The State and Labor in Modern America

Melvyn Dubofsky

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807844366, 9780807821251
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861158
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this important new book, Melvyn Dubofsky traces the relationship between the American labor movement and the federal government from the 1870s until the present. His is the only book to focus specifically on the 'labor question' as a lens through which to view more clearly the basic political, economic, and social forces that have divided citizens throughout the industrial era. Many scholars contend that the state has acted to suppress trade union autonomy and democracy, as well as rank-and-file militancy, in the interest of social stability and conclude that the law has rendered unions the servants of capital and the state. In contrast, Dubofsky argues that the relationship between the state and labor is far more complex and that workers and their unions have gained from positive state intervention at particular junctures in American history. He focuses on six such periods when, in varying combinations, popular politics, administrative policy formation, and union influence on the legislative and executive branches operated to promote stability by furthering the interests of workers and their organizations.

1 Laissez-Faire and the Origins of Federal Intervention, 1873–1900

During the late nineteenth century, the labor question first became a national issue. The growing centralization of the economy and a swelling wave of strikes prompted federal officials, most especially the president and district and circuit judges, to act during industrial disputes. More often than not, the intrusion of the executive and judicial branches into “private conflicts” between workers and employers favored business interests. Time and again, judges issued injunctions that crippled strikes, and presidents used federal troops and marshals to similar effect, either to enforce judicial injunctions or to establish martial law. Over the course of the three decades between the 1870s and the turn of the century, however, presidents, members of Congress, and even some judges began to rethink the use of federal power to regulate labor conflicts. As the century ended, the federal authorities seemed poised to adopt policies that would abet the emergence of responsible unionism and peaceful collective bargaining as alternatives to violent conflicts between workers and employers.

A National Economy

By 1900 the relations between labor and capital, workers and their employers had been largely reshaped by more than fifty years of technological and organizational innovations. At the end of the Civil War, only the railroads and some of the larger textile firms operated as modern business corporations. They obtained their capital from myriad private investors in impersonal credit markets, hired professional managers to use other people’s money for operations, supervised work forces that came to number in the hundreds and thousands, and competed in national markets. At the same time, the more typical enterprises remained small family proprietorships or simple partnerships. In such businesses, the owners raised their capital largely from among family members or close associates, managed their firms themselves, employed relatively small work forces with whom they maintained personal relations, and competed mostly in local or regional markets.

A half century of sweeping economic change did not totally obliterate the structure of the American economy as it had appeared in 1865. But as Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has shown, the large, hierarchically structured and professionally managed corporation became characteristic of the most dynamic sectors of the economy. The type of modern management pioneered by railroads between 1850 and 1870 spread by 1900 first to other transport and communications firms, then to the iron and steel industry, meatpacking, agricultural implements, and other key sectors of the economy.¹ These firms, with their large professionally managed labor forces, became involved in the most contentious labor-capital conflicts of the late nineteenth century, those that commanded national attention and the concern, on occasion, of the federal government. At the other pole of the economy, particularly in sectors where local market competition prevailed, the family firm or private partnership remained predominant. There too, to be sure, labor conflict increasingly roiled employer-employee relations. But those conflicts, which were more numerous and persistent than the struggles in the corporate sector of the economy and perhaps more important to the history of trade unionism in the late nineteenth century, rarely commanded national attention. Neither the president nor Congress bothered themselves with disputes between local noncorporate employers and their workers, although federal courts sometimes intervened through the issuance of restraining orders and injunctions.

For both businesspeople and workers, the economy and society of late-nineteenth-century America proved unsettling. As the “transport-communications revolution” intensified competition among firms, business enterprises rose and fell. Some entrepreneurs and managers adapted successfully to new forms of national, and even international, competition; others failed. In the best of circumstances, economic change would have wrought hardship on many employers and workers. But the late nineteenth century was scarcely the best of times. Known to economic historians as the era of the “great depression,” the years from 1873 to 1897 in the United States and elsewhere in the world were marked by steadily falling prices, repeated depressions or recessions (1873–77, 1883–85, 1893–97), high rates of business failure, and substantial levels of periodic unemployment. For the period as a whole, the total number of years of economic contraction exceeded those of expansion.

