Radicalism and Labor
Collins, William
RADICALISM AND LABOR By WILLIAM COLLINS THE Communists are having a field-day with present unemployment conditions. Revolutionary speeches and parades make good copy for the press. Police...
...Gompers tells us in his biography that he was in no way connected with the arrangements for the meeting, but was present as an intensely interested working-man...
...Then galloping to the scene came the mounted police, riding down men, women and children...
...This was Gompers's first experience with a Wall Street crisis and he had been laid off at the cigar factory where he was following his trade...
...I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all forces of organized society against a labor movement and nullified in advance normal, necessary activity...
...The unemployment program of the American Federation of Labor presented to Congress and state legislatures since 1921, has just been discovered by the politicians and furnishes them unlimited opportunities for oratorical outbursts...
...Tompkins Square was to be the meeting place...
...As Gompers said: Propaganda was for them the chief end of life...
...Practical results meant nothing in their program...
...The years of trade-union activities in the United States to educate public opinion to their industrial program has no appeal for the heroic ambition of the Communist, whose sole mission is propaganda for the coming world revolution...
...It will be recalled that in Europe the French Revolution and Bismarck's social methods had driven many Germans and Frenchmen to seek the shores of the United States...
...Whenever a few ragged workers gathered in the streets they were beaten and driven away...
...A detachment of police surrounded the Park...
...They raised money, issued circulars and made speeches...
...Gompers jumped into a cellar to escape having his head cracked...
...There were unemployment parades and protests, with the usual political gestures that gave no food to the hungry families...
...A comprehensive statement of the situation and its causes was read at the meeting...
...The nation was industrially paralyzed...
...It was an emergency program for 1873 but it reads familiarly enough in 1930...
...I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds had been woven the experiences of earning their bread by daily labor...
...I saw that betterment for working-men must come primarily through working-men...
...He saw that even the politicians dared not ignore them when they paraded to the City Hall...
...The father of the present Labor Day holiday, P. J. McGuire, a young Irish-American, was in charge with other members of the committee...
...The program called for employment on public works, maintenance money for at least one week for the needy, and the governor and the mayor were to prevent evictions...
...Gompers learned and felt the dread of this folk movement, born of primitive need...
...Meanwhile, thousands of unemployed accompanied their spokesmen to the City Hall and showed by their physical presence the urgency for relief...
...Thousands in New York City walked the streets seeking a job...
...Mayor Havemeyer had promised to be present and address the meeting on January 13, 1874...
...The panic of 1873 was the worst unemployment period that ever swept New York...
...The French Communists saw in the situation an opportunity for propaganda...
...Then Gompers, who was an interested spectator, heard the word that fired his heart and imagination in the age-long struggle against oppression...
...Let us see how long this has been going on by turning over a few pages of industrial history...
...The day before the mass meeting at Tompkins Square, the park commissioner sent an order to the police commissioner, forbidding the meeting because it threatened public peace...
...Gompers reached the Square next morning and found all the people assembling...
...Dreaming of a future emblazoned with seals more astounding than even those of Fourier and Saint-Simon, they could be as little satisfied with anything short of a millennium as a group of poets could be content without the spring...
...He was caught in the crowd...
...Many street meetings of protest by the unemployed ended in tragedy...
...He said: As the fundamentals came to me they became guide-posts for my understanding of the labor movement for years to come...
...The mass meeting authorized the appointment of a Committee of Safety-a name borrowed from the dreaded agency of the French Revolution...
...The city was aroused to the injustice of unemployment...
...The Communists replied that they had been sold out by some members of the Working-men's Union...
...Samuel Gompers told us a good deal of what he experienced when a young men, in his Seventy Years of Life and Labor...
...They were not at any time in accord with labor men of the type of Gompers...
...This group immediately appointed themselves as a provisional committee of the Safety Committee...
...The result gave them the material for a program to be presented at a mass meeting in Cooper Union...
...The press got scare headlines and front-page stories of the Communist speeches that made the city feel it was on the verge of a revolutionary uprising...
...Police were charging down the streets creating a reign of terror...
...The mass meeting in Cooper Union on December 11, 1873, found a great crowd...
...These Socialists and members of the French Commune had formed their various little meeting places to carry on their propaganda of freeing the worker from his class domination...
...The Safety Committee was ordered by the police commissioner to return the permit but none of the committee could be found...
...Police clubbings to the click of the camera furnish Soviet citizens with tangible evidence of the growth of the world proletariat...
...The Northern Pacific Railroad was tied up, and the Erie Railroad went into the hands of a receiver...
...The millennium has a great appeal to the unemployed worker who has been left stranded and helpless by a cold-hearted industrial society...
...They were perfectly willing to use human necessity as propaganda material...
...A group of workers carrying a banner with the words, "Tenth Ward Union Labor" marched into the Park and without a word of warning the police charged, using their clubs right and left...
...The labor men who learned of the situation feared the results for those who would go to Tompkins Square next morning, so they went to every union meeting and wherever the working people were gathered, and warned them of what had happened...
...It was a Christmas without festivity that year...
...The press began hinting at the Commune...
...He felt the importance of the situation and it left an indelible mark for his future activities...
...Soon it was packed and all the avenues leading to it...
...Meanwhile plans had been formed for a big out-of-door mass meeting...
...This is the present background of the industrial situation in the United States...
...The New York police practised continental methods of espionage by invading private meetings and ejecting all of those present...
...The Working-men's Council worked out a plan of dividing what is now known as the Lower East Side, into four sections, to take a census of unemployment...
...There was an unusually large sprinkling of French Communists...
...There were many speeches...
...The Jay Cooke Company and Fiske and Hatch failed...
...It is not new...
...I saw the danger of entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that to experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life...
...The mood and the cause for rebellion were there...
...They were young heroes, determined to play a great part, hence they were unwilling to do the unostentatious, quiet, orderly things that make for constructive progress...
...The Tompkins Square outrage of January 13, 1874, was followed by a period of extreme repression...
...The attacks of the police kept up all day...
...They justified their policy by the charge that Communism was rearing its head...
...The group representing the Working-men's Unions protested against demagogic methods and urged that relief for human beings was the real thing...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 23
