Suppression of Radical Unionism in the US
March 20th, 2007
As David Roediger put it, most attempts to explain “the failure of American socialism” give all the credit to America and put all the blame on socialism. [1] Daniel Fusfeld's The Rise & Repression of Radical Labor contradicts the trend, arguing most previous attempts to explain the lack of a large anti-capitalist labor movement in the United States ignore the role of violence in destroying radical movements.
Fusfeld explicitly attacks two older theories which neglect the role of repression in the defeat of radical labor. The first argues the lack of a socialist-oriented labor movement is due to relatively high wage rates compared to Europe, relatively high upward social mobility, and the ability of workers to use elections to improve their condition without resort to radical movements. The second, associated with Selig Perlman, argues “job consciousness” instead of “class consciousness” developed among American workers “because it appealed to the concrete interests of workers in the special conditions of the American industrial environment.” [2] Although there are a few flaws in the book, Fusfeld's argument is persuasive.
Fusfeld shows how multiple class conscious working class movements developed over the late 19th century and were violently suppressed by employers and the state. He begins with a major working class rebellion, the Great Strike of 1877, and its defeat due to state violence. In the aftermath of the strike employers and the state strengthened their repressive capacities by reviving and expanding state militias, enacting conspiracy laws against unions, and blacklisting labor activists. Subsequently, a better organized and less violent movement based on working class solidarity (although not fully radical in the contemporary sense) developed, the Knights of Labor. State repression in the wake of the Haymarket Affair destroyed it as well. In the 1890s the American Railway Union and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers again promoted a class conscious mass-oriented unionism but also fell at the hands of state violence. At each point working class movements were met with force.
At the start of the twentieth century the state began moving away from this indiscriminate use of force against workers and towards a more nuanced strategy. Fusfeld sees the anthracite coal strike of 1902-03 waged by the United Mine Workers as a key turning point. In the strike President Roosevelt intervened between management and the union in an attempt to peacefully put an end to the strike through mediation. The strike marked a key shift in the relations between the state, management, and labor unions. Instead of continual violent conflict between employers and workers, a coalition of labor conservatives and corporate liberals developed which advocated peaceful collective bargaining between corporations and conservative unions within a capitalist framework. The triumph of this coalition begun in the anthracite strike marked a shift away from violent suppression of all working class movements towards greater tolerance of the conservative unions that came to dominate the labor movement.
Fusfeld's reliance on the idea of “corporate liberalism” in his explanation of this transition is his weakest point. Corporate liberals were businessmen who aimed to reduce class conflict through concessions to workers. They supported giving workers a larger share of the wealth and tolerating conservative unions as a way of forestalling the growth of radicalism and more effectively controlling the working class. Fusfeld presents little evidence they existed or had a major impact on labor-management relations. All the individuals he cites as corporate liberals were also politicians and thus possibly acting as much in the state's interest as in their class's interest. All the examples he gives involve corporate liberals advocating other people's companies negotiate with unions; if any implemented these policies in their own companies Fusfeld does not mention it. Fusfeld cites the National Civic Federation as an example of corporate liberalism but it failed to achieve its goals in every example he uses. Even in the Anthracite strike management was unwilling to negotiate until Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines.
Reducing the extent and importance of corporate liberalism doesn't necessarily undermine Fusfeld's thesis; it could even strengthen it. It may be that many or most of the shifts in government policy towards workers during the progressive era were undertaken independent of the corporate elite so that the state could more easily maintain its control on the population even if it came at the expense of business interests. If so, it further emphases the role of state coercion in insuring the triumph of conservative unionism over radicalism and class conflict. The state not only used large amounts of violence to destroy radical labor, it also used a much lower degree of coercion against the corporate elite to make them accept collective bargaining.
After the corporate liberal/labor conservative alliance was in place, Fusfeld claims the state proceeded to brutally suppress radical labor. He emphasizes the attack on the Industrial Workers of the World, but also discusses the suppression of the Socialist party. The government dramatically stepped up its assault on radical labor during the First World War and the Red Scare. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the main agent of repression shifted from local governments to state governments and then, during World War One, to the federal level. Fusfeld attributes the defeat of radical movements during this time period to state repression, correctly arguing that violence raised the cost of radical unionism to levels few workers were willing to pay. His argument is mostly correct but he ignores secondary factors in the decline of radicalism at the end of the progressive era: internal splits over the Russian Revolution and (within the Wobblies) over organizational structure.
Fusfeld clearly shows the link between repression in the World War One era and the defeat of radical labor and successfully critiques the two arguments he is attacking, yet he ignores other theories that have been advanced to explain the defeat of labor radicals in the US. The American working class is sharply divided by race and ethnicity and some have argued that these divisions have served to weaken the working class and undermine working class rebellions, making the elite less willing to grant concessions or allow moderate forms of socialism to develop. Others have argued the two-party system makes it more difficult for labor or socialist parties to come to power, helping keep capitalist parties in power and undercutting the growth of radical movements. While repression probably played a greater role than any of these other factors, his failure to address them is a weakness.
Despite its flaws Fusfeld provides a convincing argument that coercion played a key role in the defeat of radical labor in the United States. The book is well written, accessible, and provides enough background information to be read by those unfamiliar with labor history. Perhaps its most important contribution is to remind us that working class revolutionaries did exist in the United States and that they were defeated through means that were neither pretty nor democratic.
Endnotes
1 Quoted on back cover.
2Fusfeld, p. 7.