Labor Looks Back on 1922 and Finds Its Own Strength
The official organ of the Aberdeen Central Labor Council takes stock of a year of strikes — miners, railroad shopmen, and a political awakening — and declares the destiny of labor is in its own keeping.
For years man has been in the habit of adding up his accounts at the dawn of the new year, reviewing the road he has traveled and casting a speculative eye over the future as far as he can discern it.
Not in many years has he had as much food for thought, as much reason for hope, as he has now, on the threshold of 1923. The year that has closed will remain memorable as recording the failure of autocracy to turn back the hands of the clock and stop progress dead in its tracks.
During the past year the workers fought the most desperately bitter struggles against the massed forces of reaction and greed and won their most glorious victories. The brutal, shameless conspiracy hatched when the world emerged from four years of war nightmare, having for its object the subjugation of the toiler to the status of a serf, came to its proper inglorious ending when the miners, after months of contest, compelled the employers to sign on the dotted line.
That victory was confirmed and consolidated when nearly half a million railroad workers, suffering many wrongs, unfurled their banner and went into a struggle to uphold the American standard of living, in which all the advances gained have been to the credit of the gallant shopmen.
All along the far-flung line of industrial conflict the workers have manifested the unconquerable spirit of their forefathers. The love of liberty has had a rebirth. Autocracy has been thrown back and must reform and reorganize before it can renew the assault.
Of equal significance was the matchless victory won on the political field. It is the first fruit of the workers' determination to be and remain free.
By the wise and judicious use of their economic and political power, the producers of this nation — the backbone of its wealth and guarantors of its priceless traditions — have given industrial and political overlords to understand that they have undertaken a program they can not possibly put through.
The lesson of 1922 is that the destiny of labor is in its own keeping. It goes forward, if at all, through its own efforts. At the beginning of the new year the workers are serene in the knowledge that their cause is righteous, sure of their ascertained strength and indomitable in the will to use it wisely for the benefit of all the people of this nation.
“The lesson of 1922 is that the destiny of labor is in its own keeping. It goes forward, if at all, through its own efforts.”
This is the voice of the Grays Harbor labor movement at its confident peak — the same union halls that would soon face the open-shop drives of the 1920s and the timber strikes of the 1930s. The argument that workers' gains come only through their own organized power still frames every wage fight on the harbor today.
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