GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATION OF RAILWAY DISPUTES. MONDAY, JANUARY 8, 1917. UNITED STATES SENATE, COMMITTEE ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE, The committee met at 10 o'clock a. m., at room 326, Senate Office Building, Senator Francis G. Newlands (chairman), presiding. Present: Senators Underwood, Thompson, Robinson. Cummins, Brandegee, Lippitt, and Poindexter. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order. Mr. Furuseth, are you ready to proceed? Mr. FURUSETH. Yes, sir. STATEMENT OF MR. ANDREW FURUSETH, PRESIDENT INTERNATIONAL SEAMEN'S UNION OF AMERICA, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. The CHAIRMAN. Will you state your full name and address for the record, Mr. Furuseth? Mr. FURUSETH. My name is Andrew Furuseth; president of the International Seamen's Union of America; address, San Francisco. Address here, National Hotel. Mr. Chairman, I come here on behalf of the seamen to protest against any legislation that will in any way prevent either an individual or a combination of individuals from quitting work at any time for any reason or for no reason. Whenever it has been the endeavor of society to compel either individuals or classes of individuals to continue to work against their will it has ended in disaster; first, to those who were so compelled; secondly, to society itself. Whenever, from a fear of what really is imaginary, any such legislation as this which is proposed here-industrial courts, compulsory labor-when any such legislation has been enacted it has resulted, if it was on a very large scale, in depopulating the country in which it existed. This was the situation in Rome after the promulgation of the anticombination decree of Caesar. When in the later feudal ages the people had been tied to the soil in such a way that they could not live population became stationary and then began to de cline. There are some European countries which have, for certain people at least, this kind of legislation. Hungary has legislation under which the farm laborer who begins working for a farmer in the spring is compelled to continue to work for him until the harvest is garnered, and the result is that the Hungarians are drifting out over the Hungarian borders in every direction, trying to get away. If they are unable to get away, if they are unable to overcome the 74873-17-9 129 law, then there is first insurrection and, when that is broken, decimination of the population by the people refusing to breed. Here in the United States you have had no such law, except upon seamen, since the abolition of slavery, and the result upon the seamen was so terrible that Congress wiped it out. The American quit going to sea. Modern education and the status under which the seamen lived-and it is the status which is contemplated to be placed upon the railroad men-can not exist together. The feeling that expresses itself through a strike will express itself in other ways, and when it can not obtain any redress of grievances the men engaged' in such calling quit their labor and seek other labor, or no labor, as the case may be. The number of native Americans going to sea is negligible. The law of freedom has been in operation too short a time yet to have overcome the old condition. The fact that there is freedom amongst the seamen has not penetrated sufficiently through the population to really bring the boy and the man to sea again. But with freedom left to operate the time will not be very distant when in place of the merchant vessels of the United States being manned by foreigners, who are under no obligation to the United States, they will be manned by natives or naturalized men-naturalized men, I presume, to some slight extent, but in substance by natives and you will not then have any serious question as to how to man the Navy either in peace or war. The condition imposed upon the seamen through this legislation was such that they refused to marry; in fact they could not. Their wages were stationary, and while the prices of everything rose around them their wages did not follow the upward trend, and it became impossible for them to assume family relations. And so you went to Scandinavia, to Germany, to the Mediterranean Basin, to China, and Japan, and the Malay Peninsula, and to the Kroomen, on the Mosquito coast, for men to man your vessels. It was because of this kind of law that the American boy refused to enter into it: the American man refused to remain in it. It may be said, perhaps, that this is not the same. The principle is absolutely the same. The ship is a common carrier on the water, the railroad a common carrier on land. The public demand certain things from the common carrier, and the contention is that in return legislation should give to the common carrier a certain control over his workmen, in order that he may be able to fulfill the obligations to the public. Of course, the reasoning seems right, but it does not take into consideration that the man is an entity by himself; that under the religious teachings which have at least partly penetrated the civilized world, he is made in the image of God, and therefore can not be made the bondsman of the product of his brain or hand. Under the solemn promise that the United States of America made to itself in entering the sisterhood of States, it can not be done properly here in the United States, because America promised to itself that it would see to it that the principle that all men were born equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights should be the guiding principle of this