maintain a reserve army of labour). Another proposed measure was “unemployment insurance”, an allowance for the unemployed to be paid by the employer. Despite support from many economists, this was strongly opposed by the unions. The AFL saw it (as for other social assistance measures) as an attempt to replace the function of trade unions with the direct initiative of employers and the state so as to weaken the relationship between the unions and the proletariat; since the unions were flabby in terms of struggles at this point, without their welfare function they would have lost any purpose to exist.

Despite the good intentions and reasonable proposals, there is no doubt that the most important results of the Commission’s work were political and propagandistic and that its main effect was to win the support of workers and radicals for the Wilson administration and for the idea that unions and radical intellectuals could have real power over social policy; this was of such enormous importance for the government and for American capital that, as we shall see, they will base their choices in the following years – in particular, concerning the preparedness and march towards their involvement in the First World War – precisely on this factor.

The government project on labour policy was accomplished in 1916, the last year of President Wilson’s first term.

1916: response to workers’ struggles and preparation for war

1916 was the year in which the operation initiated by the government and
big capital on labour politics was completed. Faced with the
intensification and spread of workers’ struggles, and with the prospect of
entry into the war, the need to isolate the socialist and radical forces
becomes a priority, with a view to stabilising the relationship with the
class on a “responsible” and “patriotic” level, thanks to the good offices
of the unions. From now on, the government will never lose sight of the
goal of dealing with the strike movement and preparing the country and
industry for war.

The cycle of workers’ struggles developed with the economic recovery caused by the European war — which not only stimulated production but also led to a labour market favourable to workers with the reduction of immigration and with the competition between companies for new employees — soon assumed impressive proportions: the number of strikes rapidly increased from 1,204 in 1914, to 1,593 in 1915, to 3,789 in 1916, and 4,450 in 1917.

The new wave of strikes soon appeared to the AFL as an opportunity to regain a prominent position within the working class because many of these strikes were born completely outside of the unions. According to official data, the percentage of all strikes called by the unions in particular – which until then had remained at an average of between 75% and 80% – suddenly dropped to 66.6% in 1916 and the trend continued in the following years (during the war) when the percentage reached its lowest values, with 53.3% in 1917 and 55.5% in 1918. For the unions and their federation this was clearly a rather worrying trend, which could only stimulate their commitment to expand their organised presence and influence among the struggling workers.

Strikes during this time achieved their goals quite frequently – especially regarding wage increases, which had relative value given the rising inflation. Moreover, very often it was the entrepreneurs themselves who granted them unilaterally in order to prevent conflicts; for example, U.S. Steel decided to increase wages by 10% in February and then for a second time in May 1916. Even the eight-hour workday was sometimes conquered, especially by sectors of the proletariat with a greater tradition of union organisation (such as anthracite miners and railway workers). Much more complex, however, was the problem of extending and establishing stable collective bargaining and recognition of the presence of unions. In general, where unions had already been recognised by the employers and there was a customary practice of union agreements, this strengthened and extended its scope of action both as a result of the basic push for greater power by workers and of the choice of some employers’ sectors to exceedingly cooperate with the unions in order to strengthen productive stability. Sometimes the pressure of the struggles or fear of them becoming more acute also led hitherto uncompromisingly anti-union entrepreneurs to change tactics and accept collective bargaining. On the whole, nevertheless, there was certainly no lack of resistance and even counter-offensives from all those who deliberately pursued destroying or at least weakening the unions and who saw the situation created by the war as a good opportunity to carry out their attack by exploiting the climate of emergency; they were now a minority among of the bosses, however — one which had not yet understood in what sense social relations were shifting but who nevertheless existed and continued with their methods, especially at the local level.

The federal administration was by now decidedly oriented to favour the recognition of conservative unions for their role in containing and channelling workers’ conflicts within collective bargaining schemes. As the prospect for entering the War approached, there was also the explicit recognition of the role that they could play in the development of production and in the construction of a national and patriotic identity to weaken the classist elements within the workers’ movement. At the same time, whenever they proved inefficient or insufficient, the government also tried and succeeded to replace unions during workers’ negotiations with the employers.

As a consequence, the percentage of conflicts ended with a conciliation jumped to 36.3% in 1916 after having fluctuated for years between 18% and 19% and having reached 20.9% only in 1915. If we consider that the absolute number of strikes had grown enormously and that above all the number of strikes not called by the unions had grown, it is clear that the government’s activity in mediating struggles, together with the efforts of the unions themselves, increased enormously during 1916.

