by James Green
The results of this creative activity were spectacular for Armour’s company, which led the industry’s consolidation and expansion over the next decade. The size of the firm’s workforce doubled and the value of product grew by 344 percent, ten times faster than wages increased. In just nine years Armour’s profits leapt from $200,000 to $5.5 million.5
When the depression ended, Armour’s Irish and German butchers joined their fellow stockyard workers in demanding a larger share of the company’s marvelous growth. Their leaders also wanted the employers to agree to hire union members first and not to discharge them without just cause. Some small packers agreed to these terms, but Armour would have none of it.6 He rejected the butchers’ demands, locked out the union and reopened his plant with nonunion men. The strike leaders were blacklisted and never worked in the yards again.7
The city’s skilled workers faced a vexing dilemma in 1883. Chicago employers paid higher wages than they could earn in other cities, but if they, the employees, demanded or even requested increases to compensate for the losses of the depression years or to keep up with the rising cost of fuel, food and housing, they met with stiff resistance. Employers like Philip Armour assumed that fixing wages, higher or lower, was a prerogative that came with ownership.
The union molders at McCormick Reaper Works had been more successful than most skilled workers in obtaining what they regarded as a living wage. Cyrus and Leander McCormick owned an extremely profitable business and paid relatively high wages; and, despite periodic strikes by union molders, the brothers retained the respect of their wage hands. Indeed, when the long depression ended, the McCormicks agreed to the union men’s request to raise the wage rates they had reduced during the hard times.8
In 1880, Leander McCormick left the works after a feud with his brother Cyrus, who soon retired and put his twenty-one-year-old son Cyrus, Jr., in charge. Young McCormick immediately hired a new management team; but the men he entrusted with the direction of 1,200 restless factory workers lacked firsthand experience with a large industrial workforce. Hard feelings festered in the foundries and assembly shops. One employee wrote to the president and said the old hands were leaving because of harsh treatment: “We are treated as though we are dogs,” he moaned. 9
Cyrus, Jr., had attended Princeton, where he learned mathematics and economics. Applying this knowledge in 1881, he hired an accountant to calculate the firm’s manufacturing costs per machine, along with the cost of labor per unit. The results appalled him so much that he established a new hard line on wages. When the union molders petitioned for a raise in 1882, McCormick’s assistant superintendent told the men they were set on “a suicidal course.” As the molders’ union gathered its strength and prepared for a long struggle, McCormick’s managers began to explore ways of using machines to replace the union men.10
CYRUS McCORMICK’S NEW SOLUTION to his problems with skilled union men was a strategy scores of other Chicago manufacturers had chosen by investing millions of dollars in new machinery to replace certain hand-workers and to speed up the pace of work for the rest—all within a very short and decisive period from 1879 to 1884.11
McCormick Reaper Works on the Black Road in 1885, looking south
Some trades were devastated by the invasion of machines. In the slaughtering and packing industry, skilled butchers continued to give way to more advanced “disassembly lines” in larger and larger plants. Even small manufacturers mechanized their works, like one German sausage producer who let seventy-five of his workers go and replaced them with a single machine he claimed was more efficient than all of them combined. Owners of cooperages also installed new machines for making barrels that took the pride and joy out of the coopers’ work, according to one craftsman. When English curriers struck in support of German tanners in 1882, the tannery owner imported whitening and fleshing machines that he planned to use to halve the workforce. After Irish brick makers waged a battle for higher wages that year, their employer introduced a machine that allowed an individual worker to make three times as many bricks in a day.12 Fights over wage rates had been erupting in Chicago shops off and on for years; it was simply a fact of industrial life. But mechanization hit the skilled trades with such suddenness that it shocked craftsmen and filled them with dread.
