American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935

1. Introduction

• 1 • Introduction According to David Montgomery, prior to World War I, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) defined the parameters of legitimate trade unionism.1 The government crushed radicalism during and after the war, and the AFL lost the influence that it wielded during the Wilson administration . In the years between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, however, the independent railroad brotherhoods and their partners in the American Federation of Labor–Railroad Employees Department (RED) challenged and surpassed the main body of the AFL as the most articulate, active voices of American labor, and helped to shape the future relationship between the federal government and workers. Organized railroad labor emerged from World War I both politically and financially stronger than it had been at any time in its history. By 1920 union ranks had swelled to five million, a 74 percent increase over the previous decade.2 Railway workers contributed mightily to the war effort and they had obtained uniformity in work rules and conditions. These gains were largely due to the operating practices of the United States Railway Administration (USRA), which had controlled the carriers from late in 1917 to 1920. The necessity of keeping the trains operating was the government’s primary motivation during the war and thus it was willing to grant concessions to labor. Yet railway workers, along with the rest of organized labor, faced a crisis when the fighting ended because their wartime gains were in jeopardy. Railroaders feared that their advances would be lost when the USRA returned control of the carriers to management, which it was legally bound to do within twenty-one months of the end of the war. Congress faced a difficult question: how to return the carriers to private control and reconcile labor’s 2 Chapter 1 desire to maintain its organizational advances with management’s desire to assert full authority? Ellis W. Hawley notes that some historians have argued that an “organizational revolution” was under way by 1917 that was shifting power from old elites to financial institutions, corporate bureaucracies, and functional or occupational organizations.3 In the railroad industry, labor unions fought with corporate elites to retain their recent gains. The government contributed to the organizational revolution by undertaking a greater role in managing a segment of the American economy. The railroad unions used the language of industrial democracy popularized during the war to frame the debate to their members and the public. Joseph McCartin argues that industrial democracy was significant during World War I because it gave voice to workers’ demands for organization in mass industries, which was also linked to the emerging regulatory potential of the federal government.4 McCartin contends that after the post-war wave of strike defeats, labor did not turn again to the state again until the 1930s.5 I disagree with McCartin on the latter point. I argue that the notions of industrial democracy did not die in the wave of post-war strikes, but were crucial to the brotherhoods’ political efforts throughout the 1920s. The railroaders linked the need for workplace rights, such as collective bargaining, with their rights as American citizens. Many Americans viewed the war as much in terms of bringing democracy to themselves as to the citizens of Germany.6 American workers lacked basic rights in their places of work, which violated the nation’s democratic principles. The post-war union defeats bolstered their determination to assert their rights as American citizens through electoral political action. Thepoliticaleffortsofrailroadunionsintheinterwaryears,especiallyupto 1935, illustrate the intensity of labor militancy in a period that historians have generally considered void of such activity. Railroaders were central figures in transforming pre-war Progressivism with its notions of “individualism” and industrial disorder and inefficiency7 into twentieth-century liberalism. Industrial democracy was also central to this transformation, as was reliance on the state, although much of the new labor history has deemphasized the role of the state. Colin Davis argues that between 1912 and 1922 the state was a catalyst for shifting power relations between itself, labor, and capital that brought about a profound transformation in American society that affected workplaces, union halls, corporate offices, and political corridors of power. Introduction 3 He writes, “The state action played a critical role in this metamorphosis.”8 I argue that through political activities, the railroad unions prompted the state to remain a catalyst of change beyond 1922. Steven Fraser...