There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  There had been, even in the first cheery days of “the Lowell Miracle,” sporadic acts of rebellion, usually by individual workers. Mill records indicate that as early as 1826 women were fired for “misconduct,” “impudence to overseer,” “circulating false stories,” “levity,” and complaining about their pay. One woman was terminated for “mutiny,” while another was let go because she “was hysterical and the overseer was fearful she would get caught in the gearing.” The name of one particularly uncooperative worker was appended, “Regularly discharged forever.”49

  The lack of any planned insurrection was likely due to the fact that the mill hands were willing, to an extent, to own the features of the Lowell experience, both good and bad, and to endure unwanted conditions as temporary imperfections, hardships to be borne. No doubt the employer’s absolute power to blacklist workers from hire in any of the Lowell mills was also an influence, as was the fact that labor unions—“combinations” of workers making demands of employers—were still technically illegal. Then there was the workers’ impermanence; many viewed the mill experience as an intense, short-term way to make money, and stayed only a year or two before returning to their families to go to school, take a teaching position, or to marry. The term used by the mill owners to refer to expressions of worker discontent was “New Jersey feelings,” a reference to an outbreak of labor unrest at Paterson in 1828 and a way of suggesting such discord was alien to Lowell.

  Thus it was more than a decade into the enterprise at Lowell before the first organized labor action struck in February 1834.50 One of the triggering elements was an item in the Lowell Journal stating that, due to corporate financial setbacks, “many of the directors and stockholders of the Factories in this town, are upon the point of deciding to stop the mills,” and warning portentously, “The effect upon thousands of our people will be indescribable. Laborers of every class, and artisans of every trade, must go, they know not whither, to seek in vain for subsistence, and all the inhabitants who depend upon them for support will be left destitute.”51 It soon was established the Journal had overstated the case, but there was some truth to the rumor: due to disappointing profits, it was made known, supervisors in Lowell would need to impose a 15 percent wage reduction. (This was substantially less than the 25 percent cut initially suggested by the mill owners in Boston, but it is not clear the employees knew this.)

  When supervisor William Austin learned that women in a spinning room were holding a meeting about the anticipated pay cut, he went to investigate and was challenged by “a dictatress” who was in the midst of addressing her fellow workers. Finding the woman unruly and intractable, Austin offered her an honorable discharge from the mill, which she refused. He left the spinning room, but when, a bit later, he saw the same woman preaching again to her peers and noted that she “continually had a crowd around her,” he fired her on the spot. She was soon sighted outside the mill, waving “her calash [bonnet] in the air as a signal to the others, who were watching from the windows, when 800 immediately ‘struck,’ and, exiting the building, assembled around her.”52 The crowd then marched off the mill property and paraded through the little industrial city, shouting to other mill workers looking down from their windows and beckoning them to join the exodus. “A procession was formed,” according to the Boston Transcript, “and they marched about the town to the amusement of a mob of idlers and boys, and we are sorry to add not altogether to the credit of Yankee Girls.” At the Lowell Common, “one of the leaders mounted a pump and made a flaming Mary Woolstonecroft [sic] speech on the rights of women and the inequities of ‘monied aristocracy,’ which produced a powerful effect on her auditors, as no one could recall a woman ever giving a public speech before in Lowell. The strikers determined ‘to have their own way if they died for it.’ ”53

  A great number of the women then headed for a local bank known to be used by the mill owners and withdrew all their savings. This would tide them over in case of a protracted strike and force the owners to replenish the bank’s funds. They then issued a formal proclamation embracing “the spirit of our patriotic ancestors” and vowing that while “the oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us, as we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen still.”54 The women’s claim on America’s revolutionary heritage was characteristic of the period, as the events of 1776 were often then recalled as a struggle waged and won by workingmen—Emerson’s “embattled farmers” at Concord Bridge, Franklin’s “leather apron men,” and independent artisans like silversmith Paul Revere. Urban workers’ associations of the era regularly based their own founding documents on the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, the inland villages from which the Lowell girls hailed tended to be deeply Yankee places with an intrinsic sense of Americanism.

