A History of Trade Unionism in the United States Part 3

During the War the advance in prices was due in part to the extraordinary demand by the government for the supply of the army and, of course, to speculation.

In July 1863, retail prices were 43 percent above those of 1860 and wages only 12 percent above; in July 1864, retail prices rose to 70 percent and wages to 30 percent above 1860; and in July 1865, prices rose to 76 percent and wages only to 50 percent above the level of 1860.

The unequal pace of the price movement drove labor to organize along trade-union lines.

The order observed in the thirties was again followed out. First came a flock of local trade unions; these soon combined in city centrals--or as they came to be called, trades' a.s.semblies--paralleling the trades'

union of the thirties; and lastly, came an attempt to federate the several trades' a.s.semblies into an International Industrial a.s.sembly of North America. Local trade unions were organized literally in every trade beginning in the second half of 1862. The first trades' a.s.sembly was formed in Rochester, New York, in March 1863; and before long there was one in every town of importance. The International Industrial a.s.sembly was attempted in 1864, but failed to live up to the expectations: The time had pa.s.sed for a national federation of city centrals. As in the thirties the spread of unionism over the breadth of the land called out as a counterpart a widespread movement of employers'

a.s.sociations. The latter differed, however, from their predecessors in the thirties in that they made little use of the courts in their fight against the unions.

The growth of the national trade unions was a true index of the condition of business. Four were organized in 1864 as compared to two organized in 1863, none in 1862, and one in 1861. During 1865, which marked the height of the intense business activity, six more national unions were organized. In 1866 industry entered upon a period of depression, which reached its lowest depth in 1867 and continued until 1869. Accordingly, not a single national union was organized in 1866 and only one in 1867. In 1868 two new national labor unions were organized.

In 1869 two more unions were formed--a total of seven for the four depressed years, compared with ten in the preceding two prosperous years. In the summer of 1870 business became good and remained good for approximately three years. Nine new national unions appeared in these three years. These same years are marked also by a growth of the unions previously organized. For instance, the machinists and blacksmiths, with only 1500 members in 1870, had 18,000 in 1873. Other unions showed similar gains.

An estimate of the total trade union membership at any one time (in view of the total lack of reliable statistics) would be extremely hazardous.

The New York _Herald_ estimated it in August 1869, to be about 170,000.

A labor leader claimed at the same time that the total was as high as 600,000. Probably 300,000 would be a conservative estimate for the time immediately preceding the panic of 1873.

Although the strength of labor was really the strength of the national trade unions, especially during the depression of the later sixties, far greater attention was attracted outside as well as inside the labor movement by the National Labor Union, a loosely built federation of national trade unions, city trades' a.s.semblies, local trade unions, and reform organizations of various descriptions, from philosophical anarchists to socialists and woman suffragists. The National Labor Union did not excel in practical activity, but it formed an accurate mirror of the aspirations and ideals of the American mechanics of the time of the Civil War and after. During its six years' existence it ran the gamut of all important issues which agitated the labor movement of the time.

The National Labor Union came together in its first convention in 1866.

The most pressing problem of the day was unemployment due to the return of the demobilized soldiers and the shutting down of war industries. The convention centered on the demand to reduce the working day to eight hours. But eight hours had by that time come to signify more than a means to increase employment. The eight-hour movement drew its inspiration from an economic theory advanced by a self-taught Boston machinist, Ira Steward. And so naturally did this theory flow from the usual premises in the thinking of the American workman that once formulated by Steward it may be said to have become an official theory of the labor movement.

Steward's doctrine is well expressed by a couplet which was very popular with the eight-hour speakers of that period: "Whether you work by the piece or work by the day, decreasing the hours increases the pay."

