The Daily Worker Newspaper, July 10, 1926, Page 10

WB \ i Ve LNT eh 3 e "THE Civil War taught the American workers of that day a number of useful lessons— very much the same lessons that twentieth century European labor learned from the war of 1914-1918. They learned that capital de- clares war, and the workers do the fighting; that capital reaps immense profits from war, and the workers, intensified exploitation. But above all, they learned the effectiveness of or- ganized, united action, and the necessity of meeting force with force. When the time be- came ripe for it, after the terrible misery of the panic year of ’73, when capital was begin- ning to succeed in its efforts at crushing the class organizations of labor that had attained such strength in the years following the war, and was trying to beat labor into complete submission, this war-taught acceptance of force frequently came to expression in the la- bor press. The Workingmen’s Advocate, for instance, a-sober and very influential labor pa- per, writing in ’73 on the use ‘of militia in a current lock-out, and “the determination to substitute contract coolie labor at starvation rates for the locked out workers” declares: “It will not be done without a bloody strug- gle. And if the issue must come in that shape before the American workingman, he will not be found slow to accept it. The rattle of musketry and the belching of cannon has hardly died away from the ear. The scenes of carnage are still fresh in the vision of those who survived thé battle-field; and when it comes to a choice of deaths—by slowly starv- ing, or meeting it in the face of the cannon’s mouth—the American workmen will not be slow to accept the issue. “And when, four years later, the issue did come in just that form,.at the time of the great general strike of 1877, the workers accepted it without hesita- tion. . The years immediately following the Civil War were the years of the firm establishment in power of northern capital. The rapid rail- road expansion of the previdus decade during which the government handed over immense stretches of the public domain to the railroad capitalists without cost; the accompanying de- velopment of markets on a national scale; the destruction of the southern feudal economy ; the great fortunes founded on war-profiteer- | ing; and, above all, the tremendous industrial development of these years, combined to give it complete supremacy both in the state appar- atus and on the economic field. The one effective challenge to the autocracy of capital was organized labor, which was rap- idly organizing on a national scale in line with the national expansion of industry; and every day becoming increasingly conscious of its separateness, its class interests and its rights. With its first realization of the existence of this obstacle to its dream of complete domin- ation and boundless profits, capitalism set it- self to break down this resistance to its royal will by any and every means at its disposal. It was perfectly and brutally frank about its intentions; the pretty phrases of class-collab- oration had. not yet come into vogue. The tremendous mechanical development of these years pointed the way. The multiplica- tion and perfecting of machines, with the ac- companying possibility for the division of labor and the substitution of unskilled for skilled workers in many branches of industry opened up the opportunity for the extensive employ- ment of chéap, untrained labor. Hence “cheap labor” became the slogan of the capitalists, which they advertised and glorified as today they advertise the slogan, “The partnership of capital and labor”; and immigrant contractors kept securing the labor markets of Europe for new and ever cheaper sources of labor supply. A certain defect existed however in the Eu- ropean supply—the ever-present danger that these emigrants, unorganized as they were and strangers in a strange land, might neverthe- less become infected with the virus of workers’ solidarity, and desert to the workers they were meant to replace. Enough cases of the sort were recorded to frighten them; like the in- cident of the 700 Swedes brought to smash the miners’ union in Arnot, Pennsylvania. Most of the, miners,. who were on, strike, against a 10 per cent wage cut‘and the-owners’ demand that they sign an iron-clad agreement.to aban- don the union, were Scotch and English, but they managed to find a Swede to talk to his countrymen. He broke through the company guards around the barracks where the men had been housed, and in just one hour had all 700 of them marching down the road away from the mines with a Scotch miner playing the bag-pipes at the head of the procession. THIS danger, emphasized as time went on by the fact that the International Working- men’s Association (First International) began carrying On a vigorous campaign against