by Philip Dray
While trade unions grew in strength and character, the abolitionist arm of the Republican Party’s formative years showed signs of fatigue. To many of those who had so ardently opposed slavery, emancipation represented the long-sought-for triumph. Further vindication arrived with the Reconstruction Acts, which called for new, democratic constitutions in the former Confederate states, and soon the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, granting rights of citizenship and universal male suffrage, respectively. After decades of activism and the trauma of a devastating war, few of the abolitionists sought the less morally absolute arena of labor conflict.
A notable exception was Wendell Phillips, the patrician “Golden Trumpet” of the antislavery cause, who saw clearly the importance of labor unions. “My ideal of civilization is a very high one,” he related. “It is a New England town of some two thousand inhabitants, with no rich man and no poor man in it, all mingling in the same society, every child at the same school, no poor-house, no beggar, opportunities equal, nobody too proud to stand aloof, nobody too humble to be shut out.”29 Instead the country was headed in the opposite direction, he feared, toward a condition in which an affluent minority would possess all the nation’s power, most of its opportunity, and a great deal of its property. Capital, with its corporations, banks, railroads, courts, and easily bought legislatures, would reign supreme. Phillips “wrapped his cloak once more about him [and] went forth to meet a greater enemy,” a contemporary wrote; he declared himself for “toilers’ rights” and joined the emerging call for an eight-hour workday sounded by mechanic and fellow Bostonian Ira Steward.30
During the war numerous state and local eight-hour leagues had been organized, fifty in California alone, mostly through the single-handed efforts of Steward, who was known as the Eight-Hour Monomaniac. Described as a “brown, gnome-like man,” Steward, then in his early thirties, could apparently “speak of little else…. Meet him any day as he steams along the street,” wrote a contemporary, “[and] he will stop and plead with you until night-fall.”31 Steward in 1863 had won an eight-hour resolution from his own union, the Machinists and Blacksmiths, and had created the Grand Eight Hour League of Massachusetts. Allied with Wendell Phillips, Steward made Boston a center for eight-hour agitation. His wife coined the movement’s slogan:
Whether you work by the piece or work by the day
Decreasing the hours increases the pay.
Not all Northern middle-class reformers were swayed. They tended to lack familiarity with labor groups, which were often composed of recent immigrants, and held a bias against strikes or any other potential interference with business or production. “Let not him who is houseless, pull down the house of another,” Lincoln had cautioned workingmen during the war, “but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”32 Horace Greeley, writing in a similar vein, warned against “Jacobin ravings in the Park” as a means of resolving class issues; many prominent voices urged laborers to resist rebellion and instead pull themselves up within the capitalist system, and to do so by minding their own temperance and self-discipline.33
ORGANIZED LABOR’S FIRST CHALLENGE after the war was to flex the strength of its new national unions, and in William Sylvis, president of the Iron Molders’ International Union, it had a man uniquely devoted to the task. The son of a wagon-maker, born into humble circumstances in rural Pennsylvania, Sylvis “never went to school six days in his life,” but he “could not long remain in the bondage of ignorance,” for, as the New York Sun explained, “perseverance and determination are as plainly written in his countenance as if the words were penned there with indelible ink.”34 Sleeping in lonely train depots awaiting his next connection to Buffalo, Canton, Milwaukee, or wherever iron molders awaited him, at times cadging rides in locomotive cabs from sympathetic trainmen, Sylvis was America’s original indefatigable traveling union organizer.
He was energized by the conviction that the nation’s workers only needed to know of labor’s united cause to join it wholeheartedly. Often neglectful of his wife, four children, and his own health, stricken by recurring nerve and gastrointestinal problems likely related to his itinerant existence, he drove himself feverishly, consumed with the prophecy he spread. When no audience of workingmen was handy, he turned to lecturing the young at Sunday school classes. “Suffering from permanent indignation, he was not a cautious man and if he thought a thing he would say so,” it was noted. “His bright blue eyes seemed to flare with hotness when he was angry, which was most of the time.”35
Organized labor, in the analogy Sylvis frequently offered his hearers, was a powerful locomotive, sitting in readiness on a track, but without sufficient fuel to move forward. Only a unified movement of workers could do that, could wield the power needed to confront capital. There was no alternative because industry, as he saw it, was a cheat. “If workingmen and capitalists are equal co-partners, why do they not share equally in the profits?” he demanded. “Why does capital take to itself the whole loaf, while labor is left to gather up the crumbs? Why does capital roll in luxury and wealth, while labor is left to eke out a miserable existence in poverty and want? Are these the evidences of an identity of interests, of mutual relations, of equal partnership? No … on the contrary they are evidences of an antagonism … a never-ending conflict between the two classes, [where] capital is in all cases the aggressor.”36
He had taken charge of the Iron Molders’ International shortly after its founding in 1863, when many of the union’s leaders were still at war; indeed, the organization almost collapsed when its financial officer was killed in combat without having repaid the $62 he had borrowed from the union’s funds. By 1865, however, under Sylvis’s tireless promotion, the group was on its way to becoming the strongest trade union in America, with seven thousand members and fifty-three locals. Much of this growth resulted from three lengthy organizing trips he made to the South, Midwest, and Northeast, covering ten thousand miles. The welcome he received from his beloved molders usually made the jaunt worthwhile, although more than once he left a town one step ahead of an inhospitable foundry boss.37 “He wore clothes until they became quite threadbare and he could wear them no longer,” his brother recalled of Sylvis’s wanderings. “The shawl he wore to the day of his death … was filled with little holes burned there by the splashing of molten iron from the ladles of molders in strange cities, whom he was beseeching to organize.”38 Despite his vagabond appearance, Sylvis was a superb detail man, standardizing the collection of dues and compiling an extensive card index that was probably America’s first national “database” of union membership. It led to an expanding roster of members as well as a bulging union treasury.39
Because he believed all workers belonged in a union, he had little patience for those who resisted the call to organize, and he could become apoplectic on the subject of replacement workers, those men so lacking in the spirit of brotherhood and class consciousness they would take over another man’s job. He kept what he called a “scab album,” in order to track the names and movements of these dangerous creatures. “What can be done with such trash?” he once asked. “You cannot call them human without libeling the whole human race.”40 Yet it was characteristic of Sylvis that he also reached out to scabs wherever possible, in the hope of making them reconsider their folly and adding them to the union fold.
