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Even Conservative Unions Have Revolutionary Effects: Frank Tannenbaum on the Labor Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2010

Michael Merrill
Michael Merrill
Affiliation:
The Harry Van Arsdale Jr.Center for Labor Studies, Empire State College, SUNY
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Abstract

Frank Tannenbaum is best known for his studies of Mexican agrarian reform and for his contributions to the comparative history of slavery and slave societies. But as a young man he had made a name for himself as a notorious labor agitator, and he went on to publish two books on the US labor movement, which are worthy of reconsideration as important interpretations of independent trade unionism and political reform. The first volume appeared in 1921 and offered an original perspective on the popular syndicalism that formed such a large, positive element of the philosophy of the International Workers of the World (IWW), to the extent it had one, at the center of which lay the struggle for social recognition on the part of immigrant and (supposedly) unskilled workers. The second appeared thirty years later and provided a thoughtful defense of the private, employment-based welfare and industrial relations system that the New Deal established in the United States. Together the books offer a provocative account of the social and individual radicalism of US-style “pure and simple” trade unionism.

Type
Classics Revisited: Frank Tannenbaum Reconsidered
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , Spring 2010 , pp. 115 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2010

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References

Notes

1. Thompson, Fred W. and Bekken, Jon, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years (Cincinnati, 2006)Google Scholar, 81n6.

2. Tannenbaum's views on these matters, of course, run counter to the once and still dominant radical paradigm that the unions that workers create in their day-to-day struggles betray rather than redeem the revolutionary duty of the working class. The loci classici of the dominant view are Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902), DeLeon, Daniel, The Burning Question of Trades Unionism (1904)Google Scholar, and Lukács, György, History and Class Consciousness (1923)Google Scholar. But similar themes are echoed by many contemporary historians and commentators. For example, see Buhle, Paul, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

3. Tannenbaum, Frank, The Labor Movement (New York, 1921)Google Scholar, xvi. Brissenden congratulated Tannenbaum upon The Labor Movement's publication, observing that he had “done a good job” and that “the book is a good one,” even though it seemed to him that Tannenbaum had “rushed your work through too hastily.” Paul Brissenden to Frank Tannenbaum, August 22, 1921, Uncatalogued Correspondence, Box 2, Tannenbaum Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University (hereafter TP).

4. After reading The Labor Movement, Foster even accused Tannenbaum of stealing his ideas without attribution and at first refused to allow the book to be distributed through his new Communist-syndicalist formation, the Trade Union Education League. Tannenbaum established to Foster's satisfaction that they had arrived at apparently similar positions by independent paths, pointing out that the book was already in press when the two of them had a long talk at the New School in 1921. See G. Brown to F. Tannenbaum, November 6, 1921, and F. Tannenbaum to G. Brown, November 14, 1921, Box 2, TP. For Foster's views, see Foster, William Z., Trade Unionism: The Road to Freedom (Chicago, 1916)Google Scholar. For more on Foster, see Johanningsmeier, Edward P., Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z Foster (Princeton, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Barrett, James R., William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana, IL, 1999)Google Scholar.

5. In his classic account, The Organization Man, Whyte discussed Tannenbaum's Philosophy of the Labor Movement as an example of the mid-twentieth-century American emphasis on “belongingness.” Whyte, William H., Jr., The Organization Man (New York, 1956), 43Google Scholar.

6. A considerable number of the most influential present-day radical thinkers, among them Noam Chomsky, Mike Davis, Michael Hardt, Naomi Klein, Antonio Negri, and Howard Zinn, to name only those best known in the US, acknowledge or evidence the intellectual debts to anarcho-syndicalism.

7. The possibilities of this opening are best explored, beyond Tannenbaum, in John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927), which the philosopher John Herman Randall, Tannenbaum's friend and Dewey's student, has described as heavily influenced by Dewey's conversations with the young radical. From Tannenbaum and Dewey there is a path to “the public” and to “the state” that provides interested anarchists and others with insights into not only how to attack power but also how to exercise it. According to Randall, Tannenbaum “used to visit E. R. A. Seligman, Henry Seager, and John Dewey in their offices before their classes, talk over the theme of the coming hour, and tell them what to teach. Dewey's own bent of mind—and patient tolerance—made him amenable to Frank's instruction, and together they gave a most suggestive course in institutional functional pluralism. This course is best known through Dewey's The Public and Its Problems.” John Herman Randall, “Introduction,” in Tannenbaum, Frank, The Balance of Power in Society and Other Essays (New York, 1969)Google Scholar, xi. “The State,” in Dewey's treatment, is not an abstract or alien entity set over and against “the people.” On the contrary, it is an institution created by and for people in given societies and circumstances to manage the effects of individual actions on others. The “state” anarchists need to learn to embrace, however far it requires them to stray from their roots, is the public agency of Deweyan self-government and self-rule.