Republic. It violated it with reference to the African race, and suffered. It violated it with reference to the seamen, and it ceased to have a seaman or any sea power. If it violates it with reference to the railroad men or other workers it is inevitable, gentlemen, that the men who serve in that capacity to day, the best of them, will quit their work, and there will be a constant deterioration in the skill, and a constant increase in disasters, until, as in the seamen's case, Congress will be compelled to change the law again so as to bring the right kind of men back into the service of the railroads. Is there any danger of this strike? A general strike that will tie up everything? Why, the assumption is that the working people are spiritually, morally, and intellectually superior to all the rest of the people in the country. They would have to be if they all could get together in such combination. What have the working people got? Nothing but their labor power. What is it that belongs to the people who come here asking for this kind of legislation? All the means of production-the forests, the mines, the oil wells, the manufacturing establishments, the railroads, and the ships. They are of no value to them, however, unless they can get the labor power that they need, and in proportion as they can get it cheap, it becomes more valuable; and so their self-interest necessarily leads them to come here asking for shackles to put upon the working people, and asking for opportunities to strip the working people of the only defense that they have to-day. It was thus that in the early feudal ages the people who owned the lands came to the kings and to the parliaments and asked that the people be shackled to the soil. Now, in the new industrial civilization they come and ask that the workingmen be shackled to the means of transportation upon which they work. They say they are running the railroads in the interest of the public. Yes; in a sense they are, but they are not running the railroads for their health. They are running the railroads to make money, primarily. Their service to the public is incidental, as has been proven over and over again when Congress was compelled to regulate so that they would not take all of the products of men's toil. They say you must have this kind of legislation, because a general strike would starve the people. If it were conceivable that there could be a general combination which would stop all traffic, of course that would be partially true; but that is inconceivable400.000 men on the railroads threatening to quit work unless some grievances are redressed. Railroad employees, perhaps a million and a half of people, and some of the railroad managers themselves say: "Let them strike; we will run the railroads; we will run the trains." A strike that will absolutely tie up the railroads is not conceivable because of the number of men throughout the country who would be willing to go and take the places of those men if, in the general opinon of the public and the general opinion especially of the working people, those men were asking more than they have any reasonable right to ask. These things automatically adjust themselves. The wages of these men will not rise any higher than the level of the community. Senator UNDERWOOD. Mr. Furuseth, let me ask you a question right there. Mr. FURUSETH. Go ahead. Senator UNDERWOOD. I can understand how you could get a great many men who could be conductors and probably a great many men who could be firemen, but how can you get enough men who could be engineers, who not only must know how to manipulate the engine and run it but must know the track and the roadbed and the road and the crossings and the red lights before they can carry a train over it in anything approximating schedule time? How could you do it? Mr. FURUSETH. There is no question but there would be some difficulty in obtaining those men in very large numbers, but that they could be obtained in a sufficient number to keep the business going to some extent there can be no doubt. A strike on the railroads, after all, will not tie up the railroads altogether. It will tie up a certain part of the traffic; it will make traffic difficult. In its essence it is simply a means to compel the railroad managers to grant some redress of grievances, and that is on an absolute parallel with the right of the British House of Commons to stop the wheels of government, theoretically speaking, by refusing supplies. Out of that power of the English Parliament has grown all political democracy, such as we know it. Out of the power of the working people to withhold collectively their labor power until grievances are redressed, or at least so partially redressed that they are willing to go back to work-out of that must come the kind of society that the best in the world have been looking for for ages. It can come in no other way except through the dispute, the haggling, between the interested parties. You say the public. Why, in some instances the public is entirely and absolutely with the strikers. You find it in street car strikes, where for months the people refuse to travel on the cars, at the greatest kind of inconvenience to themselves. Speak of babies being deprived of milk, why, it is a serious question, Senators, whether there are more babies dying because of the milk they are fed than because of the lack of milk. Interurban cars. automobiles, automobile trucks, conveyances of all kinds are ready at hand to be used in case of a tie-up of the railroads that is very serious; and there is no danger of any very serious