Across Labor Day weekend I was, by chance, reading about labor. David Leonhardt of the New York Times sent me his forthcoming book Ours Was the Shining Future: the Story of the American Dream. It illuminates the rise of the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century.
One factor was the rise of union membership beginning in the 1930’s. Strikes and negotiations brought up wages and benefits. They succeeded where past union movements had failed—because of larger shifts in culture and political power. President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to support unions despite his own skepticism. His secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, also had little interest in unions—she believed in improving labor conditions through government regulations, what we would see as an elite technocratic approach, the rule of experts. But she was persuaded of the value of a grassroots union movement, and she persuaded Roosevelt.
Key corporate executives also realized that greater equality was good for the economy and good for the survival of capitalism. It reinforced capitalism against fascism and Communism. Also, conservatives needed to look after working people to win elections. Executives held down their own compensation, agreed to raise wages, and built working relationships with unions.
Leonhardt says the leaders of the mid-1900’s were not necessarily “better” people than those of past eras—or more recent, less equal times like our own. They were influenced by power, and by culture, which changed from time to time.
It’s hard for me to read this without feeling connections between the history Leonhardt writes and the history in my own forthcoming book. Lincoln, too, believed people were not automatically good or bad, but were shaped by their culture—or, as Lincoln put it, their “circumstances.” I write of “the culture of equality,” which Lincoln conformed to and applied in various ways.
Differ We Must is out October 3 and available for preorder at this link. It tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him. And it shows his efforts to change the circumstances that allowed for slavery in the United States.
At one moment Lincoln addressed the right to strike. It came in early 1860, when he was giving campaign speeches across New England. He was improvising his talks based on what he read in the newspapers, and learned that shoe factory workers had gone on strike for higher wages. A transcript of his speech in New Haven, Connecticut included notes of the crowd’s response as he spoke of this.
I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to [Cheers,] where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not! [Cheers.] I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. [Tremendous applause.]
This, he said, was “one of the reasons why I am opposed to Slavery.”
I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. [Applause.]
When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat---just what might happen to any poor man's son! [Applause.]
I want every man to have the chance---and I believe a black man is entitled to it---in which he can better his condition ---when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.
Clearly, Lincoln had no special problem with capitalism. He had become a moderately prosperous lawyer by taking cases for railroads, the major corporations of his time. They were the nineteenth-century predecessors of our modern-day tech companies, awash with capital in a new business that was disrupting and transforming the economy by speeding commerce and communication. Some families were making enormous fortunes, including some like the Vanderbilts whose names still reverberate today.
Lincoln did have a problem with capitalism that degraded workers and denied people opportunities.
He also told the almost entirely white electorate that they had an interest in the fate of people who were different from them. White voters should not be “degraded, nor have your family corrupted by forced rivalry with negro slaves.” Even if some of his audience did not agree that “a black man is entitled” to better his condition, slavery depressed wages for free people. It was still better for white people to support greater equality for all.
Thankfully, slavery as Lincoln knew it is dead. But the issues he raised—about capital, labor, and opportunity in a free society—are with us every day, and especially in this time. We live in the richest nation in the history of the earth, a nation of mind-boggling fortunes. It is also a nation of great economic frustration and, in some cases, personal crises and declining life expectancy.
Lincoln’s work to build political coalitions offered some answers in his time, and may give insight into ours. It’s also just an amazing story. I hope you’ll order it here.