Steward believed that the amount of wages is determined by no other factor than the worker's standard of living. He held that wages cannot fall below the standard of living not because, as the cla.s.sical economists said, it would cause late marriages and a reduction in the supply of labor, but solely because the wage earner will refuse to work for less than enough to maintain his standard of living. Steward possessed such abundant faith in this purely psychological check on the employer that he made it the cornerstone of his theory of social progress. Raise the worker's standard of living, he said, and the employer will be immediately forced to raise wages; no more can wages fall below the level of the worker's standard of living than New England can be ruled against her will. The lever for raising the standard of living was the eight-hour day. Increase the worker's leisure and you will increase his wants; increase his wants and you will immediately raise his wages. Although he occasionally tried to soften his doctrine by the argument that a shorter work-day not only does not decrease but may actually increase output, his was a distinctly revolutionary doctrine; he aimed at the total abolition of profits through their absorption into wages. But the instrument was nothing more radical than a progressive universal shortening the hours.

So much for the general policy. To bring it to pa.s.s two alternatives were possible: trade unionism or legislation. Steward chose the latter as the more hopeful and speedy one. Steward knew that appeals to the humanity of the employers had largely failed; efforts to secure the reform by cooperation had failed; the early trade unions had failed; and there seemed to be no recourse left now but to accomplish the reduction of hours by legislative enactment.

In 1866 Steward organized the Grand Eight-Hour League of Ma.s.sachusetts as a special propagandist organization of the eight-hour philosophy. The League was a secret organization with pa.s.s words and obligations, intended as the central organization of a chain of subordinate leagues in the State, afterwards to be created. Of a total of about eighty local leagues in existence from 1865 to 1877, about twenty were in Ma.s.sachusetts, eight elsewhere in New England, at least twenty-five in Michigan, four or five in Pennsylvania, about seven in Illinois, as many in Wisconsin, and smaller numbers in Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, and California. Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Pennsylvania had each a Grand Eight-Hour League. Practically all of these organizations disappeared soon after the panic of 1873.

The National Labor Union centered on the pa.s.sage of an eight-hour law for employes of the Federal government. It was believed, perhaps not without some justice, that the effect of such law would eventually lead to the introduction of the same standard in private employment--not indeed through the operation of the law of supply and demand, for it was realized that this would be practically negligible, but rather through its contagious effect on the minds of employes and even employers. It will be recalled that, at the time of the ten-hour agitation of the thirties, the Federal government had lagged about five years behind private employers in granting the demanded concession. That in the sixties the workingmen chose government employment as the entering wedge shows a measure of political self-confidence which the preceding generation of workingmen lacked.

The first bill in Congress was introduced by Senator Gratz Brown of Missouri in March 1866. In the summer a delegation from the National Labor Union was received by President Andrew Johnson. The President pointed to his past record favorable to the workingmen but refrained from any definite promises. Finally, an eight-hour bill for government employes was pa.s.sed by the House in March 1867, and by the Senate in June 1868. On June 29, 1868, President Johnson signed it and it went into effect immediately.

The result of the eight-hour law was not all that the friends of the bill hoped. The various officials in charge of government work put their own interpretations upon it and there resulted much diversity in its observance, and consequently great dissatisfaction. There seemed to be no clear understanding as to the intent of Congress in enacting the law.

Some held that the reduction in working hours must of necessity bring with it a corresponding reduction in wages. The officials' view of the situation was given by Secretary Gideon Wells. He pointed out that Congress, by reducing the hours of labor in government work, had forced upon the department of the Navy the employment of a larger number of men in order to accomplish the necessary work; and that at the same time Congress had reduced the appropriation for that department. This had rendered unavoidable a twenty percent reduction in wages paid employes in the Navy Yard. Such a state of uncertainty continued four years longer. At last on May 13, 1872, President Grant prohibited by proclamation any wage reductions in the execution of the law. On May 18, 1872, Congress pa.s.sed a law for the rest.i.tution of back pay.

The expectations of the workingmen that the Federal law would blaze the way for the eight-hour system in private employment failed to materialize. The depression during the seventies took up all the impetus in that direction which the law may have generated. Even as far as government work is concerned forty years had to elapse before its application could be rounded out by extending it to contract work done for the government by private employers.