need arising, because, when a strike once is on and both sides realize that neither is bluffing, they will be willing to sit down and talk the matter over and come to an agreement, as the Parliament and the King in England came to an agreement over and over again and saved such a condition as arose in the French Revolution. What is a strike, anyway? Some years ago a committee made up of Volney Foster, of Chicago, the bishop of Peoria, and a coal operator of West Virginia came to Congress with an arbitration bill known as the Volney Foster arbitration bill. It was voluntary in all its phases, and yet it was the most dangerous piece of legislation that ever came into Congress, because it assumed to and would have used the public opinion in such a way as to shackle and destroy all freedom amongst the workers. When this was understood, it was laid aside. It reappeared in the shape of the Townsend bill in the House. It came up on the floor of the House and was defeated, because the membership of the House realized that the strongest force in all the world is public opinion. And now it is coming here in a new shape. Back of all of it there is the deliberate purpose to stop strikes. Why, to stop strikes would be good if you could stop them without taking away human liberty; but the most important of all things, gentlemen, in the world is liberty, freedom. Everything grows in freedom; everything dies in bondage. That is the history of the world-as I have read it, at any rate-and I belong to a class of people who have suffered so much under this and whose recollections are so new and fresh that we all recognize the shackles no matter how they may be covered by flowers. And so we protest with all the earnestness and sincerity that we possibly can find word for. The struggle in modern society This is from the hearings on that Volney Foster bill The struggle in modern society is between industrial absolutism and industrial democracy. The Christian ideal of human equality is seeking to extend itself in upon the industrial field and is meeting a power grown so great that it has to a large extent seized upon the State and is using its power for its own purposes. It controls, in a large measure, the churches through the pew, institutions of learning through endowments, the press through its advertising columns, the education of the young through the school boards; it is expurgating the poets of the past, or suppressing them, through the great publishing houses * * * And if such legislation as this is enacted and becomes at all successful, it will seize upon public opinion and use that, and so bar the last gate. What is a strike? When a strike takes place, the public is annoyed, inconvenienced, and more especially so when the strike is in transportation. Its first thought is, "Why don't they settle these differences?" And it blames some walking delegate. There is a disposition to look upon the whole thing as a nuisance which ought to be suppressed by law. Finding in some way that the strikers have sacrificed their employment and with it the bread of their children, it gradually is prevailed upon to look into the facts, and if by looking it finds that a real injustice is done, that there is a real grievance, then, and not until then, is any sympathy aroused for the strikers. In all such cases the strikers must first overcome resentment, then inertia, and must then have a cause good enough to convince upon the most casual investigation. Grievances that are not sufficiently simple to be thus easily understood yet serious enough to cause men to risk all to obtain redress are sure to be brushed aside with a contemptuous anger at those who, for no better reasons, are stopping the regular flow of business, to the great inconvenience of the public. It is a natural inclination on the part of a man who is going to travel from place to place to say, "This thing ought to be stopped,” but his convenience should here be measured against the recognition of the freedom of the men who are employed by the railroads: the recognition of the ownership of their own bodies, of the divinity that is in them, according to Scripture of the citizenship that is in them, according to our own law. Would the public opinion be strong enough, if it were employed as contemplated in one of these bills? It was this force which made it possible for the Roman Emperors to slay Christians by the millions, and which, changing around, made Constantine the first of the Christian Emperors. It kept the Roman arena as a festival, yet abolished it after the self-sacrifice of Telemachus. It supported and was the strength of the spiritual power which compelled the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to debase himself at Canosa; it made possible the imprisonment of the pontiff in France. While the temporal and spiritual powers were apart, it permitted the guilds to grow, and, when together, they were killed by legislation. It sent the populace to the auto-da-fé as to a festival, and later crowned with oak leaves the champions of freedom of conscience. It made possible the success of the revolution of the American Colonies; it burnt the witches at Salem. It deprived the Negro of his humanity, and later poured out seas of blood and untold wealth to reestablish it. It gave force and effect to the emancipation proclamation and wrote into the Constitution the thirteenth amendment. It sent the Nazarene to the scaffold, and, later on, recognizing His divinity, made of that scaffold a sacred emblem. It is the spiritual force, when guided by men, known as the spiritual power. |