The AFL drive belt of bourgeois governments

Beyond intervening in labour disputes, the government began to move towards the more ambitious goal of integrating the AFL – or at least its management structures – into its labour policy. That is, it was attempting to make it become an irreplaceable component of its apparatus of economic control which, during the war, would unfold in all its extension and articulation; but its foundations were laid in that very 1916, during preparedness. For the time being, it was a matter of persuading the Federation leaders to make a direct commitment towards patriotic ideological mobilisation, transferring also on the institutional and political level those relations of cooperation that were sought – and to a large extent already implemented – on the productive and trade union field. Since the beginning of the year, the AFL began to express itself and press directly in this direction, claiming the right of workers’ organisations to be represented “in all agencies that control and determine public policy or matters of general interest”, and guaranteeing the willingness of unions to do for the country, at all levels, what they were already doing in the factory: fighting for efficiency, production, and patriotic mobilisation. The general characteristics that the preparedness had to assume, therefore, for the leaders of the unions, were the maintenance and extension of the working conditions achieved with the most favourable labour agreements, a “democratic” management of the war effort (that is to say, including workers’ representatives in determining the main economic choices), and the development of patriotic unity among all social sectors.

The appointment of Gompers to the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense, as representative of the trade unions and at the same time with the task of orienting the war policy in the field of labour, officially marked, in October 1916, the start of this policy by the Wilson administration and prepared its most accomplished implementation during the war.

The pressure of the working class, in the absence of the communist party, had as a consequence a strengthening of the unions and the AFL precisely because of the government’s decision to support and encourage the choices of those industrial sectors inclined to develop collective bargaining and its choice to recognise unions as tools to contain conflict and pursue productive normality. In fact, cooperation remained linked to the willingness of employers to maintain it, while all the legal instruments of anti-union discrimination – which often allowed to exclude or prevent unions from entering the factory – remained in force, confirmed by several court decisions.

For unions based on skilled workers, which therefore did not tend to organise the entire working class and were not based on the search for a general unity of the class, the material basis of strength was inevitably the ability to achieve and maintain sectoral control over the labour market, place by place and in each category of workers; this was even more exacerbated by the historical characteristics of American economic development, marked by a general overabundance of labour. For this reason, they had always aimed at the establishment of the closed shop in order to obtain full control of hiring and prevent employers from using the industrial reserve army to undermine union positions and expel unions from the factories.

Conversely, the various bosses’ offensives against workers’ organisation, intertwined with the destruction of their social base through the rationalisation of production – which made the figure of the highly skilled worker, with their considerable power over the production process, disappear – had focused on the implementation of the open shop, which implied the total power of the entrepreneur to hire and fire at their leisure. This obviously meant that any workers’ organisation could easily be expelled from a factory through accelerating the turnover of workers, allowing for complete control over them. The necessary complement to the open shop was the yellow dog contract: an individual contract in which the worker agreed not to join a union during their employment or not to engage in collective bargaining or striking; in this way the formal right to belong to a union was completely worthless. The annulment by the Supreme Court of rulings against “yellow dog” contracts because they would be contrary to the 14th Amendment (according to which no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) all but demonstrates that the bosses had not renounced their arms.

Thus, at a time when trade union rights were gaining significant political recognition and collective bargaining was increasingly asserting itself as the accepted policy of large sectors of the bourgeoisie and of the government itself, all the rights of employers to violent, anti-union conduct remained intact. The only important success that the AFL obtained in this period was the beginning of legislative work on immigration restriction, which, in the post-war period, would be completed with the virtual blockade of mass immigration of workers from Europe. On the other hand, the employers aimed to substitute for the labour surplus from immigrant labour with that of female labour, with the emigration from the countryside to the city and, above all, with the great migration of blacks from the south to the big industrial cities of the north. The latter was due to a series of factors that would deserve a separate discussion: first of all, meteorological events combined with insect infestations that had wiped out the cotton production of many small farmers, who had had to pay their debts with savings, mules, or even with their small property; then a policy of the various southern states strained in previous decades to exclude blacks from civil rights; finally, an endless series of discrimination, persecutions, lynchings to keep them subjugated to the whites, who had not accepted the theoretical equal rights. Official data say that in 1916 and 1917 alone, between 500,000 and 700,000 blacks arrived in the industrial concentrations of the North. Often, playing on racial divisions and prejudices, they were used as scabs against the struggles of white workers, as in previous years the bosses had tried to do with immigrants.

