The Politics of "More": The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America

Abstract

In the midst of the catastrophic depression of the 1890s, American Federation of Labor (afl) president Samuel Gompers griped that labor was tired of “Sympathy without relief, Mustard without beef.” America's workers, he insisted, wanted “more”—“more leisure, more rest, more opportunity … for going to the parks, of having better homes, of reading books, of creating more desires.” “More” was the afl's official answer to the labor question of the late nineteenth century: the question of how to reconcile a permanent class of wageworkers with a nominally republican society. Faced with proletarianization, drastic economic instability, worker unrest, and a volatile job market, the afl leadership did not call for an end to wage labor. Instead, it demanded higher wages and shorter hours for workers, demands that were, in the lexicon of the afl, self-consciously “practical.”1 Although those “pure and simple” demands were couched in economic terms, they moved past narrowly construed monetary concerns to larger questions of social welfare, personal liberty, and full participation in society.2 As Gompers explained to the North American Review's readers in 1892, “We tacitly declare that political liberty with[out] economic independence is illusory and deceptive, and that … only … as we gain economic independence can our political liberty become tangible and important.” “Every advantage gained in the economic condition of the wage-workers,” he further insisted, “must necessarily have its political and social effect, not only upon themselves but upon the whole people.” For Gompers, demands for “more” were not only calls for higher wages; they were also demands for “all” that was “essential to the exercise and enjoyment of liberty.”3