The Negro in Southern Trade Unionism

Abstract

In two fields of thought that concern us all, the last few years have brought into view the parallel growth of interpretations that are so similar as to be almost interchangeable. The economist's institutionalism is the political scientist's pluralism. The autonomous economic individual becomes the corporate employee, or the member of an organized association of professional, business, or laboring men. The individual bearer of a mite of the nation's social judgment, expressing itself in democratic government, becomes the individual we know around us: a man swayed by inherited prejudices and loyalties, regimented into some lump of votes, and using what deserves to be called judgment only on the narrow issues that concern him closely. That either economic or political individualism ever ruled in freedom is a dogma of popular social mysticism; the forerunners of present economic and political controls have been competent if invisible for all the centuries since the guilds. It is a sign hopeful for the solution of our troubles that we now begin to think in terms that are real, that we study and describe the ultimate though plural authorities in our social organization, and prepare the time when we shall directly and openly use economically and socially canalized drives toward popular well-being. Such an attempt, though abortive, was the permanent contribution of our experience of the NRA. We are back at the age of the guilds, and the quicker we make them broadly representative, skilled in negotiation, and temperate in character, the quicker we shall have the application of organized intelligence to our problems and a collective drive toward their solution.