To repeat: the reason for this change of strategy was that recently immigrated workers, employed in large numbers in mass production, had become the main factor of social instability and had soon become the greatest danger for the economic and social system of corporations. Therefore, in the period of preparedness – when an offensive aimed at facing these threats was launched on a social level – there was also launched a political and repressive attack (which would grow until the Red Scare of the first post-war period) against the organisations in which the social danger of immigrants materialised: the radical and left-wing organisations, and in particular the IWW. The repressive wave against the socialists and the IWW and more generally against all opportunities for social and political struggle outside of class-collaborationist boundaries was the other side of the coin of the unions’ integration policy and the consolidation of the privileged relationship between the AFL, entrepreneurs, and the government.

While the episodes of violent intervention against the workers’ struggles multiplied – especially if they concerned the industries most involved in rearmament and war mobilisation programs – the repression began to assume the most typical features of a patriotic and nationalist crusade, focusing on the radicalism and foreign origin of many workers, to label as national traitors anyone striking outside the protection of conservative unions. The repression was facilitated and obtained most consensus where socialist and extreme left forces suffered the most social isolation or where these tendencies were experiencing a decreasing prominence. Albeit moderate, the reformist policy characterising the first Wilson administration and the ideological campaign conducted mainly by the NCF (aimed at emphasising the merits of this policy as an alternative to socialist programs) had weakened socialist influence in reformist circles and favoured the strategic alliance between Big Business and middle-class interests which historically characterised the “progressive” era. The 1916 elections testified to this retreat of the socialists, whose votes fell from 897,000 in 1912 to 590,000. Here, the socialists had mainly lost the support of progressive sectors, where the liberal image the administration had presented of itself had taken hold: an image skillfully built in the four years of government and in particular in the last months before the elections, which had included, among other things, support for anti-child labour laws, promotion of the eight-hour workday for railroad workers, and finally the promise to keep the United States out of the European conflict (a blatant lie).

The trade union movement actively participated in Wilson’s election campaign, and it was some of the unions most traditionally close to the Socialist Party – such as the Western Federation of Miners or the International Association of Machinists – that, through their move onto the plane of Democratic, electoral struggles, had most demonstrated the weakening influence of the Socialists. The relationship of trust built between the AFL and the Wilson administration allowed the reforms it produced – although they did not produce any substantial change in the lives of most workers – to appear as an alternative to the development of a classist and revolutionary political perspective, and their overall impact was sufficient enough to halt the previously steady growth that the Socialist Party had enjoyed over the previous four years.

Write “cooperation”, but read “collaboration”

The participation of the United States in the First World War – which established its emergence as the dominant capitalist nation – was, among other things, the result of its long process of expansion and penetration into the international market.

If the war sanctioned the definitive affirmation of the choices of large corporations in terms of international politics and the direction of economic development, on the other hand it also saw the completion of the political operation that had long been underway with regard to the workers’ movement on the part of their most discerning leaders. The traditional strategy of the kolkhoz – aimed at the division of the workers’ movement, the repression of its classist and revolutionary organisations, and recognition of and cooperation with the moderate, pro-capitalist and now “patriotic” ones on the other hand – became the official policy of the federal administration in the last months of preparedness, thus obtaining an organic and extensive application.

The leadership of the AFL obviously supported this evolution by all means, confirming without any shame its definitive and total subjugation to capital. “Our country”, said Gompers, “…has the opportunity to become the banker of the world…the great protagonist of world trade”. Therefore, preparedness saw the approach of conservative unions towards government policies which sought to seize the fruits of this “opportunity” with far more energy.

So obvious was the approval by the trade unions for the war that the conference produced a document that did not even mention the opportunity to enter it; the document instead promised maximum patriotic commitment and asked the government to recognize “the organized workers’ movement as the agency through which…to cooperate with wage earners” and consequently that its representatives were part of all “agencies for the determination and administration of national defense policy”. Secondly, it was required that these agencies adopt a policy in accordance with the needs of the workers, ensuring that “union standards” in terms of hours, wages and working conditions were respected everywhere; in return, it guaranteed maximum cooperation in the war effort.

Thus, at the official level, very few unions expressed even weak criticism of the March conference resolution (among them the Western Federation of Miners and the Typographical Union, which did not attend the meeting). Only a few independent unions, particularly in the clothing sector, sided with the anti-interventionist campaign of the Socialists, who saw their influence rapidly diminish within the trade unions despite their positions being met with growing consensus among workers (as demonstrated by some elections in the following months).

