There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  and the horrors of his situation have been depicted in a most glowing and heart-stirring manner. But where are the advocates of the oppressed among us—here at the north? In our eagerness to cast out the mote which is in our brother’s eye, have we not overlooked the beam which is in our own? … Yes, reader, we have oppression in our very midst—a slavery even worse than that endured by the poor negro, in that it bears the semblance of freedom.72

  Such opinions raised but did not answer a fundamental question: Who were the workers of America to be—members of a permanent proletariat, or free people earning their way to economic independence, property, and security? With many young men heading west to seek opportunity and land, and mill girls returning to their communities to marry and raise families, it was possible to maintain, up to a point, a vision of factory labor as a transitory stage rather than a life condition. But the ideal of the decent man or woman’s incremental rise through honest toil to prosperity had begun to feel less assured; at the same time it was becoming harder to dismiss its opposite—a life of labor at killing hours for low pay—as the industrial worker’s more or less fixed predicament. For many, the latter was a prospect too dire for citizens of a supposedly democratic republic to accept. “At one time, they tell us our free institutions are based upon the virtue and intelligence of the American people, and the influence of the mother form[s] and mould[s] the man,” observed Sarah Bagley, “and [in] the next breath, that the way to make the mothers of the next generation virtuous, is to enclose them within the brick walls of a cotton mill from twelve and a half to thirteen and a half hours a day.”73

  While the analogy between Northern factory work and Southern plantation slavery was never entirely convincing, labor reformers might be forgiven for believing their problems to be at least equally systemic. What the women mill workers of Lowell had learned in the turnouts of 1834 and 1836 was that they were no longer the special daughters of New England serving in the nation’s industrial showplace, but “had become full-fledged members of the working class.”74 Was not the factory’s exploitation of poor workers a “peculiar institution” all its own?

  Bagley’s hardening views embodied this change, for her experience in the Lowell mills had by the mid-1840s brought her a long way from the rosy optimism of “The Pleasures of Factory Life.” The Voice of Industry, a labor periodical she wrote for and later edited, openly mocked those visitors to Lowell who, after a cursory tour provided by management, compared the young women’s lot favorably to that of industrial workers in England.

  Bagley and her activist colleagues found the assessment maddeningly premature. While in England, warned the Voice, “the whole system of factory labor is unnatural, oppressive and unjust,” in America it had “not yet reached its climax,” but “that gloomy era approaches—in our manufacturing towns we see more than premonitions of its coming—when the pale sky of New England shall look down on men, women, and children ground to the very dust by feudal monopoly.”75

  MILL WORKERS WHO QUESTIONED the conditions of industrial labor could not help but be intrigued by the advent of rural workers’ collectives. These idealistic efforts offered to resolve the issue of how a self-respecting individual might fit into industrialized society, as the self-supporting communities were removed from the rigors of the urban factory as well as the sin and hubbub of the outside world. By the early 1840s they were based increasingly on the theories of Charles Fourier, a Parisian businessman and minor bank official “appalled at the monotony and waste that a free-market economy engendered.”76 Publishing a series of innovative tracts that examined the deficiencies of capitalism, Fourier prescribed a distinct alternative—a collective model of societal organization that freed man from the wage system and allowed him to develop his true aptitude and interests. Fourier had died in 1837, but his ideas were avidly promoted in the United States by a well-to-do American, Arthur Brisbane, who had met Fourier in France and paid the master for tutorials on his unique philosophy.

  Fourier envisioned rural agricultural and industrial units of approximately fifteen hundred individuals gathered in a collective he referred to as a “harmonic group” or phalanstery; the members would serve the larger entity according to one’s personal aptitude or expertise, what Fourier termed one’s passion or association; the adherents of such projects were known as associationists. The collectives were to be economically self-sustaining, offering humane conditions for members along with the uplifting benefits of education, community, and engagement with the arts. A Fourierist world of hundreds or thousands of phalansteries, it was believed, would ultimately render states and nations as well as wages obsolete. Fourier was meticulous in his planning, devising procedures and schedules for all aspects of life in his communities, even down to the marching order of barnyard animals.77

  While history has generally cast a dubious eye over these undertakings, they proliferated throughout early and mid-nineteenth-century America—forty phalanxes with approximately eight thousand members came into existence during the 1840s—and were viewed seriously as potential alternatives to factory life. “We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,” Emerson wrote to Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle in 1840. “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.” It didn’t harm their appeal that the communities harkened back to a familiar American ideal, the Jeffersonian faith in the virtues of agricultural endeavor and closeness to the land.

