George Henry Soule

“ When the railwaymen went on strike, the miners and transport workers said they would have to join forces with their comrades unless the strike was settled quickly, and their pressure helped to bring about a settlement. The same was true when the miners struck. While the Triple Alliance is a powerful threat, it has thus proved itself a little unwilling as a weapon. It is so powerful that the unions themselves have hesitated to use it, knowing that a general strike in all three industries would start a conflict the end of which nobody could predict. It might even end in a revolution. ”

“ The labor army was like an army made up of a lot of separate regiments and divisions, with no high command to plan the campaign. The result was that the labor army was in grave danger, because the employers were likely to pick a time and a place of attack very unfavorable to labor, provoke a conflict with some separate union, and then draw all the rest into the battle, only to defeat them. The only way to guard against this danger was to create a labor general staff, like the general staff of an army.
The general staff of an army does not consist of a few men who issue orders. ”

“ Whether the intellectual has any close contacts with the labor movement or not, the opportunity always is before him to understand it as well as possible, and to spread that understanding in whatever society he happens to move. A scientific and broad approach to the struggles of labor, if it can be made to permeate those classes of the community who are usually fed with calculated misinformation and actuated by heated prejudice in the presence of strikes and other labor troubles, will do much to make possible intelligent progress toward a solution of the gravest of modern problems. ”

“ It is not true that the high mutual expectations of the intellectual and labor are entirely unfounded. The picture which the enthusiast forms of the onward march of labor is not false, it is only immensely fore-shortened and romanticized. If he will but remember that workmen are people, very much like other people, and that their organizations and collective habits are institutions, very much like other institutions, he will save himself much needless chagrin. ”

“ It is true that men and women who have not risen from the ranks are in most unions neither eligible to handle nor capable of handling such important affairs of the unions as the formation of new policies, the making of contracts with employers, the managing of strikes, or the extension of the jurisdiction of the unions to unorganized fields. This does not mean, however, that college graduates are incapable of managing the basic functions of trade unionism if they go through the same training—though of less duration—as do all union officials. ”

“ And yet the engineer finds himself a less and less dominating force in industry. He no longer controls his own time, nor determines the direction of his own efforts. Like a blind Samson he turns the mill for others, often far less strong than he.
The engineer has remained too completely an engineer. While he has been working with machines and materials, others have mastered the human machine in which he is no more than a cog. ”

“ It is probable, at least, that the trend toward industrial unionism will become more pronounced, and that a more aggressive leadership will before many years succeed the present regime of the American Federation of Labor. In addition to this, some look for a drift toward independent political action, toward growth of the co-operative movement, or toward an increase of workers' control in industry. The only certainty is that the unions are facing a bitter warfare forced upon them by the employers, and we all know that under conditions of warfare drastic changes are likely to occur. ”

“ Yet a person who is unfamilar with the concrete machinery of trade-unionism, who has not wrestled with its problems at close range, and who has not understood the heavy responsibilities which rest upon the shoulders of a trade-union leader, is as venturesome in attempting to advise unionists about matters of policy as a raw college graduate would be in criticizing the technical aspects of management in a great industrial enterprise. No one who has not received a thorough education in the labor movement is fitted to assume any of the functions of technical trade union leadership. ”

“ England was the first country in the world to feel the industrial revolution, near the beginning of the nineteenth century, which brought in large factories, machine-production, and the control of manufacturing by owners of capital. The modern labor movement is therefore older in England than in any other country, and trade-unionism there has had a longer experience and more chances to grow big and powerful. ”

“ Looking abroad, he searches for an historic current which seems important enough for him to throw himself into. And soon the labor movement, as reflected in strikes, in manifestoes and prophecies, fills his eye. Here are a multitude of people who also feel discontent, who have a worthy cause, whose onward march is massive and continued enough to bear a sort of grandeur, especially in distant perspective which obscures details and confuses colors. For him the immensely complex British Labor Movement becomes the famous and inspiring Nottingham program of the Labor Party. ”

“ Another factor in the growth of industrial unionism has been the necessity of acting together on the part of established craft unions themselves. If in a certain metal factory there are machinists, iron moulders, toolmakers, metal polishers, and numerous other crafts, each organized in a separate union, it is folly for the machinists to go on strike alone for their demands, and for all the other crafts to keep at work. ”

“ Perhaps the greatest outstanding fact in the history of British labor during the last thirty years has been the organization of the great masses of the unskilled and semi-skilled. The dock workers, general laborers, transport workers of all sorts (including truckmen, street railway and busmen, expressmen, longshoremen, etc.) gas workers, track laborers on the railroads, the lower grades of miners, all these and others have become union members during the past generation, to say nothing of the great majority of semi-skilled in manufacturing industries. ”

“ WHAT LABOR SOMETIMES EXPECTS OF THE
INTELLECTUAL.
Naive members and officers of the unions sometimes have as exaggerated expectations of the intellectual as he has of them. Here is an educated man come to help them. He has been to college and hence knows everything. He knows what is the matter with the world. Give him power and he can do away in a jiffy with poverty and oppression. He has written for a newspaper, and so he can see that the newspapers at last print the workers' side of the case in full. ”

“ The day of the labor editor is just commencing.
Newspapering is a trade. Avoid the set schools of journalism, training for the commercial press. Get job after job as reporter or copyreader on six or eight papers and one news agency in as many cities, including a metropolitan paper, a big small-town paper, and one in a state capital or in Washington. Learn something about the business office—the advertising revenue and circulation—and about the printing plant of each paper you work on. Study the news agencies. Your ambition is to lose your job the minute you have made good on it. ”

“ The last railway strike awakened labor to the fact that all unions are really involved in a great movement such as a strike in a basic industry. The Triple Alliance itself was not inclusive enough to represent the many workers who would suffer or benefit by a great conflict which might arise between labor on one side, and employers and government on the other, whenever the railwaymen and miners go out. A number of unions began to see that the whole labor movement would have to be better organized to control such matters. ”

“ There is nothing labor dislikes more than philanthropy. There is nobody whom the union official despises more in his heart than the "parlor socialist" who is so anxious to help that he will do so for nothing, and whose help is so valueless that it is not worth paying for. Fair professional fees symbolize a sound relationship between the union and the technician—they establish the fact that the technician is there to serve, not to patronize, the union, and thus have a salutary effect on both parties. ”

“ The great majority of these "traders in ideas," as Barbusse has it, have not only had a passionate desire to serve labor in its immediate struggles, but to assist the worker in his age long battle toward a worthier status—toward a higher order of industrial society.
In the early days of the labor movement, the intellectual was of chief assistance to the workers in interpreting labor to itself and to those outside its ranks; in inspiring the movement with confidence in itself ”