Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement / Edition 1

by Howard Kimeldorf

Overview

In this incisive reinterpretation of the history of the American labor movement, Howard Kimeldorf challenges received thinking about rank-and-file workers and the character of their unions. Battling for American Labor answers the baffling question of how, while mounting some of the most aggressive challenges to employing classes anywhere in the world, organized labor in the United States has warmly embraced the capitalist system of which they are a part. Rejecting conventional understandings of American unionism, Kimeldorf argues that what has long been the hallmark of organized labor in the United States—its distinctive reliance on worker self-organization and direct economic action—can be seen as a particular kind of syndicalism.

Kimeldorf brings this syndicalism to life through two rich and compelling case studies of unionization efforts by Philadelphia longshoremen and New York City culinary workers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He shows how these workers, initially affiliated with the radical IWW and later the conservative AFL, pursued a common logic of collective action at the point of production that largely dictated their choice of unions. Elegantly written and deeply engaging, Battling for American Labor offers insights not only into how the American labor movement got to where it is today, but how it might possibly reinvent itself in the years ahead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520218338
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/01/1999
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Howard Kimeldorf is Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan and author of Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (California, 1988).

Read an Excerpt

Battling for American Labor

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By Howard Kimeldorf

University of California Press

Copyright © 1999 Howard Kimeldorf
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520218338

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Chapter One
Explaining Union Allegiance

Commenting on the troubled state of industrial relations at the turn of the century, Andrew Carnegie, one of the nation's leading apostles of capitalism, observed a growing "friction between the employer and the employed, between labor and capital, between rich and poor." In workplaces all across America, Carnegie lamented, "rigid castes are formed" based on "ignorance" and "mutual distrust" that only served to widen the already gaping chasm between owners and workers.1

Carnegie's vivid depiction of class polarization, while conjuring up nightmarish images for his fellow captains of industry, was like a dream come true for the nation's long-suffering union movement. After sputtering along for years, workplace organization finally and dramatically took off in 1898. By 1904 the U.S. labor movement had upwards of two million members, representing more than a fourfold increase over the previous six years and giving the upstart Americans a larger following than their more established British, German, and French counterparts.2

Still, with only about one in twenty nonagricultural wage earners enrolled in unions, American labor had barely scratched the surface.Outside of its core constituency in transportation, mining, and building trades, which together accounted for more than half of all members, union organization was weak or nonexistent. The enlarged labor movement of 1904, despite its recent gains, remained peripheral to the lives of most American workers.3

The following summer, as national union membership dipped for the first time in nearly a decade, some two hundred activists, representing forty-three unions, locals, and labor federations from around the country, gathered in Chicago to form a new, more inclusiveworking-class organization.4 While most of the delegates were Socialists of one stripe or another, they were—as only the American left can be—deeply divided over just about everything else, from organizing strategies to institutional structure to political participation. About the only point of agreement was that the American Federation of Labor (AFL), then home to roughly 80 percent of the country's union members, was never going to become the true house of labor.5

The organization that emerged after eleven days of often heated discussion, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), self-consciously defined itself as the antithesis of the AFL. Where the AFL broke up the working class into a multitude of tiny craft unions, the IWW envisioned "One Big Union" consisting of a handful of industrially based affiliates. Where the AFL's membership consisted mostly of native-born, skilled, white craftsmen, the IWW was committed to organizing almost everyone else, targeting in particular the unskilled, recent immigrants, women, and workers of color. Where the AFL monopolized employment opportunities for its current members by restricting union access through closed shops, prohibitive initiation fees, and high dues, the IWW offered a true "communism of opportunity" based on mass recruiting, low initiation fees, and work sharing. And where the AFL advocated an industrial peace based on the sanctity of contracts, the IWW promised unrelenting class war, refusing as a matter of principle to sign labor agreements or any other such "armistice" until the working class secured its final emancipation from capitalism.6

These opposing organizational missions reflected the very different ideological forces driving the AFL and the IWW. Under Samuel Gompers's strong stewardship, the federation evolved from tolerating socialism during the early 1890s to vigorously opposing it a decade later as an "industrial crime, against which the trade unions of America will contend to the end."7 By the time of the IWW's formation in 1905, the AFL had come firmly to embrace American values and institutions, including its system of capitalism, which Gompers, the former Marxist sympathizer turned pragmatist, endorsed as "the best yet devised." The AFL, having long since rejected industrial organization as a means and socialism as an end, stood for trade unionism, pure and simple. Organizing had become a business, much like any other, seeking "more, more, more" under the existing economic arrangements.8 If the rebellious IWW sought more of anything, it was revolutionary fervor. Staking out a position to the left of the Socialist party, the Wobblies, as members of the IWW were known, rejected the gradualism of electoral politics. "The ballot box is simply a capitalist concession," insisted one delegate at the IWW founding convention. "Dropping pieces of paper into a hole in a box never did achieve emancipation for the working class." Shunning the political arena as the incubator of "slowshulism," the Wobblies concentrated their efforts at the point of production, where they believed capitalism was most vulnerable to attack.9 Theirs was the socialism, not of "dentists," as Trotsky once referred to the middle-class constituency of the American Socialist party, but of the downtrodden and dispossessed proletarian masses—a kind of "socialism," as Wobbly leader "Big Bill" Haywood put it, "with its working clothes on."10

