VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM ★^707century. Having survived the depression of the 1890s, the American Federation
of Labor saw its membership triple to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904. At the
same time, it sought to forge closer ties with forward- looking corporate leaders
willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. AFL pres-
ident Gompers joined with George Perkins of the J. P. Morgan financial empire
and Mark Hanna, who had engineered McKinley’s election in 1896, in the
National Civic Federation, which accepted the right of collective bargaining
for “responsible” unions. It helped to settle hundreds of industrial disputes and
encouraged improvements in factory safety and the establishment of pension
plans for long- term workers. Most employers nonetheless continued to view
unions as an intolerable interference with their authority, and resisted them
stubbornly.
The AFL mainly represented the most privileged American workers—
skilled industrial and craft laborers, nearly all of them white, male, and native-
born. In 1905, a group of unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusionary policies
formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Part trade union, part
advocate of a workers’ revolution that would seize the means of production
and abolish the state, the IWW made solidarity its guiding principle, extending
“a fraternal hand to every wage- worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland,
or trade.” The organization sought to mobilize those excluded from the AFL—
the immigrant factory- labor force, migrant timber and agricultural workers,
women, blacks, and even the despised Chinese on the West Coast. The IWW’s
most prominent leader was William “Big Bill” Haywood, who had worked in
western mines as a youth. Dubbed by critics “the most dangerous man in Amer-
ica,” Haywood became a national figure in 1906 when he was kidnapped and
spirited off to Idaho, accused of instigating the murder of a former anti- union
governor. Defended by labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, Haywood was found not
guilty.
The New Immigrants on Strike
The Uprising of the 20,000 in New York’s garment industry, mentioned ear-
lier, was one of a series of mass strikes among immigrant workers that placed
labor’s demand for the right to bargain collectively at the forefront of the
reform agenda. These strikes demonstrated that while ethnic divisions among
workers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness could also be a basis of
unity, so long as strikes were organized on a democratic basis. IWW organiz-
ers printed leaflets, posters, and banners in multiple languages and insisted
that each nationality enjoy representation on the committee coordinating a
walkout. It drew on the sense of solidarity within immigrant communities to
persuade local religious leaders, shopkeepers, and officeholders to support the
strikes.
How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth- century
meanings of American freedom?