Assistant Professor of Economics in the University of Wisconsin; Co-author of the History of Labour in the United States PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1922 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. October, 1922....

The present History of Trade Unionism in the United States is in part a summary of work in labor history by Professor John R. Commons and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin from 1904 to 1918, and in part an attempt by the author to carry the work further. Part I of the present book is based on the History of Labour in the United States by Commons and Associates (Introduction: John R. Commons; Colonial and Federal Beginnings, to 1827: David J. Saposs; Citizenship, 1827-1833: Helen L. Su

(1) Early Beginnings, to 1827 The customary chronology records the first American labor strike in 1741. In that year the New York bakers went out on strike. A closer analysis discloses, however, that this outbreak was a protest of master bakers against a municipal regulation of the price of bread, not a wage earners' strike against employers. The earliest genuine labor strike in America occurred, as far as known, in 1786, when the Philadelphia printers "turned out" for a minimum wage of six doll

The few national trade unions which were formed at the close of the fifties did not constitute by themselves a labor movement. It needed the industrial prosperity caused by the price inflation of the Civil War time to bring forth again a mass movement of labor. We shall say little of labor's attitude towards the question of war and peace before the War had started. Like many other citizens of the North and the Border States the handful of organized workers favored a compromise. They held a labor

With the practical disintegration of the organized labor movement in the seventies, two nuclei held together and showed promise of future growth. One was the "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor" and the other a small trade union movement grouped around the International Cigar Makers' Union. The "Noble Order of the Knights of Labor," while it first became important in the labor movement after 1873, was founded in 1869 by Uriah Smith Stephens, a tailor who had been educated for the ministry, as a

With the return of business prosperity in 1879, the labor movement revived. The first symptom of the upward trend was a rapid multiplication of city federations of organized trades, variously known as trade councils, amalgamated trade and labor unions, trades assemblies, and the like. Practically all of these came into existence after 1879, since hardly any of the "trades' assemblies" of the sixties had survived the depression. As was said above, the national trade unions existed during the sixt

We now come to the most significant aspect of the Great Upheaval: the life and death struggle between two opposed principles of labor organization and between two opposed labor programs. The Upheaval offered the practical test which the labor movement required for an intelligent decision between the rival claims of Knights and trade unionists. The test as well as the conflict turned principally on "structure," that is on the difference between "craft autonomists" and those who would have labor o

The Great Upheaval of 1886 had, as we saw, suddenly swelled the membership of trade unions; consequently, during several years following, notwithstanding the prosperity in industry, further growth was bound to proceed at a slower rate. The statistics of strikes during the later eighties, like the figures of membership, show that after the strenuous years from 1885 to 1887 the labor movement had entered a more or less quiet stage. Most prominent among the strikes was the one of 60,000 iron and st

While it was in the nineties that trade unionists first tasted the sweets of institutionalization in industry through "recognition" by employers, it was also during the later eighties and during the nineties that they experienced a revival of suspicion and hostility on the part of the courts and a renewal of legal restraints upon their activities, which were all the more discouraging since for a generation or more they had practically enjoyed non-interference from that quarter. It was at this pe

When, in 1898, industrial prosperity returned, there came with it a rapid expansion of labor organization. At no time in its history, prior to the World War, not excepting the Great Upheaval in the eighties, did labor organizations make such important gains as during the following five years. True, in none of these years did the labor movement add over half a million members as in the memorable year of 1886; nevertheless, from the standpoint of permanence, the upheaval during the eighties can sc

For ten years after 1904, when it reached its high point, the American Federation of Labor was obliged to stay on the defensive—on the defensive against the "open-shop" employers and against the courts. Even the periodic excursions into politics were in substance defensive moves. This turn of events naturally tended to detract from the prestige of the type of unionism for which Gompers was spokesman; and by contrast raised the stock of the radical opposition. The opposition developed both in and

The outbreak of the War in Europe in August 1914 found American labor passing through a period of depression. The preceding winter had seen much unemployment and considerable distress and in the summer industrial conditions became scarcely improved. In the large cities demonstrations by the unemployed were daily occurrences. A long and bloody labor struggle in the coal fields of Colorado, which was slowly drawing to an unsuccessful end in spite of sacrifices of the heaviest kind, seemed only to

The Armistice with Germany came suddenly and unexpectedly. To the organized workers the news was as welcome as to other citizens. But, had they looked at the matter from a special trade union standpoint, they would probably have found a longer duration of the War not entirely amiss. For coal had been unionized already before the War, the railways first during the War, but the third basic industry, steel, was not touched either before or during the War. However, it was precisely in the steel indu

To interpret the labor movement means to offer a theory of the struggle between labor and capital in our present society. According to Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism, the efficient cause in all the class struggles of history has been technical progress. Progress in the mode of making a living or the growth of "productive forces," says Marx, causes the coming up of new classes and stimulates in each and all classes a desire to use their power for a maximum class advantage. Referring t

The puzzling fact about the American labor movement is, after all, its limited objective. As we saw before, the social order which the typical American trade unionist considers ideal is one in which organized labor and organized capital possess equal bargaining power. The American trade unionist wants, first, an equal voice with the employer in fixing wages and, second, a big enough control over the productive processes to protect job, health, and organization. Yet he does not appear to wish to

The question of a political labor party hinges, in the last analysis, on the benefits which labor expects from government. If, under the constitution, government possesses considerable power to regulate industrial relations and improve labor conditions, political power is worth striving for. If, on the contrary, the power of the government is restricted by a rigid organic law, the matter is reversed. The latter is the situation in the United States. The American constitutions, both Federal and S

The rise of a political and economic dictatorship by the wage-earning class in revolutionary Russia in 1917 has focussed public opinion on the labor question as no other event ever did. But one will scarcely say that it has tended to clarity of thought. On the one hand, the conservative feels confirmed in his old suspicions that there is something inherently revolutionary in any labor movement. The extreme radical, on the other hand, is as uncritically hopeful for a Bolshevist upheaval in Americ

The first seven chapters of the present work are based on the History of Labour in the United States by John R. Commons and Associates, [112] published in 1918 in two volumes by the Macmillan Company, New York. The major portion of the latter was in turn based on A Documentary History of the American Industrial Society , edited by Professor Commons and published in 1910 in ten volumes by Clark and Company, Cleveland. In preparing chapters 8 to 11, dealing with the period since 1897, which is not