From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  In the tradition of Chinese railroad workers’ 1867 strike for higher wages, Chinese farm workers organized against unequal pay. Fruit pickers in California’s Santa Clara Valley went on strike in 1880, as did hops pickers in Kern County in 1884. In 1890, California newspapers reported that Chinese immigrants had formed a labor union that demanded $1.50 a day for work in orchards and vineyards. Other immigrant groups drew on their own militant traditions, including German socialism, Bohemian (Czech), Italian, and Mexican anarchism, Irish resistance to English occupation, Jewish radicalism forged under Czarist persecution, Puerto Rican and Cuban rebellion against Spanish colonialism.

  The labor movement of the Gilded Age tapped into all of these legacies. And if labor organizations sometimes failed to unite even their own ranks, workplace and community solidarity provided a bedrock for resistance to corporate assaults on labor and dominance of American life.

  THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR

  The Gilded Age labor movement was as diverse as the working class itself. From 1881 through 1897, the United States saw more than 18,000 strikes for higher wages, the eight-hour day, union recognition, and other goals. Labor activists promoted their objectives in many different languages and accents, and they gathered in arenas ranging from trade unions to political parties, social clubs to revolutionary organizations, and neighborhood saloons to national conventions. At every point this movement challenged monopoly capitalists, but by the end of the era, the boldest initiatives had been crushed, and the prevailing spirit had retreated from audacity to caution.

  The largest and most influential labor organization of the Gilded Age was the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 as a secret organization of garment workers led by Philadelphia tailor Uriah Stephens. When Stephens stepped down in 1879, he was replaced by Terence Powderly, a railroad machinist who had recently been elected mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on a “Labor Reform” ticket. Secrecy protected Knights from blacklisting by employers and involved elaborate codes. The cryptic message “***** 8 610/75” chalked on a wall meant “Knights meet 8 PM June 10 Assembly 75.” Members gathered in Local Assemblies that included both “trade assemblies” organized by industry and “mixed assemblies” of people from various industries and walks of life. Locals reported to District Assemblies; annual conventions known as General Assemblies debated and adopted policy;and a General Executive Board oversaw the Order between conventions. The Knights’ basic principle was solidarity, their motto “An Injury to One is an Injury to All.”

  In 1881, the Knights went public, issuing a Declaration of Principles that began with an attack on monopoly:

  The alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses. It is imperative, if we desire to enjoy the full blessings of life, that a check be placed upon unjust accumulation, and the power for evil of aggregated wealth. This . . . can be accomplished only by the united efforts of those who obey the divine injunction, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’

  The Knights regarded monopolists as monarchs in all but name. To quote George McNeill, a longtime labor activist among the leaders of Boston’s District Assembly:

  The railroad president is a railroad king, whose whim is law. He collects tithes by reducing wages. . . . He can discharge (banish) any employee without cause. He can prevent laborers from following their usual vocations. He can withhold their lawful wages. He can delay trial on a suit of law, and postpone judgment indefinitely. He can control legislative bodies, dictate legislation, subsidize the press, and corrupt the moral sense of the community. He can fix the price of freights, and thus command the food and fuel-supplies of the nation.

  If this “iron heel of a soulless monopoly” undermined democracy, so did wage labor, which forced workers into dependency on employers. As McNeill wrote, “These extremes of wealth and poverty are threatening the existence of the government. In light of these facts, we declare that there is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government,—the wage-laborer attempting to save the government, and the capitalist class ignorantly attempting to subvert it.”

  The Knights proposed to replace the wage system with a “cooperative commonwealth.” Workers would be their own masters. Only then, proclaimed the Declaration of Principles, could they have “the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual, moral and social faculties; all of the benefits, recreation and pleasures of association; in a word . . . to share in the gains and honors of advancing civilization.”