New machinery made the greatest impact in the trades where German immigrants were concentrated, such as woodworking and cigar making. The city’s enormous army of carpenters also found their trade imperiled by contractors who bought windows, doors and other standardized wooden pieces made by machine and hired unskilled “green hands” to install them. Working for piece-rate wages, these installers were paid half the money earned by an experienced, all-around carpenter.13
The men who rolled cigars faced a similar threat. Proprietors of two sizable Chicago cigar shops installed newly invented machines operated by teenaged boys and girls who earned 50 cents to $1 a day. The producer could now have 1,000 cigars of the best brand made for $8 compared to the $18 it cost to pay union craftsmen to make the same batch by hand. In an analysis of the cigar industry, an Arbeiter-Zeitung reporter calculated that the manufacturers’ profits leapt 400 percent as a result of “plundering” their workers.14
The logic of capitalist enterprise made using machines instead of men an obvious choice for owners who could afford to mechanize. But among the craftsmen displaced by this logic a moral question remained: Would machines, driven by the endless hunger for profit, destroy a way of life that gave skilled workers a sense of pride in what they produced and gave the consumer a high-quality product as a result? Is this what progress meant? The German sausage makers insisted that machines could not do the work as well humans did, pointing out that bits of refuse remained inside the machine-made sausages. But such complaints seemed futile in the face of machinery’s “merciless advance.”15 In story after story, Arbeiter-Zeitung reporters revealed how machines ran the workers and how employers used machinery to tighten their control.16
Even after craftsmen lost their autonomy and entered larger shops and factories, many retained a moral code that governed how they worked, how they treated one another and how they ensured the quality of their products. Cheaper “green hands” who could be pushed and rushed by the boss often botched jobs and turned out shoddy goods. During his travels, August Spies had seen common laborers accept this kind of abuse; it seemed to him nothing less than an intolerable affront to their manhood. No self-respecting craftsman would allow himself to be driven or intimidated at work.17
By the same token, proud American and European craftsmen viewed other forms of unskilled or menial labor as degrading. Some men and women worked side by side in bookbinding and tailoring shops, but male garment cutters could not imagine performing the women’s work of sewing clothing. And no white workingman ever pictured himself doing the menial work assigned to “colored” men in service or to the despised “Chinamen” in the laundries. The corollary was that few of the white trades allowed access to women or men of color or to unskilled immigrants, except on a segregated basis. In the white world, however, self-reliant craftsmen often expressed “a defiant sense of egalitarianism” toward other men who acted as their superiors. Their code was based on a sense of self-worth gained through long apprenticeship and mature workmanship in an honorable trade. They believed their work was noble, even holy, and that they should be regarded romantically as “knights of labor.” Thus, manly workers refused to be put upon by their bosses or to accept any affront to their dignity. They also opposed efforts to pit them against one another. An honorable, respectable workingman did not steal work from his fellows or seek to undermine their customs and standards by rushing to please the boss or simply to make more money. Such were the ingredients of the craftsmen’s code, traits that young and inexperienced workers who entered a trade were taught to honor and obey. 18
The habits that craftsmen cultivated were first expressed in the early benevolent societies based on the principle of mutual aid and then in the fi
rst craft unions their members called “brotherhoods.” These “rituals of mutuality” fused readily with the practices of democratic citizenship that evolved during the nineteenth century among white mechanics and workingmen who came to see themselves as the backbone of the republic.19
Being a skilled tradesman, a competent craftsman and an intelligent citizen required, above all, enlightenment through self-edification. Many craftsmen took pride in the breadth and depth of their reading, and appreciated what they learned from each other on the job. Cigar rollers sometimes asked a literate one among them to read a book or a newspaper aloud to them while they worked. Samuel Gompers, who heard passages from Marx’s work from such a reader, wrote of his particular cigar shop as a little educational forum where he learned to think and speak critically. “It was a world in itself, a cosmopolitan world,” inhabited by shop mates from many strange lands, he recalled. Good cigar makers could roll the product carefully and effectively but more or less mechanically, which left them free to think, talk and listen to each other or to sing together. “I loved the freedom of that work,” Gompers recalled, “for I had learned that mind freedom accompanied skill as a craftsman.”20
