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126 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
laborers was accompanied by riots, machine-breaking,
and assaults upon men and property.
No small part of this early violence was directly due
to the brutal opposition of society to every form of labor
organization.
The workers were fought violently, and
they answered violence with violence. It must not be
forgotten that the trade unions and the socialist parties
grew, in spite of every menace, in the very teeth of that
which forbade them, and under the eye of that which
sought to destroy them. And, like other living things in
the midst of a hostile environment, they covered themselves
with spurs to ward off the enemy. The early
movements of labor were marked by a sullen, bitter, and
destructive spirit;
and some of the much persecuted
propagandists of early trade unionism and socialism
thought that "implacable destruction" was preferable to
the tyranny which the workers then suffered. Not the
philosophy, but the rancor of Bakounin, of Nechayeff,
and of Most represented, three-quarters of a century ago,
the feeling of great masses of workingmen. Riots, insurrections,
machine-breaking, incendiarism, pillage, and
even murder were then more truly expressive of the
attitude of certain sections of the brutalized poor toward
the society which had disinherited most of us
them^han
to-day realize. In every industrial center, previous to
1850, the working-class movement, such as it was, yielded
repeatedly to self-exhausting expressions of blind and
sullen rage. The resentment of the workers was deep,
and, without program or philosophy, a spirit of destruction
often ran riot in nearly every movement of the
workers.
the first fifty
During years, then, of last century, little
building was done. A mob spirit prevailed, and the great
body of toilers was divided into innumerable bands, who