The Labor Story: A Popular History of American Labor 1786-1949

By Aleine Austin

From the time this country began, workingmen have fought and starved and often died to better the life of the common man. The struggles of one generation have been carried on by the next. Where one group has failed—the next group has won. Gradually improvements have been granted. Gradually democracy has been strengthened.

Today we enjoy the fruits of this constant struggle for human dignity. Every American child is entitled to a free public education. Citizens need not own property to vote or run for office. Most public officials are elected directly by the people. No one can be thrown into jail because he is unable to pay a debt.

Child labor is illegal. Eight hours is the standard work day. Employers must pay workers a minimum wage. Safety laws must be observed. Many workers are insured against accidents on the job. Workers out of jobs receive unemployment compensation. The aged are entitled to old-age insurance. Employers may not fire workers for union activities.

These conditions did not fall into our laps automatically. They were fought for. They were fought for by generations of workers who joined together in trade unions to win a better life for themselves and their children. The story of their struggles is a dramatic one—an inspiring one. It is one that all Americans should know and take pride in. The following pages tell that story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839746864

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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THE LABOR STORY

A POPULAR HISTORY OF AMERICAN LABOR

1786—1949

BY

ALEINE AUSTIN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

PREFACE 6

PART ONE (1786-1865) 7

CHAPTER I—TINKER, TAILOR, SHOEMAKER, SAILOR 7

CHAPTER II—THE WORLD’S FIRST LABOR PARTY 11

CHAPTER III—AMERICA: FROM A RUMBLE TO A ROAR 18

CHAPTER IV—REFORM! REFORM! 21

CHAPTER V—NATIONWIDE UNIONS WERE NEEDED 28

CHAPTER VI—DOUBLE EMANCIPATION 32

PART TWO (1865-1900) 34

CHAPTER VII—TOWARD A UNION OF UNIONS 34

CHAPTER VIII—GUNS...SPIES...BULLETS...TROOPS 44

CHAPTER IX—LABOR FRAME-UP? 49

CHAPTER X—AN INJURY TO ONE IS THE CONCERN OF ALL 56

CHAPTER XI—THE BOMBING OF THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY 66

CHAPTER XII—WE HAVE NO ULTIMATE ENDS 72

CHAPTER XIII—CORPORATIONS...ARE FAST BECOMING THE PEOPLE’S MASTERS 80

CHAPTER XIV—THE PEOPLE FIGHT BACK 85

CHAPTER XV—A GATLING GUN ON PAPER 91

PART THREE (1900-1949) 100

CHAPTER XVI—UNION BUSTING AND UNION BUILDING 100

CHAPTER XVII—ABOLITION OF THE WAGE SYSTEM! 107

CHAPTER XVIII—GOING DOWNHILL...CRASH! 114

CHAPTER XIX—A NEW DEAL—FOR LABOR 120

CHAPTER XX—CIO! CIO! 126

CHAPTER XXI—ON THE DEFENSIVE AGAIN 139

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 147

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 151

DEDICATION

TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

PREFACE

THE story of America is the story of its people. It is the story of the daily lives of men and women seeking to fulfill their needs and hopes and ideals. For, as Carl Sandburg has said:

The people hold to the humdrum bidding

of work and food

while reaching out when it comes their

way

for lights beyond the prison of the

five senses

for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger

or death.

This reaching is alive.

The story of this reaching, this striving of the common man, is unknown to most of us. It is rarely mentioned in our history books. They tell us of the heroic deeds of our statesmen and politicians, our military leaders and industrialists. That is one part of our American heritage. The labor story is another.

From the time this country began, workingmen have fought and starved and often died to better the life of the common man. The struggles of one generation have been carried on by the next. Where one group has failed—the next group has won. Gradually improvements have been granted. Gradually democracy has been strengthened.

Today we enjoy the fruits of this constant struggle for human dignity. Every American child is entitled to a free public education. Citizens need not own property to vote or run for office. Most public officials are elected directly by the people. No one can be thrown into jail because he is unable to pay a debt.

Child labor is illegal. Eight hours is the standard work day. Employers must pay workers a minimum wage. Safety laws must be observed. Many workers are insured against accidents on the job. Workers out of jobs receive unemployment compensation. The aged are entitled to old-age insurance. Employers may not fire workers for union activities.

