CHAPTER II
FORMATIVE YEARS
America did not become a cisatlantic Britain, as some of the colonial adventurers had hoped. A wider destiny awaited her. Here were economic conditions which upset all notions of the fixity of class distinctions. Here was a continent of free land, luring the disaffected or disappointed artisan and enabling him to achieve economic independence. Hither streamed ceaselessly hordes of immigrants from Europe, constantly shifting the social equilibrium. Here the demand for labor was constant, except during the rare intervals of financial stagnation, and here the door of opportunity swung wide to the energetic and able artisan. The records of American industry are replete with names of prominent leaders who began at the apprentice’s bench.
The old class distinctions brought from the home country, however, had survived for many years in the primeval forests of Virginia and Maryland and even among the hills of New England. Indeed, until the Revolution and for some time thereafter, a man’s clothes were the badge of his calling. The gentleman wore powdered queue and ruffled shirt; the workman, coarse buckskin breeches, ponderous shoes with brass buckles, and usually a leather apron, well greased to keep it pliable. Just before the Revolution the lot of the common laborer was not an enviable one. His house was rude and barren of comforts; his fare was coarse and without variety. His wage was two shillings a day, and prison—usually an indescribably filthy hole—awaited him the moment he ran into debt. The artisan fared somewhat better. He had spent, as a rule, seven years learning his trade, and his skill and energy demanded and generally received a reasonable return. The account books that have come down to us from colonial days show that his handiwork earned him a fair living. This, however, was before machinery had made inroads upon the product of cabinetmaker, tailor, shoemaker, locksmith, and silversmith, and when the main street of every village was picturesque with the signs of the crafts that maintained the decent independence of the community.
Such labor organizations as existed before the Revolution were limited to the skilled trades. In 1648 the coopers and the shoemakers of Boston were granted permission to organize guilds, which embraced both master and journeyman, and there were a few similar organizations in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. But these were not unions like those of today. “There are,” says Richard T. Ely, “no traces of anything like a modern trades union in the colonial period of American history, and it is evident on reflection that there was little need, if any, of organization on the part of labor, at that time.” ¹
A new epoch for labor came in with the Revolution. Within a decade wages rose fifty per cent, and John Jay in 1784 writes of the “wages of mechanics and laborers” as “very extravagant.” Though the industries were small and depended on a local market within a circumscribed area of communication, they grew rapidly. The period following the Revolution is marked by considerable industrial restiveness and by the formation of many labor organizations, which were, however, benevolent or friendly societies rather than unions and were often incorporated by an act of the legislature. In New York, between 1800 and 1810, twenty-four such societies were incorporated. Only in the larger cities were they composed of artisans of one trade, such as the New York Masons Society (1807) or the New York Society of Journeymen Shipwrights (1807). Elsewhere they included artisans of many trades, such as the Albany Mechanical Society (1801). In Philadelphia the cordwainers, printers, and hatters had societies. In Baltimore the tailors were the first to organize, and they conducted in 1795 one of the first strikes in America. Ten years later they struck again, and succeeded in raising their pay from seven shillings sixpence the job to eight shillings ninepence and “extras.” At the same time the pay of unskilled labor was rising rapidly, for workers were scarce owing to the call of the merchant marine in those years of the rising splendor of the American sailing ship, and the lure of western lands. The wages of common laborers rose to a dollar and more a day.
There occurred in 1805 an important strike of the Philadelphia cordwainers. Theirs was one of the oldest labor organizations in the country, and it had conducted several successful strikes. This particular occasion, however, is significant, because the strikers were tried for conspiracy in the mayor’s court, with the result that they were found guilty and fined eight dollars each, with costs. As the court permitted both sides to tell their story in detail, a full report of the proceedings survives to give us, as it were, a photograph of the labor conditions of that time. The trial kindled a great deal of local animosity. A newspaper called the Aurora contained inflammatory accounts of the proceedings, and a pamphlet giving the records of the court was widely circulated. This pamphlet bore the significant legend, “It is better that the law be known and certain, than that it be right,” and was dedicated to the Governor and General Assembly “with the hope of attracting their particular attention, at the next meeting of the legislature.”
Another early instance of a strike occurred in New York City in 1809, when the cordwainers struck for higher wages and were hauled before the mayor’s court on the charge of conspiracy. The trial was postponed by Mayor DeWitt Clinton until after the pending municipal elections to avoid the risk of offending either side. When at length the strikers were brought to trial, the court-house was crowded with spectators, showing how keen was the public interest in the case. The jury’s verdict of “guilty,” and the imposition of a fine of one dollar each and costs upon the defendants served but as a stimulus to the friends of the strikers to gather in a great mass meeting and protest against the verdict and the law that made it possible.
