Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969) was a celebrated and successful Latin American historian who is now most widely remembered for his influential interpretations of the Mexican Revolution and his pioneering short essay, Slave and Citizen (1947). But during the course of his writing career he also published two important books on US trade unionism. Neither is well known today; both deserve to be. The Wobbly historian and activist Fred Thompson described the first of these books [The Labor Movement: Its Conservative Functions and Social Effects (1921)] as “a positive presentation of the IWW philosophy,” and it stands as an important alternative to other interpretations of the labor movement from the era, including Robert Hoxie's Trade Unionism in the United States (1919) and Selig Perlman's A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928). The second appeared thirty years later as A Philosophy of Labor (1951).Footnote ¹ Less original than the first volume—if only because by 1951 Tannenbaum's industrial syndicalism had become almost a commonplace—it nonetheless offered a distinctive perspective on the New Deal industrial relations system at its height. Taken together, the two books constitute an original contribution to radical and revolutionary labor thinking, in both its anarcho-syndicalist and its social democratic forms. Indeed, Tannenbaum's interpretation of trade unionism and its impact—namely, that in modern commercial societies so-called conservative unions have a transformative effect—deserves the same attention, and by all rights ought to have the same far-reaching influence, as his better-known work on the comparative status of slaves in the Americas.

Tannenbaum wrote about the labor movement from the standpoint of both a participant and an observer. He knew the doctrines of the class struggle and of “job-conscious unionism” by heart but urged the conversation in a different, less economistic direction. In his view, the desire of wage earners for recognition as fully human moral agents (and not just machine tenders or soulless “human resources”) explained not only why they organized but also what they most reliably got by doing so. The labor movement was not just about fair wages and decent working conditions. It was the institutional expression of a desire for recognition, which drove the struggle for material improvements. On the one hand, the circumstances of workers' lives—solitary, nasty, brutish, and short—made them cautious and eager to huddle in mutualistic associations to redeem their self-respect and, if possible, to improve their situation. On the other, as Tannenbaum would reiterate time and again, the identities, institutions, and traditions that working people themselves forged in their huddles, however conservative in intent, remade the fundamental relationships of their society and had revolutionary effects.

Even the most conservative of wage earners, in Tannenbaum's account, did more for the cause than the most radical of party militants simply by seeking, always and in whatever way possible, as most did, to defend themselves from the innumerable petty slights and assaults of wage work. The touchstone of revolutionary consciousness was not a “scientific” or theoretical understanding of exploitation and the class struggle but rather the flesh-and-blood felt reality of actual lives. On the basis of such experience, Tannenbaum made a case for seeing working-class organizations, including fraternal and benevolent associations, but especially trade unions, whether craft, occupational, or industrial, as both the central institutions of working-class life, at least in the first decades of the twentieth century, and as the principal means of revolutionizing the whole society. He emphasized not so much how workers developed their own particular ways of being, as how their “doings” changed the ways everyone could be.Footnote ²

While Tannenbaum acknowledged conversations with such contemporary experts as Paul Brissenden, Leo Wolman, and Horace Kallen, he wrote The Labor Movement for a radical, not an academic, audience. The scholarly debates over the nature of the trade unions and of trade unionism influenced him far less than did “many happy disputatious hours” with “friends and fellow workers.”Footnote ³ His perspective was closest to that of William Z. Foster, at least in Foster's early syndicalist phase.Footnote ⁴ Foster, too, believed that the really-existing trade unions were indispensable vehicles for worker mobilization and radicalization and advocated a strategy of working with the established unions that he called “boring from within.” The similarities between the two men stopped there, however. Where Foster thought the mass of wage earners too conservative and believed unions were the means by which they could be radicalized, Tannenbaum thought the conservatism of the mass of wage earners—their desire for wholeness and “belongingness,” to use William H. Whyte's phrase—was precisely what made them radical.Footnote ⁵

The continuing influence of anarcho-syndicalism makes tracing its history, including lost byways like Tannenbaum's, especially important.Footnote ⁶ For its part, Tannenbaum's work offers the anarchist tradition an opening to a different way of thinking about modern society and modern social institutions—at once more confidently positive and constructive and less insistently negative and critical.Footnote ⁷ But his work also makes an important contribution to the labor movement's dominant, social democratic tradition. Despite anarchism's widespread intellectual and cultural influence, social democracy, both in its liberal and its socialist guises, remains the principal (i.e., the largest, most often empowered and most effective) political alternative to capital's continuing hegemony. Any chance to refresh its practice with the bottom-up militancy and working-class identifications of anarchism, especially the anarcho-syndicalist forms exemplified by The Labor Movement and A Philosophy of Labor, is therefore to be welcomed. Social democracy needs a rougher edge if it is successfully to encompass the most marginalized and underserved members of the increasingly global, urbanized, and nomadic twenty-first century. At the same time, an anarcho-syndicalist vision of the future that does not include its own positive theory of public administration and of the state—or, if one prefers, its own positive theory of political association—is almost certain not to be able to extend its local victories to the whole society or to defend its local gains from external attack. For this reason, too, Tannenbaum's “social democratic anarcho-syndicalism” deserves a second look.

