While communes faltered, less elaborate cooperatives proliferated. The most common were consumers’ cooperatives modeled on the Working Men’s Protective Union founded by Boston craftsmen in 1845. Protective unions ran nonprofit stores where members could purchase food, fuel, and other necessities at reduced prices. They also functioned as mutual benefit societies, providing sick pay and old-age pensions. By the mid-1850s, workers organized close to 800 protective unions, mostly in New England and New York State but also as far west as Wisconsin.
Cooperative production gained a following too. Just before the depression, some craft unionists in Philadelphia, New York, and several other cities had set up their own workshops, but none of these projects had survived the economic collapse. Starting in the late 1840s, producers’ cooperatives reappeared in greater numbers, most of them organized by reborn unions. Some cooperatives, such as the Journeymen Molders’ Union Foundry in Cincinnati, were established by strikers as a temporary source of income but then developed a life of their own. Others had more radical purposes. In New York City, where unions in more than a dozen trades opened workshops in 1850, most agreed with the painters who declared their aim to dismantle the whole system by which employers “always obtain and retain the profits of our labor.”
Another popular cause was the “land reform” campaign that called on the federal government to give public lands to families who wished to homestead in the West. This movement was the brainchild of George Henry Evans, an English-born printer, editor of labor newspapers, and former leader of the New York Working Men’s Party and the National Trades Union. In 1844, a committee of veteran labor activists headed by Evans founded the National Reform Association to rally workingmen for political action in behalf of land reform. While would-be homesteaders flocked to the campaign, so did many more workers who viewed land reform as way to improve life in the East. An exodus of homesteaders promised to reduce competition in eastern labor and housing markets; those who stayed behind would presumably enjoy higher wages, better labor conditions, and lower rents. By the late 1840s, legions of workingmen had joined National Reform clubs, pledging to vote only for politicians who had agreed in writing that all public lands should be set aside “for the full and exclusive use of actual settlers.”
Factory workers from Maine to Georgia meanwhile agitated for the ten-hour day. This loose-knit movement did not generate a national organization, but it had a de facto headquarters in the New England Workingmen’s Association, founded by Massachusetts activists in 1844. Despite its masculine name, the Workingmen’s Association included workers of both sexes, most of them employed in textile mills. They came together to fight for the ten-hour day not only as an end in itself but also as the first step toward a new social order. As one of the Association’s organizers explained, shorter hours of labor would enable workers to “take the business of reform into [their] own hands” and find solutions to “the general evils of social life as it is.” This message spread far and wide through the Massachusetts labor press, read by mill workers across New England and in other regions as well.
In contrast to craft unions of the 1830s, the ten-hour day organizations of the 1840s and 1850s sought to decrease the workday through political reform. They organized petition drives and mobilized voters to demand that state lawmakers prohibit private industry from employing anyone more than ten hours a day. A number of legislatures yielded to the pressure. New Hampshire passed a ten-hour law in 1847, as did Pennsylvania and Maine in 1848 and six more states* over the course of the 1850s. Loopholes rendered these statutes unenforceable, however. They allowed for “special contracts” to extend the workday beyond ten hours, and factory owners routinely ordered workers to sign such contracts or find other jobs. In Massachusetts, textile corporations had such a stranglehold on the legislature that ten-hour bills never even came up for a vote.
Some ten-hour activists took up other issues too. Nowhere was their agenda broader than in the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA), the biggest of several women’s unions in the New England Workingmen’s Association. Members of the LFLRA organized a temperance group and a Fourierist club, raised money for the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, and sent aid to Ireland during the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. Their newspaper, the Voice of Industry, promoted these causes along with protective unions and land reform. And in sharp contrast to most of the labor movement, the LFLRA both condemned slavery and championed women’s rights.
SOLIDARITY AND FRAGMENTATION
The labor movement that emerged after the depression was more diverse than the movement of the 1830s and less cohesive. Printers, machinists, building trades workers, and cigar makers organized national craft unions, the first of which was the National Typographical Union founded in 1852 and still alive today. For the most part, however, union building was a local affair. Labor conventions and federations generally paid much more attention to issues like land reform, ten-hour legislation, and worker cooperatives than to organizing on the job. That was invariably the case at the National Industrial Congresses that convened annually from 1845 through 1856 and brought together unionists, land reformers, cooperationists, and assorted radicals. In 1850, forty-six organizations in New York City formed a local federation also known as the Industrial Congress. In addition to trade unions, participating groups included National Reform clubs, mutual-benefit societies, Christian labor reform groups, German socialist lodges, and both consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives. They tried in vain to construct a common program, and the federation fell apart in less than two years.
Divisions on the basis of sex, nationality, and color permeated the labor movement as well. Women were mostly excluded or treated as men’s underlings and helpmeets. While immigrants and American natives cooperated in some parts of the movement, other parts were hostile to the foreign-born. Black workers were the ultimate outsiders—routinely the targets of violence as well as exclusion. Many white labor activists embraced the movement to abolish slavery, but a great many more did not.