The ensuing clash between the AFL and the IWW thus provided the clearest possible choice for American workers, now in a position to choose between two organizations anchoring opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. "The choice," as Socialist leader Eugene Debs saw it, was "between the A.F. of L. and capitalism on one side and the Industrial Workers and Socialism on the other." Framed in this way, the increasingly bitter rivalry between the AFL and the IWW came to be seen as a crucial test of working-class consciousness, serving as a sort of proletarian referendum for the rank and file. Voting with their feet, some two million to three million workers passed through the IWW over the next several years. Most, however, remained only briefly, such that the number of card-carrying Wobblies in any single month seldom averaged more than sixty thousand. When the final count was taken shortly after World War I, the AFL, at more than four million strong, emerged as the clear winner, easily defeating the Wobblies.11

Important lessons have been drawn from the AFL's landslide victory. Writing in 1928, Selig Perlman claimed to find "added strength" for his influential new theory of job consciousness in "the events of the day," pointing specifically to the inability of Socialists and Wobblies "to hold their own" in the contest for union loyalty. Following Perlman's lead, succeeding generations of scholars have regarded the AFL's triumph as evidence of an underlying conservatism among the rank and file.12 In choosing to milk capitalism rather than overthrow it, so the argument goes, American workers were simply followingtheir bellies, not their heads, instinctively craving the AFL's pork chops while rejecting the Wobblies' more cerebral offerings of final emancipation. Although there has been a lively scholarly debate over the years concerning the sources of this proletarian conservatism, few observers question its role in driving organized labor to the right during the opening decades of the twentieth century, away from groups like the Wobblies and into the waiting arms of the AFL.13

This study offers an alternative account for American labor's disengagement with the left at this critical historical juncture. Challenging a wide range of theories that attribute the failure of the IWW as well as the success of the AFL to an ideologically deficient rank and file said to be suffering from some form of "collective brain damage," it begins by uncoupling observable organizational outcomes from interior psychological states, seeking in that way to disentangle the institutional results of collective action from the consciousness of the participants themselves.14 Whether American workers were "ideologically incorporated," "falsely conscious," or "brain damaged" in some other way cannot possibly be known from anything they may have done or failed to do—at least not without subjecting the rank and file to some kind of retrospective group psychoanalysis. Knowing only that a majority ultimately sided with the AFL is hardly evidence that they did so out of agreement with the ideological conservatism of its top leaders.15

Whatever the rank and file may have thought of men like Sam Gompers, they behaved on the job in ways that can hardly be described as conservative. Their greater institutional distance from the political radicalism of European labor did not prevent the feisty Americans from waging an all-out battle against their employers, marked by levels of mobilization, intensity, and violence second to none.16 This unusual combination of political quiescence and industrial revolt has baffled observers for years, leading most students of the problem, particularly graduates of the long-established exceptionalist school, to "solve" the puzzle of American labor by hoping to find the missing piece of European-style radical labor politics.17 While the search for an indigenous political radicalism has generated many valuable insights into the character of working-class movements on both sides of the Atlantic, it has diverted attention away from gaining a deeper understanding of that piece of the puzzle that is overwhelmingly present: the distinctive industrial radicalism of American labor.18

Taking a closer look at this industrial radicalism—dismissed by most academic observers as a harmless "mere economism"—is the principal objective of this study.19 In place of sweeping generalizations about the essentially "liberal" or "bourgeois" character of American workers and their unions, it offers a concrete historical analysis of union loyalty, asking why a segment of American workers was drawn earlier this century to the IWW, why most of them eventually left the Wobblies for the archrival AFL, and how, at a more interpretive level, their behavior can be understood in terms other than those handed down by the dominant paradigm of proletarian conservatism.

These questions are taken up through an investigation of two particularly revealing histories of union succession occurring over roughly the same period on the Philadelphia docks and in the hotel and restaurant industry of New York City. In both settings, unorganized workers were approached in 1913 by rival Wobbly and AFL delegates; and in each case, after considering their options, they allied with the IWW. Some twenty years later, the longshoremen and culinary workers found themselves inside the AFL, thus completing the same journey from the far left of the trade union ideological spectrum to the far right.

