American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ its mutual union card exchange that it set up with textile workers’ unions in Italy and Poland.⁴⁹

      The ATWA’s concern with Americanization had to do with the very real ways in which hegemonic notions of national identity were used against them. Employers inculcated obsequious ideas about citizenship through their Americanization programs and through welfare capitalist schemes that sought to foster loyalty to the company rather than to expansive ideals of freedom. More coercively, employers used the bugaboo of ‘‘Bolshevism’’ to break their agreements with the ATWA; they discriminated against former strikers, sped up production, spied on their workers, and sometimes moved production to nonunionized regions. Local and state authorities colluded in the hounding of the ATWA. Capitalizing on the hysteria generated by the Palmer raids, they obtained injunctions, arrested organizers, and shut down union halls. In November 1919, repression of striking textile workers in Utica, New York, culminated in an incident in which the police fired 250 rounds of ammunition into an unarmed crowd of men, women, and children, wounding six of them.⁵⁰ To put it bluntly, left-wing unionism simply did not enjoy liberties such as free speech and the right of assembly.

      The ATWA struggled mightily against the forces of reaction. When ATWA organizer (and ACLU member) Paul Blanshard was arrested in Utica for violating an injunction, he issued his own counter-injunction ‘‘against the Capitalist Class of Utica’’ in which he ‘‘restrained’’ them from ‘‘firing on unarmed women,’’ intimidating workers from joining unions, suppressing free speech, and otherwise denying workers ‘‘industrial democracy.’’⁵¹ In Passaic, New Jersey, when the police turned out the lights in their union hall, union members joined representatives of the ACLU in reading the New Jersey Constitution by candlelight.⁵² Meanwhile, the ATWA expanded its efforts into the Midwest and Pennsylvania, where some mills had relocated to find cheaper, more docile labor. In an ideological offensive, Muste and other union organizers gave speeches and published articles warning workers not ‘‘to be deceived’’ by welfare capitalism. ‘‘Real men have never desired charity, but freedom and justice,’’ Muste wrote in the pages of the New Textile Worker.⁵³

      In the summer and fall of 1919, this hard work generally paid off, and the ATWA could boast of having fifty thousand dues-paying members by the end of the year. The union’s most impressive victory, at least in terms of their desire to obtain the sort of foothold in the textile industry that the ACW had achieved in clothing, was in New York City’s silk ribbon industry where they hammered out a collective bargaining agreement using an impartial arbitrator.⁵⁴ But a postwar economic depression in the spring of 1920 shifted power decisively to the mill owners and forced the union on the defensive. At the first annual convention of the ATWA in April 1920, Muste warned that favorable conditions in industry would not last and urged affiliation with the ACW to provide the union with the institutional strength and stability to withstand the imminent onslaught. He also pursued an alliance with independent textile unions throughout the Northeast and Midwest.⁵⁵

      Yet he could not stem the tide; with their arbitrary power legitimated by the retreating wartime state, the mills spied on their workers, fired members of the ATWA, dramatically cut hours, slashed pay, and refused to negotiate with shop committees or the union.⁵⁶ When ATWA locals responded with strikes, the mills locked them out. Most dramatically, the American Woolen Company simply shut down production for the summer of 1920, and when it reopened in September, it discriminated against union members. Mills in other textile centers followed suit.⁵⁷ Recognizing the ATWA’s fragile state and confronting the same forces of postwar reaction, the ACW retreated from its earlier assurances of affiliation. Unlike the former, the latter would manage to survive the Red Scare; a more established institution, it had managed to impress certain sectors of the clothing industry of its usefulness. Hillman had also established some powerful connections in high political places through his cooperation with the wartime state—in sharp contrast to the pacifist Muste.⁵⁸

      Anarcho-syndicalist sentiment, as well as ethnic and ideological divisions, compounded the union’s woes. It should be noted in this context that syndicalism also shaped Muste’s politics: he had a strong commitment to democracy within the union and believed that the path to workers’ control lay in the organization and action of labor unions—which is why he did not join the more politically oriented Socialist Party.⁵⁹ Yet within the rank and file, syndicalism was often infused with anarchism—a sentiment to which Muste could not abide. Like his mentors Hillman and Joseph Schlossberg of the ACW, he was engaged in a modernist project to bring rationality, efficiency, and stabilization to a highly chaotic and differentiated industry. Anarcho-syndicalism could also intersect with ethnic parochialism and localism. In Lawrence, for example, the local had persistent trouble collecting dues and had to answer to charges that organizers were living high off of the earnings of workers.⁶⁰ Likewise, Muste was forced to respond to rumors that he, Long, and Rotzel were secretly in collusion with William Wood to achieve ‘‘industrial peace.’’⁶¹ Ethnic tensions, particularly Polish anti-Semitism, further hindered the union’s efforts to unite workers.⁶²

      One historian has suggested that the ‘‘naïve’’ leadership of the union’s ‘‘middle-class intellectuals’’ further contributed to the union’s demise. For evidence, he cites the union’s reluctance to stage strikes in the spring and summer of 1920, and argues that this reflected a politics of moderation out of step with the militancy of the rank and file.⁶³ Underlying his argument is the problematic assumption that religious faith leads to moderation. As we have seen, pacifists like Rotzel, Long, Evan Thomas, and Muste risked their careers for their antiwar stance, and showed courage and militancy in organizing and leading the ATWA, which is why they earned the respect and trust of the workers. Muste’s ambivalence about striking in the spring of 1920 did not reflect a failure of nerve so much as his pragmatism—with the union facing unilateral reductions in hours and even lockouts, an offensive strike to double the wages of textile workers and obtain union recognition seemed almost certain to end in defeat.⁶⁴

      Still, there were cultural differences between Protestant pacifists and the largely immigrant workforce; some of Lawrence’s Italian workers, with their strong tradition of anticlericalism, never overcame their suspicion of the ministers.⁶⁵ For their part, pacifists often experienced union politics as an ‘‘assault’’ on their affinity for moral consistency.⁶⁶ Long would ultimately decide that his ideals found better expression in the cooperative movement, where he remained for the rest of his life. Evan Thomas, who served as the ATWA’s organizer in Paterson, observed that his loyalty to individuals rather than to ideas or groups could rouse ‘‘real suspicion from some of the workers’’ in Paterson. ‘‘Many of us intellectual radicals are too introspective and ego-centered’’ to serve the labor movement, he surmised in a letter to his mother. Soon thereafter he turned away from organized politics to focus on his career and family. Likewise, following the demise of the ATWA, pacifists tended to stay on the sidelines of the labor movement, feeling morally compromised in the trenches.⁶⁷

      It would, however, be a mistake to exaggerate the divide between pacifism and labor. Left-wing members of the FOR continued to give the labor movement valuable support, and some of them remained actively involved.⁶⁸ And John Haynes Holmes may not have liked strikes very much, but he defended the rights of labor to free speech and free assembly as a member of the ACLU. Holmes’s approach to the ‘‘labor question’’ was typical of pacifists and mainline Protestants throughout the 1920s: they served as crucial allies of the labor movement, while staking their hopes for industrial and international peace on moral suasion and legalistic formulas like the ‘‘outlawry of war’’ movement and a world court.⁶⁹

      Even so, Muste’s continued and active engagement in the labor movement was unusual. In contrast to many of his fellow pacifists, he rejected the notion that individual conscientious objection alone would lead to peace. He was also deeply skeptical of legalistic and moralistic methods for achieving social change, instead placing his hopes in labor organization, militancy, and solidarity.⁷⁰ СКАЧАТЬ