  This message had a very broad appeal. The Order’s membership climbed steadily—from 28,000 Knights in 1880 to 43,000 in 1882, 71,000 in 1884, and 110,000 by 1885. At the movement’s peak in 1886, about 750,000 Knights gathered in more than over 15,000 locals across country, and only seventy counties had no assembly at all. Up to 200,000 more belonged to assemblies founded in Canada, England, Ireland, Belgium, France, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand.

  The Knights of Labor became the most inclusive U.S. labor organization of the nineteenth century. It welcomed to its anti-monopoly coalition all of the “producing classes”—not only wage workers but also housewives, farmers, clergymen, shopkeepers, doctors, writers, editors, and other professionals. Employers could join too, if they had once been wage earners and now treated their employees fairly by paying good wages and observing the eight-hour day. The only groups summarily excluded were liquor dealers, stockbrokers, bankers, professional gamblers, and corporate lawyers.

  The Knights formally admitted women in 1882, after women shoe workers in Philadelphia had organized their own assembly. In 1886, when women made up about 10 percent of the Order’s membership, the General Assembly established a national Women’s Department headed by Leonora Barry, an Irish-born hosiery mill operative who led a female trade assembly in Amsterdam, New York. Chicago’s giant District Assembly was headed by Elizabeth Rodgers, a housewife and mother of twelve children. The Order was the first U.S. labor organization to endorse female suffrage, and the local assemblies hosted many lectures on women’s rights.

  The Order also welcomed immigrants, translated its literature into various languages, and chartered numerous foreign-language assemblies, with one major exception. Though the New York City and Philadelphia districts tried to organize Chinese assemblies in 1886–87, western districts were deeply involved in the anti-Chinese movement, and the organization’s national spokesmen often proclaimed that, “The Chinese must go.” When Wyoming Knights led the mob that massacred Chinese in Rock Springs in 1885, Terence Powderly blamed the violence on Chinese evasion of the Exclusion Act.

  Black-white cooperation was more impressive. The Order’s Journal of United Labor declared in 1880: “We should be false to every principle of our Order should we exclude from membership any man who gains his living by honest toil, on account of his color or creed.” By 1886, African American Knights numbered at least 60,000. They made up about half the membership in Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas, and a third of the whole southern membership. Even after the Knights went public, black members in southern states often had to organize in secret. After touring the South, one member of the General Executive Board observed, “It is as much . . . as a person’s life is worth to be known as a member of the Knights of Labor there.” Southern assemblies were sometimes integrated: Ida Wells, who attended a Memphis assembly in the late 1880s, reported that “everyone who came was welcomed and every woman from black to white was seated with courtesy usually extended to white ladies alone in this town.”

  The Order’s most dramatic confrontation with the color line came in October 1886, when the annual convention met in Richmond, Virginia. A local hotel refused to accommodate Frank Ferrell, an African American official in New York City’s District Assembly 49 and a member of the General Executive Board. The whole New Y
ork delegation boycotted the hotel in protest and lodged with black families. At the convention’s opening session, the Knights were welcomed by Virginia’s Governor Fitzhugh Lee. The next speaker was Frank Ferrell, who had been selected to introduce Terence Powderly. “One of the objects of our Order,” he reminded his audience, “is the abolition of those distinctions maintained by creed or color.” The convention endorsed civil equality “with no distinction on account of color,” called for the admission of black apprentices to skilled mechanical trades, and recommended a southern drive “to organize all classes of laborers” irrespective of race. When the meeting adjourned, the 660 delegates and 2,000 local Knights marched to a picnic ground, joined by thousands of Richmond’s black residents. The Cleveland Gazette, a black newspaper, called this parade “the most remarkable thing since Emancipation.”