I

Before turning to the books themselves, however, let's first review some of the more relevant facts of Tannenbaum's early life. Born in Austria in 1893, he immigrated to the United States with his father, mother, and two younger siblings in 1904. Two years later, he left the family farm in western Massachusetts for New York City because his father refused him permission to continue his schooling.Footnote ⁸ Working as a busboy and a night-shift elevator operator (a job he reportedly liked because it gave him plenty of time to read), he eventually fell in with the anarchists and free thinkers at the Modern School on West 106th Street, where he came under the influence of Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and especially Carlo Tresca (who played an active part in the New York City hotel workers' strike that began in December 1912, in which Tannenbaum almost surely participated). At the Modern School, he also became part of a group known as “the 'Spittoon Philosopher' [sic] of the IWW,” which he described as “a remarkable group of keen men and women, mostly young, whom to know and love was a great privilege.”Footnote ⁹

As a young man, Tannenbaum cut quite a significant figure in American anarcho-syndicalist circles.Footnote ¹⁰ When he was twenty years old, before he was an academic or even a college student, he was a well-known—even notorious—New York City labor agitator. During a particularly cold and wet week at the end of February 1914, Tannenbaum, a hotel worker and active member of the IWW, led homeless and unemployed men (and a few women) into evening church services in lower Manhattan, where he asked for food and shelter for his followers. Repeated over several days and accompanied by increasingly incendiary rhetoric, his agitation won him a twelve-month jail sentence for unlawful assembly. The demonstrations themselves were among the most visible fruits of the IWW's efforts, in the aftermath of the Lawrence (Massachusetts) and Paterson (New Jersey) textile strikes, to convince urban workers in the eastern United States to join the revolutionary syndicalist union movement. They also made Tannenbaum's radical reputation. IWW general organizer Bill Haywood personally marked the young Tannenbaum for leadership, and both Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman thought him one of their most promising and charismatic followers.Footnote ¹¹

Tannenbaum ultimately disappointed his movement mentors in no small measure because of the opportunity—despite the fact that he had never enrolled in, let alone graduated from, high school—to attend Columbia College.Footnote ¹² During his imprisonment, when not protesting conditions, Tannenbaum had continued to read his way through whatever weighty tomes and great works the authorities allowed him. (They denied him Goethe's Faust, for instance, because they deemed it “immoral” and The Nation because it was “too radical.”) Moved by his advocacy on behalf of the unemployed and, subsequently, the imprisoned, by his demeanor both at his trial and during and after his incarceration, and by the newspaper accounts of his studious nature, Grace Hatch Childs, a well-to-do and well-connected social worker, the daughter of a prominent Chicago-based corporation lawyer, and the wife of an eminent New York City businessman and municipal reformer, thought him a candidate for college. She interceded on his behalf with faculty friends at Columbia, where the National Commission on Prisons and Prison Labor, with which she worked, was located. They arranged an interview with the dean of the college, Frederick Keppel, who admitted the young firebrand. Mrs. Childs agreed to pay the tuition.Footnote ¹³

At Columbia, Tannenbaum studied with some of the most influential reformers of the day, especially John Dewey, whose sympathies and point of view greatly affected him. Several years older than his fellow undergraduates, married, and working as a machinist's helper in a railroad shop to support himself and his wife, Tannenbaum was better known to the faculty, especially in the history department, than to his classmates. At his graduation, few of the latter knew who he was. But professors Carlton Hayes and Harry Carman, for whom he worked as a research assistant, both thought Tannenbaum “one of the best students” they ever had. Carman, in particular, had an especially high regard for him. “I expect some fine achievements,” he told the New York Times. “He is a splendid student, has a lot of ability in thinking and expression, and is able to do things.”Footnote ¹⁴ Among the things Tannenbaum was doing, Carman reported, was writing two books: Wall Shadows: A Study of American Prisons (1921), based on his own experience as an inmate, as well as subsequent research and participant-observation fieldwork at other penitentiaries around the country; and an essay on “the psychology of labor,” which was published as The Labor Movement.