Nevertheless, the American economy continued to grow absolutely, becoming by the 1890s the world’s most productive nation, far surpassing the former leader, Great Britain. Much of that economic growth resulted from two developments that exacted a heavy price from workers. In order to survive in a business environment marked by intensive competition and falling prices, entrepreneurs struggled ceaselessly to reduce their costs of production. On the one hand, they applied new forms of technology where its introduction could lower unit costs of production. Technological innovations in the steel, meatpacking, and tobacco industries, among others, greatly expanded the rate of production and lessened its cost per unit of input.² On the other hand, even in the absence of significant technological innovation, many firms experimented with new methods of routing the flow of work, controlling their sources of supply and inventories, and supervising their labor forces. These changes added up to what Daniel Nelson has characterized as a managerial revolution.³

Whether victims of technological innovation or managerial reform, workers faced a turbulent new world of toil. Some skilled workers saw machines obliterate their dearly acquired skills or tighter forms of supervision diminish their on-the-job autonomy. The less skilled found themselves subject to stricter forms of work discipline and fewer breaks from the exhausting sorts of physical labor in which they were concentrated.⁴ Had such changes in work methods and discipline occurred in a time of general economic expansion and stability, most workers might have adapted with a minimum of stress. Coming at a time of recurrent depression, repeated cyclical reductions in the total labor force, and general economic insecurity, the innovations exacted a heavy material and psychological price from many workers.

Just as employers reacted to a changing situation by experimenting with new methods of production and combining into larger enterprises, so, too, did workers seek to adapt to their new environment. Whereas before the Civil War the typical workers’ organization was a local trade union or at best a city wide coalition of such local unions, in the postbellum decades union builders struggled to create national organizations. They had no choice. In sectors of the economy untouched by national product competition, workers competed with each other for jobs. The tramping artisan or the displaced transient worker was a characteristic figure in late-nineteenth-century America. Only an effective national union that maintained uniform wages and conditions of work could protect the standards of all. In sectors where the primary competition was among products, the situation was no different. To protect the wages and conditions of one group of workers, the union had to insist upon uniform national standards, else lower-wage, lower-cost firms could displace higher-wage union enterprises. Thus, from the 1870s through the 1890s union builders sought first to create effective national trade unions and then to consolidate them into an equally effective national federation of unions.⁵

In the late nineteenth century workers and their trade unions also pioneered modern methods of industrial warfare. The strike and the boycott, the latter of which was particularly effective at the local level against employers dependent on working-class patronage, became the most common modes of working-class action. We have no reliable statistics before 1881 (fragmentary data from Massachusetts and New York, however, suggest that workers in those states increasingly turned to the strike), but between that year and 1885, the number of both strikes and the workers involved in them rose irregularly. Then, a year later, the total number of strikes more than doubled from the preceding year (695 to 1572), as did the number of workers involved (258,000 to 610,000). For the remainder of the late nineteenth century, the number of strikes remained well above pre-1886 levels, though only in 1894 did the total number of strikers surpass that of 1886. In fact, after 1886, the number of strikes annually never fell below twice as much as the initial level in 1881. By the 1890s, then, the strike had become the workers’ chosen weapon in their ongoing struggle against capital.⁶

Even more important than the total number of strikes and workers involved, however, was the changing character of such disputes. At the start of the period, strikes were often as spontaneous as planned (that is, lacked formal union control), more commonly defensive than offensive (usually in protest against a wage cut), and less likely to succeed. By the end of the 1890s, most strikes were union-initiated and planned; offensive in objective (to seek higher wages, a union shop, or a formal contract); and more likely to succeed.⁷ It was the strike, especially those that affected the nation as a whole, that initially impelled the federal government to intervene in labor-capital relations and to grope somewhat blindly toward a national labor policy.

The National State and Labor

As presidents, members of Congress, and federal judges navigated through the maze of labor-capital conflict, they reacted to the new social-economic order with ideas and values inherited from a simpler agrarian and republican heritage. Basic to that heritage were two beliefs that, while in theory affirming the rights of the common person and the dignity of labor, in practice protected the prerogatives of capital. First was the concept of equality under the law, stated so forcefully in Andrew Jackson’s bank veto message in which the president proclaimed that if government “would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.” That government was best not which governed least but rather which enacted no class legislation. Second was the often stated belief that labor was, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “prior to, and independent of capital. . . . Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.” Such sentiments led Lincoln to state in a public speech in March 1860, “I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to.” But such paeans of praise for the worthy laborer signified no hostility to capital or sympathy for industrial warfare. The same Lincoln who extolled the respectable toiler insisted, “Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.” Rather than envision a society in which labor warred upon capital, Lincoln favored one in which equality under the law and the absence of class legislation allowed “the humblest man an equal chance ... with everybody else,” in which the laborer of today became the capitalist of tomorrow.⁸

