State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United States, 1876-1914 9781501735356

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State-Making and Labor Movements

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State-Making and Labor Movements France and the United States, 1876-1914 GERALD FRIEDMAN

Cornell University Press

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University Press, Sage House, 512 East State

Copyright © 1998 by Cornell University

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First published 1998 by Cornell University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedman, Gerald. State-making and labor movements : France and the United States, 1876-1914 / Gerald Friedman, p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-2325-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Labor movement—France—History. United States—History.

2. Labor movement—

3. Trade-unions—France—Political activity—

History.

4. Trade-unions—United States—Political activity—

History.

5. United States—Politics and government—1865-1933.

6. France—Politics and government—1870-1940. HD8430.F74

I. Title.

1998

322'.2'094409034—dc21

98-37116

Cornell University Press strives to use

chlorine-free, or partly composed of

environmentally responsible suppliers and

nonwood fibers.

materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally

Cloth printing

1098765432 1

Contents

Figures, vii Tables, xi Acknowledgments, xiii Introduction: Samuel Gompers in Europe, 1 1

“The real fruit of their battles,” 22

2

“That terrible struggle,” 64

3

“Low Dues” and “Communistic Soup,” 118

4

Capitalist States, 152

5

Revolutionary and Prudential Unionism, 218

6

Radical Unions, Conservative Workers: Were There Rebels behind the Cause? 246

7

Marxist Paradoxes, 290 Index, 305

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Figures

1. Alternative perspectives on union ideology, 13 2. Union membership growth rate, the United States and France (1880-1914), 39 3. Union membership, France (1884-1913), 40 4. Union membership, the United States (1880-1914), 40 5. Unionization rates of industrial wage earners, the United States and France (1880-1914), 41 6. Union growth rates by strike activity, the United States and France (1881-1914), 42 7. Union membership growth by added 1,000 strikers, the United States and France (1881-1914), 43 8. Union membership growth rates in strike wave and other years, the United States and France (1880-1914), 44 9. Union growth by business cycle phase, the United States and France (1880-1914),55 10. Votes in the French Chamber of Deputies cast with Socialists, by political affiliation (1910-11), 107 11. Pro-labor votes in Massachusetts legislature: effects of Greenback-Labor Party vote and legislators victory margin (1886), 111 12. Pro-labor votes in Massachusetts legislature: effects of turnout, Knights of Labor membership, and victory margin (1886), 112 13. Greenback-Labor Party vote in Massachusetts by turnout decile

(1884), 113 14. Strike outcomes, the United States and France (1870-1914), 120 15. State mediation and strike outcomes in France (1895-99, 1910-14), 120 16. Union impact on strike success rates, the United States and France (1881-1914), 129 17. Union impact on strike success rates in France: effect of union ideology (1895-99, 1910-14), 130 18. Routes to strike success: craft and inclusive unionism, 131 19. Relative number of strikers: union vs. nonunion strikes, the United States and France (1881-1914), 131 20. Strike success in the United States and France: effect of doubling strike size

(1881-1914), 132 21. Determinants of strike success, France (1895-99, 1910-14), 133 22. Determinants of state mediation in strikes, France (1895-99, 1910-14), 134 23. Strike duration: effect of union involvement, the United States and France (1881-1914), 138 vii

24. Strike success rate: effect of strike duration, the United States and France

(1881-1914), 139 25. Strike success rate in the construction and other industries, effect of city size, the United States and France (1881 — 1914), 149 26. Department and industry characteristics: employer association members vs. nonmembers, France (1910), 167 27. Strike outcomes: effects of labor unions and employer associations, France, 168 28. Voting for radicals in elections to the U.S. House of Representatives: before and after 1896,190 29. Determinants of the use of strikebreakers in the United States (1881-94), 192 30. Voting in the French Chamber of Deputies by non-Socialists on the Socialist pension program: determinants, 209 31. Election to the French Chamber of Deputies: effect of unions and employer associations on first-round voting (1910), 210 32. Voting in the French Chamber on Socialist pension program: total effect of unions and employer associations, 211 33. Union membership and its time trend, France (1884-1913), 216 34. Union membership and its time trend, the United States (1880-1914), 216 35. Share of industrial wage earners striking, the United States and France (1880-1913), 222 36. Unionization rate among strikers and nonstrikers, the United States and France, 230 37. Relative mean values of selected variables: strikers vs. nonstrikers, the United States and France, 231 38. Striker rates in establishments with 10 workers: effect of unionization, the United States (1903) and France (1910), 232 39. Striker rates at a 10-percent unionization rate: effect of establishment size, the United States (1903) and France (1910), 236 40. Striker rates at a 25-percent unionization rate: effect of establishment size, the United States (1903) and France (1914), 237 41. Average annual union membership growth rates, Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand (before 1914), 253 42. Unionization rates, predicted from per capita income and actual, Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand (around 1910), 254 43. Alternative estimates of annual union mortality rates, the United States and France (before 1914), 258 44. Membership in union locals, by their age, France and Illinois (around 1900), 259 45. Average characters of manufacturing workers: union members vs. nonmembers, the United States and France (around 1900), 262 46. Correlations of industry unionization rates, the United States and France (1880-1910), 266 viii