Manufacturers exerted little control over the cigar makers, who worked by the piece, and some producers complained that many of their men would come into the shop in the morning, roll a few stogies and then go to a beer saloon and play cards for a few hours, willfully cutting the day’s production and voluntarily limiting their own earnings. These irregular work habits appeared in other trades as well, for instance, among German brewers, who clung to their Old World privilege of drinking free beer while they worked in the breweries.21 Coopers would appear at work on Saturday morning, like all wage earners did in those years, and then, in some places, they would pool their pay and buy a “Goose Egg,” a half barrel of beer. “Little groups of jolly fellows would often sit around upturned barrels playing poker . . . ,” wrote a historian of cooperage, “until they received their pay and the ‘Goose Egg’ was dry.” After a night out on Saturday and an afternoon of drinking on Sunday, the coopers were not in the best condition to settle down to a regular day’s work. They would then spend a “blue Monday” sharpening tools, bringing in supplies and discussing the news of the day.22
Into this world, with its honored traditions, its irregular work habits and its rituals of mutuality came the machine. It rattled on relentlessly “never tiring, never resting,” wrote Michael Schwab, dragging the worker along with it.23 And behind the machine stood a man, an owner or a foreman, who regarded the craftsmen’s stubborn old habits and craft union rules as nothing more than ancient customs, relics of medieval times in a modern world governed by the need for industrial efficiency and the unforgiving laws of political economy.
THE ARBEITER-ZEITUNG offered detailed reports and analyses of these new developments in Chicago’s workshops to its German readers. Many editorials simply pointed out how bosses were displacing good workers and “plundering” others because they were greedy capitalists; others were quite sophisticated. For example, in an 1883 article on “How Wages Are Depressed,” the author explained that “big capital” in Chicago had taken the lead in “employing the latest technology and imposing the division of labor” that came with it. The craftsman’s skill and intelligence were no longer as valued and rewarded, and in many places he was reduced to the status of a day laborer who tolerated his situation until he could move up to a higher-paying job. The classification of workers within the same trade into various subordinate groups was destroying “feelings of solidarity that existed within individual crafts.” A new spirit reigned within the city’s factories, the writer noted: “Each man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost.” Moreover, existing trade unions that called themselves brotherhoods had failed to counter this self-serving attitude among employees in Chicago’s big industries.24
In 1884 the city’s small number of organized workers belonged to trade union locals affiliated with the city’s Trades and Labor Assembly and with the young national Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. Composed largely of skilled craftsmen, not common laborers, these trade unions were led by pragmatists increasingly irritated by the visionary Knights and by the socialists in their own ranks. They regarded their unions as ends in themselves, not as means to an end, not as a force for building solidarity among workers or for achieving a cooperative society such as the one envisioned by the social revolutionaries at the Pittsburgh Congress in 1883. “We have no immediate ends,” testified the president of the Cigar Makers’ International Union that year. “We are going from day to day. We fight only for immediate objects . . . that can be realized in a few years.” 25
This careful posture seemed suicidal to many craftsmen in Chicago, who saw themselves being replaced by machines and “green hands.” By June of 1884 the German socialists in the Chicago Cigar Makers’ Union had had enough of going from day to day; they broke with the national organization and formed a “progressive” cigar makers’ local. For this act of rebellion, they were expelled from the city Trades Assembly. Within a few months the German renegades had inspired eight other breakaway unions to join them in creating a new Central Labor Union closely allied with the International Working People’s Association and its objectives. The radical leaders of the new labor body accused the Trades Assembly of being “a bogus labor organization” led by businessmen, not by true union men; furthermore, its members were craft unionists who constituted an “aristocracy of labor” and who expressed concern only for their own welfare and not for the condition of the unskilled workers.26