Although both groups covered the same ground, they did so by following very different paths. In Philadelphia the organizational transition was more abrupt, coming on the heels of a long and generally successful IWW reign that began in 1913 when the port's three thousand longshoremen, then evenly divided between white ethnic immigrants and African Americans, formed Local 8 of the IWW's Marine Transport Workers' Industrial Union (MTW). For more than a decade, Local 8 had its way on the waterfront, virtually running the port by relying on militant direct action and labor solidarity. As its power crested during World War I, the Wobbly union was strong enough to force recognition from the same federal government whose ongoing investigations of radical and subversive activities singled out the Quaker City longshoremen as a serious threat to national security. It was not to last, however. By 1926 Local 8 had been driven out of business, with most of its former members, including several prominent IWW leaders, defecting to the rival AFL union.20 Local 8's association with the IWW from 1913 to 1926 made it the single most durable example of Wobbly unionism at the time. During that same span of years, literally hundreds of IWW locals passed into and out of existence: hardly any lasted beyond a particular strike or job action; those that did, typically survived as paper organizations with wildly fluctuating memberships and few regular dues payers. In contrast, Local 8 remained viable throughout most of its thirteen-year existence, maintaining a stable and growing membership. If Local 8, as one of its leaders claimed, "was an outstanding example of what the I.W.W. could do" in building a durable working-class base, its eventual failure demonstrated just as clearly the limits of Wobbly unionism.21

New York's culinary workers forged a more typical relationship with the IWW, turning to the Wobblies for leadership in the midst of a faltering citywide walkout of six thousand hotel workers in 1913. The IWW's dramatic intervention, accompanied by the usual incendiary rhetoric and threats of sabotage, captured the attention of the national media and the local police far more than the loyalties of the immigrant, mostly male strikers. With the collapse of the walkout, the Wobblies withdrew from the field, leaving behind an empty organizational shell as a hollow reminder of their earlier presence.

Rebuilding on the Wobblies' foundation, a new industrial union, also independent of the AFL, was formed in 1916, the International Federation of Workers in the Hotel and Restaurant Industry. After drawing twenty thousand hotel and restaurant workers into a dramatic citywide strike, the syndicalist International Federation was dislodged in 1920 by the still more inclusive and equally aggressive Amalgamated Food Workers. For the next several years, the independently left-wing Amalgamated waged a tireless campaign to organize the city's waiters, waitresses, cooks, dishwashers, chambermaids, and hotel workers, often with stunning success. By 1934 the aging Amalgamated was pushed aside by the newly formed Food Workers Industrial Union, whose Communist officers led the city's culinary workers into the mainstream AFL union, thus bringing to a close more than two decades of self-sustaining industrial unionism.22

In following their divergent trajectories from the IWW to the AFL, Philadelphia's racially diverse longshoremen and New York's overwhelmingly white and increasingly female culinary workers offer an intriguing contrast, ideal for observing the same organizational dynamics at work among two radically different labor forces located in distinct industrial settings. It is precisely the contrasting character of these trajectories, coupled with the small number of cases under comparison, that calls for a method of "parallel demonstration" in which the objective is to build a generalizable argument by demonstrating its "common applicability" to a wide range of contexts; in this instance, seeking a unified explanation for the convergent outcomes in Philadelphia and New York—cases that represent contrasting demographics, industries, and patterns of union succession—as the basis for advancing a more general interpretation of American labor.23

Why, then, did the longshoremen remain with the IWW for more than a decade before abruptly bolting to the AFL while the hotel and restaurant workers followed a more circuitous route, passing through no fewer than three independent industrial unions before finally being absorbed by the AFL? What accounts for these distinct yet ultimately convergent trajectories? Specifically, why were both groups of workers initially attracted to the IWW?24 Once inside the IWW, why did the longshoremen remain for so long while the culinary workers left almost immediately to form a new organization? Why did both groups of workers, many of them former card-carrying Wobblies or radicals of one stripe or another, eventually turn to their old nemesis, the AFL, for relief? And, more generally, what does this history of organizational succession suggest about the alleged conservatism of American workers?

Proletarian Conservatism

In the highly competitive academic marketplace of ideas, the thesis of proletarian conservatism has at times operated as a virtual monopoly. Its influence has been such that, prior to the renewal of labor history in the 1960s, few scholars were willing to take issue with the dominant view, expressed years ago by Henry Pelling, that a "lack of class consciousness" constituted a "permanent characteristic of American labor." The only real debate has been over its permanency: most students have characterized the American proletariat as a "class without consciousness" from the moment of its inception, whereas others have sought to locate the failure of class consciousness in the harsh realities of late-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. But whatever its source—whether a congenital defect in thinking or a productof history—"the lack of class consciousness, as Paul Edwards argues, "has been a well-known feature of American workers." So well known, in fact, that a new generation of radical historians has recently joined the consensus, exemplified by Michael Kazin's insistence "that American workers have seldom been motivated by a class consciousness worthy of the name."25

