The Triangle Fire, Protocols Of Peace: And Industrial Democracy In Progressive

7. Industrial Democracy Meets the Welfare State in Progressive Era New York

7 Industrial Democracy Meets the Welfare State in Progressive Era New York "My FINGERS IS BROKE": WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST} The Factory Investigating Commission (FIC) transformed Protocolism and industrial democracy by bringing in the state. The state took responsibility for policing industry, ensuring humane working conditions, and setting up standard industry practices-all part of the Protocol's agenda for industrial democracy. Having achieved a limited success with this agenda, the FIC moved beyond "standard" labor issues into the realm of social welfare reform. Too often, scholars fail to see welfare reforms as part of a larger labor reform program. In many ways, the FIC's turn to welfare was a natural and logical outgrowth of its evolving understanding of industrial democracy. Having moved from reform successes in safety, sanitation, and health to the failures of recodification, by 1912 the FIC took up social welfare. By then, the FIC had begun efforts to curb child labor and "protect" women workers in New York. Industrial democrats, having failed to find that wedge with sanitation and health that they wanted, turned to New York's immigrant, working-class women and children to provide a successful doorway to the welfare state. In the process, they forever transformed industrial democracy. This transformation in industrial democracy is pivotal in the evolution and development of modern liberalism. In the end, as we shall see, this effort further removed labor from the picture and exalted reformers into penultimate positions of power, transforming workers from partners in industrial democracy to mere clients. The FIC laws for women and children used a moral and racialized language of conservation to argue for "protective" legislation. The FIC's most effective arguments demanded state intervention to protect the nation's "natural resources." This was effective precisely because 189 Copyrighted Material 190 CHAPTER 7 Progressives within the FIC coalition saw childhood and motherhood as sacred.2 Reformers associated with the FIC believed that most workers, especially women and children, were in weak economic positions. They did not have power to ameliorate their condition, nor could they get a fair bargain with employers. No Protocol would aid them. To many progressives, the plight of children was complicated by the failure of mothers to come to the aid of children, even if they worked alongside them. For such reformers, there was little alternative but to step in and "save" both the oppressed children and their mothers, who were seen as simultaneously negligent and exploited. It was with this moral mission that the FIC tread new ground in Progressive Era America. Using the arguments of conservation, tinged with Darwinian discourse, the FIC argued that the state had a sacred duty to "conserve their [women and children's] physical ... interests." Robert Wagner, FIC chair, summed up the new philosophy this way: "The girl of to-day is the mother of to-morrow ... we have to preserve her a little better if we are going to have good future citizens."3 The FIC's moralisms incorporated into legislation a new emerging conception of civilization informed by colonial adventures and the "ordering " of immigrants at home. As historian Gail Bederman argues, changing definitions of manhood at the time led to new theories about civilization, whereby the "enlightened" had a responsibility to protect the weak to prove their superiority, and to guide the uncivilized masses into civilization. Bederman argues that Progressives believed in a system of biological and environmental determinism in which degenerate conditions could produce degenerate races. Reform could "raise" the immigrants, making them Americans, all the while protecting our biological stock.4 For many FIC reformers, trade unions were the best vehicle to reform the abuses workers faced. But the unions' failures in organizing women workers, and the lack of union efforts around child labor issues, forced many FIC reformers to search for a more immediate means to protect these special workers. In doing so, they slowly abandoned their union allies to pursue an independent legislative strategy of their own devising . The case of FIC reformer Frances Perkins is illustrative. Recalling years later in an oral history interview her actions and motivations during this period, she straightforwardly stated: ''I'd rather pass a law than Copyrighted Material Industrial Democracy Meets the Welfare State 191 organize a union." The Triangle Fire had demonstrated just how weak unions and women workers were. She continued: We could drag Rosie Schneiderman up and say, "See, she's the President of...