to control
competitive menaces is the key to the conduct of organized labor in
America, light is thrown on the causes of the American industrial class
struggles. In place of looking for these causes, with the Marxians, in
the domain of technique and production, we shall look for them on the
market, where all developments which affect labor as a bargainer and
competitor, of which technical change is one, are sooner or later bound
to register themselves. It will then become possible to account for the
long stretch of industrial class struggle in America prior to the
factory system, while industry continued on the basis of the handicraft
method of production. Also we shall be able to render to ourselves a
clearer account of the changes, with time, in the intensity of the
struggle, which, were we to follow the Marxian theory, would appear
hopelessly irregular.

We shall take for an illustration the shoe industry.[102] The ease with
which shoes can be transported long distances, due to the relatively
high money value contained in small bulk, rendered the shoe industry
more sensitive to changes in marketing than other industries. Indeed we
may say that the shoe industry epitomized the general economic evolution
of the country.[103]

We observe no industrial class struggle during Colonial times when the
market remained purely local and the work was custom-order work. The
journeyman found his standard of life protected along with the master's
own through the latter's ability to strike a favorable bargain with the
consumer. This was done by laying stress upon the quality of the work.
It was mainly for this reason that during the custom-order stage of
industry the journeymen seldom if ever raised a protest because the
regulation of the craft, be it through a guild or through an informal
organization, lay wholly in the hands of the masters. Moreover, the
typical journeyman expected in a few years to set up with an apprentice
or two in business for himself--so there was a reasonable harmony of
interests.

A change came when improvements in transportation, the highway and later
the canal, had widened the area of competition among masters. As a first
step, the master began to produce commodities in advance of the demand,
laying up a stock of goods for the retail trade. The result was that his
bargaining capacity over the consumer was lessened and so prices
eventually had to be reduced, and with them also wages. The next step
was