The opportunity to go to college (and later graduate school) had an important influence on Tannenbaum's personal trajectory. But his experiences as a Wobbly radical were formative. In jail, Tannenbaum participated in protests against prison conditions and spent several turns in solitary confinement and other punishment cells, where he subsisted on bread and water and was subjected to various forms of arbitrary cruelty. His personal exposure to dehumanizing and degrading treatment as an inmate (and even a prospective inmate) by various representatives of the criminal justice system, including police, guards, wardens, and magistrates, each of whom, in their own sphere, seemed vested with arbitrary and apparently limitless power, permanently shaped his subsequent views in decisive ways. At a minimum, it made respect and recognition bedrock issues for him.Footnote ¹⁵ Certainly, the socio-legal dynamics of “recognition” informed his subsequent books and articles on prisons, the labor movement, and eventually slavery—all central concerns of his journalistic and scholarly career (as were Mexico and Latin America, as well as agrarian reform, about which he also wrote extensively). Most of this work had in common the notion that the most important difference among various prison or employment or slavery regimes was the degree to which the dominant social culture recognized, in law and by custom, the “moral personality” (i.e., the “humanity” and hence the spiritual, if not social, equality) of prisoners, wage earners, and slaves.

Certainly, the desire for recognition played a central role in Tannenbaum's thinking about the labor movement. The driving force for the emergence and growth of the labor movement, he argued, was the insecurity and rootlessness of the workforce consequent upon the rise of competitive market economies and machine production. More “Veblenian” than Marxian in his emphasis, he concentrated on the social effects of competition and “the machine” rather than on the evils of profit-taking or the wages system per se. To be sure, Tannenbaum sharply condemned “the competitive ownership of industry, the commercial spirit and the profit motive which dominate present-day [i.e., early twentieth century] economic organization.” It was, he charged, indifferent to “the well-being of the most defenseless group in the community—the property-less worker.”Footnote ¹⁶ But the principal villains of his story were neither capitalists nor the wage system. They were the competitive economy and the machine, which had disruptive effects on people of all classes. The newer methods of competitive exchange and mechanized work had brought down older, more settled face-to-face agrarian communities and relationships. As a result, the entire society “was torn from its roots and set adrift” (4).

The labor movement was a response to this unmooring—a quest for a sense of place and purpose in a world otherwise dominated by insecurity and rootlessness—what Marx had called (at least in part) “alienation.” Organized workers could assert a greater measure of control over the industrial process. As a by-product of this assertion, they also could acquire the sense of place and purpose that the market and the machine had destroyed. The goal of such efforts was not a return to some bucolic, precommercial world. The goal was to create a modern “industrial democracy” in which purposeful, socially driven cooperation replaced the selfish, machine-driven competition characteristic of competition. This shift from competition to cooperation, this “revolution,” was, according to Tannenbaum, an inevitable consequence of “the growth and development of the organized labor movement” (44). Overthrowing capitalism did not require a “class-conscious” workforce intent on either revolutionizing the relations of production or seizing state power. It required simply that workers organize trade unions and use them to assert more control over the production process. By acting in their own interests, wage earners transformed their own conditions and circumstances—and those of everyone else as well.

Anyone “who would know the labor movement,” he insisted, “its discontent and idealism, its hatred and love, its bitterness and enthusiasm, must also strive to understand its psychology” (45). Under modern industrial conditions, with their drive to reduce work to mechanical standards and the consequent suppression of workers' “freedom for play, for interest, for creativity” (58)—a freedom Tannenbaum believed central to human nature—wage earners found it difficult to live with acceptable dignity and respect. To their managers, they were but “tools, the instruments” (87) of an impersonal process. A packing house superintendent looked at “one of the best workers” he had, a “visibly middle-aged” Slovak woman (59), and saw “a sure machine,” someone “too stupid to vary,” whose “mind [was] on the table” (60). Tannenbaum, however, whose own Austrian mother was just such a “visibly middle-aged … European peasant woman” (59), saw someone else—a formidable personality “who had traveled across two continents and had the initiative to seek a new home” (60). It was precisely these formidable personalities who sustained, and were sustained by, the movement. As work “suppresse[d] personality,” the movement revived it, providing “relief from monotony, opportunity for expression, [and a] place for play and individuality” (61). The effort to organize and to secure recognition saved workers “from intellectual and spiritual petrifaction” (61). It also explained “a great deal of the passion, the love and the idealism” connected with the labor movement (61).