  Accounts of the 1834 turnout note the mill owners’ disappointment at the unfortunate display of worker resentment.55 The happy balance of the Lowell industrial model hinged on the reliability that the young female workers of New England would not morph into the angry proletariat that troubled English mills, but would remain content, cosseted by the owners’ patronage. Now, suddenly, they’d acted out, become ungrateful daughters. One mill agent, describing the turnout as an “amizonian display,” informed a colleague, “This afternoon we have paid off several of these Amazons and presume that they will leave town on Monday.” He bemoaned the fact that despite the caring guidance of the men who ran Lowell, “a spirit of evil omen … has prevailed” among the women and “overcome the judgment and discretion of too many.”56 A Lynn, Massachusetts, labor paper, The Mechanic, suggested the boldness of the demanding females resulted from a warping of gender traits, for which industry was responsible:

  From some cause or another, either from the despotism exercised over them, or from a too great familiarity with males … the factory girls exchange some of their feminine qualities for the masculine—she becomes too bold. Her naturally fine tones of voice are from loud speaking made coarser. There are various causes which produce this manly appearance, and which spoils their manners.57

  The Awl, a journal for shoemakers, was more sympathetic:

  The story of her wrongs is full of bitterness, and the guilty wretch who caused them [the factory boss], trembles in his shoes lest she will expose him. Hitherto he has found her tame, submissive, at times almost crouching—but now she dares look him in the eye, and every such glance is a dagger to his soul.58

  This was all a bit exaggerated. Women mill workers were not turned into unrecognizable hellcats by the ardor of mill work; in truth few dared challenge shop supervisors for fear of dismissal. And the mills’ reaction to the women’s outbursts, even to the 1834 turnout at Lowell, was in fact relatively muted. Perhaps concerned that the image of Lowell as a showcase of industrial progress be as little blemished by disruption of any kind, and sensing that the women’s strike fervor would die out quickly given the lack of job alternatives and the fear of blacklisting, the owners neither sought repression by police or militia, nor invoked the courts to punish the turnout as a criminal conspiracy, as strikes were then often defined.

  Indeed, despite its dramatic beginning and the women’s defiant march to the village green, the 1834 strike proved of short duration. The mills had substantial inventory of finished cloth, and the workers lacked the will or organizational discipline to sustain a work stoppage that would threaten profits. There also was something of a leadership vacuum, since nothing prohibited the mills from sacking workers found to be difficult or outspoken; this proved effective at weeding out potential agitators. Notably absent, too, were the well-funded treasuries, the “strike funds” that would become crucial to the support of later unionization efforts. In the end, management simply refused to reconsider the 15 percent pay cut, and within a few days most of the women had accepted the new lower wage and gone back to their looms.

  That the tactics of organized labor resistance could be learned, however, became cl
ear in 1836, when a second turnout at Lowell proved more successful. The mill owners had traditionally deducted $1.25 per week from their employees’ wage packets to cover the cost of room and board, but recently the boardinghouse proprietors had cited rising expenses. When the mills announced their intention to take an additional 25 cents per week for this purpose from each paycheck, two thousand workers, a third of Lowell’s female mill hands, rebelled. Declaring the new reduction tantamount to an unwarranted pay cut, fifteen hundred attended a spirited strike meeting. As in 1834, they linked their cause to their fathers’ valor in the Revolution, vowing “never to wear the yoke which has been prepared for us,”59 although now they had devised an actual strategy. Instead of a single large turnout, the women targeted one workroom at a time, rotating their absences and thus judiciously slowing the mill’s output. And rather than linger in town and attempt to subsist without a paycheck, many simply returned to their family farms to await word of the mills’ capitulation. The Boston Transcript mocked them as ingrates for having “kicked up this bobbery,”60 but the mills, caught off guard by the women’s actions and lacking the inventory that had protected them in 1834, eventually conceded and restored the 25 cents to the workers’ pay.

  THE VICTORY RESULTED FROM the women’s own experience, but also from their awareness that the assertion of laborers’ rights in the Merrimack Valley was of a piece with larger regional political and cultural movements. The 1830s were a time of dynamic change in New England, as railroads initiated a market revolution in the way goods were produced and transported, and the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening promoted the democratizing idea that individuals were responsible for making moral choices. Transcendentalism, a philosophical and literary movement celebrating nature and emphasizing human intuition over reason, emanated from nearby Concord and a circle of influential writers, ministers, and reformers that included Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. The elements of religious life, “the idea of God, of duty, of immortality,” they believed, were “given outright in the nature and constitution of man, and do not have to be learned from any book or confirmed by any miracle.”61 Human beings possessed an “inborn capacity to perceive truth and right.”62

  A generation after the introduction of the Lowell experiment, many workers had come to believe less in the paternalistic care of the governing mill proprietors and to see their own plight increasingly in the context of societal injustice. They identified more readily with contemporary causes such as abolition, temperance, universal free education, the utopian Socialism of the French thinker Charles Fourier, and the stirrings of a nascent feminist movement. “The elements are truly in motion which are destined to work out a greater moral, physical and mental revolution than the world ever conceived of,” predicted a Lowell labor journal in 1845.