We have dealt at length with this subject because it marked an important landmark. It demonstrated to the wage earners that, provided they concentrated on a modest object and kept up a steady pressure, their prospects for success were not entirely hopeless, hard as the road may seem to travel. The other and far more ambitious object of the workingman of the sixties, that of enacting general eight-hour laws in the several States, at first appeared to be within easy reach--so yielding political parties and State legislatures seemed to be to the demands of the organized workmen. Yet before long these successes proved to be entirely illusory.

The year 1867 was the banner year for such State legislation. Eight-hour laws were pa.s.sed in Illinois, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Missouri, and New York. California pa.s.sed such a law in 1868. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, and Minnesota bills were introduced but were defeated. Two common features characterized these laws, whether enacted or merely proposed to the legislatures. There were none which did not permit of longer hours than those named in the law, provided they were so specified in the contract. A contract requiring ten or more hours a day was perfectly legal. The eight-hour day was the legal day only "when the contract was silent on the subject or where there is no express contract to the contrary," as stated in the Wisconsin law. But the greatest weakness was a lack of a provision for enforcement. New York's experience is typical and characteristic. When the workingmen appealed to Governor Fenton to enforce the law, he replied that the act had received his official signature and he felt that it "would be an unwarrantable a.s.sumption" on his part to take any step requiring its enforcement. "Every law," he said, "was obligatory by its own nature, and could derive no additional force from any further act of his."

In Ma.s.sachusetts, however, the workingmen succeeded after hard and protracted labor in obtaining an enforceable ten-hour law for women--the first effective law of its kind pa.s.sed in any American State. This law, which was pa.s.sed in 1874, provides that "no minor under the age of eighteen years, and no woman over that age" shall be employed more than ten hours in one day or sixty hours in any one week in any manufacturing establishment in the State. The penalty for each violation was fixed at fifty dollars.

The repeated disappointments with politics and legislation led in the early seventies to a revival of faith in trade unionism. Even in the early sixties we find not a few unions, national and local, limiting their hours by agreement with employers. The national unions, however, for the most part left the matter to the local unions for settlement as their strength or local conditions might dictate. In some cases the local unions were advised to accept a reduction of wages in order to secure the system, showing faith in Steward's theory that such reduction could not be permanent.

The movement to establish the eight-hour day through trade unionism reached its climax in the summer of 1872, when business prosperity was at its height. This year witnessed in New York City a general eight-hour strike. However, it succeeded in only a few trades, and even there the gain was only temporary, since it was lost during the years of depression which followed the financial panic of 1873.

To come back to the National Labor Union. At the second convention in 1867 the enthusiasm was transferred from eight-hour laws to the bizarre social reform philosophy known as "greenbackism."

"Greenbackism" was, in substance, a plan to give the man without capital an equal opportunity in business with his rich compet.i.tor. It meant taking away from bankers and middlemen their control over credit and thereby furnishing credit and capital through the aid of the government to the producers of physical products. On its face greenbackism was a program of currency reform and derived its name from the so-called "greenback," the paper money issued during the Civil War. But it was more than currency reform--it was industrial democracy.

"Greenbackism" was the American counterpart of the contemporary radicalism of Europe. Its program had much in common with that of La.s.salle in Germany who would have the state lend its credit to cooperative a.s.sociations of workingmen in the confident expectation that with such backing they would drive private capitalism out of existence by the compet.i.tive route. But greenbackism differed from the scheme of La.s.salle in that it would utilize the government's enormous Civil War debt, instead of its taxing power, as a means of furnishing capital to labor. This was to be done by reducing the rate of interest on the government bonds to three percent and by making them convertible into legal tender currency and convertible back into bonds, at the will of the holder of either. In other words, the greenback currency, instead of being, as it was at the time, an irredeemable promise to pay in specie, would be redeemable in government bonds. On the other hand, if a government bondholder could secure slightly more than three percent by lending to a private borrower, he would return his bonds to the government, take out the corresponding amount in greenbacks and lend it to the producer on his private note or mortgage. This would involve, of course, the possible inflation of legal tender currency to the amount of outstanding bonds. But inflation was immaterial, since all prices would be affected alike and meanwhile the farmers, the workingmen, and their cooperative establishments would be able to secure capital at slightly more than three percent instead of the nine or twelve percent which they were compelled to pay at the bank. Thereby they would be placed on a compet.i.tive level with the middleman, and the wage earner would be a.s.sisted to escape the wage system into self-employment.

