Max Hayes and the Birth of Labor Politics (Preview)

By Philipp Corfman. Philipp is an attorney at Fusco Gallagher & Porcaro LLP, a union-side labor and employee benefits law firm.

The following is a preview of an upcoming project by the Northeast Ohio Worker Center Labor and Education Committee about the life and work of Cleveland labor and socialist leader Max S. Hayes.

“[A]n officer of № 53, after attending the American Federation of Labor convention at Boston, stated that whenever he told any one that he was from Cleveland, they would say: “Why, that is Max Hayes’ town . . .”

-Anonymous Union Activist, 1904¹

Max S. Hayes. Today, those who recognize that name mostly know it as the moniker of a Cleveland high school. The much smaller list of people who know anything about the person named Max Hayes have probably seen him briefly mentioned in books about labor history or American socialism. He usually gets two or three entries in the index, right above a much longer list of entries for Haywood, William D.

But in his time, anyone who knew anything about the American labor movement, or socialism, or Cleveland, knew about Max Hayes. And they probably had strong feelings about him. He was admired as a brilliant organizer, feared as a merciless debater, hated as a false prophet, revered as the hope of the working class, and despised as a traitor to his cause. He was on the shortlist for presidential tickets (including being nominated for Vice President in 1900 and 1920), and was seen as a probable successor to both Samuel Gompers as president of the American Federation of Labor, and Eugene V. Debs as the standard bearer of American socialism. His career crossed paths with Debs and Gompers, Emma Goldman and Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and Ramsay MacDonald. Vladimir Lenin commented favorably on his labor activism.

Hayes devoted his life to a radical vision, a vision that sometimes shifted, and sometimes could seem naive and self-contradictory, but always rooted in faith in the working class, and a desire to replace the exploitation and inequality of industrial capitalism with a cooperative commonwealth. In that sense, he failed. But in doing so, he helped build the Cleveland labor movement; organized much of the Ohio printing industry; ran one of the most influential labor newspapers in the country for nearly half a century; shaped the history of American socialism; and inspired generations of activists — either to emulate his successes, or avoid his missteps. He fought boldly, though imperfectly, against racism, sexism, and war. He threw himself into debates that continue to rage within the left and the labor movement, the two central strands of his own life that he worked tirelessly, and with only limited success, to bring together.

In the story of Max Hayes, we see the birth of modern labor politics. It took a shape that, in many ways, he would have found repugnant. And today, with the labor movement as tiny and besieged as it’s been since Hayes’ time, the need for change is obvious. Max Hayes reminds us that it didn’t have to turn out this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way.

American Dreams

Maximilian Sebastian Hayes was born at the intersection of great dreams. His father, Joseph Hayes, immigrated to the United States from Alsace-Lorraine (at the time, a hotly-contested border region between France and Germany) in the mid-nineteenth century. Joseph settled with his wife Elizabeth in a log cabin in Havana, Ohio, a town so tiny that one newspaper bio about Max mistakenly said he was from the relative metropolis of Fremont. Max was born in 1866, and he and the rest of the family were sustained by their small farm and Joseph’s modest income as a grain dealer.²

The Hayes’s of Havana were a textbook example of the nineteenth century American Dream. The country’s vast, cheap (because they were stolen) lands offered an opportunity to common people that was vanishingly rare in the crowded, oppressive Old World: owning the land you worked. Depending on no one, taking orders from no one. Indeed, to the followers of Thomas Jefferson, this was the only way to protect the liberty of their new nation — filling its land with independent landowners, neither rich enough to dominate others nor poor enough to be dominated. This dream of freedom, from both tyrannical government and economic exploitation, drew millions of immigrants like Joseph Hayes across the ocean to join the smallholder republic.³

Max Hayes grew up while that dream was dying. It was always half a lie; the smallholder republic existed alongside Southern plantation slavery and Eastern industrial capitalism. But after the Civil War, the possibility of self-sufficiency quickly vanished. The last parcels of land were claimed and settled. Those who were lucky enough to own their land had to contend with the massive corporations that controlled the banks, mills, and railroads, without which the farmers could neither plant nor sell their crops. A growing number of would-be smallholders had no choice but to move to cities for work.⁴

That was the prospect faced by a young Max after his father got sick. Details are sparse, but the illness was clearly severe. Joseph’s 1909 obituary in the Plain Dealer said he suffered from “years of sickness”, while the Typographical Journal said he “had been an invalid for thirty-five years” (which puts the onset of his illness around 1874). With Joseph unable to work, the Hayes family’s dream of landed self-sufficiency came to an end, as did Max’s schooling and his childhood. At the age of thirteen, Hayes went to work as a printer’s apprentice for a rural press near Havana. He was certified as a journeyman printer in 1883 and set off for Cleveland, joining a mass migration of American farm boys and girls, mixing in with a steady stream of immigrants, looking for jobs in the big city.⁵

They left the old dreams behind as most of them faced the prospect of life in the growing working class. Instead of working for themselves and their own families, engaging with the market on their own terms, they would have to permanently depend on employers for wages. And those employers greedily exploited that imbalance of bargaining power. The new world of Max Hayes’ generation was one of child labor, starvation wages, soul-crushing hours, body-destroying work, and polluted slums.⁶

But out of the nightmare came new dreams. And the power, and danger, of those dreams reflected in the armories bristling out of the growing city skylines, the ballooning budgets for the National Guard, the swelling ranks of propagandists and spies in the employ of the great industrialists, who rightly suspected that the workers with these radical dreams might actually be able to realize them. They just needed organization, inspiration, and leadership to convince them that the power to make a new world lay in their hands.

Enter Max Hayes.

To be continued.

¹ Typographical Journal, Correspondence, Jan., 1904, at 76.

² Plain Dealer, Noble Labor Leader, Oct. 13, 1945, at 6; Biographical Dictionary of American Labor, Gary Fink, ed., 285 (1984).

³ Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, 37–38 (2007).

⁴ Robert McMath, American Populism: A Social History 1877–1898, 46–49 (1993); Richard White, The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction And The Gilded Age, 1865–1896, 590–92 (2017).

⁵ Plain Dealer, Max Hayes’ Father Dies, Feb. 10, 1909, at 2; Typographical Journal, Cleveland, Ohio, Mar., 1909, at 317; White, Republic, at 406–16.

⁶ White, Republic, at 477–517.