con- tract labor and attempting to warn European workers away from sirike localities in the United States, caused American capital to in- vestigate other sources of supply. They turned their attention to China, with its exhaustless supply of cheap labor, and here they discovered a hear approach to capitalism’s ideal of a worker who could exist practically without eat- ing. Around 1869 we find a certain Koopmans- chap, a notorious slave-dealer, hailed as a savi- our by the capitalist press. “It was only a few weeks ago,” exclaims the New York Times feelingly (7-21-69), “that the name of Koopmanschap was unknown to fame! Suddenly it has emerged from obscur- ity. . . and occupies a lofty niche within the nation’s fame. . .” His claim to fame was “the proposed transportation, immediately, of hundreds of thousands of coolies, to supply the demand for labor everywhere, and in every industrial department.” As a shining example of what, will be accomplished by Koopmans- chap’s project, the Times cites the case of a certain woolen mill in San Francisco, where Chinese workers were installed “when the Irish hands refused to work more than eight hours, The firm immediately discharged them and employed the ‘coolies’ paying the latter only $1.00 per diem while to the Irish laborers they had paid on an average of $3.00 per diem.” And the Cincinnati Commercial exults: “Weavers of cotton and silks can be had in China for $2.00 or $3.00 a month. . Wom- en are found in abundance to do the labor of households for their mere bread and clothing. : » . Laborers can be got in the tea district for 6 to 7 centsaday. . .” In addition to its cheapness and submissive. ness, the other great advantage that American capitalists found in Chinese labor was the im- mense difference in language and background and customs that constituted a gulf between the workers of the two races that rendered propaganda almost impossible. Moreover, the slave conditions under which the Chinese were imported, bound them hand and foot to their employers, and left them completely at his mercy. “These Celestials,’’ wrote the Boston Com- monwealth, in boosting the propect, “belong to no striking organization, don’t worry about their pay, and do not presume to dictate to their employers.” Effective use was made of the Chinese in a number of localities in both mines and fac- “tories, in breaking the hold of organized labor. In North Adams, Mass., for example, a shoe manufacturer “determined to free himself of the cramping tyranny of that worst of trade unions,” the Knights “of “St. Crispin; the strongest of the period, discharged ‘every worker and manned his factory with Chinese, whom he kept in barracks within the factory gates, retaining them for ten years until the union menace was at an end. The Chinese contract labor system was not figuratively, but literally, slavery of the worst order, and slavery that was officially approved by the government of the United States. The men were either taken aboard the slave ships, where they were imprisoned below decks, and lashed with the cat-o’-nine-tails on the slight- est pretext, by force, or duped by lying prom- ises. Taking advantage of the Chinese work- ers’ ignorance of the devious legal paths of western civilization, the slave-dealers tied him up-in contracts framed to keep him enslaved for life. For transportation costing about $40. he was charged $300, and with wages averag- ing $8 monthly/*the dealer, with various de- ductions and manipulations, easily managed to keep him eternally indebted. Moreover, the contract stipulated that if he failed to return within a stated time—which of course he never was able to—his family might be sold into slavery under the Chinese law. An American correspondent tells of seeing any number of such families for sale in the slave markets of the large cities. In addition to cheap labor, an extensive use’ be utterly impossible for a striker to get a in his line anywhere in the land after the un- successful termination of a strike. A large number of powerful employers’ organizations sprang up during this period with union- smashing as their avowed object. There are very few of the practices of the open-shop organizations of today which were not known, was made of the blacklist; and it was said fe at least in a sketchy and primitive form to. these associations. WHEN economic measures did not seem to # suffice, the capitalists supplemented them by the use of force, the armed bodies of the’ state being of course at their disposal just as they are today. These were supplemented by the notorious Pinkerton Agency, still active today in stool-pigeon work, which had been founded a few years before the war. Martial law was frequently declared, when it seemed likely that a strike or union organ- The Prelude to the Great Struggle of 1877 - | oO! es RRREEBES OES SET HSSSESEZSSHERESE