It is here that Tannenbaum's incipient social democracy comes most clearly into view. “The real struggle,” he insisted, “is for organization and not for the program after organization is completed. This is the revolutionary significance of the labor movement. Its program is achieved if it has complete or anywhere nearly complete organization” (118). In other words, to work on behalf of incremental change so as to benefit and to protect working class interests was also to work on behalf of transformative change so as to effect a complete social revolution. Tannenbaum's perspective in these matters recalled Eduard Bernstein's famous declaration that the “final goal” of socialism, “whatever it may be,” was “nothing.” It was “the movement” that was “everything.” Between them there is little to choose except the terrain of endeavor. One is expressed in a syndicalist idiom and focused on the workplace; the other in a parliamentary idiom and focused on the state. But the effect of each is similar: to concentrate militant energies on day-to-day practicalities and incremental improvements that promised, over time, to have a cumulative effect. Bernstein's less familiar restatement of his position makes the kinship between the two even clearer: “The movement is everything to me because it bears its goal within itself.”Footnote ¹⁷ This was exactly Tannenbaum's position vis-à-vis the significance of trade union organization: Organization was everything because it was indistinguishable from the ultimate goal—the transformation of existing society into a cooperative commonwealth.

Even the most conservative trade unionists, Tannenbaum thus insisted, were revolutionaries, whatever their beliefs, even if in spite of themselves. To be sure, workers did not create or join unions so that they could overthrow capitalism. They did so simply to assume a greater degree of control over the circumstances of their own lives. But by so doing they nonetheless revolutionized society, whatever their original intent. Every union organized, and every additional increment of control achieved, expanded the sphere of worker autonomy and cooperation and contracted the sphere of machine coercion and competition. It mattered not what the leadership or the membership intended as the ultimate consequence of their actions, or even if they had ultimate intentions. What mattered was the effect of what they did. Every assertion of control, however local, added to the pressure for cooperation more broadly; and every challenge to “industrial autocracy,” however cautious, was another step toward more “industrial democracy.”Footnote ¹⁸

The ultimate consequence of this continuing and irrepressible urge for control, Tannenbaum also argued, was likely to be a final, decisive confrontation between the business community and the labor movement, a standoff in which one side would have to yield to the other. There was no alternative, no “third way out” (43). In particular, in 1921 he did not think it practicable for the state to guarantee the income of individuals and to “leave the employer free to manipulate his industry as he [saw] fit” (43). For such a guarantee to be effective, the state would have to “demand control over [the workers'] activities” and assert a “right to determine [the] place and function, hours and conditions of labor.” Such control meant “the slavery of the worker to the state,” which was “not to be had in a world such as ours,” where individualism, equality, and democracy were so highly valued and where the labor movement had already “secured control over some of the more basic industries in the community” (44).Footnote ¹⁹

Consistent with this anarchist (and syndicalist) skepticism about politics and the state as instruments of social justice, Tannenbaum imagined that the labor movement's final confrontation with the business community would take place on an “industrial” (or economic) rather than an electoral (or political) terrain. Legal ownership mattered less, he insisted, than practical control. Wage earners already could easily assert such control locally, since they worked with and on the means of production all the time. What they lacked were agencies that would enable them to assert their control on a broad front, not only within the firm but also across the wider society. It was this agency, according to Tannenbaum, that unions and the union movement supplied.

By organizing unions and by collectively bargaining with employers about the terms and conditions of their employment, wage earners transformed the functional solidarities of production and distribution into the social solidarities of self-conscious cooperation. More organic, self-conscious social ties replaced the mechanical and functional relationships that, in the capitalist system, characterized the interactions of those engaged in the production process, whether as bosses or as workers. A union, in this sense, was simply the community at work, made aware of itself and brought to the awareness of others. As such, it was always immanent in the workforce as constituted. To organize a local union was primarily to bring forth that which was there rather than to impose anything alien. Similarly, to organize industrially across the whole society was simply to make explicit the strategic position of the workforce as a whole. It was to create agencies that enabled wage earners to assert more effective control over the means of production as a whole and, as a direct effect, to make a revolution that reached across the entire society. Legal recognition of working-class control would follow rather than enable this effect.

As a further consequence of this point of view, not only did Tannenbaum think the difference between “conservative” and “radical” unions unimportant, but he also would not acknowledge any significant distinction between skilled and unskilled workers. In every industry, he argued, all workers—“the skilled and the unskilled, the trained and the untrained”—were “interdependent,” part of a common project, for they all “cooperate[d] in a common product” (88). The labor movement extended this fact of cooperation to the realm of thought, making “mutual participation, mutual cooperation, mutual suggestion and criticism, mutual subordination to the purposes in hand, the methods through which men work” (89). Under the whip of necessity, it forged characters and capacities among wage earners that enabled them to control the whole process of production on a cooperative basis. In order to successfully accomplish its immediate goals, the movement would have to include the unskilled. It could no more exclude them and be successful than it could be successful and not have a revolutionary result. The means by which it incorporated the unskilled, moreover, were the same local, regional, and national structures of cooperation, by means of which workers asserted their control of the whole economy.