Scholars who dug still deeper into the inner psychic worlds of American workers found not only a limited awareness of class but also what appeared to some as a fondness for capitalism itself. Confirming the conventional wisdom, Gerald Grob, in his influential study of nineteenth-century labor ideologies, described the rank and file as "expectant capitalists." "Above all," he concluded, "the fact remains that the American worker has been by tradition and by history inclined toward a capitalistic outlook, a phenomenon well recognized" by observers across the political spectrum. Indeed, even committed Socialists saw the American worker as someone who, in the words of former Socialist party leader Michael Harrington, "thinks and speaks well of capitalism." Having thus become "the principal upholders of the capitalist system," as American unionists have been described, their love of capitalism flowed naturally from an inability to think of themselves as members of a class—another of those "well-known" and "well-recognized" historical "facts" that have led a long procession of scholars to ask, as John Diggens recently has, "Why is the American working class so conservative?"26

But is this really the right question? How do we know that American workers were ever "so conservative" or, for that matter, enamored of capitalism and utterly lacking in class consciousness?27 Most such claims rest on little more than inference. With only the most limited access to the private mental worlds of the rank and file, conclusions about what they were thinking at an earlier point in time have often been inferred from what they actually did—in this case, deriving proletarian conservatism from the act of joining the AFL. Such reasoning, argue Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon, rests on a crude "psychological reductionism" that ends up reducing institutional outcomes to some presumed mental state, as if the failure of radical groups like the IWW was primarily attributable to a deep-seated psychic disorder—what might be termed the anticlass, procapitalist complex—plaguing the rank and file.28

Locating the left's failure in worker psychology is one of the fewcommon threads tying together a diverse range of theories aimed at explaining the relative weakness of socialism within the American labor movement. It is perhaps most apparent in many of the culturally based explanations that posit a tension of some kind between the collectivist, egalitarian, and revolutionary traditions of socialism, on the one hand, and the ostensibly individualistic, meritocratic, and pragmatic beliefs of American workers, on the other. Whether the particular ideological shortcoming is conceptualized as Leon Sampson's peculiar brand of Americanism that substituted for socialism, Louis Hartz's ever-vigilant liberalism that guarded against conservative aristocratic traditions, or Seymour Martin Lipset's vigorous antistatism that fostered distrust of political remedies based on centralized authority, the principal obstacle to working-class radicalism is seen as residing inside the heads of the rank and file.29

A similar psychologizing strategy operates just beneath the surface of the most widely accepted materialist explanations for the failure of socialism: the opportunism of the two-party system, the openness of the class structure, and the ethnic and racial heterogeneity of the labor force. Each rests on a psychological profile of the rank and file as suffering from the same anticlass, pro-capitalist complex. It is routinely argued, for example, that the two-party system was unassailable because, in the end, most workers never broke with the prevailing liberal consensus undergirding American capitalism;30 that social mobility was an effective antidote to class protest only to the degree that working people embraced the nation's cultural values of individualism, personal achievement, and material gain;31 and that ethnic and racial identities proved so durable precisely because the laboring poor failed to think of themselves as belonging to the same class.32 And so it goes, with every failed outcome ultimately traced to a corresponding failure of working-class consciousness.

This master narrative of failed consciousness has not gone unchallenged, particularly in recent years. With the "new" labor historians leading the way, the received view of American workers as "conservative by birth" has become a favored target of attack. Focusing on nineteenth-century processes of class formation, scholars have uncovered a broad insurgent current, awash in Republican ideology and dedicated to preserving preindustrial values of artisanal independence and community autonomy in the face of encroaching industrial capitalism. No longer a simple story of ideological incorporation leadingto working-class quiescence, the new revisionist history highlights a youthful and contentious proletariat, radicalized by a class-based "producerist" consciousness, launching forms of collective action in Gilded Age America that rival those of their Western European contemporaries.33

This is essentially where social scientists have picked up the story, seeking to understand why, as Kim Voss poses the question, these earlier "radical attitudes and actions on the part of American workers were eventually transformed into a weak and conservative labor movement" dominated by the AFL.34 In redirecting scholarly attention away from explaining the absence of ideological radicalism toward identifying the sources of its conservative metamorphosis, recent research by sociologists, political scientists, critical legal scholars, and others has largely abandoned the psychological reductionism of old: if working-class political insurgency was short-lived, it is no longer primarily attributable to some presumed psychological shortcoming in the form of either a failed "false" or an impotent "job" consciousness but rather to the structure of American society, which robbed the rank and file, even the most radical, of the capacity to mobilize and effect more sweeping changes.35