This ambitious, inclusive embrace of all toiling men led to his founding of the National Labor Union (NLU), the country’s first national labor federation, in the summer of 1866. Sylvis was to his last breath an iron molder, devoutly faithful to his union, but the NLU was the far more original undertaking, an entity dedicated not to any specific trade but to all, to the cause of labor itself, to both skilled and unskilled workers, as well as to farmers, women, and African Americans. The NLU’s agenda, laid out in its Address to the Workingmen of the United States, highlighted worker and consumer cooperatives as well as monetary reforms that would shift the country away from the gold standard to legal te
nder currency based on actual wealth, theoretically making more “greenbacks” available for workers and small businesses. But its major issue was the eight-hour day, which Sylvis embraced as a moral crusade. Work in industry turned human beings into automatons who did little other than sleep, eat, and work. What they required, he declared, was “time to breathe, to rest, to repose, to think—a little time transferred from the busy workshop to the quiet family circle … time to think of our Creator’s bounty, to forget man’s tyranny, to remember heaven’s promise and to refresh the weary soul with prayer.”41 Shorter hours of work held the potential to remake society, for with their new leisure time, workers would become consumers, closing the gap with the affluent; at the same time their expenditures would invigorate manufacturing and create jobs. The faith that the nation’s economy functioned best when workers were able to afford and enjoy the objects they made would be echoed by several generations of labor activists, and most famously by no less a captain of industry than Henry Ford.
Some of the popularity of the eight-hour crusade in the wake of the Civil War derived from the prospect that a shortened workday would create more jobs for returning soldiers. Private industry, however, proved resistant to the reform, although New York, Boston, Detroit, and Baltimore had at war’s end enacted eight-hour regulations for municipal employees, and half a dozen states ushered in similar laws; in June 1868 the federal government decreed an eight-hour day for workmen and mechanics in the federal arsenals and navy yards. As with any regulation, the trouble came with enforcement. Private work contracts, where eight-hour codes existed, could still stipulate whatever hours employer and worker agreed upon, and employers, even those covered by Washington’s mandate, did act where possible to either reduce wages or cram more work into the shortened day. The NLU had established the nation’s first permanent labor lobby in Washington, and when Sylvis and others suspected the Grant administration of laxity in applying the eight-hour rule, it lodged a forceful complaint. In response, President Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation in May 1869 affirming that “from and after this date, no reduction shall be made in the wages paid by the Government by the day to such laborers, workmen, and mechanics, on account of such reduction of the hours of labor.” The NLU’s intervention was one of the first examples of labor successfully politicizing an issue at the federal level, and helped set in motion the process by which all government workers were eventually granted eight-hour rights.42
IT WAS CHARACTERISTIC OF this phase of labor history that workers’ organizations perceived the leveling of American society to be both possible and necessary, and the creation of a permanent wage-earning class unacceptable. Sylvis saw a means to address the problem in cooperative ventures, both manufacturing enterprises and consumer-run stores. If workers could sustain themselves independent of wages, they would not be marginalized in society or held in industrial peonage. As cooperationists they would sell the products they manufactured and subsist off the profits. Worker-owned industries would spawn land and home associations, worker-friendly banks, and lending institutions, as well as the means to distribute food and other necessities at reasonable prices. This, like the eight-hour fight, was couched as a moral issue; wages were the buying of a man’s labor, nothing more, and wage-workers would surely become demoralized, indifferent, and lazy, if never challenged to develop business sense or the ability to rely on their own resourcefulness. It could not be healthy for society, noted the Nation’s E. L. Godkin, “when the master’s recklessness or dishonesty bring on a financial crash … [and] the working classes, on whom the heaviest burden of the woe falls, meet their fate in blind and helpless ignorance of its causes.”43 While Godkin thought trade unions valuable, because the individual worker could not “bargain with the capitalist on equal terms,”44 the better cure, as Fincher’s opined, was “Labor being its own employer. When the producer becomes the seller, [this] ceases the confliction of interests. Then Capital and Labor become mutual friends, which otherwise they can never be.”45
Sylvis’s own Iron Molders’ Union showed the way, opening an iron foundry cooperative at Troy, New York, and soon others in Albany, Rochester, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. The molders became so smitten by the cooperative program that at one point they formally changed their organization’s name to the Iron Molders’ International Cooperative and Protective Union.