Such was the curious doctrine which captured the leaders of the organized wage earners in 1867. The way had indeed been prepared for it in 1866, when the wage earners espoused producers' cooperation as the only solution. But, in the following year, 1867, they concluded that no system of combination or cooperation could secure to labor its natural rights as long as the credit system enabled non-producers to acc.u.mulate wealth faster than labor was able to add to the national wealth.

Cooperation would follow "as a natural consequence," if producers could secure through legislation credit at a low rate of interest. The government was to extend to the producer "free capital" in addition to free land which he received with the Homestead Act.

The producers' cooperation, which offered the occasion for the espousal of greenbackism, was itself preceded by a movement for consumers'

cooperation. Following the upward sweep of prices, workmen had begun toward the end of 1862 to make definite preparations for distributive cooperation. They endeavored to cut off the profits of the middleman by establishing cooperative grocery stores, meat markets, and coal yards.

The first substantial effort of this kind to attract wide attention was the formation in December 1862, of the Union Cooperative a.s.sociation of Philadelphia, which opened a store. The prime mover and the financial secretary of this organization was Thomas Phillips, a shoemaker who came from England in 1852, fired with the principles of the Rochdale pioneers, that is, cash sales, dividends on purchases rather than on stock, and "one man, one vote." By 1866 the movement had extended until practically every important industrial town between Boston and San Francisco had some form of distributive cooperation. This was the high tide of the movement. Unfortunately, the condition of the country was unfavorable to these enterprises and they were destined to early collapse. The year 1865 witnessed disastrous business failures. The country was in an uncertain condition and at the end of the sixties the entire movement had died out.

From 1866 to 1869 experiments in productive cooperation were made by practically all leading trades including the bakers, coach makers, collar makers, coal miners, shipwrights, machinists and blacksmiths, foundry workers, nailers, ship carpenters, and calkers, gla.s.s blowers, hatters, boiler makers, plumbers, iron rollers, tailors, printers, needle women, and molders. A large proportion of these attempts grew out of unsuccessful strikes. The most important undertakings were among the workers in iron, undoubtedly due in large measure to the indefatigable efforts of William H. Sylvis, the founder of the Iron Molders'

International Union.

At the close of 1869 members of the Iron Molders' International Union owned and operated many cooperative foundries chiefly in New York and Pennsylvania. The first of the foundries established at Troy in the early summer of 1866 was followed quickly by one in Albany and then during the next eighteen months by ten more--one each in Rochester, Chicago, Quincy, Louisville, Somerset, Pittsburgh, and two each in Troy and Cleveland. The original foundry at Troy was an immediate financial success and was hailed with joy by those who believed that under the name of cooperationists the baffled trade unionists might yet conquer.

The New York _Sun_ congratulated the iron molders of Troy and declared that Sylvis had checkmated the a.s.sociation of stove manufacturers and, by the establishment of this cooperative foundry, had made the greatest contribution of the year to the labor cause.

But the results of the Troy experiment, typical of the others, show how far from a successful solution of the labor problem is productive cooperation. Although this "Troy Cooperative Iron Founders' a.s.sociation"

was planned with great deliberation and launched at a time when the regular stove manufacturers were embarra.s.sed by strikes, and although it was regularly incorporated with a provision that each member was ent.i.tled to but one vote whether he held one share at $100, or the maximum privilege of fifty in the total of two thousand shares, it failed as did the others in furnishing permanent relief to the workers as a cla.s.s. At the end of the third year of this enterprise, the _American Workman_ published a sympathetic account of its progress unconsciously disclosing its fatal weakness, namely, the inevitable tendency of cooperators to adopt the capitalistic view. The writer of this account quotes from these cooperators to show that "the fewer the stockholders in the company the greater its success."