This line of argument, informed by resource mobilization perspectives and the "new institutionalism," shifts the analytical focus from the ideational to the material, downplaying the role of worker mentalities as the source of earlier left-wing failures.36 Thus Amy Bridges argues that the Workingmen's parties of the 1830s ultimately failed, not because their message was rejected, but because their working-class supporters were concentrated in cities, where they constituted a minority of the electorate.37 The revolutionary anarchist movements that flourished in Chicago and elsewhere a generation later met a similar fate, not because they were too radical, but because, in Eric Hirsch's words, "elites ... brutally and violently invaded" and destroyed the ethnically based urban "havens" that sustained an oppositional political culture among recent working-class immigrants.38 Similarly, the solidaristic Knights of Labor collapsed during the 1880s, not because they violated the spirit of individualism, but because, as Voss and others have argued, they were unable to withstand the combined weight of repression by employers and the state.39

This growing body of work is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that it does not go far enough. Neither the revised portrait of nineteenth-century worker radicals nor the structuralist explanations for their defeat have altered the received view of early-twentieth-century trade unionists as fundamentally conservative. All that has changed is the assignment of cause and effect: the rank and file's anticlass, pro-capital complex—its "well-known" lack of class consciousness and love of capitalism—is now seen as more of a consequence rather than a cause of the AFL's ascendancy during the 1890s. For most students of twentieth-century American labor, however, the federation still represents the coffin of proletarian radicalism, with its cautious business unionism entombing a conservative rank and file.40

Having long since buried the indigenous radicalism of the Workingmen's parties, the revolutionary anarchists, and the Knights of Labor, the craft unionists thus remain cast in their stereotypical role as the gravediggers, not of capitalism, but of worker insurgency. As this familiar plot unfolds, their main protagonists at the time, the Wobblies, appear briefly on the historical stage as compassionate but slightly delusional Don Quixotes, sadly out of touch with the political realities of twentieth-century American capitalism and its hold over the minds of most workers. Preaching their revolutionary message to the unconverted, "the I.W.W.," observed Robert Hoxie in 1920, "faces a perpetual dilemma." "The bulk of the American workmen," he wrote, "want more here and now for themselves and their immediate associates and care little for the remote future or the revolutionary ideal. These will have none of the I.W.W.... [W]e find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the Industrial Workers of the World as a positive social factor is more an object of pathetic interest than of fear." Hoxie was only partly right: the real pathos of the Wobblies was that they failed despite having their finger on the syndicalist pulse of the American working class.41

Syndicalism and American Workers

What most contemporary observers saw as the "weak" and "spasmodic" character of the direct-actionist IWW proved to Hoxie's satisfaction that there was "no syndicalist problem of consequence in this country." Characterizing syndicalism as "a doctrine of despair" fundamentally at odds with the "optimism" of American workers, Hoxie concluded that "the conditions are not here for its growth." Much the same argument was advanced a few years later by Perlmanin his landmark comparative study, A Theory of the Labor Movement . Like Hoxie, he wrote syndicalism out of the American class experience altogether. While conceding that syndicalism had become in several Western European countries "an easy plaything for the gusts of wind blowing from Soviet Russia," it failed to reach the shores of the United States where, in Perlman's classic formulation, a "job-conscious" trade union movement, represented by the AFL, reigned supreme.42

The AFL thus came to be seen as the organized expression of a "homegrown" job consciousness in contrast to an alien and potentially subversive syndicalism associated with groups like the IWW. Although most Wobbly leaders explicitly rejected the syndicalist label—in part because of its sinister "foreign" connotations—the term stuck. And for good reason: like the self-described syndicalist movements sweeping parts of Europe, Latin America, and Africa at the time, the IWW saw capitalism as exploitive and the political state as oppressive; both could be overthrown, the Wobblies believed, only by the direct economic action of a unified proletariat whose "new unions" represented the nucleus of a future society in which workers would collectively own, manage, and administer industry for the benefit of all.43

The IWW's expansive syndicalist vision appeared sharply at odds with the AFL's myopic trade union focus. Federation leaders, having long since made their peace with capitalism, targeted individual employers, not the system. They directed their organizational efforts at giving workers a fatter paycheck and more say on the job, not unifying them as a class or instilling a revolutionary consciousness. Their unions were vehicles of piecemeal reform in the present, not staging platforms for an unrealized working-class utopia. In short, the AFL was a business, not a social movement.

