American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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they drove to Lamont’s home where the magnate began cursing him as an outside agitator who had created the trouble in Lawrence. After a while, Muste asked, ‘‘Is this what you got me here for?’’ ‘‘No,’’ he replied. ‘‘How can we settle this goddamn strike?’’ After Lamont assured him that he spoke for all of Lawrence’s mills, Muste returned to the strike headquarters to announce that management was ready to settle with a 15 percent increase in wages and no discrimination against strikers.42
After the strikers joyfully ratified the settlement, Muste focused on channeling their enthusiasm into a solid industrial organization. This was a huge educational and cultural undertaking, for workers with traditions of shop-floor militancy and strikes did not necessarily translate into reliable union members.43 Moreover, as Muste was fond of saying, the ATWA was like a ‘‘proletarian League of Nations’’ and while differences in language, nationality, and custom could be overcome, they presented a constant challenge.44
TO overcome these ethnic and ideological differences, as well as a culture of resistance centered on the spontaneous strike, Muste and the ATWA leadership drew upon the example of the ACW and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), both of which stressed the importance of building a union culture. Revolutionary idealism alone was not enough, Muste argued; strikes should be supplemented by ‘‘a great deal of quiet educational work’’ to give workers practical skills in union organization and to foster a common workers’ culture. By offering members services that met ‘‘all their varied needs’’ as human beings, such as recreation, entertainment, and housing, Muste contended, unions would ‘‘hold the worker to his union and so build up labor morale.’’ It was ‘‘fundamentally bad to have these services handed to the workers from . . . above.’’ Workers must be prepared for the future, when they would run industry and society by themselves.45 Thus, in that brief period from 1919 through 1920, the ATWA locals not only led strikes and organized shop committees, they also opened union halls, developed youth programs, sponsored lectures and classes for adult education, formed consumer cooperatives, and hosted festivities like picnics and dances, all in an effort to build up a union culture.46
In organizing schools, the ATWA also sought to counter the influence of the Americanization programs set up by employers and the public schools as part of the nativist sentiment that swept the country after the war. According to the ATWA, the language of Americanization ‘‘cloaked’’ a determination to exploit workers and preserve the status quo. In contrast to racist and deferential notions of citizenship, the ATWA and its supporters constructed a pragmatic definition of Americanism, viewing it as an inclusive, collaborative process that was constantly ‘‘in the making,’’ as Harold Rotzel put it. ‘‘I, for one, am for a rapidly changing Americanism which will represent the people of America and make democracy real where the people spend so much of their time—in industry,’’ he wrote.47 ATWA educational programs thus sought to teach ‘‘in a spirit . . . of equals working out a problem together,’’ with the recognition that ‘‘what the alien knows’’ would help make American life ‘‘fuller and better.’’48 Significantly, its cosmopolitan understanding of Americanism was embedded within a working-class, revolutionary internationalism. Reflecting this spirit, it sought to organize rather than exclude immigrants and to build relationships with textile workers across national borders—such as 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