These conditions did not fall into our laps automatically. They were fought for. They were fought for by generations of workers who joined together in trade unions to win a better life for themselves and their children. The story of their struggles is a dramatic one—an inspiring one. It is one that all Americans should know and take pride in. The following pages tell that story.

PART ONE (1786-1865)

CHAPTER I—TINKER, TAILOR, SHOEMAKER, SAILOR

IN 1806, eight shoemakers stood in a Philadelphia courtroom awaiting the verdict of the jury in the now famous Cordwainers’ Case. Their trial had been a dramatic one—a controversial one. Several months earlier, their employer had brought them to court as lawbreakers. Their crime? They had formed a union and had struck for higher wages.

The court upheld the position of the employer—it found the shoemakers guilty. Of what? Of criminal conspiracy—of joining together in a union and forming a combination and conspiracy to raise wages. An individual employee could legally ask his employer for a wage increase, the court hastened to assure the cordwainers. Nothing illegal about that (and, of course, nothing very effective about it either). But for workers to form a union, for workers to agree to stick together and refuse to work for low wages—that was a conspiracy. That was illegal in the United States of America in 1806.

And still, workers formed unions. Laws and courts and employers’ opposition could not stop them. Unions were their only protection against changing conditions that were worsening the lot of the skilled handicraftsmen and depriving them of the independence they had known in the colonial period and during the early years of the Republic.

In those days, a shoemaker, for instance, often worked for himself in his own home as an artisan shopkeeper. He owned his tools—his awl, last, scissors, rasp, bench, and the like. He owned his raw material—his leather, thread, beeswax, and even the iron and wood from which he made the nails for the townsmen’s shoes. He was an independent worker, who depended on no one else for a job. Nor did he receive just a meager wage for his work. Because he owned his own equipment, because he worked for himself, he received the full amount his work was worth—the full price paid by the customer.

Later, as the demand for goods grew, the artisan shopkeeper, or master craftsman as he was then called, took on one or two apprentices and journeymen as assistants. Most apprentices were young boys who received intensive training from the master over a period of years. They then became journeymen, receiving still further training and experience, until eventually they were equipped to set up their own shops and become masters themselves.

In those days, the early and middle 1700’s, the master and his assistants made products only for the home market, for the people in their own town. If someone in Philadelphia needed shoes, he would order them from one of the local shoemakers. Then the master, or one of his assistants, would make that pair of shoes. He would do the whole job. There was no such thing as one person making the soles, another doing the stitching, and another cutting the leather. This was how all goods were produced at that time—not only shoes, but clothes, hats, furniture, and all other commodities people needed. The workers of the time, the carpenters, masons, smiths, shoemakers, and tailors were all skilled workers.

The life of the handicraft worker was a comparatively satisfying one. Most craftsmen owned their own small homes and a little plot of land. When things were slack in the shop, they were able to turn to farming to sustain themselves. Unemployment did not leave them desperate and penniless. They were independent, resourceful people; they had pride, self-respect, and security.

The journeymen in the shop performed their work in an atmosphere of comparative freedom. A historian of the period observed that when a mechanic left his work at night he might be expected back in the morning, but there were no special grounds for this expectation. He might drop in the next morning or next week. Often, the men in the shop hired a boy to read to them while they worked. They were regarded as intelligent and thoughtful people—as social equals of the master who owned the shop.

Although their wages were low and their hours long, the journeymen considered their interests to be much the same as the master craftsman’s. They worked beside him in the shop, they ate with him, they lived much the same kind of life, and eventually they themselves became masters. For these reasons, the relationship between the masters and the journeymen who worked for them was a friendly one. They even belonged to the same benefit societies formed to assist each other in case of accident, illness, or death.

Soon, however, changes in the economy altered this relationship. Around the 1790’s, local craftsmen began producing for people outside their home towns. The early Western settlers needed the goods produced in the East. The people of Europe needed American goods, because the war between France and England prevented the usual flow of European trade. And the people in the Southern States needed goods made in the North because they were concentrating on farming—on growing cotton to export to Europe.

The market was expanding. But the craftsman’s setup was designed to fit a small local market. When the market widened, this setup no longer fit; a middleman was needed to distribute local goods to outside markets. He appeared. The merchant capitalist entered American economic life. Not only did he buy the craftsman’s goods and distribute them, but he also supplied the craftsman with the raw materials from which he made his products.