These are essentially the terms in which the IWW and the AFL have been traditionally viewed by students of American labor. From this familiar perspective, the Wobblies appear "as the only major labor organization in the U.S. which seriously and consistently challenged the capitalist organization of production." Holding down the center of "radical labor leadership" in early-twentieth-century America, the IWW exemplified a truly "class-conscious movement."44 Whereas the revolutionary Wobblies "made thousands of laborers and farmers the enemies of capitalism," the role of AFL leaders, in Debs's memorable phrase, was "to chlorophorm the working class while the capitalistclass goes through its pockets." Led by the "virulently antiradical" Gompers, the trade unions were bastions of "procapitalist and anti-socialist" ideology, standing as the country's strongest "bulwark against revolution."45

The ideological contrast was certainly undeniable. But so, too, was the commitment to a kind of practical syndicalism that led both organizations—in waging the day-to-day struggle against the rule of capital—to eschew the political arena in favor of the workplace, to generally prefer the immediacy of direct action at the point of production to the uncertainty of legislative action in the halls of Congress. However much AFL leaders warmed up to capitalism, they remained cool toward the state as either an object or an instrument of working-class reform. If their belief in voluntarism grew mostly out of past political failures rather than from a principled rejection of politics as such, the effect was the same in forcing most AFL affiliates, like their IWW counterparts, to rely primarily on building up economic power on the job. So, despite their divergent views on the desirability of capitalism and revolution, the IWW and the AFL shared, as Will Herberg observed years ago, a "definite affinity to syndicalism ... with its stress on proletarian direct action and its marked distrust of government and the state."46

Yet this "affinity to syndicalism" has seldom been recognized by students of twentieth-century American labor. Instead, most scholars have followed Lipset in seeing the "essential traits of American trade unions"—most notably the reliance on militant direct action—as the product of a national "value system" that simultaneously "depreciated a concern with class" while valorizing "individual achievement" as measured chiefly by "pecuniary success." It follows that the peculiarly American recourse to "violent and militant tactics" reflects the dominant cultural "emphasis on ends as contrasted to means" that leads most wage earners in the United States "to compare themselves individually with other workers who are relatively close to them in income and status." Driven by the resulting high levels of "individual discontent," American workers have thus lashed out at their immediate employers with an uncommon aggressiveness, seeking "to win economic and social objectives by whatever means are at hand."47

The nation's "value system" is likewise the implicit starting point for Kazin's recent interpretation of early-twentieth-century labor militancy as an evolved species, not of syndicalism, but rather an "elasticand promiscuous" populism. Rejecting Lipset's assertion of a seamless national culture spun from individualism, Kazin spins a more patchworked cultural yarn in which savvy union leaders, having failed to reach ordinary workers through the Marxist vocabulary of class, discursively constructed their followers as "average men" battling an "unscrupulous" and "unworthy elite." This "oppositional discourse," rooted in a culturally accepted mode of "populist persuasion" that elevated "the people" above "class," compelled wage earners to vigorously exercise their "rights" of industrial citizenship on the job, often through violent and confrontational means.48

If most observers have missed the syndicalist affinities of American labor it is because they usually have been looking in the wrong places. Focusing on a national "value system" that is conceived from the outset as classless is unlikely to turn up evidence for a class-based syndicalism. As a result, most cultural explanations for the peculiarities of American unionism have not only overlooked its obvious affinities to syndicalism, they have, in addition, failed to really examine the nature of what it is they claim to be explaining: invariably seeing American labor's distinctive reliance on direct action at the point of production as a simple reflection of individualism, populism, antistatism—almost anything, that is, except syndicalism.49

The view from the ground, however, offers a much better vantage point from which to observe the syndicalist practices that undergirded labor organizations as diverse as the IWW and the AFL. In immediate aims, according to IWW authority Melvyn Dubofsky, "one could not easily distinguish the behaviour of the Wobblies from those of more conventional trade unions. Like members of the craft unions affiliated with the AFL, IWW activists struggled to raise wages, reduce hours, and improve working conditions." Moreover, in pursuing their common objectives, the IWW and the AFL relied mainly on the activity of workers themselves, not the neutrality of the state or the majesty of the law. Finally, whatever lasting gains both organizations made came largely from extending their control over the job, often using the same methods of direct action aimed at disrupting production.50

Autonomous self-activity, direct action at the point of production, and an emphasis on workers' control were all part of a diffuse "syndicalist impulse" that, as David Montgomery has convincingly argued, defined the struggles of American workers for nearly two decades following the birth of the IWW. Between roughly 1909 and 1922 this"new unionism" pushed strike activity to record levels in the United States. At its peak in 1919 more than four million workers officially went out on strike—nearly one out of every four wage earners in the country. That this industrial insurgency extended so far beyond the organizational boundaries of the IWW led Montgomery to question "the customary image of the IWW as representing conduct and aspirations far removed from the 'mainstream' of American labor development."51

In construing syndicalism as a practice of resistance rather than a theory of revolution, Montgomery grasped what was most relevant about the IWW experience, unlike Hoxie and others who, focusing on the Wobblies' limited ideological appeal, came up empty-handed.52 Put simply, it was neither the Wobblies' increasingly resonant critique of capitalism nor the unremarkable character of their immediate union objectives that made them a part of labor's mainstream but the fact that they were anchored in the same syndicalist waters as the AFL. Washing across the industrial landscape of early-twentieth-century America, syndicalism represented a fluid mix of organizational practices that combined the institutional brawn of pure and simple trade unionism with the mobilizing muscle of contemporary working-class insurgency to produce a kind of "syndicalism, pure and simple"—defined by its point-of-production focus, aggressive job control, and militant direct action.