But the bosses had not given up their offensive; the entry into the war saw the concentration and intensification of attacks on various labor laws in the states on the basis that patriotism required the abolition of all restrictions on the full use of the country’s labor potential. In particular, attempts were being made to obtain the revocation or suspension of child labor laws, those for the limitation of women’s working hours, laws on the exclusion of immigration from the Far East and, in some states such as West Virginia, laws were also being proposed to prohibit strikes. Although some measures, in some states, were approved, in general the attitude of the federal state prevailed, aimed at uniformly defining working conditions, also in view of a partial planning of productive activity.

With regard to the objective of social peace, the rising tide of struggles for wage increases and the 8 hours could not be faced with simple repression, which would have risked triggering an explosion of class struggles and a radicalization of the proletariat. On the other hand, the boom produced by the orders of the government and the allies led to enormous profits for the corporations — above all for the biggest ones: US Steel, for example, went from an annual average of 76 million dollars in the three-year period 1912-1914 to 478 million dollars in 1917, while the aggregate figures of net earnings of the American industry rose from 4 billion dollars in 1913 (the best year so far) to 7 billion dollars in 1916 and even higher for 1917. This made possible a policy of wage increases — indulged by many corporations at the time — aimed at counteracting inflation or at least masking its effects on the purchasing power of the workers.

Thus, while the 8-hour limit was abolished in the sectors in which it was previously conquered, excess hours were paid 50% more. Everything now depended on governmental decisions and arbitration by specially created agencies, after the Council of National Defense. President Wilson himself took care to call on state governments not to take advantage of the situation to legislate against workers.

The repression of radicalism and of class organizations

All these measures had, however, a minimal influence on the overall economic and social situation. The situation was characterized by, on the one hand, the chaos and anarchy of a productive recovery that was as intense as it was unregulated and with very strong competition, and on the other hand by a further increase in workers’ demands and strikes to support them. Businesses contending for the workers and “labor stealing” among the entrepreneurs, became a source of strength for the proletariat: it was no longer they who competed for jobs and wages, but the entrepreneurs who competed for workers, resulting not only in a strong push for higher wages but also a growing mobility of workers, who went where new jobs were created and where there were the highest wages. There was a very rapid congestion in the industrial centers, where not enough measures were taken to accommodate the workers, an enormous increase in rents, and a sharpening of the wage differences between the various sectors and regions of differing importance to the war. All of this, and the very high inflation resulting from it, would further increase social unrest and the frequency of strikes.

The social situation therefore seemed to be pointing towards a progressive radicalization in which wildcat strikes could spread and the influence of leftist organizations could expand. In many areas, and particularly in the West where the presence of the AFL was much weaker, very hard clashes broke out between workers and employers.

Evolution towards the harshest social clash was on the agenda in all industrial sectors where a habit of union agreements had not existed; the AFL did not fail to emphasize this fact in order to accelerate the spread of collective bargaining and its recognition as a reliable intermediary between the needs of capital and the working class.

Faced with this situation, and in view of the war effort, the federal government moved more and more quickly and decisively in the direction of a far-reaching offensive against social unrest. It was based on a dual policy of concessions to pro-war organizations – such as the AFL – and the suppression of anti-war organizations and periodicals. Therefore, a rather widespread and capillary process of disintegration of organizations that could organize and consolidate a discontent or opposition to the war soon occurred. The first instrument of this campaign were the laws against trade unionism (criminal syndicalism) that several western states, starting from Idaho and Minnesota, voted in the spring of 1917 and in the following years. They established serious penalties (usually from 1 to 10 years, but sometimes the maximum could rise to 20 or even 25 years) for crimes typically of opinion such as propaganda and agitation. Under these laws, not only those who openly advocated doctrines of criminal acts for political, industrial, and social change (i.e., crime, sabotage, violence, and other unlawful methods of terrorism) could be found guilty, but also all those who justified it or belonged to organizations inspired by these doctrines and, finally, even those who had granted the premises for meetings of these organizations. Finally, it should be noted that these laws often contained clauses that removed them from the possibility of a repeal referendum!

To those on “criminal” trade unionism were soon added other laws that also tended to strike at any attitude contrary to the government and the established order, such as those on the flag, which established, for example, that “no red or black flag or banner, emblem or insignia could be carried in a demonstration that bears writings contrary to the established government, or that are sacrilegious, or that may be offensive to public morals”. In this way, the various powers of the state were entrusted with all sorts of instruments to strike at popular unrest and protest. In general, these laws were particularly aimed at repressing the IWW and its activities because, especially in Western states they were identified as the most dangerous organisers of workers’ discontent; nevertheless, often the real usefulness the law went much further. Several of their clauses were designed to hit, when deemed appropriate, also certain activities of conservative unions or elementary civil liberties of citizens who had very little to do with organised radicalism; in the phase in which they were issued, however, their objective was only revolutionary and anti-war organisations.

