Organized labor in American history

Re-examining the past may yield a better understanding of preceding events and a keener appreciation of existing institutions. The emotions that sur round current controversies are likely to be dissolved by time, and the dissipation of excessive hopes and fears they once aroused may make pos sible a fairer and more accurate reappraisal.

American unionism came on the scene not quite two hundred years ago. The first labor organizations and the central bodies they established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were exponents of what is today called "business unionism," a view and practice carried on by all generations of unionists from the founding of the first economic organizations of labor in the late eighteenth century to our own time. The evidence presented will show that the tenets of business unionism were followed by the first unions. In contrast to the ephemeral programs of social and political reform offered to American labor, business unionism

has remained the permanent expression of organized workers seeking

remedies for the evils and problems arising in the place of employment. Business unionism stresses limited objectives, immediate improvements and eschews broader programs of social and political change. It depends upon the willingness of workers to organize for mutual help, upon the exist ence of an expanding economy as well as political freedom and civil rights for special groups to organize for the promotion of their own interests. This view was given greater coherence by the unionists of the 1870's and 1880's, and was later summarized by Gompers as the eternal quest for "more and more." Such a program, while lacking the grandeur of the elaborate pro grams for the reorganization of society on more correct principles,