In competing for the allegiance of American workers, the IWW and the AFL tapped into different dimensions of this diffuse syndicalism. The AFL's approach might best be characterized as "business syndicalism."53 Grounded in the restrictionist practices that Perlman saw as the essence of "job consciousness," the AFL's syndicalism carved out its jurisdictions along craft or narrowly drawn occupational lines, carefully regulated enrollment in relation to local labor market conditions, and elaborated rigid work rules to protect its existing job territory and monopolize employment opportunities for current union members. In contrast, the IWW practiced a form of "industrial syndicalism." Rejecting the exclusionary logic of craft unionism, the Wobblies' syndicalism was organized along more inclusive occupational or industrial lines, relied on an expanded membership as the basis of mass mobilization and disruption, and used its control over the job to challenge traditional managerial prerogatives over hiring, firing, and the organization of work.54 Driven by these competing organizational logics, business syndicalism and industrial syndicalism generated corresponding ideal-typical patterns of collective action. Business syndicalism depended on establishing, strengthening, and enforcing the labor contract. It thus privileged the solidarity of small numbers over mass disruption, generally limiting organizing campaigns and strike activities to specific groups of workers directly implicated in each dispute. In contrast, industrial syndicalism avoided contractual relations that in any way restricted its freedom of movement. Operating for the most part from outside the emerging system of "industrial legality," as Antonio Gramsci termed the growing formalization of collective bargaining, it drew strength from the rank and file's spontaneity, creativity, and emergent solidarities.55

These rival syndicalisms were rooted in differential disruptive capacities. Business syndicalism grew mostly out of the experiences of strategically located skilled workers, whose centrality in production and irreplaceability maximized their disruptive potential while their minimal numbers facilitated self-organization and collective action. It was a wickedly effective combination that gave early-twentieth-century craftsmen what Luca Perrone has termed "reserve power": the capacity to secure their objectives merely by threatening to actualize their widely recognized disruptive potential. Such was the basis of early contract unionism, as powerful craft workers and relatively vulnerable employers came together to coordinate their "mutual" interests in sustaining high levels of economic growth through industrial peace and stability.56

Industrial syndicalism grew out of the differently structured disruptive capacities of the less skilled. Theirs was the power of large numbers, as magnified by strategic timing. Lacking the positional advantages of craft workers, their ability to disrupt production depended on the exercise of "situational power": the capacity, unconstrained by time contracts and labor agreements generally, to take direct action whenever the balance of class forces was most favorable. To be effective, this power had to be repeatedly actualized and demonstrated, not held in reserve. Capitalizing on the element of surprise and seizing on moments of employer vulnerability, less skilled workers were drawn to industrial syndicalism as their weapon of choice.

What distinguished these two variants of syndicalism, then, was not only that one was led by revolutionaries while the other was not. Itwas not just that one opened its membership doors more widely than the other. Nor simply that one refused to sign contracts while the other saw that as its principal objective. More fundamental than any of these programmatic differences were the contrasting logics of collective action on which they rested: the AFL's reliance on small numbers, reserve power, and contractualism versus the IWW's dependence on mass mobilization, situational power, and unrestricted direct action. As ideal types, business syndicalism and industrial syndicalism thus represented alternative routes of class formation that led craftsmen and less skilled workers toward opposite ends of the same syndicalist continuum.

Although tradesmen and common laborers generally followed divergent organizational trajectories, their paths sometimes crossed. Many of the most highly skilled trades regularly went into battle armed with nothing more than the logic of business syndicalism. And in many cases that was enough to secure their objectives. But whenever their conventional arsenal lacked sufficient fire power, highly skilled machinists, engineers, carpenters, railroad workers, and others did not hesitate to grasp, if only momentarily, the more potent "organizational weapon" of industrial syndicalism, wielding it with sometimes deadly force against combative employers or resistive government officials.57

Much like those craftsmen who found it advantageous at times to support more inclusive forms of organization and even defy the tenets of contractualism, less skilled workers were drawn periodically into the orbit of business syndicalism. Textile operatives, miners, and other laborers employed in the emerging mass production industries sometimes pulled back from the logic of industrial syndicalism by restricting their membership or signing time contracts, particularly when, as was often the case, doing so appeared to offer them the best chance of staying organized in the face of overwhelming odds.

In short, economic location and patterns of collective action were highly correlated, though not perfectly so. Clearly, there were times when craftsmen selectively borrowed from the repertoire of industrial syndicalism, just as there were times when less skilled workers opportunistically appropriated elements of business syndicalism. But such "times" were just that: exceptional moments whose very infrequency proved the general rule that skill and organizational logics were—for most workers, most often—linked in ways thatsystematically drew craftsmen toward business syndicalism and less skilled workers toward industrial syndicalism.

