III
THE ENLARGEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
As something distinct from Socialism and from trade unionism, Syndicalism is now set down as a "World Movement." The claim is made that it has differentiated a revolutionary force of its own, sure to supersede the niggardly ways of ordinary labor organization, on the one side, and an entangled political Socialism on the other.
At the Lawrence strike, I saw a newcomer so fresh from the Old World, that he tripped awkwardly in almost every English sentence. But he was aglow with beneficence. He said he had been in eight different countries. "Always it is the same. Everywhere it is the one home. I had only to smile and say a little word—'Comrade.' At once something happens. I get quick my smile back and such great welcome. With 'Comrade' and no money, I could see all the world and learn all things."
There is neither measurement nor appreciation of this movement apart from the spirit revealed in this simple incident. Year by year each isolated group gets new strength and confidence from the thrill of its wider brotherhood. Scarcely a week passes that some electric event does not furnish proof of these tidal sympathies.
Among a dozen recent occurrences of our own is that at San Diego, California. Those of social and business importance, those in public office suddenly note increasing bands of I. W. W. orators about the streets. For practical reasons (like density of traffic) most towns set apart certain spaces on which public speaking is prohibited. Sometimes in ignorance and sometimes in defiance "to test free speech" the orators were found haranguing crowds upon these forbidden spots. Often this restricting ordinance had been forgotten—religious and political addresses being freely given on these interdicted areas. These promoters of the I. W. W. act like acid on parchment; the dimmed legal traceries flash out distinct as if written an hour ago. No I. W. W. shall now speak on these reserves, nor shall he speak anywhere else. In the heat and confusion, all the demarcations are lost and citizens proud of their behavior become more lawless than their invaders. The noise was such as to give unenviable notoriety to this town "with the best climate in the world." Just now it is aflame with speculative hopes based upon the early opening of the Panama water way. Property really frightened is almost certain to be cruel, and therefore to be shortsighted. Those socially ascendant in San Diego "went to it" with a high hand. There were almost barbaric cruelties, but there was more shortsightedness. They imagined themselves like Little Falls and Lawrence officials dealing only with their own community. "Surely in San Diego we can manage our own affairs and in our own way." From one of them, I heard the familiar expression, "But damnation! It's nobody's business outside this town." This remonstrance was caused by criticism in papers further up the state. Criticism already rife in eastern papers was naturally answered with contempt. A few days later the surprise came. A report on local behavior had been ordered by the Governor of the State. It was published with maddening strictures on the methods of these same protectors of San Diego. The report was met with hot denials by local patriots. Then, armed with the authority of the State, the State's attorney appears upon the scene, and the "business of the town becomes the business of the State."
This same swift enlargement of the scene came to Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, too, it seemed at first a little matter only of local concern. To cut such a wage scale as Commissioner Neil's Report has now made clear, to cut it because fifty-four hours took the place of fifty-six; to cut it with so little regard for those affected, that no sort of adequate warning or explanation was given, shows how sure of itself the mill ownership felt. There was ground for this assurance. Conditions in Lawrence were no worse than in other mill towns, but ownership there had shown one doubtful superiority. It could hold organized labor effectually at bay. It could have for itself all that organization gives, but refuse it to labor. It could have generations of paternal tariff-coddling from Government to protect its product, at the same time that unprotected and competing labor was at its disposal. These were advantages that beget confidence; a kind of confidence that easily breeds arbitrary habits of mind. Thus the jar with its rude provoking came to Lawrence, as it came to San Diego. A lawyer said to me, "We are trying up here to mind our own business. I wouldn't mind a bit if the rest of the world did the same." He thought a vigorous purge that should clean his city from the nausea of sociologists would be a good beginning. They were doubtless a nuisance, these sociologists, but they, too, were a sign of something serious. Their irritating curiosity was only a bit of writing on the wall. The State also came as at San Diego, then the general Government looked in upon the mill town. Men came, equipped by long experience for their work. They "stayed upon the job." Pitiless and uncolored, the facts concerning wages had to come out. Employers under criticism behave like the rest of us. They put the best foot forward, call attention to the highest wages, direct the visitor to best conditions, precisely, as upon the other side, labor points to every haggard fact upon the scene; wretched housing, indecencies and abuse of foremen; petty personal discriminations, and every item of lowest and most uncertain labor income.