8. For more biographical details, see “Introduction: Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969),” in The Future of Democracy in Latin America: Essays by Frank Tannenbaum, ed. Joseph Maier and Richard W. Weatherhead (New York, 1974), 3–46; Delpar, Helen, “Frank Tannenbaum: The Making of a Mexicanist, 1914–1933,” The Americas 45 (1988): 153–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Randall, “Introduction,” in Balance of Power, ix-xiii. For the dispute with his father, see Putnam, George Palmer, “The New Tannenbaum,” New York Times, (June 26, 1921), 68Google Scholar.

9. On the anarchist origins and importance of the Modern School, see Avrich, Paul, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Tresca and the hotel workers' strike, see Pernicone, Nunzio, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (London, 2005), 61–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Tresca on the unemployed demonstrations, see his “The Unemployed and the IWW,” Retort 2 (1944): 23–24. For Goldman on Tannenbaum, see Living My Life: An Autobiography (Salt Lake City, 1982), 523–525. For Tannenbaum on the “Spittoon Philosopher,” see Labor Movement, xv; and also F. Tannenbaum to T. Grant, April 21, 1917, Box 3, Folder G, TP, where Tannenbaum described “the men and women that I knew in the IWW” as “hard working, rugged and aspiring human beings whose life seemed bound up with the struggle of their class to rise above poverty and disorganization,” who were “in human worth amongst the best I know.” A group of “spittoon revolutionists” are mentioned in Cohen, Joseph and Fern, Alexis, The Modern School of Stelton (Stelton, NJ, 1925), 23Google Scholar, and Modern School of Stelton: Twentieth-Fifth Anniversary, 1915–1940), 29, per Avrich, Modern School Movement, 114 and 369 n.11; see also ibid., 184–185, where Avrich discusses members of the group. For a more critical view of Tannenbaum, see the reminiscences of Charles Plunkett, one of the “spittoonists,” in Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton, 1995), 216–217Google Scholar.

10. Tannenbaum was also, for a time, a darling of radical society. Mabel Dodge Luhan remembered him from one of her “Evenings” as “a handsome, serious-looking boy of about seventeen or eighteen” with “a broad white forehead, dark, waving hair and earnest eyes.” He had accompanied Emma Goldman, a featured speaker, to an invitation-only debate at Luhan's apartment about the radical movements of the day. Luhan, Mabel Dodge, Intimate Memories, Vol. III: Movers and Shakers (New York, 1936), 88–89, 96–116Google Scholar; Avrich, Modern School, 121–124. Charmed, Luhan attended every day of Tannenbaum's later trial, and she remained in touch with the young man even after his release. In a later letter Luhan promised to introduce Tannenbaum to Walter Lippman once she came back from the country. M. Dodge [Luhan] to F. Tannenbaum, undated, Box 2, Folder D, TP.

11. On Tannenbaum's role in the demonstrations on behalf of the unemployed, see Roulston, Jane, “The IWW and Events in New York,” Solidarity (August 8, 1914), 1Google Scholar; Thompson, Charles Willis, “So-Called IWW Raids,” New York Times Sunday Magazine (March 29, 1914)Google Scholar, SM2; and Avrich, Modern School Movement, 184–188.

12. Berkman wrote Tannenbaum an impassioned letter urging him not to accept the scholarship offer to Columbia: “I'm sure you are going to waste several years in learning things mostly not worth knowing, partly that ‘ain't so,' & a small balance of which worth knowing you could acquire more thoroughly with much less expenditure of time, effort & money. In other words, it's a relic of ignorance to worship a ‘college education'.” A. Berkman to F. Tannenbaum, May 21, 1915, Box 2, Folder B, TP.

13. On his reading list while in prison, see New York Times (March 11, 1915), 10; and Tannenbaum, “Prison Literature,” The Masses (April 1915), 6. On Grace Childs, see Maier and Weatherhead, “Tannenbaum,” 13–14; also Bernhard Hirschhorn, Democracy Reformed: Richard Spencer Childs and his Fight for Better Government (Santa Barbara, 1997), 9–13. After the interview Keppel is said to have remarked, with respect to his eagerness for study, that “it would be easier to let Tannenbaum in than to get him out.”

14. “Tannenbaum Wins Academic Honors,” New York Times (June 5, 1921). Carman was a member, along with his former history department colleague, Charles Beard, of the Worker Education Association, which Beard and others founded in 1919, modeling it after a similar enterprise that Beard had also helped to found in England two decades earlier. See Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968), 174–176, 288Google Scholar.

