American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ efficient unions, a project that entailed rationalizing and modernizing industry. The ACW deeply influenced Muste’s ideas about trade unionism and provided the model for the ATWA, which he headed from 1919 through 1921.⁶

      The forces of postwar reaction would ultimately destroy Muste’s textile union, but his philosophy—which might best be described as ‘‘labor pragmatism’’ or ‘‘working-class pragmatism’’—continued to shape his thought and served as the theoretical basis for the workers’ education movement that he led in the 1920s and, later, the ‘‘Musteite’’ movement of the 1930s. As the chairman of the faculty at Brookwood Labor College, the country’s only residential school for workers, Muste and his fellow ‘‘labor movement intellectuals’’ found the pragmatic engagement of modernity, criticism of individualism, and optimisim about social progress as valuable resources in their laborite project. At the same time, they rejected its emphasis on the internal development of the child to the exclusion of collective action and ideals. As Muste put it, teachers must take ‘‘their social responsibilities seriously’’ and articulate ideals of ‘‘genuine democracy and an economic collectivism suitable for the machine age.’’⁷ In that spirit, labor educators made their commitment to socialism explicit and viewed their role as fostering the working-class solidarity and militancy needed to make it a reality. With the support of sympathetic academics, liberals, and leftists from across the ideological spectrum, the workers’ education movement made up a key constituency of the left-liberal coalition that survived World War I and the Red Scare and that continued to evolve in creative ways through the 1920s.⁸

      In many respects, their theory and practice of workers’ education ‘‘anticipated’’ Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and culture. In his prison notebooks, Gramsci would argue that the bourgeoisie maintained its dominance largely through culture and ideology and that cultural institutions such as schools play a role in the hegemonic process by denying the reality of class conflict, producing intellectuals who rationalized the existing order, and giving the impression of facilitating social mobility. Conversely, workers should make education a vital part of a revolutionary ‘‘war of position’’ in which they would ‘‘free themselves from their dependence on bourgeois intellectuals [and] develop and disseminate their own conception of the world and of life.’’⁹ Muste and his comrades in the workers’ education movement developed a similar analysis of education and culture under capitalism and viewed their schools and colleges as counter-hegemonic institutions that would produce working-class meaning and knowledge. As they put it, effective working-class organization was only possible ‘‘when it [was] based upon a labor culture; that is, a mode of feeling, thinking and acting in terms of the problems and aspirations of labor.’’¹⁰ Their efforts to create a counter-hegemonic labor culture in the 1920s challenge historical narratives of the decade as a period of quiescence and suggest that the seeds of the CIO and the ‘‘cultural front’’ of the 1930s were laid a decade earlier.¹¹ Not coincidentally, it was a debate over the meaning of working-class education in 1928 that served as a lightning rod around which the movement for industrial unionism began its open revolt against the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL).

      LAWRENCE was the nation’s largest textile city, located north of Boston on the banks of the Merrimack River. Its massive textile mills lined the city’s skyline and employed over thirty thousand workers, most of them immigrants, who worked and lived under abysmal conditions. Like other mass production industries, textiles were notoriously difficult to organize. The workforce was divided by skill and ethnicity; ‘‘older’’ immigrants dominated lower-level management and skilled positions and ‘‘newer immigrants’’—predominantly Italians, Russians, Syrians, Walloons, and French Canadians—were largely unskilled and thus easily replaceable. The unwillingness of the AFL’s United Textile Workers (UTW) union to organize unskilled workers further undermined and divided Lawrence’s working class.¹²

      With the UTW indifferent and even hostile, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had managed to gain a foothold in Lawrence in 1912, when they successfully led the ‘‘bread and roses’’ strike, a dramatic and often violent confrontation that made the city ‘‘the era’s supreme symbol of militant struggle against industrial oppression.’’¹³ The local disintegrated soon afterward, largely because of repression, but also because the IWW proved itself more capable of leading strikes than forming stable unions. ‘‘Most of us were wonderful agitators but poor union organizers,’’ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalled of their efforts in Lawrence.¹⁴ Still, the legacy of the 1912 strike was important in indoctrinating the revolutionary philosophy of syndicalism among Lawrence’s workers. At the same time, its failure bequeathed a sense that organization, when it came, would need to have a more practical orientation by signing contracts and paying close attention to bread-and-butter issues.¹⁵

      The 1912 strike has obtained almost mythic status in the annals of radical history, no doubt in part because of the involvement of IWW luminaries Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti, and ‘‘Big’’ Bill Haywood. But the 1919 strike was equally dramatic. Like other industries, textiles had experienced wartime prosperity, enjoying record-breaking profits from 1916 to 1918. The greatest beneficiary of all was William Wood’s American Woolen Company, the largest company in the entire textile industry, which had extensive operations in Lawrence. For the first time, mill workers enjoyed year-round employment. Recognizing their advantage, they broke traditional patterns of deference on the shop floor and staged a number of small strikes to gain wage increases. Textile workers were eager to hold on to their gains as the war ended. Mill owners, on the other hand, sought to maintain their high level of profitability, and they began to lay off workers and to reduce their hours as soon as wartime orders dropped off.¹⁶

      It was in the context of this tense and volatile situation that the UTW, under its conservative president John Golden, launched a nationwide campaign for the eight-hour day, passing a resolution calling on the textile mills to begin the new schedule on February 3, 1919. When it became clear that Golden was content to leave wage adjustments to the future, a movement emerged throughout New England textile centers to change the demand to 48/54—fifty-four hours’ pay for forty-eight hours’ work. As workers prepared to strike, the American Woolen Company announced it would honor the forty-eight-hour week but without the wage increase. The tactic succeeded in ending the UTW’s involvement and in undercutting the strike movement everywhere except in Lawrence and, to a lesser extent, Passaic and Paterson, New Jersey, which were also major textile centers.¹⁷

      With memories of the violent 1912 strike still fresh, the imminent standoff in Lawrence was front-page news in Boston. Eager to translate their ideals of nonviolence and brotherhood into reality, the Comradeship sent Muste, Harold Rotzel, and Cedric Long to Lawrence to investigate the situation. When the three ministers arrived on a bleak winter day in January, they found a city tense with excitement and fear. In true pacifist fashion, they immediately set about researching the situation from all points of view, interviewing workers, ministers, professionals, and industrialists, including William Wood Jr. They quickly concluded that the strike was justified; the pay was ‘‘miserable’’ even as the mills enjoyed windfall profits, yet the mill owners were utterly opposed to compromise and the native-born public was ‘‘paralyzed with fear,’’ viewing the movement as part of a plot to Bolshevize the United States. To show their support, the ministers began passing out leaflets explaining the ‘‘facts’’ to the wider public and raising relief funds for the impending strike.¹⁸

      The strike leaders welcomed the ministers’ support. Many of them had been involved in the 1912 strike and knew the importance of outside support and publicity. As Muste recalled, ‘‘we were hailed as angels in these circumstances. They had virtually nobody who could talk English straight, nobody who could write English,’’ and they recognized the value of ‘‘our connections’’ in Boston.¹⁹ Strike leaders had already set up a provisional strike committee composed of representatives from the various national and language groups. Under its auspices, for the first week of the strike, the ministers СКАЧАТЬ