Understanding syndicalism as the driving force behind early-twentieth-century worker mobilization has far-reaching implications, suggesting that the IWW and the AFL—despite trading in very different ideological currencies—often functioned as flip sides of the same syndicalist coin, having been forged out of the same base elements of productionism, job control, and direct action. This common amalgam, although bearing distinct organizational imprints, served as a uniform medium of exchange for Wobblies and craft unionists alike, providing a shared syndicalist standard as the basis for working-class organization.

Recognizing the substantial overlap in syndicalist practices, however, is not in any way to deny the vast organizational distance separating the IWW from the AFL—a gulf that was all too real for countless workers who, by virtue of their occupation, skill level, citizenship status, race, ethnicity, or gender, found themselves on one side or the other of what was usually a wide and unbridgeable chasm.58 But what separated most rank-and-file Wobblies from their trade union counterparts had little to do with any of the presumed differences in world-views, ideological attachments, degrees of class awareness, or stages of consciousness that have become the stock-in-trade for students of American labor. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the ground-level war between the IWW and the AFL was seldom fought over questions of reform versus revolution, job versus class consciousness, even political conservatism versus radicalism. Rather, as the following case studies seek to demonstrate, for many American workers the contest between the IWW and the AFL was fundamentally about which practice of syndicalism—industrial or business—would define the main current of labor development in the United States.

This way of thinking about the rivalry between the IWW and the AFL offers a particularly useful framework for analyzing the dynamics of union succession on the Philadelphia waterfront and in New York's culinary industry. In both settings the great majority of unorganized and less skilled workers turned initially to the IWW's industrial syndicalism. Rival AFL organizers, advocating a business syndicalism of craftism and contractualism, found themselves isolated from the rank-and-file movement developing on the docks and inside the hotels and restaurants. While the newly organized longshoremen and culinaryworkers ended up following very different institutional paths over the next two decades, they remained fiercely loyal to the industrial syndicalism of their birth, so much so that the rival AFL union operating in each industry was unable to make any inroads until it embraced many of the same organizational practices. Even after the Wobblies were gone, important elements of their industrial syndicalism lived on for a time, within the shell of the triumphant AFL.

In choosing between both organizations, then, the longshoremen and the culinary workers were not guided by a narrow and defensive job consciousness that uniquely "fit" the AFL but rather by an expansive and combative industrial syndicalism that was more closely identified with the IWW—and to which the AFL in large part later adapted itself. What was striking in both cases was the continuity of syndicalist organizational practices, even as the rank and file was moving from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other, from the left-wing IWW to the right-wing AFL. Few among the thousands of longshoremen and culinary workers who made that journey bore any resemblance to the "job-conscious" conservatives in whose image scholars have routinely portrayed—and arguably distorted—the way that class was experienced at the point of production by ordinary American workers.59

Conceiving of the rank and file as practicing syndicalists of one kind or another, rather than as political Neanderthals or primitive militants, invites a fundamental rethinking of the peculiar dualism that has defined the American working class. The seeming contradiction between its political conservatism, on the one hand, and its industrial radicalism, on the other, turns out, on close inspection, to be a problem only for those who assume that workers are by nature either politicized socialists or economistic conservatives. Once unionists are examined under the lens of syndicalism, however, this superficial distinction can be shown to hide more than it reveals, obscuring as it does the rich history of syndicalist practices that—while avoiding the political area—were hardly conservative and that—while focusing on the job—threatened at times the stability of the capitalist economic order. Therein lies the significance of syndicalism in the formation of the American working class.

These issues are explored more fully through separate analytical narratives that trace the history of organizational succession in Philadelphia and New York. Chapters 2 and 3 narrate the struggle forunion supremacy on the docks. Chapters 4 and 5 do the same for the culinary industry. All four chapters focus on the world of work, not out of some misguided commitment to a kind of "theoretical economism," but because that was the principal site of contestation between the IWW and the AFL: the workplace, the union hall, and the picket line provided the main public arenas in which their competing visions and practices of class organization were fought out, debated, and ultimately decided.60

The approach taken here is also deeply historical in recognizing that the formation of union loyalty, like that of class, is indeterminant to the extent that organizational allegiance is the product of multiple, path-dependent struggles whose outcomes are historically contingent. This irreducibly historical dimension calls for a degree of narrative integrity that can only come from moving "contextual" variables like timing, sequence, and events from the margins of sociological analysis to the explanatory center.61 The result is a grounded work of historical sociology that takes the patient reader down the same path blazed years ago by the pioneering longshoremen and culinary workers whose struggles are chronicled in the following pages.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Battling for American Labor by Howard Kimeldorf Copyright © 1999 by Howard Kimeldorf. Excerpted by permission.
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