Underlying these tensions over union politics were older religious and ethnic differences among Chicago’s workers. Most leaders of craft unions tended to be English-speaking Protestants of American, Canadian and British origins, although some were Irish Catholics. Religious hostilities had cooled during the Civil War, and by the 1880s Christian workers of all denominations readily joined the same unions. The Knights of Labor even abandoned their secret rituals to avoid condemnation by Catholic cardinals and to open their order to once-despised “papists.” The social revolutionaries in Chicago took an opposite tack, alienating devout Catholics and Protestants alike by criticizing their clergymen and their beliefs and by calling their followers to secular meetings on Sundays. One of the few things the city’s many ministers, missionaries, priests and rabbis agreed on was that the red internationals sounded terribly like the evil children of the godless French Jacobins and Communards.27
As the International Working People’s Association extended its activities into the city’s immigrant neighborhoods, Catholic priests in the German and Czech parishes swung into action against the heathens in their midst. The bishops of the church could be fairly sure that priests in Chicago’s Polish and Irish parishes would keep their flocks inoculated against the infectious ideas spread by socialist subversives. Catholic clergymen were more worried that German and Bohemian Catholics were being seduced by freethinkers and socialist agitators.28
Protestant ministers and missionaries expressed even more anxiety than Catholic priests about the spiritual lives of poor city dwellers. Even Chicago’s famous soul saver, the greatest of all evangelists, Dwight L. Moody, despaired when his big revivals failed to attract the downtrodden. 29 In a best-selling book, Our Country, Josiah Strong, a Congregational minister with midwestern roots, expressed the growing fear among native-born Protestants that immigrant workers in the great industrial cities could no longer be contained within their slums, where “volcanic fires of deep discontent” smoldered. The dangerous classes seemed ready, at any moment, to sweep like a flood over the homes of respectable Christian people. The city churches were asleep, Strong charged, citing one section of Chicago where thousands of children lived “without the gospel of Jesus Christ,” a “district of saloons and dago shops and other vile places,” where many more children were arrested than attended Sunday School.30
As concerned clergymen like Josiah Strong fret
ted over losing souls to the inner city, working-class reformers and radicals suffused their speaking and writing with biblical parables and verses, which they used to chastise their oppressors and arouse the spirits of their followers. For example, George McNeill, a founder of the first eight-hour movement and an influential figure in the development of young Knights like Albert Parsons, believed that the workers’ dream of an equitable life on earth was revealed in the gospels. The Bible foretold a time, McNeill wrote, when the “Golden Rule of Christ would govern the relations of men in all their duties toward their fellows, in factory and work-shop, in the mine, in the field, in commerce, everywhere.”31
This strain of Protestant millennialism even appeared in the speeches of August Spies, who admired the Protestant martyr Thomas Munzer and believed the Bible “commanded equality and brotherhood among men on earth.” Like most other nineteenth-century American radicals, the social revolutionaries felt compelled to illustrate their secular complaints with sacred texts and to connect their vision of a truly free society with the Christian image of a heaven on earth. Unlike the European anarchists, whose hostility to religion knew no bounds, the socialist internationals devoted little attention to the ministries of their clerical opponents. They had much larger quarry in their sights: the evil capitalists who lived, as they saw it, in a paradise of riches while they made life for Chicago’s workers a hell on earth. 32
WHILE NEW FORMS of mechanization and industrial discipline affected certain trades during the early 1880s, a massive calamity befell a far greater number of wage earners. Another depression enveloped Chicago late in 1883, and the hardships that followed proved far more severe than those experienced in the long depression that had ended just three years before.33
Once again social commentators appeared to analyze the causes and assign blame for the calamity, as they had a decade before, but now the criticisms came not only from voices of socialists and trade unionists but from the pens of journalists like the Chicago Tribune’s famous business writer Henry Demarest Lloyd. The journalist no longer blamed the market for economic distress, but pointed his finger at railroad barons like Jay Gould who hoarded land and wealth and refused to raise wages or reduce hours for their wage hands. Henry George, author of the enormously influential book Progress and Poverty, also accused railroad magnates like Gould of causing the nation’s worst social problems. The wealth created by railroads allowed a few “American pashas” to count their income by the millions each month while their employees survived on $1.50 a day. Even in the wealthy state of Illinois, where the nation’s railroads converged, workingmen could not earn enough for their daily bread and were forced to depend upon the labor of women and children to eke out an existence. “The people are largely conscious of this,” George observed, “and there is among the masses much dissatisfaction.”34
