workers worldwide from the grip of segmented coercive national labor markets by applying its provisions to any ship of whatever flag that docked in a U.S. port. By its provisions, any sailor (of whatever nationality) could quit his ship in port and demand half-wages through U.S. courts while he sought his next contract on board a ship presumably paying the highest prevailing rates for maritime labor. As union advocates figured it, if “sea labor,” like any other commodity, were allowed to float—freed from draconian penalties against desertion—at market price, then all would-be employers worldwide would have to pay that price. “The remedy,” argued the Sailors’ Union in 1914, “is to set free the economic laws governing wages. 60 Yet, by way of remedy, a removal of the desertion penalty on U.S. ships alone would not do the trick. With average U.S. sailor wages nearly $40/month compared to British rates at $20–25, Swedes at $17 and Chinese at $7–9, restricted U.S.-only regulations would likely utterly drive U.S. ships from the sea. 61 Apply the new standards to foreign ships—what one La Follette bill partisan called a “free seas” principle—and you could expect a gradual convergence of all sea wages at a higher rate. 62 However mixed the returns (the subject necessarily of another study) from what was appropriately conceived at the time as a “radical” piece of legislation, the point here is that organized workers themselves were making their own confident, if selective, use of market-oriented thinking.
One way to read free-labor ideology in the Long Gilded Age, then, might be in the frame of what Eric Hobsbawm called “learning of the rules of the game.” Long-established notions of a “fair wage” were transformed as workers “recognized the nature of the trade cycle and increasingly demanded “what the traffic would bear.” 63 The era began with widespread suspicion of and desperate search for alternatives to the rapidly emerging wage system of labor, as arbitrated at once by market conditions and the coercive hand of employers. Over time, by this reading, labor accepted the inevitable, giving up a direct challenge to market and managerial hegemony in favor of incremental gains, registered by the most skilled or at least well-organized sectors of the working class.
Yet, in approaching the subject from the “bottom up,” or at least through the eyes of contemporary labor actors, such a functionalist scenario seems inadequate. Workers as well as capitalists were experimenting in these years with the exercise of various kinds of leverage or checks and balances over the operations of labor-management relations and the larger social welfare. Free wage labor, per se, may have been largely accepted early on as a given by all parties, but that admission settled little that was significant for workers’ lives. First, relations in the labor marketplace were often strained and complicated by manifest manipulations and unfreedoms—viz. contract labor, convict labor, company stores, and so on. Second, the “voluntary contract” at the essence of free labor might or might not serve and advance the workers’ own welfare (and indeed collective power), depending on the political and economic context in which it was invoked. Contractual discipline could effectively shackle or liberate working people, depending on the context. Freedom, we might say, was in the hand as well as the eye of the beholder. In the name of freedom, then, late nineteenth-century Americans were regularly fighting about power and economic security. The latter themes have remained well-nigh permanent issues (if eventually deprived of the soul-stirring force attached to the freedom concept). When contemporaries—ranging from industrialists and conservative jurists to trade unionists and socialist agitators—declared the system of “free labor” to be at risk from the hands of one antagonist or another, they were engaging a peculiarly American intellectual and political argument. 64
But might we not venture farther by way of assessment? All nations, Benedict Anderson has famously argued, construct their identity around an “imagined community” “conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” 65 Benedict’s younger sibling Perry Anderson adds a darker tinge to the evaluation of such projects by resurrecting an older concept of national mystification. Just as Marx and Engels in The German Ideology identified, in the writings of Hegel and Feuerbach, a false idealism that masked the true economic relations of society, Perry Anderson dissects an “Indian ideology,” wherein Hindu chauvinism and even vestigial caste thinking masquerade as universalism within outwardly secular, universalist, and even socialist ideals. 66 Given the chapter’s argument thus far, it is perhaps no great leap to reach for an equivalent “American ideology.” As a far-reaching distortion of social reality that nevertheless enjoys a strong grip on the national political and intellectual imagination, American free labor seems nicely to fill the bill. At once emancipatory in relation to individual economic rights and choices (at least at a formal level), it has simultaneously helped to narrow the options for communal and collective national standards.
At least from the comparative historical perspective with which we began, “freedom” in America has been asked to carry an awfully heavy load. In France, for example, at about the same time as the creation of the American constitutional order of individual rights, even the bourgeois leaders of the political center, were being pushed to adopt a comparatively expansive set of national welfare measures. It was a battle, as one historian has put it, “between liberty and obligation,” in which (at least as compared to the U.S.) there was substantial cultural capital on the side of the second proposition. 67 In fairness, the forces pushing for social “solidarism”—a term that became something of a mantra for expanding state functions in the Third Republic (1870–1940)—did not all emanate from the ideological left. A perceived demographic crisis buttressing “pronatalist” support for family welfare, Catholic social doctrines, and a “social defense” to ward off socialist revolution all played a role. 68 To put it perhaps too crudely, “Fraternité” and “Égalité” in the French revolutionary inheritance helped to balance the cultural resonance of “Liberté.”
Curiously, one factor consistently cited as a buttress to French welfarism also possessed strong American bona fides. The eminent social historian Philip Nord especially credits the voluntarist associations and mutual-aid associations—including Masonic lodges and trade unions—for building a culture of “republican idealism” encompassing “human solidarity” and ultimately the infrastructure of state-based welfarism. 69 The American nineteenth century, of course, did not lack for either fraternalism or larger mutualist, self-help networks. The Knights of Labor, for example, both imitated and overlapped with the lodge structure spread across the surrounding social landscape. As an early twentieth-century account put it, “Class consciousness, American style … expressed itself through the characteristic medium of social clubs and secret orders. The native technique of reform is, first of all, to demand three raps and a high sign.” 70 Yet, somehow, in ways still inadequately explored by historians, the mutualist path in the U.S. gave way less to state than to private, commercially oriented institutions. 71
The paradox attending American free labor comes more clearly into view. We see at once how it remained a broad-based ideal in a nation politically attentive to freedoms precisely because so much coercion, double-dealing, and subterfuge still existed in the employment relationship. Campaigns to eliminate “distortions” clouding fair-dealing in a market-place of buyers and sellers of labor—whether it be unfair competition from convicts, duplicitous weighing of coal, or coercive checks on the right-to-quit affecting seamen and contract laborers—attracted sure-fire attention from organized labor and the larger public. Second, identification with “free labor” status served American workers, however imperfectly, as a badge of common interest and identity. Encompassing diverse occupations, skill, and income levels that otherwise experienced quite specific, sometimes even internally conflicting grievances, America’s free laborers also bridged diverse ethnic and racial groups. Moreover, the pride in free-labor identity made it a harbor for new immigrants (even noncitizens) as well as a potent political stick to wave at class enemies as would-be tyrants who would deprive Americans of their birthright of freedom: this was our source of “deep, horizontal comradeship.”
At the same time, however, the labor movement paid a price for trusting so ardently to its own version of Freedom Road. Not only did its industrial and political antagonists lay continuous claim to alternate interpretations
