Tramps & Trade Union Travelers

by Kim Moody

Why has there been no viable, independent labor party in the United States? Many people assert “American exceptionalist” arguments, which state a lack of class-consciousness and union tradition among American workers is to blame. While the racial, ethnic, and gender divisions within the American working class have created organizational challenges for the working class, Moody uses archival research to argue that despite their divisions, workers of all ethnic and racial groups in the Gilded Age often displayed high levels of class consciousness and political radicalism. In place of “American exceptionalism,” Moody contends that high levels of internal migration during the late 1800’s created instability in the union and political organizations of workers. Because of the tumultuous conditions brought on by the uneven industrialization of early American capitalism, millions of workers became migrants, moving from state to state and city to city. The organizational weakness that resulted undermined efforts by American workers to build independent labor-based parties in the 1880s and 1890s. Using detailed research and primary sources; Moody traces how it was that ‘pure-and-simple’ unionism would triumph by the end of the century despite the existence of a significant socialist minority in organized labor at that time.

Kim Moody was a founder of Labor Notes and is the author of On New Terrain .

Genres: Labor, History, Nonfiction

330 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Cool_guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tramps and Trade Union Travelers debunks the trope that the American worker lacked class consciousness in the late 19th century, the era when labor and socialist parties were popping up everywhere else in the industrial world. Numerous commentators remarked on this absence, the most famous being the German economist Werner Sombart, who published a book called Why is there no Socialism in the United States?

Many explanations have been put forth over the years. The American mindset, that we are, in the words of John Steinbeck, a nation “not of an exploited proletariat but temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Anyone can make it if they try, most of all thanks to a continent full of free real estate. Other explanations include state repression and the stoking of ethnic and racial division. All this prevented the foundation of a serious workers’ party

The implication is that the lack of a party means the lack of consciousness. This gets it backwards. A party is a tool to direct and organize class consciousness, not create it. There were many attempts by workers to create labor and socialist parties during the Gilded Age, outgrowths of thousands of strikes, supported by a labor press with hundreds of newspapers. And while the labor movement couldn’t be spared the rampant racism that infected the whole of American society, it still seriously attempted to overcome it, understanding that it was an impediment to working class resistance.

The fundamental reason for the failure of worker organizing is “free real estate”: not the promise of cheap land, but the promise of work elsewhere, on the other side of the continent or the next state over. America is enormous. The westward creep of the railroad created new opportunities for capital accumulation. The rugged frontiersmen is a myth. First came the train, then the town; only then did the farmer follow. Capital needed labor to develop these new settlements. Labor was scarce, at first, so wages were high.

In late 19th Century Britain, on the other hand, industry was fully developed. A laborer who lost his job in Manchester due to a downturn would run into the same problem if he walked to Birmingham. In this face of exploitation, there were less options: it made sense to stay put and fight. In the United States, on the other hand, a worker who lost his job due to a lost strike or seasonal unemployment (the author quotes a survey of railroad workers from 1889 that found that the average worker was employed only 147 days of the year) had little incentive not to seek work elsewhere.

In fact, capital depended on the itinerant laborer, even when he terrified the middle classes and was subject to surveillance and control by the state and capital. The notorious Allan Pinkerton, founder of the eponymous private police firm derided the tramp: “shiftlessness, discontent, restlessness all reach in and take possession of him”. The tramps who formed the advanced battalions of the reserve army of labor were reviled. A labor newspaper lambasted the “capitalistic press”, who called the tramps “pests”, for celebrating with “their venal pens…the system that has produced these tramps”.

All of this should be familiar. The steady employment of the postwar era was an anomaly. Capitalism depends on what Human Resources officers like to call flexible work arrangements - paired with a heavy dose of surveillance, from the vagabond passes of Stuart England to the away notification of today. But while the tramps got to see a continent from the top of a freight train, bindles lazily draped over their shoulders, we’re stuck inside, playing Call of Duty and occasionally updating our Goodreads accounts.