15. On his prison experiences, see Tannenbaum, “What I Saw in Prison,” The Masses (May 1915), 8–9; “The Blackwell's Island Hell,” (June 1915), 16–17; and “A Strike in Prison,” (July 1915), 16–18. Also Tannenbaum, “Blackwell's Revisted,” (April 1916), 24. See Tannenbaum, Wall Shadows: A Study of American Prisons (New York, 1921).

16. Tannenbaum, Labor Movement, 187. Henceforth, all references to The Labor Movement will be included parenthetically in the text.

17. Bernstein, Eduard, “The Struggle for Social Democracy and the Social Revolution: 2. The Theory of Collapse and Colonial Policy,” Neue Zeit (January 19, 1898)Google Scholar, and Bernstein, “A Statement,” Vorwarts (February 7, 1898), both in Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896–1898, ed. H. Tudor and J. M. Tudor (Cambridge, 1988), 168–169, 194.

18. See Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, The Holy Family in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 4, (Moscow, 1975 [1845])Google Scholar, [in Chapter 4 on Prodhoun]: “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.” See also Samuel Gompers's testimony before the US Industrial Commission in May 1912: “I say that the movement of the working people, whether under the American Federation, or not, will be simply following the human impulse for improvement in their condition, and wherever that may lead, they will go, without having a goal.” In The Double Edge of Labor's Sword: Discussion and Testimony on Socialism and Trade Unionism before the Commission on Industrial Relations by Morris Hillquit, Samuel Gompers & Max J. Hayes (New York, 1971 [1912]), 125.

19. There are echoes here of Gompers as well. See Double Edge, 98.

20. Labor Movement, chapters XV-XXI, 179–259.

21. Bowles, Samuel, Gordon, David, and Weisskopf, Thomas, Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; idem., After the Waste Land: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (Armonk, NY, 1991); The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, ed. Stephen Marglin and Juliet Schor (Oxford, 1990).

22. The similarity between Tannenbaum's arguments and those of Berkman ten years later is instructive here. See What Is Anarchism, Part Three, “The Social Revolution” (Oakland and Edinburgh, 2003 [1937]), 172–236. See also Rocker, Rudolf, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland and Edinburgh, 2004Google Scholar [1937]) and Pannekoek, Anton, Workers' Councils (Oakland and Edinburgh, 2003 [1946/1950])Google Scholar.

23. J. T. Murphy, the English shop steward movement and later British Communist Party leader from Sheffield, had similar criticisms in a long letter he penned after receiving and reading The Labor Movement: “You appear to me to have concentrated too much attention upon the unions in relation to industry and given too little attention to the relation of unions to the State in the process of struggle.” J. T. Murphy to Frank Tannenbaum, December 3, 1921, Box 3, Folder M(1), TP.

24. “A Radical at Columbia,” Letters to the Editor, New York Times (July 12, 1921).

25. Robinson, Arthur, “Radicals in Retirement,” Collier's (January 10, 1925)Google Scholar.

26. Tannenbaum, A Philosophy of Labor, 3. Parenthetical page references in the text from this point forward refer to A Philosophy of Labor.

27. See, for example, Baum, Gregory, The Priority of Labor: A Commentary on Laborem Exercens Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; and Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the US Economy (Washington, DC, 1986).

28. The other two were William Lloyd Warner's studies of Newburyport and Elton Mayo's human relations school of management. While Tannenbaum seemed to be “working the other side of the street from Mayo and Warner,” who were “truer to the medieval spirit in wanting the nobility rather than the serfs in charge,” as Whyte noted, still “the outlook [was] the same.” All three looked for a future in which the rampant individualism of the recent past would be embraced and constrained by the group. While “they [didn't] agree on which group should do the embracing,” they were “all of a piece on the idea [that] the embracing should be done—although not by the state, for that would be totalitarian.” Whyte, Organization Man, 43. See also Warner, W. Lloyd and Lunt, Paul S., The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven, 1941)Google Scholar and Mayo, Elton, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Boston, 1945)Google Scholar.

29. Tannenbaum, A Philosophy of Labor, pp. 186–191, 198.

30. An excellent illustration of the sort of “participatory representative democracy” required is that engendered and encouraged by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) in Brazil. See, for example, Sue Branford and Bernardo Kucinski, with Wainwright, Hilary, Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil (New York, 2003)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 5 by Wainwright, “Porto Alegre: Public Power Beyond the State,” 107–135. Similar efforts in Cuba and more recently Venezuela, have been marred, in my view, by an overemphasis on executive, not to say dictatorial, powers.