3 West 16th Street, New York City

200

CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE:

M. H. HEDGES, Director, Speakers' Bureau, affiliat-
ed with International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers; member, staff, Electrical Workers' Jour-
nal.

ISRAEL MUFSON, Secretary, Philadelphia Labor

College.

CHARLES L. REED, Educational Director, Salem

Central Labor Union, whose organization is carry-

ing on a fine piece of work in practical workers'

education.

A. J. MUSTE, Chairman, Faculty, Brookwood Work-

ers' College, whose wide knowledge of all groups in

the Movement makes his contribution of especial

value.

B

Eyes on the rails, testing hammer in hand, the track walker by day inspects the railroad's right of way and makes minor repairs. At night his task requires even more skill.

His patrol is then reduced in length, the number of his tours is increased, and all his attention is concentrated on safeguarding the long trains that rush by in the darkness.

EHOLD the above piece of advertising art! Fasten your gaze upon it. It is taken from the anti-Labor "Saturday Evening Post" of November 6th-part of a full-page ad of the Pennsylvania Railroad, head and front of Scabbery.

In words that sob and thrill, this enemy of the workers recounts the heroic deeds of the men who guard its trackway. Neither heat nor cold, blazing sun nor biting wind or tempest, halt them in their eternal round of watchfulness. Out of this wondrous story, we are led to feel completely at ease in traveling on the Pennsylvania lines.

BUT-ah! what a word-what do these faithful souls,

so widely sung, receive for their careful labors? ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS a month, or thereabouts! And the Pennsylvania Railroad, with its non-union mechanics. has the world's record for big and complete wrecks.

Here is part of the challenge, brothers. It is up to us to nail lies of this sort on the head. The daily press and standard magazines are full of them. It is part of the job before us. Let us get into the scrap. Use the "hidden men" mentioned in the following article; Inform ourselves on the schemes and resources of the Open Shoppers, such as Mr. Dunn gives us. With this knowledge: our communities, educate the unorganized, and give no quarter until Unionism is re-established In our basic Industries!

arouse

M

I.

"SELLING" THE UNION IDEA

OST all of us have had the experience of growing fearsomely angry over trifles. What Jerry says to us may make us laugh, but when Tom says it, we boil inside, and lash out with first or tongue. Tom just somehow grates on us. He's a fine He's a fine fellow, and all that, but we just can't get along with him. It isn't so much what he says, as the way he says it. When we analyze it thus, we are admitting that communication is not a mere matter of words. Communication is a matter of a good deal more-hidden elements which may exist without our knowing it between individuals. Let us, for sake of discussion, write it down thus:

Communication is a matter of

Words Ideas Emotions

For want of a better word, we will call all these mysterious sub-conscious points and currents of attraction and antipathy between men, by the common word, emotions.

It is upon an understanding of these inner hungers what is usually lumped under the expression "human nature"-that success in union organization depends. In the commercial world, the organizers for employers and for Big Business have a phrase of which they are very fond. They speak of "selling the idea". If you study their salesmanship you will find that the means by which they sell ideas is through an appeal to fundamental emotions.

Take down the SATURDAY EVENING POST and study the advertisements a little while. Note how many turn upon sex appeal. "The skin you love to touch"; "Preserve that school-girl complexion"; the car the lady of the house delights in owning; the cigarette that your sweetheart loves to have you smoke; and the suit of clothes that makes you look strong, aggressive, handsome and very male. Here are ads that also appeal to everyone's desire to be superior;-most all the advertising of correspondence schools is of this kind, and the religions of uplift, while much of the advertising of toothpaste and antiseptics is an effort to play on a man's sense of inferiority. A prominent radio firm tries to sell its product by describing the instrument in terms of massiveness, power and durable strength, qualities we all respect. The unconscious grip of beauty upon our senses is often used as a bait to capture our allegiance to merchandise. A recent advertisement for Duco paint was done in color. Down the center was splattered a manycolored waterfall. There is no real connection between cascades and Duco, but they are connected in our experience by the subtle publicity man, and forever after we are prejudiced in favor of the paint. These, then, are some of the fundamental appeals made by advertisers:

to sex, to the desire to be superior, and to sensuous beauty.

We know how in the last presidential campaignand in the campaign before that, and in the one before that-in fact ever since Mark Hanna's squat, sinister figure walked upon the political scene, fear has ruled the vote. In doubtful states, in 1924, the word went out through department store heads, through bank heads, through political heads, that if La Follette were elected, factories would be shut down and devastation would walk the land. It's an old ruse, but it never fails. Our reason may tell us that La Follette should be elected; our loyalty to a noble leader may assert itself, but when the old primitive fear for self-preservation begins to wake, we march right up to the ballot box and vote for Cal and prosperity.