A similar instance is furnished by the Cooperative Foundry Company of Rochester. This venture has also been a financial success, though a partial failure as a cooperative enterprise. When it was established in 1867 all employes were stockholders and profits were divided as follows: Twelve percent on capital and the balance in proportion to the earnings of the men. But the capitalist was stronger than the cooperative brother. Dividends on capital were advanced in a few years to seventeen and one-half percent, then to twenty-five, and finally the distribution of any part of the profits in proportion to wages was discontinued.

Money was made every year and dividends paid, which in 1884 amounted to forty percent on the capital. At that time about one-fifth of the employes were stockholders. Also in this case cooperation did not prevent the usual conflict between employer and employe, as is shown in a strike of three and a half months' duration. It is interesting to notice that one of the strikers, a member of the Molders' Union, owned stock to the amount of $7000.

The machinists, too, throughout this period took an active interest in cooperation. Their convention which met in October, 1865, appointed a committee to report on a plan of action to establish a cooperative shop under the auspices of the International Union. The plan failed of adoption, but of machinists' shops on the joint-stock plan there were a good many. Two other trades noted for their enthusiasm for cooperation at this time were the shoemakers and the coopers. The former, organized in the Order of St. Crispin, then the largest trade union in the country, advocated cooperation even when their success in strikes was at its height. "The present demand of the Crispin is steady employment and fair wages, but his future is self-employment" was one of their mottoes.

During the seventies they repeatedly attempted to carry this motto into effect. The seventies also saw the beginning of the most successful single venture in productive cooperation ever undertaken in this country, namely, the eight cooperative cooperage shops in Minneapolis, which were established at varying intervals from 1874 to 1886. The coopers took care to enforce true cooperation by providing for equal holding of stock and for a division of ordinary profits and losses in proportion to wages. The cooper shops prospered, but already ten years later four out of the eight existing in 1886 had pa.s.sed into private hands.

In 1866 when the eight-hour demand was as yet uppermost, the National Labor Union resolved for an independent labor party. The espousal of greenbackism in 1867 only reenforced that resolution. The leaders realized only too well that neither the Republican nor Democratic party would voluntarily make an issue of a scheme purporting to a.s.sist the wage earner to become an independent producer. Accordingly, the history of the National Labor Union became largely the history of labor's first attempt to play a lone political hand on a national scale.

Each annual session of the National Labor Union faithfully reaffirmed the decision to "cut loose" from the old parties. But such a vast undertaking demanded time. It was not until 1872 that the National Labor Union met as a political convention to nominate a national ticket. From the first the stars were inauspicious. Charges were made that political aspirants sought to control the convention in order to influence nominations by the Republican and Democratic parties. A "greenback"

platform was adopted as a matter of course and the new party was christened the National Labor and Reform Party. On the first formal ballot for nomination for President, Judge David Davis of Illinois, a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, received 88 votes, Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, 52, and the remainder scattered. On the third ballot Davis was nominated. Governor J. Parker of New Jersey was nominated for Vice-President. At first Judge Davis accepted the nomination, but resigned after the Democrats had nominated Horace Greeley. The loss of the candidate spelled the death of the party. The National Labor Union itself had been only an empty sh.e.l.l since 1870, when the national trade unions, disaffected with the turn towards politics, withdrew. Now, its pet project a failure, it, too, broke up.

In 1873, on the eve of the financial panic, the national trade unions attempted to reconstruct a national labor federation on a purely trade-union basis in the form of a National Industrial Congress. But the economic disaster of the panic nipped it in the bud just as it cut off the life of the overwhelming majority of the existing labor organizations. Another attempt to get together on a national basis was made in the National Labor Congress at Pittsburgh in 1876. But those who responded were not interested in trade unionism and, mirroring the prevailing labor sentiment during the long years of depressions, had only politics on their mind, greenback or socialist. As neither greenbacker nor socialist would meet the other half-way, the attempt naturally came to naught.

