Jane Addams

“ Commons which shows that the conflict is disappearing from the very exigencies of industry: that the newer organization of industry brings the employer himself into a position subordinate to the trust: the trust is composed of the constantly changing stockholders; the trust can be controlled only by the government which after all in a democracy is composed of all the citizens, a universal class. ”

“ From my own experience I should say perhaps that the one symptom among working-men which most definitely indicates a class feeling is a growing distrust of the integrity of the courts, the belief that the present judge has been a corporation attorney, that his sympathies and experience and his whole view of life is on the corporation side. ”

“ My observation leads me to conclude that the result upon the immigrants of having had their class-consciousness broken into, and the necessity of making new and unprecedented connections with the community about them, is in itself such an educating process that when they reach the second stage in which class-consciousness begins to form again on other lines, the process itself has been so educating that they can't get back to the original position in order to start afresh ”

“ The blame for the actual condition of things is thus transferred from the actual manager of a department to the one next in authority on and on until it reaches the stockholders or that which in the popular mind is a horrible thing, the trust itself. When the blame reaches the trust it must become impersonal, for the stockholders of a given concern change every day with the operations of the stock exchange. When an enemy is impersonal, it is difficult to be bitter, although one may yet be very bellicose and determined. ”

“ All succeeding efforts will be less fundamental and easier to make. People are after all more or less alike, and it is much harder to utilize your prejudices after they have once failed you than it was to break into them the first time. It requires less effort to be friends with your employer than it required in the first place to be friends with your alien fellow-employee if one effort follows after the other. ”

“ The managers in the various departments of such a plant compete with each other and the one who drives his men the hardest, whose department makes the best showing in the reduction of cost, is the one in line for promotion. The manager feels the wretchedness of such a situation very keenly and the workmen under him know how he feels about it. There grows up a certain common experience between them and the men say, "The manager is in the same box with us." ”

“ Commons' paper, one for and two against the contention that the class-conscious struggle is increasing in America.
The first point in the paper which occurs to me to be open to discussion is the statement that as but one-third of the workers are engaged in industrial processes, they alone are subjected to the acute operations of class-consciousness. To my mind it does not follow that the other two-thirds are not also subjected to the same social results of industry. The "industrial conflict" is very absorbing and has many characteristics of a game. ”

“ If you are an Italian and are forced to make friends through the very exigencies of the situation with a Polish Jew representing another nationality, another religion which cuts into all your most cherished prejudices, it isn't so hard after that to make a larger synthesis and include everybody with whom you come in contact. ”

“ When the trust is the enemy it comes to be a matter for governmental action. I suppose one reason for the popularity of the recent federal attempts to regulate the trusts has been the impression that the President is a general leading the nation against a common enemy ”

“ That the first experiences of the immigrants in America doubtless break into their former European class-consciousness, but that later the immigrants are incorporated into the working-class consciousness which is rapidly being formed in America, and that thus an orderly development goes on. ”

“ Certainly it has been apparent throughout all the discussions today that the scholar and the working-man are uniting in a demand for social legislation, and it may well be possible that the amelioration which we all hope is thus being inaugurated will result in a further lessening of the class conflict. ”