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Workers' Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience1
By David Montgomery, Yale University
In 1898, the American Federation of Labor feared that colonial expansion would militarize the republic and undermine the living standards of American workers. Subsequent expansion of industrial production and of trade union membership soon replaced the fear of imperial expansion with an eagerness to enlarge the domain of American unions internationally alongside that of American business. In both Puerto Rico and Canada important groups of workers joined AFL unions on their own initiative. In Mexico, where major U.S. investments shaped the economy, anarcho-syndicalists enjoyed strong support on both sides of the border, and the path to union growth was opened by revolution. Consequently the AFL forged links there with a labor movement very different from itself. Unions in Mexico became tightly linked to their new government, while World War I drove the AFL's leaders into close collaboration with their own. The Pan-American Federation of Labor was more a product of diplomatic maneuvering than of class solidarity.
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During the last forty years, historians of the labor movement in the United States have focused their attention on the local places of work and residence. Rightly so. We have learned much about our social and political life from such studies. Nevertheless, at no point during the twentieth century could union or socialist movements ignore the global economic networks that shaped workers' lives. By 1900, the handful of countries in North America and Europe that accounted for more than 85 percent of the world's manufacturing output had effectively divided the rest of humanity into their respective spheres of influence and colonies. Moreover, some 55 million Europeans and more than 30 million people from India, China, and Java had migrated overseas between 1820 and 1920. Most of them traveled on shipping lines built by countries competing for world power, and most of them went, temporarily or permanently, to destinations where the Great Powers needed their labor.2 |
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When leaders of trade unions and socialist parties in Europe and North America discussed the economic transformation of the globe taking place around 1900 before their very eyes, they couched issues in terms of the impact on domestic affairs: the use of soldiers from the ranks of the poor (especially conscripts) in colonial wars, naval construction, the rising tax burden, and migration (or the perceived threat of migration) from and to the colonies. The wars and rumors of war in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East from 1894 to 1904 greatly intensified these concerns and produced innumerable cartoons of workers staggering under the burden of cannons and warships.3 The 1900 May Day Manifesto of the International Socialist Bureau highlighted these issues: "It is war all over the globe. War budgets rise and rise.... More is spent on rifles, cannons, barracks, ships than is paid in wages to millions of workers; millions of men are put under arms, to massacre, to destroy, to burn, to steal, to kill."4 |
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