Such trends were watched with caution by the country’s editorial pages, for there was fear that the leaders of such communistic enterprises, namely those of the increasingly powerful NLU, would place undue demands on state legislatures or Washington to make special fixes for industrial projects unable to compete in the open market.46 These concerns were borne out when the molders’ foundries hit rough financial water and Sylvis approached the federal government about supporting worker cooperatives with gifts of money and public lands, much as it had railroad interests. Godkin, writing sympathetically of the cooperative effort, nonetheless cast doubt as to its survival in America. Unlike Europe, where the collective impulse was intrinsic to how citizens viewed their governments and themselves, America was devoted to the individual—a person’s freedom to compete and to succeed or fail based on his or her own merits and abilities. So ingrained was this quality, Godkin predicted, that impatience with cooperative ventures would persist even if they proved successful. “By many, [cooperation] is still regarded as an offshoot of communism … hostile to property and therefore to civilization; by others, simply as an expression of political discontent, part of a great leveling process which will end in something very destructive.”47
In less ideological terms, what ailed the cooperatives was that they were undercapitalized; sales of their manufactured products were inadequate, and they lacked the money necessary to grow and sustain a large industrial enterprise. Nor was workers’ faith in such projects absolute. Union molders grumbled when Sylvis tried to shift money from a standing strike fund to cover the needs of one teetering foundry; workers at other sites rebelled when managers were forced to cut wages to cover outstanding overhead costs, and they rejected the co-ops’ effort to introduce profit-sharing as a substitute for the missing pay. A more fundamental problem was that cooperative businesses, because of their stress on democratic decision making and the absence of traditional managerial control, often lacked the market-savvy leadership needed to compete with ordinary enterprises. “The business of production is the most difficult kind of business,” advised Godkin. “Raw materials have to be bought at the lowest prices, worked up with economy, and sold at the right time, in order to keep the concern going; and this requires a combination of qualities which are as yet not readily found amongst workingmen.”48 Industrial cooperatives didn’t die off overnight. Some managed to creep into the twentieth century, and the cooperative store movement, always easier to maintain, fared better than its industrial cousin, although there, too, enthusiasm gradually dropped off.
The NLU also broke new ground in its inclusion of women and blacks in its membership rolls. While Sylvis personally believed women’s primary roles were as nurturers of children and keepers of a civilized home, he recognized that insomuch as they had been forced into the workplace, they had the right to unionize no less than men. “How can we hope to reach the social elevation for which we all aim,” he asked, “without making women the companion of our advancement?”49 He knew the hardships workingwomen endured, sewing and laboring at piecework from dawn to dark for less than $3 a week, “steeped in a gulf of mental and moral darkness, such as make angels weep.” He believed such conditions “ruined more innocent girls than all the libertines and roués of the land.”50
Not all the male members of the group shared Sylvis’s attitude; some were made apprehensive by the influx of female industrial workers that had occurred during the war and by the possibility that their presence in the workforce would drive down wages. Many simply did not believe women deserved wages equal to those given a man. Women’s role in the NLU was also thwarted by strong differences of opini
on about female suffrage. They had played a crucial part in the abolition movement, and at war’s end had been angered to find their male colleagues, including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass, willing to set the campaign for women’s vote aside in order to prioritize the immediate interest of advancing black citizenship and suffrage. The women were insulted not merely because they felt they had priority, but because they considered themselves more qualified to cast votes than recently freed slaves, a high percentage of whom were illiterate. When Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton appeared at an NLU gathering on September 21, 1868, it was recorded by the New York Herald that Anthony’s assured demeanor impressed “the bearded delegates,” but that Stanton was greeted with derision because she came from a women’s suffrage group, and thus her cause was political and not labor-oriented.51 There was a motion to admit Mrs. Stanton only as a “corresponding delegate,” but Sylvis, calling her “one of the most brilliant writers of the age,” assured his fellow workingmen that he would “admit the devil himself” to the NLU if that personage was a great reformer and labor sympathizer as was Stanton. Anthony suggested that the degradation of women workers was related to their not having the vote, and pointed out that if they were politically equal to men, that would benefit labor overall, for when a boss paid women less, workingmen’s pay and opportunity, too, was diminished.52 The situation in the hall became unruly as members of the building trades threatened to walk out of the gathering over the suffrage issue. One delegate complained that “a woman is a very strange kind of being,” who might nullify her husband’s vote in an election just out of marital spite.53 Sylvis’s fiery speech in Stanton’s defense notwithstanding, she was allowed to remain only under an agreement that the NLU “does not regard itself as endorsing her peculiar ideas” on women’s suffrage.54