  As Emerson’s comment suggests, there was in America even prior to Brisbane’s efforts on behalf of Fourierism already an active interest in self-sustaining communities set apart from the immoral, wasteful world. The goal, according to George Ripley, founder of Brook Farm, a 170-acre dairy farm near West Roxbury, Massachusetts, one of the best-known secular “Transcendentalist” collectives, was “to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor [and] to guarantee the highest mental freedom by providing all with labor adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry.” Begun in 1841, Brook Farm attracted such notable participants as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dana, and Orestes Brownson, as well as visitors like Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. Members earned their keep by performing work in their chosen field of labor or through an investment in the farm. The collective operated a successful school attended by the children of many prominent liberal New Englanders (one student was Robert Gould Shaw, later to attain immortal glory leading the all-black 54th Massachusetts Infantry in the Civil War) and produced its own literary journal, The Harbinger. When Brook Farm struggled financially it reorganized in early 1844 as a Fourierist entity, bringing dozens of new membership applications, thanks to Brisbane’s advocacy and his popular publication of Social Destiny of Man, an accessible account of Fourier’s thought. Brisbane gained a critical ally in New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who beginning in 1842 gave Brisbane space for a front-page column in which Brisbane expounded on Fourier’s ideas.78

  Most Fourierist communities foundered within a few years, or at the longest a generation, the enterprises culturally out of sync with American notions of private property and individual autonomy. In addition, the romantic men and women such ventures tended to attract were often ill-suited for the daily rigors of industry or agriculture. Hawthorne, resident at Brook Farm, has a protagonist in his novel The Blithedale Romance sour on “the spiritualization of labor,” and conclude, “The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over, were never etherealized into thought…. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar … are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or melded into one substance.” Amid mounting financial woes, tensions between the original and later-arriving participants, and a debate as to whether the enterprise should be Christian in orientation, the Brook Farm experiment flamed out quite literally in 1846 when the main communal structure burned to the ground.79

  A brief
flirtation of sorts did ensue between mill workers and collective farmers. The women of Lowell were interested in an alternative to wage labor, while the associationists were drawn to the workers’ efforts to ameliorate inhumane mill conditions. Sarah Bagley immersed herself in the Lowell Union of Associationists, which advanced information about Fourier projects, and spoke on behalf of the group at a gathering in Boston in 1846. The Fourierists, however, were soon convinced their aims could never be conjoined with wage earners who passed their days within the confines of a traditional factory. The Lowell mill hands did respond to the spirit of the movement by joining local consumer cooperatives—at one point there were eight cooperative stores in the city with almost a thousand members—and associationist speakers were frequent visitors at the local lyceums, even as their theories over time seemed increasingly quaint. “We often heard the Brook Farm community talked of, and were curious about it,” Lucy Larcom recalled, “as an experiment at air-castle building by intellectual people who had time to indulge their tastes.” Of course, Lowell workers were hardly immune to the appeal of other faddish trends. They contemplated water cures and the dietary philosophy of the Connecticut vegetarian guru Dr. Sylvester Graham, father of “the Graham Cracker,” and listened earnestly, like many in the Northeast, for spirit noises and rapping on tables.80

  American workingmen and -women of the 1840s found a far more pragmatic and relatable cause in the crusade for land reform. One of its guides, George Henry Evans, former editor of the Working Man’s Advocate, believed that “if man has any right on the earth, he has the right to land enough to raise a habitation on.” Not only did Southern slaves deserve emancipation, he insisted; without land ownership neither would white laborers ever attain a respected place in society.81 The land movement went through a brief Fourierist-like phase in which it demanded free land for the establishment of “rural republican townships,” but it morphed eventually into a call by Evans, echoed by Greeley, for land out west as, among other things, a possible solution to the nation’s labor troubles.

  “An idealistic Yankee” who “had come to New York as a farm boy to enter the printing trade,” Greeley “was a familiar figure at labor gatherings … his round moon face, with its fringe of whiskers known to thousands of workers.”82 Along with his support of collectives and the people’s right to free land, he supported the idea of legislatures setting limits on hours worked, and even the heretical notion that the government had a responsibility to provide people jobs.83 Greeley disliked strikes or any expression of class conflict, insisting on the possibility that harmony could prevail between worker and employer, both sharing in the benefits of production and progress in a capitalist system.84 The prospect of land ownership, he and Evans believed, would act as a kind of societal safety valve, drawing off surplus workers and keeping management honest by offering workers an alternative to factory life.

  Greeley’s editorial advocacy of the “free soil” homestead idea, joined with the efforts of Evans’s National Reform Association and its explicit slogan, “Vote Yourself a Farm,” led in 1844 to the introduction of several land-granting bills in Congress. This effort was particularly important for its thematic alliance with the antislavery cause, and because homesteading offered a distinct economic alternative to the spread of plantation slavery to the western territories, it became known as the “free soil” movement. Predictably, it was anathema to the Southern bloc in Congress, who stifled any possibility of the legislation’s passage. “Free soil-ism,” however, became the common plea of both antislavery forces and laborers seeking freedom from wage slavery, a useful political platform championing the freedom of social mobility and the dignity of labor as well as the restricting of slavery from the new western states. This broad political viability provided the genesis in 1848 for the Free Soil Party, whose members, upon the party’s dissolution in 1854, joined Northern Whigs and antislavery Democrats to found the Republican Party.85

  For many Americans, especially low-wage industrial workers, westward migration would remain something of a dream. The western wilderness was isolated and dangerous. Transporting one’s family and worldly possessions hundreds of miles to begin a farming enterprise from scratch would be a struggle for even an experienced tiller of the soil, and most laboring poor lacked the know-how or capital to make the transition from eastern mill towns to a life clearing and working a plot of land in the west. But few were unaffected by the ideal the homestead concept represented.