“You have been degraded long enough,” the Voice of Industry told its female readers in 1846. “Resolve that you will think, reason, judge, love, hate, approve and disapprove, for yourselves, and at your own volition; and, not at the dictation of another.” Most of all, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association urged workingwomen to defy the notion that social activism was unwomanly. Sarah Bagley, the Association’s president, declared at a meeting of ten-hour organizers:
For the last half century it has been deemed a violation of woman’s sphere to appear before the public as a speaker; but when our rights are trampled upon and we appeal in vain to legislators, what shall we do but appeal to the people? Shall not our voice be heard and our rights acknowledged?
One of Bagley’s coworkers, writing under the name of Julianna, urged mill women to rally behind the motto, “EQUAL RIGHTS or death to the corporations.”
Though New England’s factory operatives sent no delegates, some other workingwomen attended the nation’s first women’s rights convention, which met in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. Among the participants was the nineteen-year-old Charlotte Woodward, an outworker who sewed deerskin gloves for leather shops in Seneca County. She dreamed of becoming a typesetter but could not find a printer willing to teach a woman the trade. “I wanted to work,” she later wrote, “but I wanted to choose my task. . . . That was my form of rebellion against the life into which I was born.” As the convention closed she put her name to a Declaration of Principles that updated the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men and women are created equal . . .”
Workingwomen had voiced such sentiments as early as 1831, when Sarah Monroe, the president of New York City’s Tailoresses Society, chided workingmen for making light of a wage strike by her union. In a speech reprinted by the labor press, she asked, “if it is unfashionable for the men to bear oppression in silence, why should it not also become unfashiona
ble with the women? or do they deem us more able to endure hardships than they themselves?” In many cases workingmen actively supported women’s militancy. During the strike wave of the mid-1830s, journeymen’s unions backed women strikers, and women and men struck jointly in Philadelphia’s shoe and textile factories. A decade later the ten-hour campaign in western Pennsylvania’s cotton mills was punctuated by rip-roaring strikes of women operatives who rallied male friends to help. In 1845 and again in 1848, the strikers tore down factory gates and stormed in to oust workers who had remained on the job. Hundreds of men showed up to cheer these actions and dissuade police from stepping in. “Let ‘em hit one of them gals if they dare, and we’ll fetch them out of their boots,” one man told the Pittsburgh Journal.
Chivalry was one thing, however, and comradeship another. Even the most generous workingmen did not generally accept women as equals, and many craftsmen were profoundly disturbed by women’s very presence in industrial jobs. The National Trades Union, whose locals supported many a women’s strike, excluded women’s unions and voted at its 1835 convention to oppose “the multiplying of all description of labor for females.” The shoemaker William English, head of Philadelphia’s city central during its general strike for the ten-hour day, appealed to workingwomen to restrict their hours of labor in order to create more and better-paying positions for men. What nature intended, he said, was that men be the breadwinners so that women could devote themselves to housework, each generation training the next for the “sober duties of wives, mothers and matrons.”
In 1836, the NTU appointed a Committee on Female Labor that echoed English. In its report to that year’s convention, the committee urged journeymen’s unions to help workingwomen organize for better labor conditions, but only as a stopgap effort “to curb the excess before we destroy the evil.” The ultimate goal, the report insisted, should be women’s removal from workshops and factories. Since workingwomen were “very blind to their real interest,” they had so far failed to recognize the beauty of that goal, and so it was imperative that union men enlighten them. Every woman had to be made to understand that “her labor should be only of a domestic nature” and that taking industrial work was “the same as tying a stone around the neck of her natural protector, Man.”
When craft unions regrouped in the late 1840s and early 1850s, their posture toward women was much the same. They defined female industrial labor as an evil and proposed as a solution that workingmen receive a “family wage” sufficient to keep the womenfolk at home. A handful of unions helped to organize sister locals of workingwomen. The Journeymen Tailors of Cleveland admitted women in 1850 in return for their support of a union strike. That same year, the Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in New York City established a local for women workers related to union men. Otherwise craft unions excluded women, as did most of the National Industrial Congresses.
There were moments of unity. Women and men cooperated closely in the New England Workingmen’s Association, whose constitution granted women’s unions “all the rights, privileges and obligations” enjoyed by the men’s. President Sarah Bagley of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association presented an address at the first National Industrial Congress in 1845, and women took part in the land reform movement under the National Reform Association.
The most celebrated example of labor solidarity between men and women was the Great Shoemakers Strike of 1860, in which some 20,000 shoe workers in factory towns across New England staged a six-week strike for better pay. The strike was led by journeymen’s unions but included a good many women, those who did outwork at home as well as those employed in the factories. Women were especially active in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they staged the strike’s most widely reported parade. On March 7, two weeks into the strike, about 800 women braved a snowstorm to march through town behind a banner proclaiming that “AMERICAN LADIES WILL NOT BE SLAVES. GIVE US FAIR COMPENSATION AND WE LABOR CHEERFULLY.” Cooperation between the sexes was another important theme. Male strikers marched behind the female contingents, and a group of women from the town’s Fourth Ward presented the men with a flag that read, “Weak in Physical Strength but Strong in Moral Courage, We Dare to Battle for the Right, Shoulder to Shoulder with Our Fathers, Husbands, and Brothers.”
