.


SCI LIBRARY

The Confessions Of A Reformer

Frederic C. Howe



[Part 11 of 11]


CHAPTER 32 / WORKING WITH LABOR


[While at Ellis Island] ...I had an understanding with the department that aliens should enjoy the right of counsel. I had protested against deporting aliens to devastated areas or countries in revolution. But orders of the Secretary of Labor and agreements which I had with him were ignored by bureau officials.[p.326]

...I was through. The Red hysteria was at its height. The Commissioner-General and Attorney General were directing it. I might be asked to carry out any order and be compromised in any promise which I made. There was talk of chartering a vessel and sending a boat-load of deportees back to Russia. Many of them I had personally examined and found held on the most trivial charges. Driven by business organizations back home, congressmen were demanding action, no matter how innocent the victims might be.[p.327]

I had exhausted my power. Even the secretary was being carried along by the hysteria. High officials in the department had resigned; Louis F. Post, the first assistant Secretary of Labor, was being tried by a committee of the House of Representatives. There were some orders which I would not carry out. And I wanted to be rid of political office that compelled compromise.[p.327]

The next day I sent for my personal correspondence. I gathered together records of aliens and personal-interest stories that I had been collecting for five years, and which I had planned to use in a book. I sent for a porter, and together we carried them to the engine-room, where I consigned them to the flames.[pp.327-328]

" I will end that chapter forever," I thought. Then I sat down and wrote my resignation to the President. I left with a feeling of exhilaration. I had entered whole-heartedly into my principality of Ellis Island, hoping to make it a playhouse for immigrants. I left a prison. I recalled what Wendell Phillips said about Negro slavery, that it "made a slave of the master no less than the slave."

When I stepped from the ferry-boat in New York I felt that I was through with politics. I had seen the government at close range, with its mask off; it existed for itself and for hidden men behind it, as the realists in Paris had said. It was as dangerous to the innocent as to the guilty. It was frankly doing the bidding of business. At home as in Paris men said: "The ideals of President Wilson had been necessary to win the war but now that the war is won let us get back to business." That meant using the Department of Justice frankly as an agency to protect profiteers, high officials, and business men who looked upon the government as their own; it meant crushing liberalism by deportations, arrests, a terrorism of fear. This was the democracy that the boys were to come back to from the trenches. There was no place for the liberal in it.[p.328]

But I could not be rid of the desire for things that I had so long wanted. I saw them as a picture, as I had seen the city when I worked with Tom Johnson; the picture was vivid, photographic. I had always seen things photographically. That was the way I wrote. It was like painting a picture out of the mind. And I had a passionate desire for a society of economic freedom, in which every power and talent of man could function freely. I saw the abundant wealth that could be produced with the land opened up by taxation; saw this wealth running freely from one end of the country to the other, with publicly owned railroads operated for service; saw the wealth of all the world enriching the culture of America through free trade. I had a mental passion for a free society, with the state owning a few industries strategic to its life and functioning more as an administrative than a political thing. I hated anything that blocked effort, that levied unnecessary tribute, and interfered with freedom.[pp.328-329]

My passion for these ideas made inactivity impossible to me. I could not be through with politics.

At Paris I had accepted the new creed of labor; I had accepted it as a necessity; had accepted it because of its leaders and programme. A new party was necessary. It was a party of primary producers, of workers and farmers, of men whose economic interests would exile war from the earth, at home as well as abroad.

For some weeks I had been reading in the press articles on a new organization formed by the railway labor-unions. Its purpose was the government ownership of the railroads and their operation by a corporation, the directors of which were to be appointed by the President, one-third representing the railway workers, one-third engineering and executive skill, one-third representing the public. ...[p.329]

I went to Washington and met the leaders of this movement. I found the railway labor leaders to be men of ability, understanding, power -- great executives. ...there were a dozen men of bigger personality than many of the men I had known professionally or in business. And I found that they were far more scrupulous; they fought fair; they took pride in keeping their contracts; they had the old-fashioned moralities of my boyhood. They were often trapped through their respect for the law, their reliance on old ethical standards.[pp.329-330]

I became associated with them. They were fearful of radicals, Reds, revolutionists. They wanted change brought about in an orderly way. Radicals in the labor movement were challenging their authority, were sapping their organizations.