From socialist papers reporting the Lawrence strike, I cut for weeks their assertions about the wage scale. Their understatement was much like the overstatement of the management, even further from the truth. But now between these two exaggerations, the agents of the Government, in twenty thousand classified cases, came to state the facts with neither fear nor bias. This is "political interference," most cordially detested by business that thinks itself a private affair. But this "interference" has come to stay. Its growth is continuous in every country. It was long ago said of a religious movement, "It is like a naked sword, its hilt in Rome and its point everywhere." Government interference is more and more everywhere. We in the United States are very laggard among the nations, but not a month passes in which the sword's tip will not show itself in some new center of conflict. It is nothing in the world but the groping insistence that the public is justly concerned in these disturbances. The sword's point is the public point of view. In the hand of President Cleveland, it had a long thrust in the case of the Pullman strike. It was used by Roosevelt in the Anthracite Coal Commission. It is now a fixed and permanent policy.
Senators and representatives appeared at Lawrence. Rumor had it that Congressional investigations were at hand with purposes to probe deeper than the strike. And so this mill city rouses to the fact that her distress was neither local nor private. Like many another industrial center in recent years, she was an object lesson of industrial maladjustment. Of this maladjustment the nation is becoming conscious and so it, too, plays the sociologist. Very slowly and with much obstinacy, we are learning the great lesson that neither the town nor the state nor the nation can any longer act as if it were sufficient unto itself.
A plaintive Egyptian Pasha has just told us that Turkey could have conquered Italy "if left alone." "We owe our defeat," he says, "to Egypt's neutrality." Together the nations had made Egypt "neutral" and therefore Turkey could not use it as a highway for troops, any more than Italy could strike Turkey by closing the Dardanelles. This water way, too, was neutralized—set apart by world agreement as a kind of consecrated space which lesser units should respect. For the first time, town after town, like Lawrence, Pittsburg and Little Falls learns with disgust, like the Turks, that it must act with reference to the enveloping life of which it is an integral and living part. Good citizens must not begin by themselves playing the anarchist. In the last year several communities have been robustly acting the anarchist rôle.
The most fundamental of all anarchies is the practical contempt for laws of our own making. Yet several of these centers have been under provocation so acute as to excite sympathetic understanding. In other Western towns, I saw I. W. W. behavior of so galling a nature, that no community known to me in the United States would have borne itself with dignity or perfect law-abidingness.
There is a line in Virgil which runs:
If I cannot bend the powers above,
I will rouse Hell.
The more bumptious of those raiding these towns had not even called upon the "powers above." They were very open in their declaration that "to raise hell" was one of their hearts' desires. It is true, that friends of theirs had been roughly and illegally handled. This was their excuse. The authorities said they feared trouble and for this reason acted as those who deal with a "situation rather than with a theory."
A social conflict has arisen among us between a "situation" and a "theory." Whatever our accepted "law and order" may mean, it is challenged by the socialist movement as a whole and very sharply challenged by a growing revolutionary section known as the "Industrial Workers of the World." They are not in the least disturbed that we name them "outlaws." If a half of what they say of our present society is true, the "outlaw" is the one heroic figure in our midst.
At the heart of the movement is an impulse and a motive which no one with open mind can really see without respect. The hectoring crudities of the movement are so in evidence, as to blot out what is best in an idealism which we should not lose. To forget that the movement has its idealism is not only to mistake it as a whole, but very wretchedly to bungle in our practical relations with it. Thus far I. W. W. victories have been largely won by the blunders of their enemies. This will continue until we know better what socialism in general really means and why a more giddy and harassing form of it now appears.
If it could become, once for all, clear to us what this means, it would save us from immeasurable ills. The government has taken no one of its ungainly steps in "interference" which was not forced upon it by the vague but importunate pressure of a changing public opinion. No politician has a feather's weight of influence in these interferences, beyond what the atmospheric pressure of this general opinion gives him. The scurviest demagogue can only take advantage of it.
Beginning with transportation; then with larger businesses in closest affiliation with these main arteries of traffic, the public has come to feel that these are social as well as private affairs. Above all, it has come to feel that they are no longer to be kept as the secret speculative tools of finance.
When Woodrow Wilson said that these were public rather than private, he was merely interpreting the growing collective opinion in this country. Until the more masterful holders of these centers of economic power recognize this and enter with some heartiness into more sympathetic coöperation with the new and altered opinion, both political and industrial friction will increase.
Against the spirit of secrecy and absolutism in this more powerful business management, the protest rises. Its warning comes from all those who would "regulate" these forces. It comes from collectivists, from socialists of every shade, and now, with shrill and mocking challenge, from a new "Order" of the I. W. W. It is a dangerous form of dullness merely to sniff at this latest note of protest. It is a part of something far greater than itself. Roughly, the word socialism stands for this larger thing, but especially about the spirit of this movement, foggy misconceptions still cling. A further appeal must be made to the reader's patience in a brief attempt to illustrate what seem to the writer some errors in interpreting the spirit and motive of the socialist protest and still more in all attempts to understand the I. W. W.