Radical Heritage by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes

Author:Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AFL HEGEMONY

Until the outbreak of World War I, the Wobblies continued to challenge the AFL in the forests and fields of the Pacific Northwest. Despite this activity, the federation gained an ever increasing influence over organized labor in Washington and, to a lesser degree, in British Columbia.

The eventual triumph of the AFL in the Pacific Northwest was not necessarily the inevitable corollary of the rise of the national or international trade union in North America. The same international trade unions established locals on both sides of the 49th parallel, but in British Columbia the local labor movement remained far more independent of AFL leadership than that in neighboring Washington did. Gompers’ “Voluntarism,” for example, never attracted a large following in British Columbia because of the province’s political and governmental heritage.

The establishment of AFL hegemony in Washington was largely a consequence of the economic integration of the state into the remainder of the nation. Had Washington remained physically or economically isolated, it is probable that given the generally tolerant and frequently innovative climate of political and judicial opinion that prevailed in the state during the twenty years preceding World War I, Washington labor would have evolved toward industrial unionism two or three decades prior to the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s. But Washington contained a mere .68 percent of the nation’s population in 1900. (At the same time, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California combined contained only 3.4 percent of America’s population.) The growing strength of the AFL among conservative tradesmen in many of the major commercial and industrial centers of the East and Midwest after 1900 placed the federation in a position to thwart the development of indigenous industrial unionism in most parts of America’s hinterland. When radical members of Seattle’s CLC came to the realization in 1919 that workers holding cards from Washington State industrial unions would find it difficult to find employment outside the state, they had arrived at an insight similar to that reached by men like AFL organizer C. O. Young some twenty years earlier.52

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