The actual mechanics of these structures, as Tannenbaum envisioned them, and the ways in which particular local interests were folded into wider social interests, came in for a great deal of discussion in The Labor Movement.Footnote ²⁰ But the details are of less interest than the effects that Tannenbaum predicted would follow from the inevitable growth of unions and union power. These effects included the following: a more equitable distribution of income; fewer violent social conflicts and an increasing reliance on more peaceful methods of dispute resolution; a relatively expanding sphere of production determined by need and a relatively shrinking sphere of production determined by profit (in other words, an economy increasingly driven by the needs of the consumer rather than those of the investor); the growing control and regulation of production on a democratic basis and the growing “socialization” of the benefits derived from it; the rise of new needs, desires, and appetites in the working classes; a shift from an almost wholly producerist to an increasingly consumerist orientation on the part of more and more working families; and, finally, a continuously rising level of education and skill in the workforce.

This very optimistic list of emergent social trends, which Tannenbaum believed consequent upon the continuing development of capitalism and the growth of the labor movement, is a far cry from Marx's prediction of the continuing immiseration of the proletariat. But it was also remarkably prescient. Tannenbaum's discussion in The Labor Movement of the probable social effects of greatly expanded trade union representation captured many of the most important economic and social trends in the United States and other advanced industrial economies in the ensuing decades, especially after the growth of the unions in the 1930s and 1940s. There was, in fact, a marked increase in union representation before and after World War Two; and with this increase came a flatter and more equal distribution of income. By mid-century, also, consumer capitalism came increasingly to replace producer capitalism as the driving force of the economy in the richest countries; and there was a vast expansion of investment in transportation, education, health care, and pensions, together with an increased socialization of their provision. Moreover, these years were marked by rising levels of education, skill, disposable income, and leisure time for the workforce as a whole.Footnote ²¹

That these positive trends have slowed and in some cases actually reversed, such that many of them now seem in danger of being—like the density of union representation itself—permanently eroded, does not gainsay the fact that most workers in the United States and elsewhere across the industrialized world experienced a significant and positive increase in their expectations and standards of living through the third quarter of the twentieth century. Nor does it gainsay the fact that most of this increase, in the United States at least, was in large measure due to the vastly expanded scope and influence of a labor movement largely conservative in orientation, certainly not ideologically anti-capitalist, focused for the most part on bread-and-butter issues, concerned at most with job control unionism, and very little interested in the revolutionary transformation of society or the seizure, by themselves, of the means of production. About all of this, Tannenbaum's Labor Movement was dead-on. Looking back on The Labor Movement with the benefit of the intervening ninety years, there is much to admire in its description of the psycho-social roots of “the love, the passion, the bitterness and the idealism” (61) many workers felt—and still feel—for their unions, especially their locals and in the farsighted optimism of its final section.

On other matters, though, there is more to criticize. Tannenbaum's description of the syndicalist takeover of the political economy has all the reductive fervor and flaws of the genre.Footnote ²² Governance in his account, no less than in others, presented only technical problems—the logistical complications of administering things rather than the political complications of leading people.Footnote ²³ The biggest challenge, he clearly assumed, was simply to get the right people together in the right room to hash things out; that done, all would be well. Of course, it is not. Governance is more than a technical problem; it is also a moral problem. To govern itself, a community must not only figure out what it wants and how to get it, but also who is going to do the wanting, who is going to do the getting, and how the various “whos” are going to divvy up the wanting and the getting in the first place. Anyone charting the future must acknowledge that there is usually more than just one possible and desirable path forward. Just so, we can't always agree: Any attempt to abolish all contention will prove vain. At best, we can only hope to reduce our contention to a manageable scope and to find ways to live with and work through our disagreements without killing, or wanting to kill, one another.

Tannenbaum would soon enough find his way to a similar place. (In this, as in so much else, he was a student of John Dewey.) In The Labor Movement, however, despite the fact that he “humbly dedicated” it to Dewey, he had not yet gotten there. Instead, he fundamentally mistook himself and, neglecting the organic character of movements, institutions, and societies that he would later come to appreciate, dreamed in The Labor Movement of a wholly planned society organized around a “producers' congress” (228). This congress would, among its many functions, determine not only the kinds and amounts of products, but also the “priority of production” and the allocation of labor to accomplish it (200). Nor was there to be just one such congress. For every issue there was a congress. It was congresses all the way down! “The shoe industry would then, at its own congress … decide the distribution of the work.” It would know “where shoes were more essential than boots.” It “might say to the shoemakers in California, if there are any [!], that they had better produce footwear for themselves than ship shoes from Massachusetts to California, and shoes from California to New York.” Moreover, through “its technical organization and committee arrangement in conference with the machinery industry,” the shoe producers' congress would “decide just what kind of machinery it needed” and in conference with the railroad industry decide “just where it wants those machines delivered” (206–207).

