The Intellectual and the Labor Movement/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
It is now many years ago that Prince Peter Kropotkin wrote his famous appeal to young "intellectuals" to cast in their lot with the labor movement—to the poets, the painters, the sculptors, the musicians, who understood that their "true mission and the very interests of art itself" were with labor; to the physicians, who had become convinced that the causes of disease must be uprooted; to the lovers of pure science, to all "who possessed knowledge, talent, capacity, industry."
"And remember," declared Kropotkin, "if you do come, that you come not as masters but as comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for yourselves in a new life which sweeps upwards to the conquest of the future; that you come less to teach than to grasp the aspirations of the many; to divine them, to give them shape, and then to work without rest and without haste, with all the fire of youth and all the judgment of age, to realize them in actual life. Then and then only will you lead a complete, a noble, a rational existence. Then you will see that your every effort on this path bears with it fruit in abundance, and this sublime harmony once established between your actions and the dictates of your conscience will give you powers you never dreamt lay dormant in yourselves.
"The never-ceasing struggle for truth, justice and equality among the people, whose gratitude you will earn—what nobler career can the youth of all nations desire than this?"
This and similar appeals made before and since, and, most of all, the great, crying need of the times have, during the last hundred years, irresistibly aligned men and women of keen mind and fine idealism on the side of labor. A host of them we find in Europe alone—Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Galsworthy, Carpenter, Masefield, among the dramatists and poets; Tolstoi, Zola, Hugo, Turgieneff, France, Gorky, Wells, Rolland, Barbusse, among the novelists; John Stuart Mill, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Sorel, Lagardelle, Place, Lenin, the Webbs, the Hobsons, Gide, Cole, Kautsky, Hilferding, among the economists; Ruskin, Morris, Crane, Millet, Meunier, Wagner, among the artists and musicians; Alfred Russel Wallace, Lombroso, Ferri, Labriola, Frederic Harrison, Grant Allen, Bertrand Russel, Albert Einstein, among the scientists and philosophers; Lassalle, Jaures, Mazzini, Adler, the Liebknechts, Snowden, Vandervelde, Trotsky, Macdonald, Branting, Longuet, among the orators and the parliamentarians; Robert Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, among the Utopian writers; and men and women of rare attainments in every line of intellectual endeavor.
The great majority of these "traders in ideas," as Barbusse has it, have not only had a passionate desire to serve labor in its immediate struggles, but to assist the worker in his age long battle toward a worthier status—toward a higher order of industrial society.
In the early days of the labor movement, the intellectual was of chief assistance to the workers in interpreting labor to itself and to those outside its ranks; in inspiring the movement with confidence in itself; in assisting it to formulate its program for social change, to keep its idealism, its enthusiasm alive; in widening its vision of future possibilities.
In Europe today, particularly in countries such as Russia, where labor is in control, the prime present day need is for technical assistance in the administration of socialized industry. The indifference or opposition of many brain workers to the government has been a serious handicap to it. In other countries—Sweden, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, among them—labor has selected many "intellectuals" to voice its demands in the parliaments and in municipal councils, and to aid it in the cooperative, the educational and other movements.
In the United States, labor has for some time utilized lawyers to defend it in court—lawyers of the type of Clarence Darrow, Jackson H. Ralston, Morris Hillquit, Frank P. Walsh. It has gladly accepted the service of such university trained men and women as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, John B. Andrews, Owen R. Lovejoy, Henry R. Seager, John R. Commons, Lillian Wald, in its fight for better labor legislation. It has received aid—material and spiritual—from writers and speakers of the type of Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Wendell Phillips, Albert Brisbane, William Henry Channing, John Swinton, Edward Bellamy, and Henry D. Lloyd, at an earlier period; and, more recently, of Jack London, William D. Howells, Frank Norris, Edwin Markham, Charles Rann Kennedy, Mary Austin, Upton Sinclair, Vida D. Scudder, Sinclair Lewis, Louis Untermeyer, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Poole, Frederic C. Howe, Arthur Gleason, Lincoln Steffens, among writers, poets and dramatists; William James, John Dewey, Charles P. Steinmetz, among the philosophers and scientists; Lester F. Ward, Robert H. Hoxie, Carlton Parker, Thorstein Veblen, E. A. Ross, Franklin H. Giddings, Charles A. Beard, among political scientists; and John A. Ryan, Walter Rauschenbusch, Bishops Spaulding and Williams, Harry F. Ward, Judah L. Magnes, and John Haynes Holmes, among religious leaders.
During the past few years organized labor on the economic field has developed a number of constructive features. It has entered the field of labor education, labor banking, labor health, cooperation, labor politics, and these developments have led to an increasing need for university trained technicians. In some ways service as expert advisers in these fields of trade union activity furnish the most fertile field today for the trained student who wishes to devote his energies to the strengthening of the labor movement.
How can the young intellectual be of service in this field? In what spirit should he approach the task? What pitfalls should he avoid? What should be the attitude of the trade union leaders toward the technicians?
George Soule, of the Labor Bureau, Inc., has attempted to answer these questions. After suggesting some answers, he has asked for comments from others working in the same field. These comments are, in large part, embodied in the text of the pamphlet, in footnotes and in the appendix. The pamphlet thus becomes, in a real sense, a cooperative venture.
The pamphlet does not attempt to persuade students of the importance of the labor movement in the life of today and tomorrow. It assumes that importance. It does not attempt to cover the whole field of intellectual activity surrounding the movement. It is confined largely to the opportunities of the technician, in the broader sense of that term, in the present day trade union movement.
The League counts itself as particularly fortunate in securing this contribution from Mr. George Soule and his colleagues. A graduate of Yale University, 1908, Mr. Soule has been a thorough student of the labor movement for many years past. Since 1918, he has served on the staffs of the New Republic, the Nation and the New York Post as a special writer on labor problems, is the author of a report on the industrial service section of the Department of the Secretary of War, and more lately has devoted his entire time to the Labor Bureau, Inc., as one of its directors. He is co-author with J. M. Budish of "The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry," a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a writer for various scientific journals.
The pamphlet is the third of a series on social problems published by the League. It will not have been published in vain if it helps any young idealist to find his niche in the labor movement and to assist in the onward march of this movement toward a nobler civilization.