In 1821 the New York Typographical Society, which had been organized four years earlier by Peter Force, a labor leader of unusual energy, set a precedent for the vigorous and fearless career of its modern successor by calling a strike in the printing office of Thurlow Weed, the powerful politician, himself a member of the society, because he employed a “rat,” as a nonunion worker was called. It should be noted, however, that the organizations of this early period were of a loose structure and scarcely comparable to the labor unions of today.
Sidney Smith, the brilliant contributor to the Edinburgh Review, propounded in 1820 certain questions which sum up the general conditions of American industry and art after nearly a half century of independence: “In the four quarters of the globe,” he asked, “who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets?”
These questions, which were quite pertinent, though conceived in an impertinent spirit, were being answered in America even while the witty Englishman was framing them. The water power of New England was being harnessed to cotton mills, woolen mills, and tanneries. Massachusetts in 1820 reported one hundred and sixty-one factories. New York had begun that marvelous growth which made the city, in the course of a few decades, the financial capital of a hemisphere. So rapidly were people flocking to New York, that houses had tenants long before they had windows and doors, and streets were lined with buildings before they had sewers, sidewalks, or pavements. New Jersey had well under way those manufactories of glassware, porcelains, carpets, and textiles which have since brought her great prosperity. Philadelphia was the country’s greatest weaving center, boasting four thousand craftsmen engaged in that industry. Even on the frontier, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati were emerging from “settlements” into manufacturing towns of importance. McMaster concludes his graphic summary of these years as follows: “In 1820 it was estimated that 200,000 persons and a capital of $75,000,000 were employed in manufacturing. In 1825 the capital used had been expanded to $160,000,000 and the number of workers to 2,000,000.” ¹
The Industrial Revolution had set in. These new millions who hastened to answer the call of industry in the new land were largely composed of the poor of other lands. Thousands of them were paupers when they landed in America, their passage having been paid by those at home who wanted to get rid of them. Vast numbers settled down in the cities, in spite of the lure of the land. It was at this period that universal manhood suffrage was written into the constitutions of the older States, and a new electorate assumed the reins of power. Now the first labor representatives were sent to the legislatures and to Congress, and the older parties began eagerly bidding for the votes of the humble. The decision of great questions fell to this new electorate. With the rise of industry came the demand for a protective tariff and for better transportation. State governments vied with each other, in thoughtless haste, in lending their credit to new turnpike and canal construction. And above all political issues loomed the Bank, the monopoly that became the laborer’s bugaboo and Andrew Jackson’s opportunity to rally to his side the newly enfranchised mechanics.
So the old days of semi-colonial composure were succeeded by the thrilling experiences that a new industrial prosperity thrusts upon a really democratic electorate. Little wonder that the labor union movement took the political by-path, seeking salvation in the promise of the politician and in the panacea of fatuous laws. Now there were to be discerned the beginnings of class solidarity among the working people. But the individual’s chances to improve his situation were still very great and opportunity was still a golden word.
The harsh facts of the hour, however, soon began to call for united action. The cities were expanding with such eager haste that proper housing conditions were overlooked. Workingmen were obliged to live in wretched structures. Moreover, human beings were still levied on for debt and imprisoned for default of payment. Children of less than sixteen years of age were working twelve or more hours a day, and if they received an education at all, it was usually in schools charitably called “ragged schools” or “poor schools,” or “pauper schools.” There was no adequate redress for the mechanic if his wages were in default, for lien laws had not yet found their way into the statute books. Militia service was oppressive, permitting only the rich to buy exemption. It was still considered an unlawful conspiracy to act in unison for an increase in pay or a lessening of working hours. By 1840 the pay of unskilled labor had dropped to about seventy-five cents a day in the overcrowded cities, and in the winter, in either city or country, many unskilled workers were glad to work for merely their board. The lot of women workers was especially pitiful. A seamstress by hard toil, working fifteen hours a day might stitch enough shirts to earn from seventy-two cents to a dollar and twelve cents a week. Skilled labor, while faring better in wages, shared with the unskilled in the universal working day which lasted from sun to sun. Such in brief were the conditions that brought home to the laboring masses that homogeneous consciousness which alone makes a group powerful in a democracy.