The good news is that this was a daydream from which he awakened. College exposed him “to various faiths other than his own,” and the exposure was bracing. “The value of education,” he later remembered, “is to be found in the strength it gives, in the provision of a sense of relativity, in revealing the organic character of institutions, in making visible the fact that the world has a past as well as a future.” It wasn't a matter of losing faith but deepening it. “One's faith becomes more definite, but [it] also becomes clearer, more inclusive, and vividly conscious of the complexities of the world.” Anyone whom an education did not so affect, he insisted, “condemns himself.”Footnote ²⁴

II

In a 1925 Collier's article four years after the publication of The Labor Movement, the book on prisons, and a later collection of essays on the South, Tannenbaum described himself, in response to the interviewer's question, as “still a Socialist.” He continued to believe that “so far as unemployment is concerned,” to permit starvation was “a greater crime” than “the property crime of stealing.” The former was not only criminal, he said, but also “preposterously stupid.” At the same time he also confessed that when he was “invading” churches with an “army of the unemployed” in 1914, he was convinced that he had “the key to heaven and that no one else's key would fit the lock.” Not so, he had come to learn. Not only was there more than one way to achieve a goal, no approach that proceeded as if the best solution was always the simplest or easiest was likely to work. “The social problem is not a Gordian knot that can be cut by one sweep of the sword.”Footnote ²⁵

The clearest exposition of Tannenbaum's more considered position vis-à-vis the labor movement can be found in A Philosophy of Labor (1951), which restated and deepened the basic arguments of The Labor Movement. “Trade unionism is the conservative movement of our time”.Footnote ²⁶ Its values are “those of an older day”: security, justice, freedom, and faith (11). It is “a repudiation of the individualism of the French Revolution and of the liberalism of the utilitarian philosophers. It rests upon the group, upon the original ‘society' forged by mine, mill and factory” (10). In response to the alienation and insecurity engendered by the rise of commercial markets and machine production, the trade unions created a new society, replacing the cash nexus in which individuals were counted only in and through the market, with ethical relationships based upon mutual recognition and social cooperation. “In tinkering with the little things—hours, wages, shop conditions, and security in the job—the trade union [was] … rebuilding our industrial society on a different basis” (3). Industrialization had “destroyed the symbolic and meaningful world that had endowed the life of the individual with an ethical character” (8). This was “the great moral tragedy of the industrial system” (8). Trade unions returned workers to a recognizable community, to a society in which life again took on meaning, as it was lived alongside and in concert with others.

People had once lived in known, recognizable communities, Tannenbaum insisted, in which each had, and knew, a place. Everyone was definitely not created equal; but membership in the community, when achieved, provided individuals with a safety net and conferred “the peace and serenity from which could flow the medieval art and craft” (30). “Each [person], each act, was part of a total life drama, the plot of which was known and in which the part allotted to each was prescribed. No one was isolated and abandoned” (30).

The rise of the market and the spread of industrial methods had replaced this older pattern of mutual obligation and prescribed status with incessant competition and individual insecurity. By taking wages out of competition and by negotiating the “little things” that affected the pace and conditions of work, the trade unions reverted to the older way (37). The union pulled society back from a focus on individual rights and the explicit, specified contracts of individualized strivings, while pushing it toward a focus on mutual obligations and the implied, open-ended understandings of cooperative endeavors. One again belonged, somewhere, to something.

The effect of this pull and this push was far-reaching. Whereas the commercialization of labor replaced the personal relationship and sense of obligation between traditional masters and servants with an employment contract and a money wage, trade unions restored social connections that the imposition of a labor market had undone. The labor movement recreated—at first within the class (among workers themselves) and later, where they were successful, between the classes (by means of collectively bargained agreements)—a sense of obligation and responsibility similar but also superior to that which had characterized previous practice. Without a doubt, unions represented and protected the pecuniary—and, when they did their job well, the social—interests of wage earners, just as management represented and protected the pecuniary interests of owners and stockholders. However, in order to “make the job secure” and “to force it to yield a high monetary reward,” the union had no choice but “to extend the union rules and their consequent costs to a whole industry” (115, 117). Thus, as the unions negotiated benefits and welfare plans to protect their members across an increasingly broad front, they were forced to extend their reach beyond the local level. “Welfare plans, like wages and working conditions, could only be stabilized upon an industry-wide basis” (118). (Actually, as has since been driven forcefully home, such plans are sustainable only on a society-wide basis, if at all.) But by extending these benefits across industry, they fundamentally changed the character of the entire society.