  IT HAD BEEN SHOWN at Lowell that Yankee farm girls and gentlemen capitalists could attain a balance of mutual regard and enrichment, a superior American version of industrialization. But the ardor of life in a textile mill, the two turnouts of the mid-1830s, and the financial pressures felt by the Boston Associates from a series of economic downturns gradually eroded that fragile ideal. Each year there were new tensions, new worker resentments. As yet there existed no respected structure for the hearing of grievances or constructive compromise between employees and management (what would later be known as collective bargaining). The courts held labor unions to be unlawful “combinations” or “conspiracies,” and mill owners tended to dismiss work stoppages as illegitimate, while workers had no recourse against firings or the blacklist.

  “We are destined to be a great manufacturing people,” the Reverend Henry A. Miles reminded readers in Lowell, As It Was, and As It Is, written in 1845, one of the first retrospectives of the city. He cautioned, however, that “the influences that go forth from Lowell will go forth from many other manufacturing villages and cities. If these influences are pernicious, we have great calamity impending over us.” Miles vowed that he would “prefer to have every factory destroyed” than lasting harm done to “our sons and daughters”—the working people of the country.86

  Not that the working people were passive in this regard. Each season saw the founding of new groups and publications furthering the labor cause, and ever-larger yearly petitions to the Massachusetts state legislature demanding relief from the crushing work schedule in textile mills and other factories. The most prominent of these was the Ten-Hour movement. In 1835 the labor pamphleteer Seth Luther, who’d emerged from a carpenters’ guild, published a seminal treatise, the “Ten-Hour Circular,” which posited that men and women were citizens before they were workers, and that as citizens they had the right—a “natural right” akin to those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—to do something other than work twelve- and fourteen-hour days.

  The Ten-Hour cause was both popular and to a degree irrefutable, for it had the advantage of being primarily about time, not money. Its argument that providing workers more leisure time so that they might become literate and educated, in short, better citizens and workers, was compelling, and was not as easily brushed aside as a demand for higher wages. “What are we coming to?” asked a New Hampshire textile worker named Octavia. “Here am I, a healthy New England Girl, quite well-behaved, bestowing just half of all my hours including Sundays, upon a company, for less than two cents an hour, and out of the other half of my time, I am obliged to wash, mend, read, reflect, go to church, etc. I repeat it, what are we coming to?”87 Workers recognized the irony that just as they had gained access to the benefits of the manufacturing economy through the wage system, they were denied the time and opportunity to buy the objects they produced. “We are free, but not free enough,” was a Massachusetts shoemaker’s lament. “We want the liberty of living.”88

  They were encouraged by the fact that shorter-hour measures had been enacted in the past. The ten-hour issue was at the heart of what some consider the first labor confrontation in U.S. history, when in June 1827 Philadelphia carpenters mounted an unsuccessful strike. The defeat prompted the carpenters to reach out for allies among the city’s weavers, printers, and other journeymen, and to found in 1828 the nation’s first urban labor federation, the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations.89 By 1835 the Philadelphia common council had established the ten-hour day for municipal workers, and
in 1840 President Martin Van Buren issued an executive order making ten hours the standard for contract workers and employees of the federal government.

  The plea for reasonable hours of work struck directly at the question of whether the wealth created by industry was truly to be shared, and revived the debate that had prevailed in the early years of the republic as to whether industrialism would be a more just and equitable affair in America than abroad. It was an issue that mattered greatly because workers increasingly recognized the industrial revolution’s permanence, and, in seeking to define their place in it, resisted vehemently the possibility that they were to be mere cogs, a laboring peasantry, not citizens. “We have erected these cities and villages,” a spokesman for a Boston area workingmen’s committee told an 1840 labor rally:

  Our labor has digged the canals, and constructed the railways…. We have built and manned the ships which navigate every ocean, and furnished the houses of the rich with all their comforts and luxuries. Our labor has done it all, [yet] we toil on from morning to night, from one year’s end to another, increasing our exertions with each year, and with each day, and still we are poor and dependent.90

  Rallying around the ten-hour day, the New England labor movement grew in size and determination in the mid-1840s, with Sarah Bagley emerging as a leader in the fight. In December 1844 she and dozens of other women pressed into a Lowell lecture space appropriately named “Anti-Slavery Hall” to create the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA), a branch of the New England Workingmen’s Association (NEWA), founded that same year by shorter-hour advocates. “When men begin to inquire why the Laborer does not hold that place in the social, moral and intellectual world, which a bountiful Creator designed him to occupy, the reason is obvious,” insisted the women’s constitution. “He is a slave to a false and debasing state of society. Our merciful Father in his infinite wisdom surely has not bestowed all his blessings, both mental and moral, on a few, on whom also he has showered all of pecuniary gifts. No! To us all has he given minds capable of eternal progression and improvement!”91