I worked with these men for three years. We started a weekly paper called Labor, under the editorship of Edward Keating. It was soon self-supporting and reached a circulation of five hundred thousand copies. It takes no advertising; it is devoted almost exclusively to labor and labor policies; is ably edited and exerts a powerful influence.

For a time I had charge of the editorial columns, writing on co-operation, banking, railroads, and guild socialism, which the programme of the Plumb Plan League closely resembled. I traveled, speaking for the Plumb Plan, engaging in joint debates and organizing branches.

My enthusiasms took definite form in a plan for mobilizing the power of nearly two million railway employees. They were intelligent, for the most part well paid, courageous, and independent. Such workers could exert great influence in their communities; if they could mobilize all their power in their own interest they could improve their own standard of living. I was particularly interested in co-operation, labor banking, and direct political action.[p.330]

The newspaper Labor provided a forum for ideas. The Plumb Plan had branches all over the country. There was the organization with which to work, and I threw myself into the movement with eagerness.[p.330]

For once I was no longer attempting to be in two camps. My convictions and my class were one, As an editorial writer I appealed to men to follow their own interests, to use their collective power for their own well-being. I was no longer appealing to men of my own class to stop exploiting somebody else. I was urging men to free themselves, not persuading some one to give freedom to others. These men had the power if they would use it. They had billions on deposit in the banks. They had great purchasing power and could organize stores, even factories, for themselves. They could join hands with the farmers, and develop direct bargaining. I began to have the same enthusiasm for this vision that I had for the city. I saw a state within a state, creating its own economic life, massing its own power, using it to build up a co-operative society inside the political state. I had the same kind of dream of order that I had in the city, only it was the order of a class rather than a locality. It was working with a group whose ideals and interests were alike instead of with men whose ideals and interests were diverse.

My interest in a producers' state recalled Denmark, which I had visited some years earlier in my study of experiments in industrial democracy. I wrote a book about this little state entitled Denmark: A Co-operative Commonwealth. It was the story of a country ruled by farmers and workers, men who forty years before had been ignorant, bankrupt, and untrained to political action. They had gone into politics through necessity; the bankruptcy of agriculture had forced political action on them. They had elected peasants and workers to Parliament; had become in time the majority, and filled the ministry with men from their class. They had created a peasant democracy; had all but gotten rid of landlords and capitalists. They stopped spending money on the army and navy and spent it for schools, which had ended illiteracy. There was no ignorance left in this country ruled by peasants. They had almost ended poverty by giving a farm to every man who wanted it and who proved his ability to work it. They had all but exiled middlemen and profiteers. The state owned the railroads and ran them for service at very low charges. These farmers bought and sold co-operatively. They had hundreds of co-operative dairies, slaughter-houses, egg-collecting societies. They had almost gotten rid of capitalists through voluntary co-operation. The landlord had been dispossessed through purchase, and his land distributed among the peasants. Denmark was a living proof of what men in Paris had said: that a diseased society could be brought back to life through the producing classes, and that they, and they alone, would get rid of the things that made for war.[pp.331-332]

Co-operation gripped me as Socialism had not. It was voluntary, open to individual initiative; it trained leaders and minimized the state. Apparently it achieved all the ends that Socialism promised and left the individual free from bureaucratic control. I saw labor and the farmer rising to political power through the training which co-operation gave. The All-American Co-operative Commission was organized, and I became its secretary. It promoted cooperative stores, published bulletins, and maintained a press service. It was supported by contributions from the railway labor organizations.[p.332]