Figures

47. Union involvement in strikes by establishment size, the United States and France (1895-1914), 268 48. Unionization rates by establishment size, manufacturing industries, the United States and France (around 1900), 269 49. Unionization rates by establishment size and union ideology, the United States (1900) and France (1898-1910), 271 50. Foreign-born workers, union members and nonmembers, the United States (around 1900), 275 51. Strike success: effect of unions by establishment size, the United States (1903) and France (1895-99), 277 52. Unionization rates at different levels of Socialist voting, the United States and France (around 1900), 280 53. Unionization rates by establishment size at different levels of Socialist voting, France (1905), 282 54. Unionization rates by establishment size at different levels of Socialist voting, the United States (1899), 284 55. Probability of local union organization: effect of increasing election margins, the United States (1914), 286

Figures

ix

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.

Tables

1. Data sets used in analysis of labor movements, the United States (1880-1914) and France (1884-1913), 15

2. Strikers per 100 wage earners by industry, France (1881-1914), 220 3. Strikers per 100 wage earners by industry, the United States (1881-1905), 221 4. Effects of changes in material circumstances on striker rates per 100 wage earners, the United States and France (early 1880s to 1910-13), 234 5. Union members per 100 industrial wage earners, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States (around 1910), 256 6. Union members per 100 wage earners by industry, France (1886-1910), 264 7. Union members per 100 wage earners by industry, the United States (1880-1909), 265 8. Distribution of union members by industry, France (1886-1910), 273 9. Distribution of union members by industry, the United States (1880-1909), 274

xi

-

Acknowledgments

Some of my greatest debts are to my early adviser at Harvard University, Robert Fogel. I am also grateful to David Landes, Jeffrey Williamson, and Barry Eichengreen for encouragement and advice. Since leaving graduate school I have benefited from the generosity of some of the country’s finest scholars. Stanley Engerman has been a wonderful help, reading my work at his well-known prodigious speed and providing insightful comments. Charles Tilly gave me the strike data he and Edward Shorter had compiled, as well as the encouragement and advice for which he is well known. Michael Hanagan read early versions of the manuscript, discussed several of my papers, and corrected some of my mistakes. Bruce Laurie, my col¬ league at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has gone above and beyond what anyone could reasonably expect; he has read almost every¬ thing I have written over the last decade and has given detailed and useful comments. Other scholars provided comments, advice, and encouragement. These include Ron Aminzade, Katherine Auspitz, Sol Barkin, Lenard Berlanstein, Sam Bowles, Jerry Braunthal, Susan Carter, Helen Chenut, Sam Cohn, Carol Conell, Frank Couvares, Jean-Pierre Dormois, Robert Drago, Richard Edwards, Ken Fones-Wolf, Richard Freeman, Claudia Goldin, Pat Green¬ field, Jean Heffer, Carol Heim, Sandy Jacoby, Herman Lebovics, Robert Margo, John Merriman, Allan Mitchell, Richard Oestreicher, Michael Podgursky, Charles Rearick, Joshua Rosenbloom, Nick Salvatore, Lisa Saunders, Ken Sokoloff, Marc Steinberg, Claire Stifler, John Stifler, Judith Stone, Peter Temin, and Kim Voss. Anonymous referees at Cornell University Press, French Historical Studies, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Social Sci¬ ence History, Theory and Society, and the Journal of Economic History have also been considerate and helpful. I am grateful to seminar participants at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Illinois, the University of Massachusetts, Yale University, the Cliometrics Conference, the Social Science History As¬ sociation meetings, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Five College Social History Workshop. I have received noteworthy research assistance from Dora Dumont, Karen Graubert, Charles Jacobson, and Pierre Laliberte. I am in debt to librarians at the Tamiment Institute; the New York Pub¬ lic Library; Harvard’s Widener Library, Baker Library, and Littauer Library; the University of Wisconsin Library; the Wisconsin State Historical Society; xiii

and the Columbia University Archives. I am indebted to librarians in Paris at the Musee Social in Paris, the Archives Nationals, and the Bibliotheque Nationale. I owe the most to the wonderful people at the interlibrary loan department at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachu¬ setts at Amherst. Financial support was provided by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and by faculty research grants from the University of Massa¬ chusetts. As with my other children, it took a village to make this book. My in-laws Esther and Lou Jacobson helped during some prolonged family illnesses; without them I never could have finished this work. I am also grateful to the Amherst moms (and dads) who chatted with me at gymnastics, ballet, and violin and who carpooled and helped care for my children. I am especially grateful to Robin Diamond and Ann Woodbridge. Suzanne Morse-Rilla has been all I could hope for as my daughters’ teacher and my friend. Debra’s illness has clouded the last six years and delayed this book’s com¬ pletion. But it has not diminished my respect and appreciation for all the ideas and insights she has brought to this work and to my life. And my love for her has only grown. My dissertation was dedicated to the memory of my father, who taught me the importance of roots and dedication to others. This book is in mem¬ ory of my mother, who taught me to love justice. And it is for her youngest grandchildren, Rosa Rachel and Natasha Leah, in the hope that they will grow old in a better world. G.F.