  The Knights of Labor sponsored social and educational programs, ran candidates for office in over 200 cities and towns in 1885–86, and sponsored hundreds of consumer and producer cooperatives. First and foremost, however, K of L assemblies functioned as labor unions. Many craft unions wiped out by the 1870s depression reconstituted themselves within the Order. Local assemblies frequently went on strike to force employers to negotiate wages and working conditions, and trade assemblies in the same industry frequently backed each other with sympathy strikes. Walkouts grew more common as the Order expanded. Across the country, K of L strikes averaged about 450 a year from 1881 through 1884; but they numbered 645 in 1885 and more than 1,400 in 1886 and again in 1887. In 1885, a successful strike against wage cuts on Jay Gould’s southwestern rail lines greatly boosted the Order’s prestige and attracted many new recruits.

  The proposal for the Knights’ biggest campaign originated outside the Order, in the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. The FOTLU was a relatively small network of national craft unions not affiliated with the Knights, and it seldom did more than pass resolutions. But in September 1882, its Central Labor Union in New York City staged a “labor holiday” parade; instead of going to work, some 30,000 men and women marched for labor’s rights. Labor Day parades henceforth became annual events in New York and other cities, including Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Lynn, Massachusetts.* Many marchers carried placards and banners emblazoned with the slogan “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Sleep, Eight Hours for What We Will.” Earlier campaigns for the eight-hour day had aimed at winning legislation, but FOTLU leaders like P. J. McGuire of the Brotherhood of Carpenters held that unionists should take direct action to shorten the workday. The FOTLU convention of 1884 resolved that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886,” and called for nationwide strikes to enforce this edict.

  The Knights’ General Executive Board declined to endorse the plan, and Terence Powderly secretly ordered his lieutenants to discourage its adoption by local and district assemblies. But the FOTLU’s call galvanized rank-and-file Knights. Assembly after assembly pledged support, and organizers built multitudes of new assemblies on the eight-hour platform. That accounted for most of the Order’s astonishing sevenfold growth between 1885 and 1886.

  The eight-hour movement generated tremendous optimism—more than enough to sustain the Order through a crushing rematch with Jay Gould. In February 1886, Knights on his southwestern railroads struck to enforce a demand for union recognition. This time around, Gould refused to give in, and lawmen mobilized to smash the strike. Many workers were arrested; in East St. Louis, Illinois, seven were killed during a battle with militiamen and police. By mid-April, it was clear that the strike would go down to defeat, that monopolists like Gould could find the wherewithal to vanquish mass revolts. But the Knights’ eight-hour assemblies continued to multiply. As John Swinton wrote in the spring, “Never has there been such a spectacle as the march of the Order of the Knights of Labor at the present time.”

  On Saturday, May 1, about 350,000 workers at more than 11,000 establishments across the country went on strike for the eight-hour day. In Chicago, 65,000 strikers staged weekend rallies and parades. Counterattacks began on Monday;police fired into a group picketing the McCormick Harvester Works and killed at least four workers. Anarchist leaders of the city’s eight-hour coalition called a protest meeting, held the night of May 4 at Haymarket Square. A few thousand showed up, but the crowd had dwindled to a few hundred by the time policemen arrived to disperse the gathering a little after ten o’clock. As the police entered the square, someone—the culprit was never identified—threw a bomb that killed one officer and wounded another sixty-six, seven of whom later died.

  For several weeks police rounded up labor activists by the hundreds. Meeting halls and residences were raided; entire families were jailed; evidence of incendiary plotting was seized—and planted when it could not be found. Newspapers reported daily on the police department’s progress in solving the “crime of the century.” On May 27, eight anarchists—August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab—were indicted for conspiracy to commit murder. Their trial began on June 21.

  Only two of the defendants, Spies and Fielden, had been present when the explosion occurred, but the prosecution did not care who actually threw the bomb. The anarchists had been indicted for their radicalism and militant leadership of the eight-hour movement, not for their actions in Haymarket Square. As the state’s attorney told the jury:

  Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted because they were leaders. . . . Gentlemen of the jury: convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society.

  The jury convicted all of the defendants. Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years; the others were condemned to death.