Greenbackism was popular with the working people during the depressed seventies because it now meant to them primarily currency inflation and a rise of prices and, consequently, industrial prosperity--not the phantastic scheme of the National Labor Union. Yet in the Presidential election of 1876 the Greenback party candidate, Peter Cooper, the well known manufacturer and philanthropist, drew only a poor 100,000, which came practically from the rural districts only. It was not until the great strikes of 1877 had brought in their train a political labor upheaval that the greenback movement a.s.sumed a formidable form.

The strikes of 1877, which on account of the wide area affected, the degree of violence displayed, and the amount of life and property lost, impressed contemporaries as being nothing short of social revolution, were precipitated by a general ten percent reduction in wages on the three trunk lines running West, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the New York Central, in June and July 1877. This reduction came on top of an earlier ten percent reduction after the panic. The railway men were practically unorganized so that the steadying influence of previous organization was totally lacking in the critical situation of unrest which the newly announced wage reduction created. One must take also into account that in the four terrible years which elapsed since the panic, America had developed a new type of a man--the tramp--who naturally gravitated towards places where trouble was expected.

The first outbreak occurred at Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 17, the day after the ten percent reduction had gone into effect. The strike spread like wildfire over the adjacent sections of the Baltimore & Ohio road, the strikers a.s.suming absolute control at many points. The militia was either unwilling or powerless to cope with the violence. In Baltimore, where in the interest of public safety all the freight trains had stopped running, two companies of militia were beleaguered by a mob to prevent their being dispatched to c.u.mberland, where the strikers were in control. Order was restored only when Federal troops arrived.

But these occurrences fade into insignificance when compared with the destructive effects of the strike on the Pennsylvania in and around Pittsburgh. The situation there was aggravated by a hatred of the Pennsylvania railway corporation shared by nearly all residents on the ground of an alleged rate discrimination against the city. The Pittsburgh militia fraternized with the strikers, and when 600 troops which arrived from Philadelphia attempted to restore order and killed about twenty rioters, they were besieged in a roundhouse by a furious mob. In the battle the railway yards were set on fire. Damages amounting to about $5,000,000 were caused. The besieged militia men finally gained egress and retreated fighting rear-guard actions. At last order was restored by patrols of citizens. The strike spread also to the Erie railway and caused disturbances in several places, but not nearly of the same serious nature as on the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania. The other places to which the strike spread were Toledo, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

The strikes failed in every case but their moral effect was enormous.

The general public still retained a fresh memory of the Commune of Paris of 1871 and feared for the foundations of the established order. The wage earners, on the other hand, felt that the strikers had not been fairly dealt with. It was on this intense labor discontent that the greenback agitation fed and grew.

Whereas in 1876 the greenback labor vote was negligible, notwithstanding the exhortations by many of the former trade union leaders who turned greenback agitators, now, following the great strikes, greenbackism became primarily a labor movement. Local Greenback-Labor parties were being organized everywhere and a national Greenback-Labor party was not far behind in forming. The continued industrial depression was a decisive factor, the winter of 1877-1878 marking perhaps the point of its greatest intensity. Naturally the greenback movement was growing apace. One of the notable successes in the spring of 1878 was the election of Terence V. Powderly, later Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, as mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Congressional election in the autumn of 1878 marked the zenith of the movement. The aggregate greenback vote cast in the election exceeded a million, and fourteen Representatives were sent to Congress. In New England the movement was strong enough to poll almost a third of the total vote in Maine, over 8 percent of the total vote in both Connecticut and New Hampshire, and from 4 to 6 percent, in the other States. In Maine the greenbackers elected 32 members of the upper house and 151 members of the lower house and one Congressman, Thompson Murch of Rochland, who was secretary of the National Granite Cutters' Union.

However, the bulk of the vote in that State was obviously agricultural.

In Ma.s.sachusetts, the situation was dominated by General Benjamin F.

Butler, lifelong Republican politician, who had succeeded in getting the Democratic nomination for governor and was endorsed by the Greenback convention. He received a large vote but was defeated for office.