xiv

Acknowledgments

State-Making and Labor Movements

Introduction Samuel Gompers in Europe An American in Paris On 14 July 1909, Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), returned to the Old World. No longer the poverty-stricken shoe-factory operative and apprentice cigar maker who had left London for New York in 1863, Gompers came to the Paris con¬ ference of the International Secretariat of Trade Unions as America’s lead¬ ing union leader. Having defeated advocates of radical political action and inclusive organization, he had become the world’s leading advocate of pure-and-simple business unionism. The well-paid head of a labor confed¬ eration with over 2 million members, Gompers came to Europe not to learn but to teach. On his arrival Gompers was greeted warmly by moderates but with indifference by both the right and the revolutionary left. Politically moder¬ ate trade unionists and their government allies expected Gompers to pro¬ vide ammunition for their attacks on the revolutionary-syndicalist leader¬ ship of the French union movement. The (renegade) Socialist minister of labor, Rene Viviani, personally briefed Gompers on the government’s efforts to promote trade unions, and Gompers reported friendly meetings with leaders of the moderate minority in the French national trade union confederation, the Confederation generale du travail (CGT).1 Socialists and revolutionary syndicalists were distinctly cooler to him. The Socialist Party journal, L’Humanite, greeted his arrival cautiously. Giving him his due as

1. Samuel Gompers, Labor in Europe and America (New York, 1910), 53, 55-56.

1

“the authorized representative of over 2 million union workers," the paper published a front-page interview. But it warned its readers that Gompers was one of the most inveterate adversaries of American socialisms Suppressing concerns over his politics, the anarcho-syndicalist leader¬ ship of the CGT and the Seine trade unions arranged for Gompers to ad¬ dress a union rally called for 16 July and excerpted his speech in the CGT paper, Voix du peuple.3 While making permanent the breach with his erst¬ while comrades among the French trade unionists, Gompers’s speech brought him acclaim from the French government and business commu¬ nity. Gompers used the occasion to lecture the French on the superiority of American trade unionism. He boasted that “in unity and compactness of organization, progressiveness in propaganda, thoroughness and clearness in scope and purpose the national movement in no foreign country can compare with the A.F.L.”4 Gompers attributed the AFL’s success to its pure-and-simple orienta¬ tion, its narrow focus on economic issues without regard for broader social concerns. By contrast, he claimed that radical politics hurt European unions. Politics—by which Gompers always meant radical politics— hindered union growth by distracting union leaders and members from the task of building well-funded, disciplined craft unions. By alienating conser¬ vative workers and diverting energy and other resources from building bu¬ reaucracies and union structures, radicalism depresses membership. Fur¬ thermore, it obstructs collective bargaining by frightening employers and government officials. Gompers told his audience how “there was a time, when we were in our infancy, that we also had our communists, our anar¬ chists, our Knights of Labor. We were powerless. Instructed by the experi¬ ence, we have abandoned the dreams which directed our actions and we be¬ came unionists pure and simple.”5 Instead of radical politics and class struggle, Gompers urged caution and appeals to class harmony. Shun radical politics, he advised French union¬ ists, abandon the attempt to build a united working-class movement. In¬ stead, build craft organizations and well-funded union institutions and win acceptance from government and employers through political restraint and collective bargaining. Forget radical aspirations: “devote all your efforts,

2. VHumanite, 15 July 1909, 1. 3. See Voix du peuple, 25 July-1 August 1909, 1, and 1-8 August 1909, 1, 2. 4. Gompers, Labor in Europe, 260. Lengthy excerpts from his speech are published in Voix du peuple, 1-8 August 1909, 2. 5. Le Temps, 16 July 1909, 1.