Behind this show of unity, however, lay a split. Lynn’s journeymen said they were striking “not as citizens and men merely but as heads of families,” and in that spirit they requested that women strikers restrict their pay demands so that the men might win more. Outworkers readily agreed; since most lived in family households whose men worked in the shoe factories, they stood to benefit from a male raise. But there was resistance from factory women, most of them entirely self-supporting and about half from out of town. Just days before the March 7 parade, factory women angrily abandoned the strike when outworkers altered the high female wage demands earlier approved at a mass meeting. Other shoe towns saw the same division in less dramatic forms. Workingwomen related to male shoe workers ardently supported the strike while the rest generally sat it out. If the Great Shoemakers’ Strike epitomized labor solidarity between men and women, it also revealed the boundaries of solidarity centered in the family.
Another fault line among working people was that between immigrants and natives. Labor campaigns of the 1840s and 1850s coincided and in some instances overlapped with an anti-immigrant movement that especially targeted Irish Catholics. During the depression, nativism surged under the auspices of the American Republican Party, which was founded in 1841 and had major branches in New Orleans, Charleston, Boston, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and St. Louis by late 1843. The American Republican platform called for immigrants’ exclusion from politics. Public offices, it said, should be reserved for native-born citizens, and immigrants should have to wait twenty-one years before they could file for naturalized citizenship and gain the right to vote. The party also charged that Catholicism—Irish Catholics in particular—caused most of the poverty, crime, and political corruption that plagued American cities. These arguments attracted a fair number of Protestant working men, especially those from skilled trades that employed few immigrants. In 1844, American Republican candidates swept municipal elections in New York City, and a wave of anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia claimed more than thirty lives.
A year later the party had sharply declined, but nativism flourished in new fraternal orders for white, native-born Protestants. While some were founded and led by men of the elite and attracted predominantly genteel followings, other nativist fraternities had working-class roots. The most popular was the Order of United American Mechanics, which began in Philadelphia in 1845 and quickly spread to other cities in both the North and the South. Craft journeymen made up the great bulk of OUAM members, though master craftsmen with small shops joined as well. American Mechanics helped each other find jobs; promoted abstinence from alcohol, profanity, gambling, and sexual vice; and maintained a mutual insurance system that provided sick, unemployment, and death benefits. They also boycotted immigrant-owned businesses, pledged not to work with immigrant labor, and gathered on patriotic holidays to proclaim Protestant America’s superiority to Catholic nations. Some of the journeymen’s unions that sprang up in the 1840s and 1850s recruited their charter members from OUAM lodges or kindred groups.
Immigrants also built unions and in some cities became the labor movement’s driving force. The Laborer’s Union Benevolent Association—organized in 1843 by Irish workingmen on New York City’s docks and construction sites—became the country’s biggest labor organization, with 6,000 members in 1850. By then, New York’s craft unions were largely composed of Irish, German, and British immigrants, and the same pattern prevailed in all of the North’s major cities. In 1849, British coal miners in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, established the country’s first miners’ union, one of many U.S. labor organizations founded by veterans of radical reform campaigns led by the Chartist movement in England. Many German unionists had radical backgrounds; the m
ost militant were the “Forty-Eighters,” who had taken part in Germany’s failed democratic revolution of 1848. Irish immigrants often had old-country experience in the radical Society of Ribbonmen or secret associations like the Whiteboys, which waged a guerrilla war against British colonialism. Infusing the American labor movement with new traditions of struggle, immigrants also expanded its awareness of struggles abroad. Native as well as foreign-born labor activists attended mass meetings to congratulate British workers when Parliament passed a ten-hour law in 1847, to hail the revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848, and to express solidarity with Irish resistance to British rule.
In factory towns, on the other hand, immigrants and natives generally kept their distance. That was especially true in New England’s cotton mills, where Irish workers became the largest ethnic group over the course of the 1850s. Unions formed in connection with the ten-hour campaign had mostly died out by the start of the decade, and working conditions were on the decline. Yankee workers often blamed the decline on the Irish, who entered the mills at substandard pay and worked at speeds the Yankees had resisted. Sometimes employers recruited Irish strikebreakers. In 1851, mill overseers in Amesbury and Salisbury, Massachusetts, brought Irish immigrants to town to replace local people on strike over an increase in the workday. For the most part, however, Irish workers replaced Yankee women departing for better jobs, and complaints against them were nothing more than bigotry dressed up as a grievance.
Some of the loudest complaints came from conservative quarters like the New England Offering, a journal edited by a former mill worker, largely written by Yankee operatives, and subsidized by textile companies. Editor Harriet Farley thought wages would fall on account of defects in immigrants’ character. Their poor work, she predicted, would compel the companies to reduce pay, and the Irish would submit “since they have little energy, few aspirations to be ministered unto by their gains, and . . . little of the home sentiment.” That was the gist of all nativist thinking: attribute unsavory traits to immigrants, then blame those traits for whatever is going wrong.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 10