The movement can most clearly be discerned in the cities. Philadelphia claims precedence as the home of the first Trades’ Union. The master cordwainers had organized a society in 1792, and their journeymen had followed suit two years later. The experiences and vicissitudes of these shoemakers furnished a useful lesson to other tradesmen, many of whom were organized into unions. But they were isolated organizations, each one fighting its own battles. In 1827 the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations was formed. Of its significance John R. Commons says:
England is considered the home of trade-unionism, but the distinction belongs to Philadelphia.… The first trades’ union in England was that of Manchester, organized in 1829, although there seems to have been an attempt to organize one in 1824. But the first one in America was the “Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations,” organized in Philadelphia in 1827, two years earlier. The name came from Manchester, but the thing from Philadelphia. Neither union lasted long. The Manchester union lived two years, and the Philadelphia union one year. But the Manchester union died and the Philadelphia union metamorphosed into politics. Here again Philadelphia was the pioneer, for it called into being the first labor party. Not only this, but through the Mechanics’ Union Philadelphia started probably the first wage-earners’ paper ever published—the Mechanics Free Press—antedating, in January, 1828, the first similar journal in England by two years. ¹
The union had its inception in the first general building strike called in America. In the summer of 1827 the carpenters struck for a ten-hour day. They were soon joined by the bricklayers, painters, and glaziers, and members of other trades. But the strike failed of its immediate object. A second effort to combine the various trades into one organization was made in 1833, when the Trades’ Union of the City and County of Philadelphia, was formed. Three years later this union embraced some fifty societies with over ten thousand members. In June, 1835, this organization undertook what was probably the first successful general strike in America. It began among the cordwainers, spread to the workers in the building trades, and was presently joined in by cigarmakers, carters, saddlers and harness makers, smiths, plumbers, bakers, printers, and even by the unskilled workers on the docks. The strikers’ demand for a ten-hour day received a great deal of support from the influential men in the community. After a mass meeting of citizens had adopted resolutions endorsing the demands of the union, the city council agreed to a ten-hour day for all municipal employees.
In 1833 the carpenters of New York City struck for an increase in wages. They were receiving a dollar thirty-seven and a half cents a day; they asked for a dollar and a half. They obtained the support of other workers, notably the tailors, printers, brushmakers, tobacconists, and masons, and succeeded in winning their strike in one month. The printers, who have always been alert and active in New York City, elated by the success of this coördinate effort, sent out a circular calling for a general convention of all the trades societies of the city. After a preliminary meeting in July, a mass meeting was held in December, at which there were present about four thousand persons representing twenty-one societies. The outcome of the meeting was the organization of the General Trades’ Union of New York City.
It happened in the following year that Ely Moore of the Typographical Association and the first president of the new union, a powerful orator and a sagacious organizer, was elected to Congress on the Jackson ticket. He was backed by Tammany Hall, always on the alert for winners, and was supported by the mechanics, artisans, and workingmen. He was the first man to take his seat in Washington as the avowed representative of labor.
The movement for a ten-hour day was now in full swing, and the years 1834-7 were full of strikes. The most spectacular of these struggles was the strike of the tailors of New York in 1836, in the course of which twenty strikers were arrested for conspiracy. After a spirited trial attended by throngs of spectators, the men were found guilty by a jury which took only thirty minutes for deliberation. The strikers were fined $50 each, except the president of the society, who was fined $150. After the trial there was held a mass meeting which was attended, according to the Evening Post, by twenty-seven thousand persons. Resolutions were passed declaring that “to all acts of tyranny and injustice, resistance is just and therefore necessary,” and “that the construction given to the law in the case of the journeymen tailors is not only ridiculous and weak in practice but unjust in principle and subversive of the rights and liberties of American citizens.” The town was placarded with “coffin” handbills, a practice not uncommon in those days. Enclosed in a device representing a coffin were these words:
The Rich Against the Poor!
Twenty of your brethren have been found guilty for presuming to resist a reduction in their wages!… Judge Edwards has charged… the Rich are the only judges of the wants of the poor. On Monday, June 6, 1836, the Freemen are to receive their sentence, to gratify the hellish appetites of aristocracy!… Go! Go! Go! Every Freeman, every Workingman, and hear the melancholy sound of the earth on the Coffin of Equality. Let the Court Room, the City-hall—yea, the whole Park, be filled with mourners! But remember, offer no violence to Judge Edwards! Bend meekly and receive the chains wherewith you are to be bound! Keep the peace! Above all things, keep the peace!
The Evening Post concludes a long account of the affair by calling attention to the fact that the Trades Union was not composed of “only foreigners.” “It is a low calculation when we estimate that two-thirds of the workingmen of the city, numbering several thousand persons, belong to it,” and that “it is controlled and supported by the great majority of our native born.”
The Boston Trades Union was organized in 1834 and started out with a great labor parade on the Fourth of July, followed by a dinner served to a thousand persons in Faneuil Hall. This union was formed primarily to fight for the ten-hour day, and the leading crusaders were the house carpenters, the ship carpenters, and the masons. Similar unions presently sprang up in other cities, including Baltimore, Albany, Troy, Washington, Newark, Schenectady, New Brunswick, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. By 1835 all the larger centers of industry were familiar with the idea, and most of them with the practice, of the trades organizations of a community uniting for action.