2

State-Making and Labor Movements

comrades, to obtain hours of work shorter and shorter and salaries higher and higher.” Such policies, Gompers admitted, may not lead to socialism. They may be “conservative and even reactionary.” But they will produce “an existence more comfortable, and will strengthen and perfect your organiza¬ tion,” because “if you improve the conditions of the workers then tomorrow they will all be with you.”6 Behind these policy recommendations is a social theory that Gompers developed through fifty years of activism, a theory based on a particular in¬ terpretation of worker psychology. Workers, Gompers argued, are practical materialists seeking to better themselves within capitalism but wary of quixotic campaigns for fundamental social change. Warming to his theme, Gompers spelled out this premise to his Parisian audience: “It is not cries for liberty, the professions of faith that are necessary to the workers. What do they the workers want? Shorter hours of work and higher salaries.”7 Gompers’s words were as welcome to employers as they were resented by radicals. After ignoring his arrival in Paris, Le Temps, the conservative mouthpiece of the Paris business community, devoted two stories to Gom¬ pers s speech. Under a banner front-page headline, “A Union Lesson,” Le Temps could not conceal its glee: “The American C.G.T. differs completely from the French C.G.T”: It is not preoccupied with political movements; it is neither antimili¬ tarist nor antiparliamentary, but devotes itself to improving the condi¬ tion of its members.... The union members who attended the meeting yesterday with M. Samuel Gompers heard a language with which un¬ happily they are unfamiliar_We can confess the hope, however fatu¬ ous, that our unionists learned something from M. Gompers’s words_ Someday the French unions will understand the positive role that unions can play... as a social lubricant, not a war machine to be used against so¬ ciety.8

6. Le Temps, 17 July 1909,1,3; THumanite, 15 July 1909,1, and 16 July 1909,3; Voix du peuple, 1-8 August 1909, 2; Gompers, Labor in Europe, 128, 286-87. 7. Voix du peuple, 1-8 August 1909, 2. 8. Le Temps, 16 July 1909,3, and 17 July 1909,1 .Le Temps was not alone, or the first, among French moderates in praising the AFL; see Paul Bureau, Le Contrat de travail (Paris, 1902), 6; Le Moniteur, 14 February 1909, 3; Isidore Finance, Les Syndicats ouvriers aux Etats-Unis (Paris, 1894), 45; Celestin Bougie, Syndicalisme et democratie (Paris, 1908), 148; L. Garriguet, VAssociation ouvriere (Paris, 1904), 44-45; Paul Deschanel in Journal officiel des Chambre de Deputes, 8 May 1907, 938.

Introduction

3

For their part, French socialists and union activists were annoyed with Gompers s lecture. L’Hutnanite was silent about his speech, uncharacteristi¬ cally ignoring the rally. Few French activists appreciated a lecture from the leader of what they saw to be a “reactionary and corrupt” union move¬ ment.9 Introducing Gompers, the CGT leader Georges Yvetot urged pa¬ tience, even conceding that “all [union] tactics can be good under the right circumstances.” But hardly had Gompers finished when the audience, in Gompers’s words, “turned their guns upon me with the stale shibboleths and theories of an exploded socialism.”10 Gompers answered all comers in his usual resolute style, but he made few converts. On the contrary, Voix du peuple made a point of observing that while “comrade Gompers” was speaking of “the beauties of practical, prudent unionism as practiced in the New World, we learn of a strike there coming to term in blood” at McKees Rock.11 By highlighting the repression of American unions, revolutionary syndi¬ calists countered Gompers’s claim that worker psychology is at the root of American conservatism. Instead, they charged that the AFL was seeking an accommodation with a powerful and repressive American capitalism. But, for radicals, McKees Rock showed that capitalists could not be appeased. And since capitalists will not long tolerate any union, revolutionary politics is a necessary part of any union strategy. Beyond these tactical considera¬ tions, revolutionaries rejected Gompers’s reasoning as unduly static. Many admitted worker conservatism.12 But they denied that this was a funda¬ mental characteristic, instead arguing that attitudes are malleable and change with opportunities and experience. Popular attitudes are part of the environment shaping unions, but they are also a product of social action, shaped by participation in unions and other collective enterprises. Gom¬ pers urged conservative politics to attract conservative workers. Revolu¬ tionaries sought a union practice that would change workers to create a militant working class. French syndicalism reflected this evolutionary approach: its ultimate ends mattered less to daily practice than did its means. Sometime in the fu¬ ture, revolutionary syndicalists hoped to achieve a revolution; but until then their immediate goals were much like those of their more conservative

9. P. Monatte, “Gompers et la Civic Federation,” Vie ouvriere, 5 July 1910, 52. 10. Le Temps, 17 July 1909, 3; Gompers, Labor in Europe, 54-55. 11. Voix du peuple, 25 July-1 August 1909, 1. 12. See, e.g., Nicholas Papayanis, Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Rev¬ olution (Dordrecht, 1985).

4

State-Making and Labor Movements

rivals

wage and hour gains won through strikes and collective bargaining.