By the end of the Civil War, an amalgam of the Jacksonian Democratic commitment to equality before the law and the Lincolnian Republican praise for the dignity of labor (what Eric Foner in a different context has called the ideology of “free soil, free men, and free labor”) had become the common currency of popular belief and national politics. For a time, as David Montgomery has shown in his study of labor and the Radical Republicans, some labor radicals demanded that state policy go “beyond equality,” that the government should enact laws that lifted the humble and restrained the mighty, that promoted equality of condition as well as equality of opportunity. Such demands may have split Radical Republicanism, as Montgomery suggests, but they scarcely dented the ideology of legal equality, free labor, and individual opportunity.⁹ The tenacity of that ideology was well illustrated in the speech of a congressman from Ohio, who in June 1874 introduced on the floor of the House a bill to incorporate the Iron Molders’ International Union. Capital and labor are not enemies, proclaimed the congressman, for “in this free land of ours the laborer of to-day is the capitalist of tomorrow, while the capitalist in turn may become the laborer.”¹⁰

Lincoln could not have said it better. Nor did the Iron Molders’ president disagree, for in his own petition he assured members of Congress that the molders’ union believed in harmony between capital and labor and that the respectable worker repudiated all subversive influences. On the one hand, the union president pledged to respect fully the rights of capital, yet on the other hand, he asserted that he and his union were “unalterably fixed in our determination to resist by all lawful means any and every effort made to deprive the molder of his right to demand and receive a fair equivalent for his labor, or to abridge his right to fix a price for that labor.”¹¹

The contradiction between the union leader’s pledge to respect the rights of capital and his insistence on the worker’s right to fix his own price for labor (skilled workers at this time preferred to speak in terms of prices rather than wages, for the latter suggested dependence and servility in contrast to the former’s signification of independence and manhood) was not the only paradox inherent in the free labor ideology. More important, it was a structure of belief that had emerged in an era when independent, landowning farmers remained the largest single segment of the productive population and also when self-employed craftspeople were still a substantial proportion of the urban work force. In antebellum America, the structure of society remained sufficiently decentralized and open to the ambitious to sustain the myth.

By the 1870s, however, the full-time, dependent wage earner had become more characteristic of the economy than the self-employed artisan, and independent farmers saw their relative influence shrink. With each passing year the proportion of dependent wage earners rose as that of independent farmers fell. Thus, in a society and economy that experienced increasing centralization and concentration of material resources, the myth of free labor and equal opportunity lost its luster. Still, if citizens at the end of the nineteenth century were no longer equal in the economic arena, each man remained both free and equal in the realm of politics, where the votes of the masses far outweighed those of the fortunate few who built the Gilded Age’s mammoth corporations and amassed its great fortunes. Indeed, time and again, when labor found itself locked in conflict with capital or the masses struggled against the plutocrats, they trumpeted the virtues of a people’s, or democratic, republic. And time and again, when the representatives and agencies of the national state involved themselves in labor-capital struggles, their commitment to equality before the law conflicted with their responsibilities as trustees for a people’s republic. In theory, federal officials maintained that legal equality guaranteed individual opportunity and preserved popular sovereignty, while in practice, the law in its impartial majesty protected the property of the blessed few from the onslaughts of the angry many.

Before the 1870s, however, the relationship between labor and capital had rarely, if ever, intruded on the consciousness, policies, or actions of federal officials. Ritualistic defenses of the protective tariff as the guarantor of high wages and an American standard of living for workers and equally ritualistic critiques of the tariff as a device to rob the productive masses for the benefit of the rapacious few served as the bread and wine of Democratic and Republican politicians. Republicans, by and large, lauded protection as the source of national prosperity that best promoted harmony between workers and their employers. Democrats, by contrast, damned tariffs as a device that impoverished working people and hence intensified social, economic, and even racial confli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The State and Labor in Modern America
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: State and Society in Modern United States History
• 1 Laissez-Faire and the Origins of Federal Intervention, 1873–1900
• 2 The Progressive Approach: From Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, 1900–1916
• 3 World War and the Positive State, 1917–1920
• 4 Interregnum: The State as “Neutral,” 1921–1932
• 5 The New Deal Labor Revolution, Part 1,1933–1936
• 6 The New Deal Labor Revolution, Part 2,1937–1941
• 7 War and the Creation of a New Industrial State, 1940–1946
• 8 An Almost Perfect Machine: Industrial Relations Policy in an Age of Affluence, 1947–1973
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Cases Cited
• Bibliography
• Index