  Trade unionists and social reformers campaigned widely for clemency or pardon. Albert Parsons’s wife was especially active. A Texan of black, Mexican, and Native American ancestry, Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons worked tirelessly for the amnesty campaign, speaking to 200,000 people in sixteen states and inspiring widespread support. John Brown, Jr., sent the convicted men baskets of grapes and a letter that quoted his father’s statement shortly before execution: “It is a great comfort to feel assured that I am permitted to die for a cause,—not merely to pay the debt of nature as all must.” Petitions on behalf of the Haymarket martyrs came from as far away as Russia. Just days before the execution, the governor of Illinois commuted the sentences of Fielden and Schwab to life in prison. The night before the execution, Lingg cheated the state by committing suicide. On November 11, 1887, Spies, Parsons, Fischer, and Engel went to the gallows. Some 25,000 people marched in their funeral procession.

  The eight-hour movement had already fizzled, and the Knights were on the wane. Within a week of the bombing, strikers across the country were straggling back to work, brutalized by police and vilified by the press as dupes of an “anarchist plot.” Terence Powderly and his General Executive Board joined the conservative chorus. Denouncing anarchism, they refused to contribute to the Haymarket defense fund, and they tried their best to stamp out militancy among the Order’s rank and file.

  In October 1886, trade assemblies of meatpacking workers led a strike of 25,000 at Chicago’s Union Stock Yard, which had adopted the eight-hour day that spring and now declared a return to ten hours. Powderly told the striking assemblies to go back to work; when they defied him, he threatened to revoke their K of L charters. Smelling blood, the company broke off negotiations and announced that it would no longer employ any member of the Knights of Labor. A week later the strikers conceded defeat, and the meatpackers’ assemblies soon died out.

  There followed a long series of strikes that pitted rank-and-file Knights against their national leaders as well as corporate employers. Workers lost nearly all of these battles, and the Knights of Labor shrank almost as swiftly as it had grown. Membership fell from 750,000 in 1886 to 220,000 in 1888, 100,000 in 1890, and only 20
,000 by 1896.*

  THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

  As the Knights of Labor declined, a new national labor organization came to the fore. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was founded in December 1886 in Columbus, Ohio, at a convention called by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. The AFL’s founding president—reelected almost every year until his death in 1924—was the cigarmaker Samuel Gompers, an English immigrant of Dutch Jewish descent. An alliance of thirteen national craft unions, the newborn Federation advanced two fundamental principles: “pure and simple unionism” (a narrow focus on wages, hours and working conditions) and “voluntarism” (strict reliance on only the union and its members). Defining itself as a better alternative to the Knights of Labor, the AFL practiced what one historian has aptly called “prudential unionism,” a defensive strategy that accepted the wage-labor system and tried to avoid government intervention in labor disputes.

  In some respects the early AFL took up where the Knights had left off. In 1890, the Federation revived the eight-hour campaign, selected the Brotherhood of Carpenters to be the first union to strike, and urged all unionists to demonstrate in support on May 1. The business journal Bradstreet’s reported more strikes started that day than on any previous day on record, and the Carpenters won the eight-hour day for more than 46,000 members. Sympathy strikes characterized AFL style in the early years. Of the 7,500 strikes its unions staged from 1890 through 1894, nearly one in ten was a sympathy strike.

  Otherwise, the Federation sharply distinguished itself from the Knights. It did not run candidates for public office. In contrast to the Order’s centralized structure, the AFL Executive Council upheld the autonomy of affiliated unions. The Council intervened only to mediate between affiliates disputing jurisdictions and to provide support for organizing drives and strikes. Critical of rank-and-file Knights’ penchant for going on strike without adequate resources, the AFL also encouraged affiliates to set high initiation fees and dues so that union treasuries would be large enough to sustain members through long work stoppages. And the Knights’ diversity gave way to homogeneity in the AFL, which focused on organizing highly skilled workers—those with the most social clout. The AFL’s initial membership was overwhelmingly male and white, reflecting the composition of skilled trades. Of the thirteen founding unions, only the cigarmakers and the typographers admitted women, and none included many men of color.