Indeed, French unions were distinguished less by their goals than by their methods. They differed from their business union rivals in their spirit, their rhetoric, and their preference for inclusive forms of organization. But most of all, they differed in their militancy, their readiness to use strikes. “Better failure than inaction,” said CGT leader Victor Griffuelhes; “It is action that permits militants to better understand how to use the means of struggle.”13 “Partial strikes,” his CGT colleague George Yvetot said, “are the locomotive, a helpful exercise preparing the proletariat for the supreme struggle, the revolutionary general strike.”14 Regardless of their outcome, Griffuelhes claimed, strikes help workers to “overcome the habits of submission and passivity... to acquire education by teaching the practice of solidarity[.] ... [T]hey fortify the men, make them stronger and more confident.”15 The revolutionary-syndicalist leadership of the Steelworkers union agreed, vot¬ ing in its 1903 convention that Partial strikes are the preliminary skirmishes preparing soldiers of the great proletarian army for the supreme battle, for the general strike, and we believe they are insufficient in themselves; we recognize that although the employers dominate us daily, we can pull out of each of these con¬ flicts the greatest advantage. Material advantages in the situation of the worker, moral advantages leading to the day of the great battle ... partial strikes are the training maneuvers for the liberating general strike.16 Both Gompers and his radical opponents addressed workers and labor activists, as if the character of the labor movement depends only on them and their attitudes. But Gompers was more realistic. Opposed to indepen¬ dent radical politics, he advocated political action when circumstances were favorable, when powerful allies would support labor.17 Yet at other times, he

13. Victor Griffuelhes, Voyage revolutionnaire (Paris, 1909), 24; Griffuelhes, “La Formation du syndicalisme fran^ais,” Mouvement socialiste, 15 December 1907, 476. 14. Georges Yvetot, ABC syndicaliste (Paris, 1908), 51. 15. Victor Griffuelhes, Le Syndicalisme revolutionnaire (Paris, 1909), 13, 15, 16. 16. Quoted in Serge Bonnet and Roger Humbert, La Ligne rouge des hauts fourneaux (Paris, 1981), 163. 17. Gompers was more flexible than his scholarly allies. Note that he supported the major¬ ity report of the Industrial Relations Commission of 1915, rejecting John R. Commons’s mi¬ nority report although the latter was closer to his own views. See Roger D. Horne, “John R. Commons and the Climate of Progressivism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1989), 267. On Gompers, see Stuart Kaufman, Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Fed¬ eration of Labor, 1840-1896 (Westport, Conn., 1973).

Introduction

5

was a realist who acknowledged squarely how much the opposition to or¬ ganized labor in the United States constrained workers options. Gompers emphasized worker conservatism, but it was the strength of the opposition to unions in the United States that led him to retreat from labor radicalism. He admitted that, regardless of their merit, attempts to achieve an immedi¬ ate revolution were doomed in an America dominated by powerful capital¬ ists. “It is useless,” he wrote a friend, “to be simply trying to ram our heads through stone walls.”18 Defending his cautious policy during the Pullman strike of 1894, he warned that “against this array of armed force and brutal moneyed aristocracy would it not be worse than folly to call men out? Workers, he argued, cannot transform society; attempting to do so will only antagonize labor’s powerful enemies and provoke attacks that will under¬ mine attempts to achieve smaller goals or to build organization for later struggle. Gompers may have been right in urging prudence, but not because workers have limited aspirations. Prudence was wise because of the power of labors enemies.

The Republican Roots of Labor Militancy It should not be surprising that activists seeking to mobilize workers into labor organizations focused on the popular roots of labor militancy, nor that their narrow focus has carried over to labor historians. Concentrating on the workers’ side of the class divide, activists and their scholarly allies leave others to study employers and political elites. But this does not change workers’ relative weakness. In any conflict with capitalists, workers possess fewer resources and face more obstacles to their collective action. Success depends on more than workers’ commitment. Labor history needs to study the views and actions of those in other classes, because such allies are nec¬ essary if workers are to succeed. Spotlighting the working class reflects the influence of the Orthodox Marxism of the Second International, its doctrine of the economic roots of labor militancy and the bourgeoisie’s unmitigated hostility. Faith in working-class self-creation leads activists and historians to focus on the choices labor makes instead of on the constraints it faces and the role played

18. Samuel Gompers to David Watkins, 17 July 1893, quoted in Gerald Grob, Workers and

Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900 (Evans¬ ton, Ill., 1961), 154. 19. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography (New York, 1925), 413.

6

State-Making and Labor Movements

by allies outside the working class. It is easy to see the attraction of this labor-centered approach to labor activists. But by ignoring the historical context, they have come to see the labor movement as the beginning of a new socialist era rather than the heir of an earlier period of republican so¬ cial revolution. From the seventeenth century on, republicanism was a revolt of all the laboring classes, including laborers and bourgeois, against the class rule of aristocratic gentlemen. Bourgeois leadership did not make the republican revolution irrelevant to the lower classes. On the contrary, it was a revolt against privilege, upholding work as the only legitimate grounds for au¬ thority and social respect. Republicanism advanced the interests of all in the laboring classes, all denied respect on the basis of birth. Thus early re¬ publicanism called for the extension of equal citizenship to all (adult white males) on the grounds that social worth should reflect work rather than birth.20 Before it was a model of price determination, the labor theory of value was a revolutionary slogan affirming the social merit of work against the aristocratic ideal of the idle gentleman living off the labor of others. As Isaac Kramnick observes, “The eighteenth-century revolutionary spirit ... assaulted the vestiges of feudalism and the hierarchical and hereditary prin¬ ciples by which the old order, the ancien regime, ascribed place, power and privilege: in accordance not with talent and achievement but with birth.”21 In the hands “of ingenious self-made men such as Franklin and Paine,” the labor theory of value was a weapon against the ancien regime of ascribed privilege. Republicans like them would level the social order to distribute rewards and rights according to work and productivity. In the face of aristocratic privilege, republican values made revolution¬ aries of even the wealthiest bourgeois.22 In the name of equal rights and free labor, the revolutionary bourgeoisie summarily annulled the property rights of aristocrats and slave owners, expropriating feudal property in France in 1789 and American slave property in 1865. But capitalists sought