This brought about a drastic change in the craft-production system. The master craftsman was no longer his own boss. He worked for the man who owned the raw materials—the merchant capitalist. True, the master was paid for the product he and his workmen made, but he received much less from the merchant capitalist than he had gotten by selling directly to his own customers.

To offset this loss, the master craftsman tried to cut costs by reducing wages, by replacing journeymen with low-paid apprentices, by stretching the work day from sunup to sundown (twelve hours in the winter, sixteen in the summer). A shoemaker in 1789 claimed, I could only earn eight dollars and a half a week and I worked from five in the morning till twelve or one at night.

The new economic setup slowly destroyed the old cooperative, friendly relationship between masters and journeymen. Both employers and the employed...no longer live with anything like cordiality on either side, commented a Maryland clergyman of the period. The old mutual-benefit societies in which both masters and journeymen could belong as brothers gradually passed out of existence. They were now being replaced by organizations of journeymen alone—uniting to protect themselves against the abuses of the masters. The courts outlawed such associations in 1806, but the move toward unionization had begun at least twenty years earlier.

In 1786 the journeymen printers formed a temporary association in New York to obtain a dollar a day. The employers turned them down—the printers turned out. They conducted the first organized strike in the United States, and won their demands. Soon other handicraftsmen followed their example, at first forming only temporary associations at special times to get specific demands. After they won their demands and disbanded their organizations, however, they found that the employers restored the old conditions.

To keep the gains they had made and continually to improve their conditions, the journeymen soon formed more permanent unions. The Philadelphia shoemakers took the lead. In 1792 they organized the first permanent union in the United States, with a constitution, dues, a treasury, and provision for regular meetings.

These young unions were quite different from the ones we know today. They had to be; the economic conditions of the country were different. Unlike the factories of today, few shops consisted of a variety of workers doing different kinds of work. Since production was carried on in small shops by mechanics who performed the same skilled operations, workers of different crafts had little contact with one another. They were hired by different employers and they felt their economic problems to be different from those of workers engaged in other trades. That’s why, when they organized, they formed small craft unions, including in their membership only workers of the city engaged in the same trade.

Each union carried on its separate activities. They operated only on a local level, distances being too great and transportation facilities too poor to make possible the formation of national unions. Since the employers from whom the craft workers were trying to win improvements were small local businessmen who, as yet, had not organized on a national level, the need for national unions was not felt to be great at the time.

But though the early craft unions were different in these respects from the unions we know today, many of the practices they introduced are still used by modern labor organizations. There is nothing new about picketing, for example. Tramping committees, as groups of pickets were then called, are as old as the first American craft unions. So is the demand for the closed shop. Contracts also were not unheard of at that time. Some date as far back as 1799. The strike was, of course, the union’s chief weapon just as it is today. To protect their members during strikes these early unions established strike funds and paid benefits to the men who turned out just as many contemporary unions do.

Anti-union weapons of the employers also have their roots in this early period. The blacklist, for example, appeared as soon as unions were formed. By this means, masters circulated the names of undesirable workers (union members) to employers in other crafts and towns.

Hiring strike-breakers is another old technique. Then, as now, strike-breakers filled workers with loathing. The early unionists hated no one so much as a scab. A scab is a shelter for lice, exclaimed a shoemaker of the time. Learning a lesson from the employers, the printers distributed a list of their own to their fellow typographical workers in other towns. Theirs was a scab list.

Control of the press proved another valuable weapon to the employers; it enabled them to prejudice workers as well as the general public against unions. Many of the labels used to smear unions today can be found in the journals of the 1800’s. In 1825, for example, journeymen carpenters of Boston struck for a ten-hour day and a wage increase. In the pages of the Columbia Sentinel we find the employers’ reply: "We cannot believe this project to have originated with any of the faithful and industrious sons of New England, but are compelled to consider it an evil of foreign growth, and one which we hope and trust will not take root in the favored soil of New England." (My italics.)

An old effective technique.

As we have already seen, when employers were unable to defeat unions by themselves, they quickly turned to the courts for assistance—and got it. For thirty-six years, from 1806 to 1842, the courts consistently upheld the decision in the Cordwainers’ Case. They prosecuted unions as illegal conspiracies, believing that they would thus put an end to these associations which have been so prejudicial to the successful enterprise of the capitalist in the western country. But court rulings did not put an end to these associations, for as the enterprise of the capitalist became increasingly successful, the need for unions became increasingly greater. Workingmen responded to this need after 1806 as they did before—they banded together for mutual protection.

