Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [232]
The dockers’ strike waged in the heart of London had thrust the realities of labour’s battles under the eyes of capital and swept young men like Herbert Samuel into politics. Appalled by conditions among the strikers and by the sweatshops and squalid homes he saw in Whitechapel when canvassing there for his brother’s candidacy for the LCC (London County Council), he decided “from that moment” that the House of Commons was “my objective and to take part in social legislation my aim.” The strike also brought to prominence a rampant trade unionist, John Burns of the Amalgamated Engineers, union of the locomotive drivers, who was known as the “Man with the Red Flag” from his habit of carrying that item with him whenever he addressed meetings. Although the dockers were not his union, he took over management of the strike to help its leaders, Tom Mann and Ben Tillett. He kept on excellent terms with the police, organized food lines and procured the settlement which won the “dockers’ tanner”—to the distress of Kropotkin, who thought a critical moment had been missed. “If Burns with 80,000 men behind him does not make a revolution,” he wrote, “it is because he is afraid of having his head cut off.” Burns, however, despite a period of vociferous Socialism, was too English to be revolutionary and never shared Hardie’s refusal to compromise with capitalism. He preferred to fight labour’s cause through whatever alliances suited the situation, and when elected to the LCC, collaborated with the Liberals. His hatred of Keir Hardie, according to Beatrice Webb, “reaches the dimensions of mania.”
At the Trades Union Congress of 1893 Hardie generated enough support, against the opposition of Burns, to form an Independent Labour Party of which he was named chairman. Its declared Marxian purpose was to secure public ownership of “all means of production, distribution and exchange” and, lest there be any mistake, “to take charge of the revolution to which economic conditions are leading us.” Not unnaturally financial support from the craft unions was shy. Two years later in the general election of 1895, which brought in Lord Salisbury’s Government, the ILP failed to elect a single one of its twenty-eight candidates. It was “the most costly funeral since Napoleon’s,” commented Burns, not without satisfaction in which he was joined by Mrs. Webb. For Labour to act independently and insist on three-cornered contests, she declared, was “suicide.” Yet the Conservative editor J. L. Garvin suspected that despite the fiasco the ILP might well prove to be “an increasingly powerful and disturbing factor in English politics.”
At the same time, employers’ associations—formed to resist the demands of labour—increased in number and joined in agreements to employ non-union labour. To create a “reserve” in case of strikes they organized Free Labour Registries, which were simply lists of strikebreakers under another name. In 1897 they were able to defeat the old and powerful Amalgamated Engineers in its strike for the eight-hour day which lasted thirty weeks. Taking the offensive by lockouts, they succeeded against other unions in re-establishing piecework and repudiating overtime pay. On occasion the Government lent troops in their support. Leaving nothing to chance, the associations in 1898 formed the Employers’ Parliamentary Council to smother any nascent legislation unfavorable to their interests.
In 1900, reluctantly edging toward the political arena, a number of trade unions, representing about one quarter of the total membership, joined with the ILP and Hyndman’s group to form a Labour Representation Committee for the election of political candidates. The Fabian Society lukewarmly and temporarily joined also. As Secretary, the Committee chose Ramsay MacDonald, a thirty-four-year-old Scot who emerged from obscure beginnings to be a founder of the ILP and was recognized for an astute political sense. On discovering that the intellectuals were not, after all, to control policy, Hyndman’s group pulled out and the Fabians, finding the endeavor