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers had long thought of organizing a Brotherhood bank. The organization had millions of funds on deposit in private banks. It had huge insurance funds, and ninety thousand members, most of them well-to-do. They formed the aristocracy of the labor movement. Mr. Warren S. Stone, the Grand Chief of the Brotherhood, employed me on behalf of the organization to investigate banking. I spent six months in this study. I saw the power of credit in private hands, saw its possibilities when dedicated exclusively to productive uses. Credit was power in the modern world; through the mobilization of the credit power of labor co-operative enterprises could be started, homes built, talent encouraged, and men equipped with tools, machines, and capital. And labor had colossal deposits at its disposal, which only needed to be mobilized and dedicated to new ends. I suggested a cooperative bank with dividends limited to ten per cent; a bank that would distribute some of its earnings back to depositors and that would utilize its resources exclusively for productive uses. The governing board of the Brotherhood met and approved the proposal. The bank was organized and opened in Cleveland in 1921 and almost immediately became a recognized success. In two years' time its resources rose to twenty-five million dollars. Subsequently other banks were purchased or organized by the Engineers in New York, Minneapolis, Hammond, Ind., and elsewhere. A coal-mine was developed, two new office-buildings acquired, security companies organized. Ninety thousand men were using their economic power for themselves, as they had previously used their collective power in wage disputes.[p.333]

The idea of labor banks grew rapidly. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers established three banks on the same model, as did the Railway Clerks and Telegraphers. Other banks were opened by labor groups in New York, Philadelphia, Alabama, California. Soon there were nearly thirty labor banks throughout the country, with resources of close to a hundred million dollars.[p.333]

My political enthusiasm was now for a party of primary producers. Picturing it, my mind exercised its old affinity for fortifying facts and ideas. Such a party was the last step in political evolution. It justified itself historically, scientifically. First, the king had lost power to the landed aristocracy. They had ruled during the first half of the eighteenth century. Then the commercial classes demanded a share in government and formed their own -- the liberal-party. Tories represented landlords -- the old feudal aristocracy; the liberals, the new commercial interests. Both were class parties, legislating for the things their members owned. Farmers and workers formed a natural economic class. They should form a party, send their own members to Congress. There was no other way for them to get recognition.[pp.333-334]

A party made up of primary producers would of necessity serve the great majority of the people. It could not serve privilege; privilege could only be enjoyed by the few. Individuals of the new group might be selfish like other men -- dishonest; but collectively they had to follow the economic needs of their class. They represented the many, not the few. They would have to oppose exploiting agencies and the private monopoly of natural resources.

Bankers thought as bankers, railway-owners as railway-owners; railway employees thought as railway employees. Labor and the farmer would think for themselves; they had to think for themselves. Men did not think disinterestedly in politics; they followed their economic interests. They were moved by elemental motives. Like the amoeba going out for food, man went out for the things he wanted; sought to satisfy his wants by a minimum of effort. That was universal in nature. Moral professions were weaker than instinctive desires.[p.334]

The instinct of a labor party would be to produce as much wealth as possible, to distribute it as equitably as possible; to insure a free field and no favors to themselves and their children. It was my old dream of equal opportunity.[pp.334-335]

Labor leaders, especially Mr. Gompers, resisted the idea of political action. But the open-shop drive and railway strike of 1921, together with the deflation of the farmers by the Federal Reserve system, drove both labor and the farmer into politics. The Conference for Progressive Political Action, financed largely by the railway labor-unions, was formed in 1922, to merge these groups.

I became secretary of the organization, which carried on a vigorous fight in the congressional elections of 1922. We prepared political instructions for primaries and elections; unions were circularized; the labor executives sent their best men into strategic States -- Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana. They demonstrated real political ability. As a result, a half-dozen men were elected to the United States Senate, and nearly fifty to the Lower House. It was my conviction that labor should begin at the bottom, in city and State elections; that in national affairs it should concentrate its power on congressmen and build up a labor-farmer bloc in Congress. I urged the nomination of dirt farmers, actual workers rather than liberals outside of the ranks. Preliminary training was essential; it would be gained in city, State, and congressional elections. Gains of this kind would not be lost. In time we would have the group system in Congress; ultimately workers and farmers, being in the majority, would control it. Then a third party would come. It could probably come, I thought, in no other way.[p.335]

I have never known better political workers than the rank and file of the labor movement, or executives more intelligent than its leaders. There were timidities among them, conflict and differences, but no bitterness.[p.335]