CHAPTER II—THE WORLD’S FIRST LABOR PARTY

THE old order continued to change; it did not give way to the new immediately, but the innovations of the late 1700’s set in motion the beginnings of a new method of production. It was not long before the factory system began to edge its way into American economic life.

Division of labor was the first step. Around 1800, the merchant capitalist began to assemble a considerable number of workers into a large workroom. He then divided the work among them, thereby putting into practice what William Petty, a famous economist, had suggested in the seventeenth century. Cloth must be cheaper, Petty said, when one cards, another spins, another weaves, another dresses, another presses and packs, than when all the above mentioned operations were clumsily performed by the same hand."

Instead of making an entire product, each workman was given a specialized operation to perform. He repeated that process over and over again. This method made production faster; it required little training; it enabled employers to replace skilled craftsmen with lower paid, less skilled labor. Eventually crude new machines were used to perform the simplest operations—the groundwork for the factory system was laid. As early as 1789, Samuel Slater launched the first American power-driven mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

It was not until the War of 1812, however, when the United States was cut off from the manufactured goods of Britain, that factory production really got under way in this country. Our first factories were textile mills, situated along the many streams and falls of the New England and Middle Atlantic States. Here the mill owners found a perfect solution to the need for water power with which to run their machines.

Their next problem was more difficult to solve. Workers were needed to tend the machines, but in the early 1800’s few American men were available for factory work. The vast majority of Americans were then small farmers, and the workers of the time were skilled artisans who were still engaged in handicraft production. Soon, however, the mill owners found a solution to this problem. They discovered that children were cheap and plentiful.

The working force in one of America’s first factories was nine youngsters under twelve years old. Ten years later, in 1801, this same mill employed over one hundred children between the ages of four and ten. Alexander Hamilton, first secretary of the United States Treasury, heartily recommended this practice. In his Report on Manufactures in 1791 Hamilton said, It is worthy of particular remark that in general women and children are rendered more useful, and the latter more easily useful, by manufacturing establishments than they otherwise would be.

By 1820 half the nation’s factory workers were nine-and ten-year-olds who worked an average of thirteen hours a day. For their labor they received from thirty-three to sixty-seven cents a week. Manufacturers thrived on this wonderful source of cheap labor. Throughout the Northeast they advertised for more and more children—Help Wanted: a family of from five to eight children capable of working in a cotton mill. Such were the announcements that filled the want-ad columns of the period.

Women were another answer to the demand for cheap labor. Employers, anxious to hire as many of them as possible, sent agents into rural areas to lure farm girls to the mill towns. These agents were paid so much per head for each girl they brought back, and they brought back thousands. How? By painting a glorious picture of city life—high wages, leisure hours, and dresses of silk.

The promise was not kept. A dismal life was all that awaited factory workers. Work started at five in the morning and ended at seven thirty in the evening, for wages of two to two and a half dollars a week. Half these wages went as rent to company boarding-houses where most single girls were forced to live. There, a company housekeeper enforced strict rules set down by the company—doors to be shut at ten, rigid observation of the rules of the Sabbath, all games of hazard and cards prohibited. This was the life of freedom and luxury that the mill town of the 1800’s offered its newcomers.

In the meantime, the skilled mechanics, who still far outnumbered the new factory workers, were suffering increasing hardships as a result of the new industrial developments. In 1819 a depression hit the nation, causing widespread unemployment and accentuating the low wages and brutally long hours of the commercial and industrial Northeastern States. A reporter from The New York Times commented: Thousands of industrious mechanics who never before solicited alms, were brought to the humiliating condition of applying for assistance, and with tears on their manly cheeks, confessed their inability to provide food or clothing for their families. From an appeal made by the workers of Manayank, Pennsylvania, we learn that it requires the wages of all the family who are able to work...to furnish absolute wants.

The depression lasted until 1822, bringing not only new desolation to the skilled mechanics, but destroying, in the process, the small craft unions they had formed. With the recovery of business conditions, the mechanics began to revive their old organizations. Masons, carpenters, tailors, seamen, shoemakers, stonecutters, hatters, and cabinetmakers returned to unionism with a new aggressiveness born of their experiences during the depression. They conducted strike after strike for higher wages and shorter hours. Sometimes they won, but often they lost because as small craft unions they did not have the resources to hold out against their employers.

This happened to the Philadelphia carpenters in 1827, when