20. The restriction of republican citizenship to adult white males eroded over time because the logic of republican values led to a broadening of citizenship rights to women and non¬ whites. See, e.g., Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in NineteenthCentury France (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 247. 21. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, 1990), 135. 22. See, for example, the experience of Parisian businessmen in forming the Union Nationale du Commerce et de l’lndustrie during the Second Empire, described in Nord, The Re¬ publican Moment, 54-62.

Introduction

7

to legitimize property as a physical manifestation of the owner’s labor. As interpreted by conservative republicans, the labor theory of value justified the capitalists’ control over their property on the same grounds as those used to defend the property of small farmers and artisanal producers. Few challenged this approach for independent producers and employers work¬ ing alongside a few employees. New York’s Governor Dix, for example, ar¬ gued that “capital and labor are, if not synonymous, at least interblending terms, for the capitalist is a toiler, even if only with his brain, and the la¬ borer is a capitalist, even if his sole capital is that of brawn.”23 But some rad¬ icals challenged the casual association of property produced through the employment of wage labor with that produced through direct, personal labor. In their speeches and writings, republican social theory found service as the social theory of the revolutionary working class. They questioned whether the work invested by capitalist employers should give them full property rights in their workers’ output or whether the workers themselves acquire rights beyond their wages.24 Applying the labor theory of value, James Boyce, a strike leader in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892 asserted that “The Carnegie mills were built up by us, the great profits of the con¬ cern were made by us. Our labor was expended for Scotch castles, and li¬ brary advertising. We do not say that Carnegie, Phipps, and Company do not own the mill property, but we do say that we have some rights in it our¬ selves.”25 As much as the mill’s owners, the strikers have invested their wealth (as labor) in the Homestead mill. The strike’s directing committee proclaimed that The employees in the mill of Messrs. Carnegie, Phipps & Co. at Home¬ stead Pa., have built there a town with its homes, its schools and its churches; have for many years been faithful co-workers with the com¬ pany in the business of the mill; have invested thousands of dollars of their savings in said mill in the expectation of spending their lives in Homestead and of working in the mill during the period of their effi¬ ciency. ... Therefore, the committee desires to express to the public as its firm belief that both the public and the employees aforesaid have equi-

23. Governor Dix, letter to the convention in American Federation of Labor, Report of Pro¬

ceedings of the... Convention,... Rochester, 1912 (Washington, 1912), 9. 24. This view was upheld by some prominent early economists. See, e.g., Henry C. Adams, “The Labor Problem: Sibley College Lectures XI,” Scientific American, supplement, 21 August 1886,8861-63. 25. Quoted in Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and

Steel (Pittsburgh, 1992), 339.

8

State-Making and Labor Movements

table rights and interests in the said mill which cannot be modified or di¬ verted without due process of law.26 So long as republicans faced aristocrats and slave owners, workers and bourgeois united without inhibition. But the republican coalition unrav¬ eled after its early triumphs. For radical workers, equal rights and the labor theory of value meant more than the right to sell their labor power to any employer. The French socialist Jean Jaures equated republicanism and so¬ cialism: “Socialism is for us,” he told the French Chamber of Deputies, “the fulfillment of the Republic extended from the Parliament to the work¬ shop. It is the total realization of democracy in economic life as well as in political life.”27 Gompers too linked labor to the republican campaign for political freedom: “The old political democracy is the father of this new industrial democracy. Like government, industry must guarantee equal op¬ portunities, equal protection, equal benefits and equal rights to all.” “We complain,” Gompers’s friend George McNeill wrote, “that our rulers, states¬ men and orators have not attempted to engraft republican principles into our industrial system, and have forgotten or denied its underlying princi¬ ples ... that we are wholly in the hands of our employers—serfs of the mill, the workshop and the mine—subjects of the railroad kings and the cotton lords.”28 An early French labor leader, himself a convert from moderate re¬ publicanism to socialism, declared simply: “Republic, democracy, socialism are essentially the same thing.” Surveying the possibilities for the Third Re¬ public, Georges Clemenceau declared in 1876: “We, the radical republicans, want the Republic because of its results: the great and fundamental social reforms to which it leads. Our proposed aim is the fulfillment of the great metamorphosis of 1789, launched by the French bourgeoisie but aban¬ doned before it had been completed.”29 Republicans challenged rule by ascribed right and inherited privilege, inaugurating an era of revolutionary change that would transform the

