Chairman: I see that you are a little sensitive lest it should be thought that you are a mere theorizer.I do not look upon you in that light at all.
Witness: Well, we say in our constitution that we are opposed to theorists, and I have to represent the organization here.We are all practical men.
This remains substantially the trade union platform today.Trade unionists all aim to be "practical men."The trade union has been the training school for the labor leader, that comparatively new and increasingly important personage who is a product of modern industrial society.
Possessed of natural aptitudes, he usually passes by a process of logical evolution, through the important committees and offices of his local into the wider sphere of the national union, where as president or secretary, he assumes the leadership of his group.
Circumstances and conditions impose a heavy burden upon him, and his tasks call for a variety of gifts.Because some particular leader lacked tact or a sense of justice or some similar quality, many a labor maneuver has failed, and many a labor organization has suffered in the public esteem.No other class relies so much upon wise leadership as does the laboring class.The average wage-earner is without experience in confronting a new situation or trained and superior minds.From his tasks he has learned only the routine of his craft.When he is faced with the necessity of prompt action, he is therefore obliged to depend upon his chosen captains for results.
In America these leaders have risen from the rank and file of labor.Their education is limited.The great majority have only a primary schooling.Many have supplemented this meager stock of learning by rather wide but desultory reading and by keen observation.A few have read law, and some have attended night schools.But all have graduated from the University of Life.Many of them have passed through the bitterest poverty, and all have been raised among toilers and from infancy have learned to sympathize with the toiler's point of view.* They are therefore by training and origin distinctly leaders of a class, with the outlook upon life, the prejudices, the limitations, and the fervent hopes of that class.
* A well-known labor leader once said to the writer: "No matter how much you go around among laboring people, you will never really understand us unless you were brought up among us.There is a real gulf between your way of looking on life and ours.You can be only an investigator or an intellectual sympathizer with my people.But you cannot really understand our viewpoint."Whatever of misconception there may be in this attitude, it nevertheless marks the actual temper of the average wage-earner, in spite of the fact that in America many employers have risen from the ranks of labor.
In a very real sense the American labor leader is the counterpart of the American business man intensively trained, averse to vagaries, knowing thoroughly one thing and only one thing, and caring very little for anything else.
This comparative restriction of outlook marks a sharp distinction between American and British labor leaders.In Britain such leadership is a distinct career for which a young man prepares himself.He is usually fairly well educated, for not infrequently he started out to study for the law or the ministry and was sidetracked by hard necessity.A few have come into the field from journalism.As a result, the British labor leader has a certain veneer of learning and puts on a more impressive front than the American.For example, Britain has produced Ramsey MacDonald, who writes books and makes speeches with a rare grace;John Burns, who quotes Shakespeare or recites history with wonderful fluency; Keir Hardie, a miner from the ranks, who was possessed of a charming poetic fancy; Philip Snowden, who displays the spiritual qualities of a seer; and John Henderson, who combines philosophical power with skill in dialectics.On the other hand, the rank and file of American labor is more intelligent and alert than that of British labor, and the American labor leader possesses a greater capacity for intensive growth and is perhaps a better specialist at rough and tumble fighting and bargaining than his British colleague.** The writer recalls spending a day in one of the Midland manufacturing towns with the secretary of a local cooperative society, a man who was steeped in Bergson's philosophy and talked on local botany and geology as fluently as on local labor conditions.It would be difficult to duplicate this experience in America.
In a very real sense every trade union is typified by some aggressive personality.The Granite Cutters' National Union was brought into active being in 1877 largely through the instrumentality of James Duncan, a rugged fighter who, having federated the locals, set out to establish an eight-hour day through collective bargaining and to settle disputes by arbitration.He succeeded in forming a well-disciplined force out of the members of his craft, and even the employers did not escape the touch of his rod.
The Glassblowers' Union was saved from disruption by Dennis Hayes, who, as president of the national union, reorganized the entire force in the years 1896-99, unionized a dozen of the largest glass producing plants in the United States and succeeded in raising the wages fifteen per cent.He introduced methods of arbitration and collective agreements and established a successful system of insurance.
James O'Connell, the president of the International Association of Machinists, led his organization safely through the panic of 1893, reorganized it upon a broader basis, and introduced sick benefits.In 1901 after a long and wearisome dickering with the National Metal Trades Association, a shorter day was agreed upon, but, as the employers would not agree to a ten-hour wage for a nine-hour day, O'Connell led his men out on a general strike and won.