At any rate, the conservative unions were already so caught up in the vortex of “patriotic” mobilisation that the state federations of the AFL did not oppose the promulgation of the laws on “criminal” trade unionism, limiting themselves, however with little success, to press for clauses to prevent their use against their organisations: the principles of their stance were never openly contrary to repressive legislation and their practical action – with full participation in the “patriotic” and anti-radical campaign – certainly contributed to its spread. As good shopkeepers, they were happy to accept legislation that took out the competition for the control of the working class, even if it was legislation that in theory could also be used for purely anti-union goals.

Active supporters and promoters of these laws were instead the bosses, who aimed to take advantage of the climate created by the war to equip themselves with effective tools for the repression of workers’ struggles. The authorship of the bills was in fact almost always of some entrepreneurial group or association. Around these forces, of course, all the patriotic organisations had gathered (such as the American Legion), the most important of press organs, and the most influential political circles. In this way there spread, in the first months of the war, a frantic local mobilisation of the public apparatus, of the major political and economic interest groups, and of vigilante groups or volunteers who closed the locales of the Socialist Party and the IWW, chased away the militants, and destroyed their organisational networks, making increasing use of the aforementioned laws to facilitate their work.

In this framework, at the beginning of the summer of 1917, a national initiative of the federal government was also launched: on June 15th, the Congress voted the Espionage Act, a law directly requested by the president to provide the administration with broad powers of repression. Wilson had asked the congress to authorise direct censorship of the press by the White House, but this proposal had been rejected following lively protests from the press and because of the fear of entrusting such power to the executive. However, another article of the Espionage Act gave the administration what it had requested, entrusting the postmaster the authority to exclude from the shipments any material that would incite “betrayal, insurrection or resistance against any law of the United States”. In this way, almost all the major socialist newspapers were confiscated, depriving the party of its most important propaganda tools and, having deprived their main source of contact with the centre, wreaking havoc on its local organisations.

In addition, the government and the courts attacked the opponents with a long series of indictments that affected both the leaders and, often, the party rank and file. These initiatives, and the great propaganda campaign that accompanied them, naturally fuelled violence and paramilitary activity in all areas of the country so that public demonstrations were very difficult to carry out and the work of the militants had to become semi-clandestine. It is estimated that in the last year of the war there were about 1500 party headquarters destroyed out of a total of about 5000, and this, combined with the suppression of newspapers and the arrest of several activists, greatly weakened the socialist party, especially in the West and Midwest.

This furious repressive campaign was probably made all the more urgent by the considerable consensus that the Socialist Party was gaining among workers and farmers by virtue of its opposition to the war, reflected in some local elections. Despite the considerable difficulties of its campaign and the terrorist press campaign it was subjected to, the party had multiplied its votes in an impressive way: in the Dayton (Ohio) elections held on August 14th, the Socialists obtained 44% of the votes against 6.5% of the previous year; in Buffalo, the following month, they went from 13% to 32% of the votes, in Chicago they obtained 34%, in Cleveland 22.4% and in New York – in an election of considerable national importance – 21.7%. These successes came almost entirely from the small industrial centres or, in the case of large cities, from the workers’ districts, testifying to the class character of the opposition to the war.

The other main target of the repressive campaign were the IWW, attacked mainly in their national centre and in those situations of labour struggle in the West that represented their strongholds. From the bourgeoisie of the West there was a strong pressure to take exceptional measures against the presence and influence of wobblies among workers. After having obtained the passage of laws against “criminal” trade unionism, at least in some states, and having started a real lynching campaign against the IWW, the bosses and governors of several states began to turn to the federal government to dissolve the organisation. The administration at first responded negatively to these requests, but started an investigation into the character of the organisation directed by the Department of Justice. In the meantime, a wide variety of repression initiatives were taken by the states.

Finally, the federal government accepted the pressures from many States and, towards the end of the summer, took the initiative in its own hands: several jurists, following the investigation of the Justice Department, suggested to the federal government to arrest and indict the wobblies for conspiracy, in order to infringe the law on draft and the Espionage Act.. The government, starting with President Wilson, approved the project. On September 5th, federal agents, along with local sheriffs, raided all IWW offices throughout the country, starting with the National Directorate located in Chicago, and on September 28th, a federal court in Chicago indicted 166 IWW leaders, including all major national leaders, for conspiracy; thus began a series of trials against the organisation’s members, beheading the its executives and turning it from a combative industrial union into a legal defence committee.