26. Advisory Committee of the Homestead Workmen, “An Address to the Public,” Na¬ tional Labor Tribune, 30 July 1892,4. 27. Jaures quoted in Richard Wayne Sanders, “The Labor Policies of the French Radical Party, 1901-1909” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1972), 40. 28. Samuel Gompers, editorial in the American Federationist 26 (May 1919), 399; George McNeill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (Boston, 1887), 456. 29. Etienne Cabet, quoted in Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, vol. 1, The Age of Artisan Revolution (Oxford, 1992), 171; Clemenceau, quoted in Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, 1994), 88. Hazareesingh notes that by “because of its results,” Clemenceau meant “because of its promises.”

Introduction

9

world. They blazed the trail for capitalism by establishing the principle that individual worth depends on work rather than origin. But republicans also created capitalism’s rival by giving labor the essentials for a movement of the weak: legitimacy, protection, and allies.30 Republicans’ egalitarian ideals and respect for labor encouraged those outside the working class to support workers’ demands with material aid and political patronage. Republican in¬ stitutions also facilitated union organization. Civil liberties lowered the cost of collective action by establishing rights to free speech, to public assembly, and to formal organization; and democratic elections made workers politi¬ cal actors. The social theory of the revolutionary bourgeoisie gave organized labor legitimacy, but it also created dilemmas for labor militants. Republicans were individualists, committed to individual rights and the distribution of social rewards according to an individual’s work. Republicans thus pro¬ moted a negative liberty, defining freedom as autonomy from social con¬ straint. But the labor movement was a social program that depended on social coercion to create the conditions for a positive liberty in which all had an equal opportunity to act. The conflict between these conceptions of liberty—between liberty as opportunity and liberty as freedom from constraint—bedeviled eighteenth-century republicans from Rousseau to Paine. But following Adam Smith, early republicans assumed that the re¬ moval of aristocratic monopoly privilege would defer this conflict by creat¬ ing such a wide diffusion of small productive property that all would have an opportunity to positive self-expression without any social intervention. Equal access to productive property, they hoped, would leave a stingy na¬ ture as the only barrier to the individual’s freedom of action. Economic change frustrated these hopes, however, as the increasing scale of production allowed fewer to gain independent employment. By the late nineteenth century it was clear to all but the most determined optimists that economic democracy would require the exercise of collective authority over individuals, whether through government agency or private associa¬ tion.31 Republicans could no longer evade the conflict between the two

30. “Frames,” “opportunities,” and “alliances” are found in Sidney Tarrow, Power in Move¬ ment: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge, 1994). 31. See Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago, 1978); Alfred Fouillee, Le Socialisme et la sociologie reformiste (Paris, 1909), 42-44; Joseph Paul-Boncour, La Federalisme economique (Paris, 1901); Nicolas Roussellier, “Alexandre Millerand et la question de Farbitrage des conflicts du travail,” in Histoire de VOffice du travail (1890-1914), ed. Jean Luciani (Paris, 1992), 108-9.

10

State-Making and Labor Movements

views of individual liberty. The labor movement was one response to this dilemma, promising to promote opportunity through social action. Orga¬ nized labor advanced individualism as a social project through collectively imposed restraints on individual behavior. Here the old republican coalition splintered, torn between labor’s active republicanism and the earlier project of individual freedom. Liberty and the labor theory of value had united worker and capitalist against aristocratic power. That battle won, the allies divided with different conceptions of what their theory entailed. No longer bound by a common enemy, worker and cap¬ italist took up arms against each other in what was an uneven class conflict.

Politics and the Construction of Meaningful Comparisons This book investigates the origins of the labor movements in two coun¬ tries, the United States and France. Despite their liberal democratic govern¬ ments and advanced capitalist economies, these countries harbored labor movements that spanned the ideological range from business unions to the revolutionary syndicalist left. I examine each movement during its forma¬ tive years before World War I, when the political orientations were adopted that have persisted until today. The multinational comparative approach used here is a break with tra¬ ditional labor history, which studies unions within compact regions or cities.32 Local studies can uncover links between unionization and technol¬ ogy by comparing unions across industries and occupations within a single political region. This is appropriate where variation in labor movement success and orientation comes from differences in industrial conditions (see the first panel in figure 1). But case studies cannot assess the impact of political opportunities and alliances, because these generally do not vary within communities. A multinational comparison adds a new dynamic to labor history by including factors that vary only between countries, includ¬ ing state policy, politics, and the nature of the ruling coalition (see the sec¬ ond panel in figure l).33 Only international comparisons can explore these

32. For good examples, see Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788—1890 (New York, 1985); Patricia Hilden, Working Women and Socialist Politics in France, 1880—1914 (Oxford, 1986); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, 1990); Remy Cazals, Avec les ouvriers de Mazamet: Dans la greve et Faction quotidienne,