Tannenbaum's vision of a pacific, mutualistic industrial syndicalism was not unique, but he did follow out the implications of this vision further than most were willing to do. Similar themes to those he sounded can be found in Catholic social teachings, especially those articulated in the context of emerging industrial societies.Footnote ²⁷ His analysis also resonated closely with what William H. Whyte denoted in The Organization Man as an emergent “social ethic.” Indeed, Whyte cited Tannenbaum's A Philosophy of Labor as one of three exemplary instances of “the growing quest for belongingness,” which was the central theme of his book.Footnote ²⁸ However, while other analysts confidently predicted the continuing growth of the unions and their institutionalization through various union security provisions, Tannenbaum was the only one to draw the conclusion that the effect of these trends would inevitably be to “re-create a society based upon status and destroy the one we have known in our time—a society based on contract” (140). The rise of the unions would do nothing less than inaugurate a new “society of status,” just as surely as the market and the machine had destroyed the old.

His argument was relatively straightforward. “If membership in a union is essential to an opportunity to work, and if every union has its own rules of admission, apprenticeship, dues, initiation fees, promotion, wages, retirement funds, and social benefits, then every union becomes in effect a differentiated order within the community, endowing its own members with rights and immunities shared only among themselves.” It became harder and harder to leave one's job (or union), because the costs of doing so (including “the loss of a job, the impossibility of securing other employment in the same industry, the loss of seniority and possible promotion, and the surrender of accumulated retirement, sickness, and old age benefits”) became so steep. The growth of unions thus created a “new body of rights and disciplines, which greatly change the substance of a free society” (141). If the industrial revolution had destroyed an older social system “in which each [person] had a place in a ‘society' and in which he could fulfill his role as a human being” (142), then the trade union movement—and the whole series of “values, rights, duties, privileges and immunities, tolerances and expectancies, as between members and nonmembers” (143) that constitute the growing body of “industrial jurisprudence” spawned by its collectively bargained agreements—represented a return to the older way of doing things.

Some such return, Tannenbaum believed, had to occur. “When a money wage … represent[s] the sole income for the mass of individuals, it carrie[s] with it not only complete independence and isolation, but also complete helplessness against the vicissitudes and needs that each individual faces at some time in his life” (147). Trade union demands for “old-age, sickness, and retirement pensions” arose of the desire to hedge these risks. “These demands were inevitable,” Tannenbaum argued. “The real question is not whether they will be met, but whether they will be met by trade unions and industry or by the welfare state out of taxation” (149). Of the two, Tannenbaum preferred the former. “If the workers do not succeed in making the industry and the union the vehicle for the provision of essential security, then the state will perform the task” (150). And if the state does so, he feared, “it will destroy the liberties of our time and make [everyone] subservient to an all-absorbing Leviathan” (150). “Every state,” Tannenbaum insisted, “including Great Britain, must end as a police state if the government becomes the arbiter of the innumerable incidents and accidents of industrial life” (192). “When the state operates the industry, every failure, every negligence, every bit of soldiering on the job, every strike, every criticism, every demand for a change, even the failure to come to work, or unavoidable accident, may be taken as opposition to the state” and be therefore “subject to political sanctions” (192).

This is as close as Tannenbaum ever came to repudiating the more orthodox syndicalism of The Labor Movement. Political control of industry, like that which he had once urged, was economically untenable and morally undesirable, he now believed, not only in its socialist but also in its syndicalist form. It simply worked less well than the more private alternatives, which gave managers “the freedom to be wrong” as well as the more important freedom, however occasionally, “to be right” (193). According to Tannenbaum, this was one of private enterprise's principal virtues. One could not afford to make as many mistakes in public affairs, he insisted, as one could in private business. A mistake in private business brought only a monetary loss, from which one could more easily recover; a mistake in politics brought a loss of position and power, from which one recovered with great difficulty, if at all.

At the same time Tannenbaum remained well aware that all private control was not equal. That which was only partial, that which vested control in owners and stockholders without the participation of the workforce, might avoid organizational paralysis; but it did so at the risk of social catastrophe. The most desirable form of private control, the only one that would work across the board, was that based on neither capital nor labor alone but on both together. The best hope for such a result, in Tannenbaum's opinion, was the trade unions, which he believed were primed to take over the corporations and run them for the benefit of all stakeholders, including investors, managers, employees, and customers. Then and only then would corporate governance accord to social need.Footnote ²⁹

By ensuring adequate recognition of and provision for wage earners, on the one hand, and adequate freedom of opportunity for managers and owners, on the other, the US collective bargaining system, as it had evolved, provided the best way to avoid the Scylla of a class war and the Charybdis of a police state. Or so, at least, Tannenbaum argued. A Philosophy of Labor described the really-existing US industrial relations system as a realized Madisonian industrial democracy in which the best decisions were ensured, to the extent they could be, by “the flexible, many-sided, and frequently contradictory play of many minds and purposes, where numerous judgments [were] made by large numbers involved in the same process, the errors checking one another because most decisions affect[ed] only fractions of the total enterprise” (194). There was no need, in such a system, to worry about the larger political implications of every day-to-day decision. It left politics to the politicians and entrusted the economy to those directly involved in the production and distribution of marketable goods and services.

