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.