Politicians don't make only an appeal to fear for the job. They prey upon other subconscious fears. Sexjealousy, for instance, ruined the Non-Partisan Political League in the Northwest. The whispering tongues, tattling, tittling, insinuating that free love was the sole objective of Townley and his crowd drove thousands away from the League. The same innuendo was used against Brookhart this year in Iowa. No one doubts that polygamy prevails in practice pretty generally in all strata of society, and yet "nationalization of women" has lost more friends to working-class Russia than nationalization of mines.

So the hidden man rules all of us. He rules us against our wills, against our reason, our judgment, against our own self-interest.

One would think that most men could learn to act out of their own self-interest. But it is not always true. Thousands of workingmen throughout the United States in company-unionized shops are today acting against their own self-interest. For they are beset by appeals to one or another deeply-inlaid sentiment: to everyone's natural desire to be loyal; or to everyone's natural desire to have comfort and beauty; or to everyone's natural pride in himself.

II.

APPEALS THAT MOVE MEN

It is proposed further in this brief and necessarily disconnected study to consider those appeals to funda

mental emotions that the labor movement has made to men. For it must not be supposed that a movement as large, as cohesive, as successful as the union movement is, can triumph over the obstacles, the daring and powerful opposition it has, without having engaged men's profoundest emotions.

It is proposed also to see if there are not other appeals the labor movement can legitimately make that it is not now making, which will widen its influence.

Most obviously, the first appeal organized labor makes to men is that to intelligent self-interest. We know men do not always act out of self-interest. Indeed, we might

pause right here to read a large group of political philosophers a lecture, for these philosophers assume that these men act out of self-interest. But they don't. Or ganized labor has taught men to do this necessary thing. For what kind of a world would it be, if suddenly we all started to act against our own self-interest? We would become a race of slaves and morons.

Second, organized labor has appealed strongly, to what Veblen calls the instinct of craftsmanship. Here is the strongest reason why the craft union idea endures. Men respect and love good workmanship. They will fight for the right to perform a good, workmanlike job. The union has always been hospitable to this sentiment in men. And it is the fact that mass production and the automatic machine have killed craftmanship which makes organized labor so cold to their highly touted virtues. Third, organized labor has appealed to men's gregarious instincts. Call these instincts the propensity to work together, the comradely or brotherly motives. They are stronger than we think. German and French soldiers fraternized in No Man's Land, and had to be whipped back to the trenches in order to take up the work of blood-letting. They would have preferred to be bending shoulder to shoulder over jobs at farm and mills. No doubt much of the real dissatisfaction with the present order of society arises because it does not give enough expression to the cooperative spirit.

Fourth, the labor movement has appealed to man's sense of the heroic. It is untrue that men love only luxury and ease. If they did, who would go to war; who would search for Arctic lands; who would build bridges and dig a subway and erect skycrapers? William James has written brilliantly of this human habit in his "Moral Equivalent of War". The sacrifice, the struggle, the anonymous service that is part of the daily routine of the labor unionist's job intrigues men just as parenthood intrigues men. Militant types-men like Gompers, Debs and Liebknecht-make their strongest appeal to the rank and file of the labor movement, for they incarnate the spirit of the struggle. The charm the labor movement is having for the youth of the world is in part the spell exercised by hard, soul-striving sacrifice and labor.

III.

THE PAST, POWER AND PIONEERING Organizers for labor unions could well stress other sets of values than those already enumerated. To be sure, much of the practical organization work is done under the lash of immediacy. The appeal to self-interest, to necessity, must be made, and often is enough to carry a man into the union. But getting a man into the union is only a part of the organization job. It is to make him

stay organized, make him a union man, and his children and children's children union men that is the real task. This, of course, is a matter of education, and here is where the Workers' Education Bureau and publications like LABOR AGE can be of great help. They can stress what might be called the secondary appeals of the labor movement. They can "sell" the labor union to the labor unionist. They can make every man, woman and child glad and proud that there is a federation of workers touching hands across the world in pursuits of peace. How to do this?

First, we can appeal to every man's respect for the past. Ancestor worship is still a driving force in human lives. What about the past of labor? Who are the labor leaders of yesterday? Where is there an adequate story of the struggles of past years? We need labor poets, novelists and historians. Most of the chronicles of labor have been written by professors who have treated it as a surgeon treats a patient under the knife. The heroic, ludicrous, human, ridiculous, obscene, and tragic everyday stories have gone unrecorded. We should see that better records of present struggles are kept, for the present is to be tomorrow's past. It is to be hoped that publishing houses interested in labor's brave and gay tradition will multiply. It is hoped that labor plays will find their way to Broadway theatres and labor movies will speak to millions.

Second, we can cease to be ashamed of the labor movement. We can cease to be apologetic about it. We can cease to think of manual labor as inferior work. We can give up the white-collar spirit of cringe and smirk. We can make the appeal not so much in the "spirit of help the underdog" as in the spirit of "join the pioneers."