They were like men learning a new trade, something outside their experience that they would willingly have been relieved of if there were any other way. In the issues they stood for, in the programme they wanted for themselves and others, there was an instinctive desire for right things; for legislation for all of the people rather than emphasis on trade-union demands. There was real wisdom. They threshed things out in the open. Their demands conformed to democracy, to equality, to justice, criticism of them could not relate to intelligence, justice, or the property of their demands; it related rather to too great respect for men, for authority, for things outside their own lives. They feared to move too fast; they were willing to accept favors from others rather than seize rights themselves. That is the weakness of labor. It will remain so for a long time until the old psychology of hope for the individual passes, and labor comes to see that no matter what happens to individuals, it will always be a class by itself. When labor realizes that it has to look after its own interests, as do all other classes, then it will become a menace to the existing party system. Injustice, such as the farmers suffered in 1921 and 1922 by the action of the Federal Reserve banks, the injustice that labor experienced through the decisions of the Railway Labor Board and the "open shop" drive -- will drive home this realization. Labor is disinclined to politics. It will be forced into politics and will become politically powerful through the injustice of the existing system. Like other classes, labor prefers to have some one else look after its political activity. It will only cohere through some compulsion outside of itself.[p.336]

In working with labor I felt a satisfaction that I had never before experienced, and a sense of greater personal integrity. I made friends with men who faced life without confusions. They were the kind of men I had known as a boy, kindly, generous, courageous. They spoke straight and fought fair. With them I wrote without qualifications, without considering whether I would be misunderstood. ...Association with them is one of the outstanding experiences of my life.

The election of 1922 showed that labor could mobilize its power. It showed the possibility of union with the farmers; time alone was needed for the inevitable steps that should bring them into united political action. Reaction had to run its course. Privilege would have to disclose its indifference to democracy before America would accept the inevitable dividing line of politics between those who produced wealth and those who exploited it.[p.337]

La Follette's campaign of 1924 drew me deeper into the movement. I traveled with him on his speaking-tour. In Boston and Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit, St. Louis and Minneapolis, the largest halls were packed, with thousands of people standing outside. If a political movement could be gauged by enthusiasm, it seemed from the outpouring of people that he was going to receive a tremendous vote. Both the farmers and the workers seemed to be supporting him. Corruption in Washington, the high tariff, high railway rates, the oil scandal, the wide-spread agrarian discontent augured victory for his unquestioned integrity. But fear is one of the assets of the prevailing system. People do not always vote as they shout; they do not even vote as they want to vote. Iowa, California, Kansas, Nebraska rolled up their accustomed majorities for the Republican ticket. But the movement has started. It has a following of nearly five millions; it will require time to overcome inertia. No man can call into being a new party; it will come from economic and biological forces. The people will have to learn to use the ballot as they use their hands and their brains to satisfy their wants. Morality does not change men's politics; my class cannot be brought to do justice; justice will come through the efforts of those to whom it is now denied. Justice has never been given to people; they have had to take it for themselves. From the beginning men have had to fight for equality of opportunity; they will have to fight for it, I believe, to the end.

CHAPTER 33
BEGINNING AGAIN

Satisfied as I was with my new work there was something I more ardently wanted. It seemed socially indefensible, for it related only to myself. I wanted to live on the Nantucket moors, to be quit of conflict; to live content with simple, friendly contacts, with horses and dogs, with a fire on the hearth. I wanted to build something with my hands; to plant things and see them grow. These reveries were warmer than any other desire. They had something to do with my deeper self. Perhaps they were a throwback to my forbears, to generations of blacksmiths, carpenters, and farmers, men who had lived close to the soil -- my people had been peasants in England, Scotland, and Ireland. It may have been the lure of the Scotch moors that called me to Nantucket. Each year I waited impatiently for the summer to come; each fall I left my moorland cottage with greater reluctance.

In the summer of 1920 I had a chance to buy an old farm. On the land were a large farmhouse, a big barn, and a number of other buildings. A plan surged up from somewhere in me that I would build a community; would plant and beautify it, make a free and happy place for myself and my friends. I would have a herd of my own -- for along with my desire for personal freedom was a need for people -- people who also wanted to escape other herds and be themselves. That was the thing that interested me -- finding myself; and I wanted to be surrounded by people who were interested in finding themselves who wanted to understand life and its meanings.