The local unions were not unmindful of the need for wider action, either through a national union of all the organizations of a single trade, or through a union of all the different trades unions. Both courses of action were attempted. In 1834 the National Trades Union came into being and from that date held annual national conventions of all the trades until the panic of 1837 obliterated the movement. When the first convention was called, it was estimated that there were some 26,250 members of trades unions then in the United States. Of these 11,500 were in New York and its vicinity, 6000 in Philadelphia, 4000 in Boston, and 3500 in Baltimore. Meanwhile a movement was under way to federate the unions of a single trade. In 1835 the cordwainers attending the National Trades Union formed a preliminary organization and called a national cordwainers’ convention. This met in New York in March, 1836, and included forty-five delegates from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut. In the fall of 1836 the comb-makers, the carpenters, the hand-loom weavers, and the printers likewise organized separate national unions or alliances, and several other trades made tentative efforts by correspondence to organize themselves in the same manner.
Before the dire year of 1837, there are, then, to be found the beginnings of most of the elements of modern labor organizations—benevolent societies and militant orders; political activities and trades activities; amalgamations of local societies of the same trades and of all trades; attempts at national organization on the part of both the local trades unions and of the local trade unions; a labor press to keep alive the interest of the workman; mass meetings, circulars, conventions, and appeals to arouse the interest of the public in the issues of the hour. The persistent demand of the workingmen was for a ten-hour day. Harriet Martineau, who traveled extensively through the United States, remarked that all the strikes she heard of were on the question of hours, not wages. But there were nevertheless abundant strikes either to raise wages or to maintain them. There were, also, other fundamental questions in controversy which could not be settled by strikes, such as imprisonment for debt, lien and exemption and homestead laws, convict labor and slave labor, and universal education. Most of these issues have since that time been decided in favor of labor, and a new series of demands takes their place today. Yet as one reads the records of the early conspiracy cases or thumbs through the files of old periodicals, he learns that there is indeed nothing new under the sun and that, while perhaps the particular issues have changed, the general methods and the spirit of the contest remain the same.
The laborer believed then, as he does now, that his organization must be all-embracing. In those days also there were “scabs,” often called “rats” or “dung.” Places under ban were systematically picketed, and warnings like the following were sent out: “We would caution all strangers and others who profess the art of horseshoeing, that if they go to work for any employer under the above prices, they must abide by the consequences.” Usually the consequences were a fine imposed by the union, but sometimes they were more severe. Coercion by the union did not cease with the strike. Journeymen who were not members were pursued with assiduity and energy as soon as they entered a town and found work. The boycott was a method early used against prison labor. New York stonecutters agreed that they would not “either collectively or individually purchase any goods manufactured” by convicts and that they would not “countenance” any merchants who dealt in them; and employers who incurred the displeasure of organized labor were “nullified.”
The use of the militia during strikes presented the same difficulties then as now. During the general strike in Philadelphia in 1835 there was considerable rowdyism, and Michel Chevalier, a keen observer of American life, wrote that “the militia looks on; the sheriff stands with folded hands.” Nor was there any difference in the attitude of the laboring man towards unfavorable court decisions. In the tailors’ strike in New York in 1836, for instance, twenty-seven thousand sympathizers assembled with bands and banners to protest against the jury’s verdict, and after sentence had been imposed upon the defendants, the lusty throng burned the judge in effigy.
Sabotage is a new word, but the practice itself is old. In 1835 the striking cabinet-makers in New York smashed thousands of dollars’ worth of chairs, tables, and sofas that had been imported from France, and the newspapers observed the significant fact that the destroyers boasted in a foreign language that only American-made furniture should be sold in America. Houses were burned in Philadelphia because the contractors erecting them refused to grant the wages that were demanded. Vengeance was sometimes sought against new machinery that displaced hand labor. In June, 1835, a New York paper remarked that “it is well known that many of the most obstinate turn-outs among workingmen and many of the most violent and lawless proceedings have been excited for the purpose of destroying newly invented machinery.” Such acts of wantonness, however, were few, even in those first tumultuous days of the thirties. Striking became in those days a sort of mania, and not a town that had a mill or shop was exempt. Men struck for “grog or death,” for “Liberty, Equality, and the Rights of Man,” and even for the right to smoke their pipes at work.
Strike benefits, too, were known in this early period. Strikers in New York received assistance from Philadelphia, and Boston strikers were similarly aided by both New York and Philadelphia. When the high cost of living threatened to deprive the wage-earner of half his income, bread riots occurred in the cities, and handbills circulated in New York bore the legend:
Bread, Meat, Rent, Fuel
Their Prices Must Come Down