Even Conservative Unions Have Revolutionary Effects: Frank Tannenbaum on the Labor Movement (original) (raw)

Frank Tannenbaum is best known for his studies of Mexican agrarian reform and for his contributions to the comparative history of slavery and slave societies. But as a young man he had made a name for himself as a notorious labor agitator, and he went on to publish two books on the US labor movement, which are worthy of reconsideration as important interpretations of independent trade unionism and political reform. The first volume appeared in 1921 and offered an original perspective on the popular syndicalism that formed such a large, positive element of the philosophy of the International Workers of the World (IWW), to the extent it had one, at the center of which lay the struggle for social recognition on the part of immigrant and (supposedly) unskilled workers. The second appeared thirty years later and provided a thoughtful defense of the private, employment-based welfare and industrial relations system that the New Deal established in the United States. Together the books offer a provocative account of the social and individual radicalism of US-style "pure and simple" trade unionism. Frank Tannenbaum (1893-1969) was a celebrated and successful Latin American historian who is now most widely remembered for his influential interpretations of the Mexican Revolution and his pioneering short essay, Slave and Citizen (1947). But during the course of his writing career he also published two important books on US trade unionism. Neither is well known today; both deserve to be. The Wobbly historian and activist Fred Thompson described the first of these books [The Labor Movement: Its Conservative Functions and Social Effects (1921)] as "a positive presentation of the IWW philosophy," and it stands as an important alternative to other interpretations of the labor movement from the era, including Robert Hoxie's Trade Unionism in the United States (1919) and Selig Perlman's A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928). The second appeared thirty years later as A Philosophy of Labor (1951). 1 Less original than the first volume-if only because by 1951 Tannenbaum's industrial syndicalism had become almost a commonplace-it nonetheless offered a distinctive perspective on the New Deal industrial relations system at its height. Taken together, the two books constitute an original contribution to radical and revolutionary labor thinking, in both its anarcho-syndicalist and its social democratic forms. Indeed, Tannenbaum's interpretation of trade unionism and its impact-namely, that in modern