I laid out a quadrangle on the edge of the moors; cottages were built around it; the barn was turned into a tavern, with an upper story like a sun-parlor overlooking the moors and the sea. There I planned that we would dine, talk and have music and dances intimately, informally, as if we were around a fireside. We would have a little world of our own, bounded on four sides by the sea, unconditioned by any other herd than our own; and we would invite people to share it with us who had something to say about the things we were interested in.

James Harvey Robinson came down the first: summer; other men came and talked about science, philosophy, literature and art, politics and international relations. A hundred-odd young people came in September on their way to college. The next year the school expanded into ten weeks. Some one named it the "School of Opinion." What I was unconsciously looking for was wisdom; I could not find it alone; I wanted other people to be looking for it with me. I would have liked to call it a "School of Wisdom," remembering Count Keyserling's school at Darmstadt in Germany. But I was inexperienced in knowledge of myself; hesitant about believing in ally subconscious urge; my life had always been shaped by the opinions of others, the groups and classes with which I had lived. I had run away from self-questionings; had evaded the solution of personal problems in activities, movements, causes, which had never completely expressed my nature and had sometimes been in conflict with it. I had rationalized about life rather than found it. Building, planting, living in the open, in contact with fishermen, farmers, and workmen, I found a new sort of adjustment. It seemed essential that others should be doing and enjoying the same things; perhaps I wanted them to fortify me in the rightfulness of my enjoyment.[p.341]

The name "School of Opinion" stuck. It was as good a name as another. I had guesses about the wisdom that I was looking for, not overtly; it might have little to do with facts, statistics, information; less to do with careers and getting on in the world, not much with zeal to make the world better. It had to be gotten mostly out of oneself. Buildings, endowments, and trustees did not aid universities to impart it. Grown-ups like myself found it obscured by various impedimenta of life; young people did not know that academic instruction was bare of it. The School of Opinion should provide an atmosphere of simplicity and intimacy, in which varying opinions, freely expressed, might give hints of wisdom.[pp.341-342]

The experiment captivated me. Each year my submerged chromosomes became more insistent; they asserted themselves in my reveries, in my thoughts of old age. Each year my escape from political activities was of longer duration. Each summer was a new experience of friendship with others and comradeship with myself such as I had never known before.

This long history of changing view-points might seem to argue that I am disillusioned with former convictions and hopes. But the reverse is true.

I still believe in liberalism, I believe in keeping the mind open to everything that is moving. To me liberalism is open-mindedness.

I still believe in education. It is not merely a matter of books or of schools. The best education is derived from life and human contacts. Education can be best gained from great men, not alone from men in educational work.

I am not through with study. I want to study in connection with other books which I hope to write.

I am free from the strain of money-making. I have no desire to be rich or to make more money than is demanded by the simple existence I have chosen.

I believe in ideas; I believe in the single tax as intensely as I ever did, but I think that the single tax as well as other reforms in line with freedom will come through the rise of a new political group that will instinctively demand it.

I began life with a sense of responsibility for my own soul. I returned to the same sense of responsibility thirty years later. Then my concern was as to the hereafter; now my concern was pre-eminently with to-day. Then life was conditioned by fear; now it is conditioned by desire. I was concerned with the poverty of others; now I am concerned with the poverty of my own undeveloped experiences.

Unobligated to movements or to reforms, I find a kind of verity that I did not know before. I have few mental conflicts and get a warmth and joy out of life that are new to me. As a boy I had wanted to be a newspaper reporter, had abandoned reporting for the law with reluctance; nothing subsequently gave me the satisfaction that I got from newspaper work. In a deeper way I now find the same content in living as I choose and being myself. I respect my previous activities, and would not want my life to have been without them. I believe in reform, but prefer the reform that is taking place within myself.

And at fifty-odd, with a conscience that still troubles me often, I spend my summers on the island and my winters in Europe. A lifetime spent in making good in material ways, in political struggle, and moralistic reform, leaves me aware of gaps in personality; of a fashion of perceiving life fragmentarily. I am committed to such beauty as I can find, to harmony within and without, to friends and the things I love. I have more to learn than the time that is left suffices for. Yet I realize that only a beginning is possible to any man.



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