Tannenbaum had in this way come very far from the “cooperative commonwealth” of a “producers' congress.” But he still held firmly to a corporatist and (modified) anarcho-syndicalist vision of a good society, one in which institutional diversity and social tolerance maximized realizable freedom, while mutual recognition and social caring maximized realizable security. Where the early Tannenbaum urged the unions to assume the functions of the state (and thus abolish it), the late Tannenbaum urged them to assume the function of the corporations (and thus abolish them). In so doing, he proposed harnessing the productive power of the machine to the moral power of a face-to-face society, recreating a society of statuses as an alternative to both the exploitation of the market and the tyranny of the state. It was a powerful evocation of the possibilities unlocked by the persistent, often unconscious actions of millions of ordinary people striving for nothing more sublime than to have a better tomorrow than their yesterday. It was also a compelling argument about the revolutionary effects of the otherwise conservative functions of bread-and-butter trade unionism.

Of course, it was a self-limiting vision. It took for granted, first, that the industries and corporations within which the unions had become entrenched were more or less permanent—at the least, certainly very stable—entities. Only by so assuming could they be imagined a suitable basis for a new and viable “society of statuses.” It is clear now, as it could easily have been suspected then, especially by a historian like Tannenbaum, that this hope was illusory. History was not going to end with industrialism and the corporation. Indeed, the corporate provision of social security proved fairly short-lived, as did the apparent power of the unions.

Moreover, the corporate form, even in the hands of the unions, could not by itself have guaranteed what Tannenbaum assumed it could. He built his future on far too narrow a base. For one thing, the trade unions in most places have so far proved unable to extend their reach to all but a relatively few workers in the private-sector service-providing industries (which now account for the overwhelming majority of the work force) in the wealthiest countries; for another, they have not even retained their previous position of dominance in the private-sector goods-producing industries. The significant exceptions to this failure have been in the newly commercializing and industrializing countries and in the public sector, where trade unionism even in the most established commercial and industrial nations has successfully grown and held its own in recent years. If the unions are to be the vehicles by which US workers are ensured an adequate measure of social security, not only in retirement but throughout their formative and working years as well, then either the unions will have to grow to Swedish proportions (in Sweden, union density approaches or surpasses ninety percent) or the benefits of union membership have to be socialized and thus made accessible to all.

Neither has happened in the US—nor many other places, for that matter. But one or the other has to happen, here and wherever wage earners lack adequate protection against “the vicissitudes and needs” of life, if the private property system is to prove permanently compatible with democratic governance and aspirations. The Many will not go on forever providing for and protecting the Few, if they are not provided for and protected themselves. Union density is unlikely to grow to Swedish proportions in the US unless the federal government encourages the process and institutionalizes any gains. At a minimum it should pass legislation to allow employees to elect representatives of their own choosing without delay or employer interference; mandate arbitration for first contracts at the request of either party; and amend the National Labor Relations Act to repeal its antilabor provisions, including union security nullification. Alternatively, if instead of growing the unions, the US chooses as a society to socialize the benefits of unionization and thus to make them available to all citizens, rather than just to union members, the government will still have to do a lot more to encourage and to make possible such innovations. There is no way to secure the benefits of unionization without extensive government action to create and to sustain the necessary political and social conditions.

In neither of his books on the labor movement did Tannenbaum hold out much hope for a political strategy. He had much more faith in the people than he did in their representatives. But this lack of faith in government also blinded him to the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of some kind of political approach. Government can solve certain “public goods” problems, as even Adam Smith allowed. However, it can also ensure that people are better able to solve their “private goods” problems. Following Tannenbaum, if there is to be a solution to the insecurity and rootlessness caused by competitive markets and continuing technical change, it will have to be social, enacted across a broad front. It will also have to involve the cooperative efforts of all those affected and it will have to be rooted in the daily concerns of all those involved. Unlike Tannenbaum, it is important that we acknowledge the important role, if we are to mobilize the necessary energies and achieve the desired effects, not just of working-class self-activity, but of politics and government as well. We cannot rely on the blind instincts of individual working people alone, even if they are formidable personalities. We need to create mechanisms for common action that can press for due recognition and ensure equitable reward in the workplace, in the local community, and in the wider public sphere. The syndicalism that Tannenbaum favored is a valid expression of a necessary aspect of this need, but it is not sufficient. If we are to be a democracy, working people need both economic and political power. If we are to remain a democracy, it will have to run deep and wide.Footnote ³⁰