  The strong band of Abolitionists … are making visible inroads upon the foul and heaven-cursed institution of black slavery…. Our Temperance reformers are on the alert … bringing joy and hope to the drunkard’s once desolate home…. The Workingmen have put on the whole armour … combating the powers of white, as well as black slavery…. God speed these noble reforms which … are all acting in harmony, and will usher in a day of peaceful industry and happiness to our degenerate world.63

  Slavery was a particularly discomforting, morally intrusive fact at Lowell, for mill workers, no less than the Boston Associates and the plantation owners of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, were links in a chain daily brightened and enriched by the South’s slave economy. “The lords of the loom and the lords of the lash” was the memorable expression the Massachusetts abolitionist statesman Charles Sumner used to forcefully connect Lowell to the Southern disgrace.64 The dilemma for the mill workers was that they insisted on comparing their lot to that of plantation slaves, even as they worked the very cotton the actual slaves had picked, although, according to worker Lucy Larcom, since the cloth produced at Lowell was worn by even “the most zealous antislavery agitators, the question was allowed to pass as one too complicated for us to decide.”65 Many of the mill workers felt that their low pay and status exonerated them from culpability, while, to most abolitionists, comparisons between Northern “wage slavery” and Southern chattel slavery were offensive. Unlike Negro bondsmen, after all, mill employees were citizens; if poorly paid or unfairly treated, they were free to leave their job. The mill owners themselves were not immune to feelings of complicity. Nathan Appleton as a young man had seen a slave auction in South Carolina and been sickened by it, but while continuing to regard slavery as “a tremendous evil,” he rationalized that the question was one the South must address.66

  Debate over the worker/slave analogy roiled the first several issues of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist weekly, the Liberator, which debuted in January 1831, a month before the founding in Boston of the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen. Garrison brusquely minimized the possibility that wage workers’ suffering was anywhere near on par with that of Southern slaves; labor’s grievances were, if anything, exaggerated, even sensationalized. “An attempt has been made,” he wrote,

  to enflame the minds of our working classes against the more opulent, and to persuade men that they are contemned and oppressed by a wealthy aristocracy. It is in the highest degree criminal … to exasperate our mechanics to deeds of violence or to array them under a party banner; for it is not true, that, at any time, they have been the objects of reproach. Labor is not dishonorable. The industrious artisan, in a government like ours, will always be held in better estimation than the wealthy idler.67

  William West of the Boston workingmen’s group took strong exception, replying to Garrison that there existed “a very intimate connection between the interests of the workingmen’s party and your own. You are striving to excite the attention of your countrymen to the injustice of holding their fellow men in bondage and depriving them of the fruit of their toil. We are aiming at a similar object.” West pointed out that, like slaves, working people were kept in a state of serfdom, ignorance, and dependence, and that capital did not truly share the bounty of production with the producers, but rather strove to obtain workers’ labor at the cheapest possible rate. “The value and the price of labor have been rated not by the worth of their product, but by the power of those who command its proceeds, or for whom it is performed—to obtain it, and enjoy its benefits.”68

  Garrison responded that it was unjust to indict the wealthy as behaving cruelly toward labor, since it was wealth that created commercial enterprises, manufacturing, and employment. He wrote:

  There is, no doubt, an abuse of wealth, as well as of talent, office and emolument, but where is the evidence that our wealthy citizens, as a body, are hostile to the interests of the laboring classes? It is not found in their commercial enterprises, which whiten the ocean with canvas, and give employment to a useful and numerous class of men; it is not found in their manufacturing establishments, which multiply labor and cheapen the necessities of the poor…. It is a miserable characteristic of human nature to look with an envious eye upon those who are more fortunate in their pursuits, or more exalted in their station…. Perhaps it would be nearer to the truth to affirm that mechanics are more inimical to the success of each other, more unjust toward each other, than the rich toward them.69

  West then asked Garrison why, if wealthy men harbored no hostility for the laborer and all men in a republican nation shared equal opportunity, it was the workingman who was found

  living in the poorest hovels or meanest dwellings—subsisting on the humblest fare—working in all weather, exposed to every evil—and enjoying but little leisure or opportunity for the cultivation of heart or intellect. Would this be so if they were equitably paid for their labor? Is it not obvious that the process[es] of mechanical and agricultural labor are altogether too low, when an idle libertine, who produces nothing, can command the proceeds of the labor all around him, and live at the cost wh
ich would support a hundred industrious working citizens and their useful families?70

  West’s argument had a distorted echo in the writings of Southern apologists like George Fitzhugh, who insisted in two popular books of the era that the paternalism of plantation slavery was superior to the supposedly enlightened attitudes of Northern mill owners, since Negro slaves were valued and looked after, while in the North’s system of “wage slavery” the individual was left to struggle alone against uncaring corporations and the unknowable forces of economic fate.71

  The discussion soon receded from the Liberator’s pages. But West’s remarks would prove prescient. Labor advocates increasingly compared their fate to that of Southern chattel slaves as labor militancy hardened in the 1840s. “Much has been written and spoken in [the slave’s] behalf,” said the Boston Bee in 1844,