The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age

5. The End of the Labor Question

5 The End of the Labor Question In Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane Addams wryly recounts her disastrous meeting with Leo Tolstoy. Addams had long revered the Russian’s writings on social reform and made a visit to his farm a central part of her 1896 trip to Europe. But the encounter did not quite unfold as she had imagined . She had hoped “to find a clew to the tangled affairs of city poverty,” new ways to revive the democratic promise of America. Instead, she got a thorough scolding from the great man himself, first for the “monstrous” size of her fashionable dress sleeves and then for her apparent unwillingness to “till [her] own soil.” Addams cringed. Could Tolstoy be right? Could “the wrongs of life be reduced to the terms of unrequited labor and all be made right if each person performed the amount necessary to satisfy his own wants?” she wondered. And “what about the historic view, the inevitable shadings and modifications which life itself brings to its own interpretation?” Chased back to America by this “horde of perplexing questions,” Addams resolved at least to bake bread each morning and thus to rely less on the labor of others to support and feed her. Her conscience was momentarily assuaged, though the question of how her baking would square with the work of “the German union baker who presided over the Hull-House bakery” continued to nag at her. But when Addams returned to Chicago, she changed her mind. “Suddenly the whole scheme seemed to me as utterly preposterous as it doubtless was. The half-dozen people invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the piles of letters to be opened and answered, the demand of actual and pressing wants—were these all to be pushed aside and asked to wait while I saved my soul by two hours’ work at baking bread?”1 Addams means this episode as more than an amusing anecdote. She follows her chapter on “Tolstoyism” with a lengthy discussion of “public activities and investigations,” beginning with an account of the difficulties—and smells— posed by urban garbage. The considerable garbage problems on Halsted Street were social problems that reached past the street and the ward and lay beyond the power of any single individual to solve. In the end, the garbage troubles were somewhat ameliorated—it would be difficult to argue that they were truly ended—by the many small, combined efforts of many individuals that extended across both geographical and class lines.2 Addams’s juxtaposition of Tolstoyism and garbage reform is not accidental. She is contrasting not only two divergent attempts to tackle “tangled affairs of city poverty” but two different historical moments. Addams, unlike Tolstoy, lived in 1890s Chicago, a world marked not by self-sufficiency but by large-scale industry, wage work, and consumption—that is, by interdependence. Addams’s Tolstoyian tale lays out in one amusing incident the transition that defined the 1890s. The decade was, as Henry Steele Commager has argued , not only “the end of an era” but “the beginning of one.” In every sense, “economically and politically” as well as “intellectually and psychologically,” the 1890s pushed the United States into the twentieth century. The continuing efforts to answer the labor question, to rethink the parameters of American democracy, helped propel this transformation. By the early twentieth century , the labor question had produced two new models of democracy—a “democracy in social terms” and a “democracy of choice.” These answers in many ways dissolved the labor question of the nineteenth century and changed it into questions for the twentieth, questions that would set the “pattern to which Americans of the next two generations were to conform, set the problems which they were required to solve.”3 “Democracy in social terms” is Addams’s phrase, though she was hardly the only American to espouse it.4 She came to the idea through an examination of precisely the juxtaposition she describes between herself and Tolstoy. As she struggled with the problem of democratic life in an industrial world, she turned away from the producerism that Tolstoy offered and the vision of society it implied. His producerism valorized an individual’s labor as the source of his social and political value and reflected nineteenth-century American producerism’s stress on an individual’s right to the fruits of his labor and the priority of self-employment over the wage system. For her part, Addams rejected that “republican liberal” understanding...