Pragmatism and ‘‘Transcendent Vision’’

      In every movement or institution that I have ever belonged to, except the trade union movement, I have felt like a free lance, an individual who could stand over against it, so to speak, and whose main concern was to get his ideas uttered at every cost. In the trade union movement I just feel different. Of course, I do not agree with many of those who are in it . . . however . . . I cannot divorce myself from it any more than I can jump out of my own skin. No matter how much I differ from many of those prominent in the trade union movement, I want to differ with them as one who is just as much a part of that movement as they are.

      —A. J. Muste, 1925

      ‘‘IT WAS QUITE AN EXPERIENCE,’’ Muste recalled in his memoirs, to be driven from his pulpit for holding pacifist views, but it was ‘‘nothing’’ compared to the transition from preaching at a Quaker meeting to the leadership ‘‘of a turbulent strike of 30,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.’’ In the context of the postwar Red Scare, there was ‘‘no middle course’’; by supporting the strike, he had placed himself on the side of anarchy and violence not only in the eyes of the authorities, but also among many of the liberals and pacifists whom he had counted as allies and friends.¹ For Muste, however, the strike was an intoxicating experience. Like so many of his generation and the next, the labor movement became his ‘‘messiah,’’ destined by history to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. Indeed, one can make too much of the religious differences between Muste and the workers he organized and led. Though his idealism may have sprung from a different source, all imbibed the ferment of 1919 with a millennial urgency that spoke of the cultural contexts in which they were reared. Anthony Capraro, an anarcho-syndicalist who was one of Muste’s closest comrades during this period, wrote in the midst of the strike that the death and destruction of World War I also signaled ‘‘the birth-throes’’ of ‘‘a period of creation,’’ of ‘‘renaissance and regeneration.’’ ‘‘As the gospel of Jesus, so is the revolution,’’ he proclaimed. ‘‘It comes from the East.’’² Sidney Hillman, Capraro’s superior in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union (ACW), offered a similar analysis at a mass meeting in 1918: the ‘‘Messiah is arriving. He may be with us any minute—one can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer—if only he listens intently. Labor will rule and the World will be free.’’³

      Still, the Lawrence struggle and the subsequent challenge of organizing the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (ATWA) forced Muste, the religious idealist, to deal with practical questions. ‘‘What does one do in a strike? How do you organize relief? What about pickets? How do you start negotiations? How do you get national publicity? Where do you get milk for the hungry kids? How do you spot a labor spy? How do you start a union?’’ To answer these questions, Muste turned to the pragmatic philosophy of William James and John Dewey.⁴ Though often misunderstood to mean moderate or sensible, pragmatism seeks to reconcile idealism and realism by holding that ‘‘truth’’ emerges out of the dynamic interaction between the individual and the environment, theory and practice, and thus is always subject to change and revision. A distinctly modern philosophy, pragmatism did not view the decline of the self-sufficient individual of the nineteenth century as a tragedy, instead viewing ‘‘the increased interdependence and association determined by a corporate world of large-scale, even global, production’’ as having cosmopolitan and collectivist possibilities.⁵ In these ways, pragmatism dovetailed with the views of Muste’s comrades in Hillman’s ACW, who sought to combine revolutionary commitment with the creation of stable, 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