Third, we can increase the individual unionist's sense of power. This, of course, is what the union does anyway, but we can make each individual unionist conscious that he is a more important citizen, a more effective citizen by virtue of his union. All unions as they cooperate affect national, industrial and political policies. Unorganized citizens, unless peculiarly situated, are powerless to affect the direction of industria! society. Men organized are not powerless. Unions do. The civic and public force of union organization can act as a strong selling point to most workers.

I have been describing what is happening in a small way. I predict that it will happen in a large way. Leaning on these larger values of collective life and effort, strengthening them, we can go forward more rapidly and confidently to union organization. Organization, we must remember, is more than enlisting huge numbers. It is discovering and isolating the labor tradition, then battling down obstacles to the growth of that tradition, and feeding it with the food it needs for mature growth.

"In his inimitable style, Mr. Pierce E. Wright, Secretary of the Associated Building Employers of Detroit, will recite the manner in which the industrial and business executives of that city 'anticipated' Mr. Green's visit."

W

E quote from the program of the Tenth SemiAnnual American Plan-Open Shep Conference which opens in Dallas, Texas, as this magazine goes to press. We are very sorry we shall be unable to attend as we should like to hear Mr. Wright report to the open shoppers on his various manouvers against the American Federation of Labor Convention when it met in Detroit in October. Item Number One on the program is "What Happened at Detroit." The American Plan heroes of the automobile metropolis will tell their fellow business men just how they did it. This ought to be a juicy session.

Just what is this American Plan-Open Shop Conference? Workers ought to know something about it for it seems to be the most bitter and blatant of all the national organizations dedicated to what they ironically call "freedom in employment". In last month's LABOR AGE we indicated what this "freedom" means-the socalled God-given right of John Doe, steel worker, to enter into individual bargaining relationship over wages, hours and working conditions with the United States Steel Corporation.

The American Plan-Open Shop Conference is a loose association of employers and employers' associations established in 1922. The business units comprising it had just finished the job of deflating labor unions in hundreds of communities. They decided to club together to hold their gains and to carry the offensive further into union territory. The leaders in the new federation of employers were such western anti-union groups as the Associated Industries of Utah, the Associated Industries

of Seattle and the Employers Association of Kansas City. Open shop bodies known variously as associated intlustries, employers associations, merchants and manufacturers associations, industrial associations, and federal industries, sent their representatives to the first conference, and they have been meeting since at semi-annual intervals.

This November conference at Dallas is typical of their periodical get-to-gethers. The slogan used in the calling of the conference is "We must build our redoubts." Against what? "Against the destructive forces now operating throughout the world." The words are taken from an address by the distinguished reactionary Charles Evans Hughes. What are the "destructive forces?" The Open Shop Conference answers," the labor unions."

Those Anti-American Unions

Under the title "Hold High the Torch of Industrial Freedom" the conference announcers refer to the Amer

ican Federation of Labor's union campaigns in the following language: "Day and night, without surcease, these enemies of American institutions are striking at the very foundations of our industrial peace, social unity and economic development. How futile then for any man even to attempt to cope with these perilous situations unaided, isolated, alone."

What does this strong talk mean? Simply that these strong talkers are committed to a policy of destroying labor unions just as fast as they can get at them. And that in pursuit of these ends they believe in organization of employers-of themselves. In fact these semiannual confabs of bosses have no other purpose but to strengthen the organization of the employers, to solidify the corporation forces for further drives on American trade unions.

At the Dallas convention the open shoppers take up the practical question of tactics and methods to be pursued to smash labor organizations and defeat the purposes of the labor movement Look over the program and you find they are preparing carefully the open shop drives of the next six months. Under the heading "Restoring Industrial Freedom to a Closed Shop Community" we read that "the conference at this point will resolve itself into a board of strategy and step by step will give the course to pursue to storm the outposts, destroy the defenses of union domination and turn over to the besieged community the gift of industrial freedom." That ought to be an interesting session; also the one at which they discuss "Selling the Open Shop to the Workman." Big business Babbitts will tell "how they have succeeded in immunizing their men against that dreaded industrial disease-the closed shop. The "closed shop" is, of course, the union shop which the labor movement has struggled decades to achieve in scattered trades and industries. The American Planship schemes, group insurance, industrial pensions and ners with their company unions, employee stock ownermiscellaneous uplift, intend to smash to smithereens this labor gain-the union shop.

Then the Conference will take up "Subversive Influ ences in Our Public Schools," which means that they will plan to get rid of teachers who have an occasional good word for labor unions. They will discuss also "The Office-Holder and the Open Shop"-which means they will lay out plans for stricter control over their business puppets in public office so that they can always count on mayors and chiefs of police and legislators to serve their interests. (See the record of the local politicians in the Passaic strike and in the New York strike of the Cloak Makers.)

Open Shop Publicity

Reports from the various industries are made and the progress union-wrecking campaigns are making are also on the program at these conferences. One item that