1909—1914

(Paris, 1978); Bonnet and

Flumbert, La Ligne rouge. 33. Previous multinational studies include John Horne, Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1991); Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France,

Introduction

11

connections, weighing how differences in national politics affect the out¬ comes of strikes and union form and ideology. Because the economic and political differences between France and the United States were relatively small, the causes of dramatic differences in union ideology can be appraised more easily than where there are greater contrasts in economic and political structure. The time period studied al¬ lows a further dimension for comparison because American conservatism and French radicalism were learned adaptations. After the repression of the Paris Commune, French unions were led by cautious reformers who care¬ fully distanced their organizations from radical politics. The radical ideolo¬ gies associated with twentieth-century French labor, revolutionary social¬ ism and syndicalism, attracted wide support only in the late 1880s, just when American unions were moving away from political militancy. Indeed, in 1886 American labor was far the more “radical.” Returning from an American speaking tour, Eleanor Marx and her husband Edward Aveling wrote that the Americans were showing the way for Europeans to follow. They called the Knights of Labor “the first spontaneous expression by the American working people of their consciousness of themselves as a class.” Its program was “pure and unadulterated Socialism.”34 By exploring changes in labor movement ideology over time as well as across countries, I can evaluate interpretations that deny the differences be¬ tween national labor movements along with those that attribute these diff¬ erences to national cultures or other unchanging national characteristics. I argue that by 1900 unions in France and the United States were different: they organized along different lines and followed different strategies guided by different ideologies. But these differences did not reflect unchanging contrasts in national cultures. Instead, unions in both countries evolved to

1830-1968 (Cambridge, 1974); David Snyder, “Institutional Setting and Industrial Conflict: Comparative Analyses of France, Italy, and the United States,” American Sociological Review 40 (1975), 259-78; Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge, 1985). The price of the multina¬ tional study is a loss of detail on the individual countries. Examples include Seymour Martin Lipset, “Radicalism or Reformism: The Sources of Working-Class Protest,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983), 1-18, and Adam Przeworski and John Sprague, Paper Stones: A His¬ tory of Electoral Socialism (Chicago, 1986). An admirably nuanced approach is to be found in Gary Marks, Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Princeton, 1989). 34. Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America, 2d ed. (London, 1891), 139.

12

State-Making and Labor Movements

Simple economic determinism

Alternative, political, model

Figure 1. Alternative perspectives on union ideology: simple materialism and political conflict models.

take advantage of political opportunities. In repeated “cycles of con¬ tention,”35 unions became more radical to press opportunities when state politics was friendly, only to retreat into conservative camouflage under subsequent employer counterattacks. As responsive to employers and state officials as to the workers themselves, unions seized opportunities to press radical demands when sheltered by friendly allies among state officials and

35. See Tarrow, Power in Movement.

Introduction

13

the republican bourgeoisie. But each surge of labor militancy provoked a countermobilization in defense of property. And when labor s allies re¬ treated and hostile employers and state officials closed off its political op¬ portunities, repression pushed surviving unions to adopt conservative pol¬ itics in self-defense. Between the early 1880s and 1910, events transformed the labor move¬ ment in both France and the United States. I have organized my research to integrate changes in union ideology and strategy with the period s class conflict, including strikes, employer strategy, and political conflicts. Data have been collected matching information on American and French unions and strikes with economic and political variables (see table 1). Information on union membership, growth, and the number of strikes and strikers has been matched with the pool of potential members and strikers to measure the quantitative evolution of the American and French labor movements. Other data focus on the conduct and outcomes of strikes, including mea¬ sures of union strategy, government intervention, and employer organiza¬ tion and resistance. Finally, data have been collected on elections and leg¬ islative voting to explain government labor policy. This book builds from an analysis of early union growth and the origins of the labor movement in the republican revolutions of the nineteenth cen¬ tury. New estimates of union membership are used in Chapter 1 to measure union growth cycles. Strike waves provoke growth spurts in both countries, extending union membership to previously barren industries and regions. I show how the central role of strikes in union mobilization indelibly asso¬ ciates unions with social contention and labor militancy, frightening labor s allies and heightening resistance from employers and their allies. Growing resistance ends each union growth spurt. The construction of a republican coalition uniting elements of the polit¬ ical and social elite with workers in support of working-class collective ac¬ tion is discussed in Chapter 2. New data on election activity and legislative voting in France and the United States are used to show the strength and sources of the republican coalition. Ideology, it becomes clear, led republi¬ cans to favor strike arbitration, rejecting employers’ preferred solutions of employer paternalism and state repression. Seeking to restore harmony between employer and employee, French and American republicans established government strike mediation pro¬ grams in the 1880s and 1890s. Their effect is discussed in Chapter 3. Data on individual strikes are used to show the effect of different strike strategies. Mobilizing large numbers of workers increased the probability of gaining

14

State-Making and Labor Movements

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