There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The mill owners countered that fewer hours worked would result in lower wages paid, and argued further that a long day’s work was actually beneficial to workers; shorter hours, by making possible greater leisure time, would leave them more susceptible to corrupting influences. “The morals of the operatives will necessarily suffer, if longer absent from the wholesome discipline of factory life,” they warned, “leaving them thus to their will and liberty, without a warrant that this time will be well employed.”118

  Bagley and her peers lampooned such objections, noting that where the mills had added a quarter hour to the workers’ mealtimes, lengthening them from thirty to forty-five minutes, the young women had been observed to chew rather than swallow their food. “This system of placing a quantity of food in the mouth and swallowing it almost without any mastication whatever is one peculiar to the Working Classes of this country,” deadpanned the Voice, “and we do believe it to be one of the principal causes of the mortality existing among them.” Some workers, it related, had begun using the extra minutes after dining for other pursuits. “And what horrible things do you suppose they were doing? Most of them were reading books or newspapers, others were chatting with their friends or greeting newcomers, and all seemed to be enjoying themselves rationally and happily.”119 The longer lunch hour no doubt helped allay the fears of Lowell clergyman Henry A. Miles, who had worried that the women would grow so listless from lack of nourishment that they would succumb to a “morbid hankering” for candy.120

  The petitions submitted for the ten-hour day in Massachusetts proved historic, in that they led to the first legislative hearings ever conducted in America to examine the conditions of labor. Lowell’s state representative, William Schouler, owner of the corporation-friendly Lowell Courier and briefly a publisher of the Lowell Offering, led the investigating committee, which called upon six women and two men, including Bagley, to testify in person. This may have been an attempt at intimidation, as it was still unusual for women to speak in public forums. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, white daughters of South Carolina who had toured New England in the 1830s in opposition to slavery, had stunned the public by doing so, and the “flaming Mary Woolstonecroft speech” delivered by a female mill hand from atop a water pump on the Lowell Common in 1834 was still recollected as something of a scandal. But such concerns did not deter Bagley and the others from testifying before the legislature’s committee. They told of fourteen-hour workdays, beginning at 5 a.m. and extending to 7 p.m., with short breaks allowed for meals, 150 people made to work side by side in close quarters, and women standing on their feet all day. They spoke of prolonged exposure to the noxious atmosphere in the workrooms, the airborne cotton dust, the smoke from whale-oil lamps, and the fact that the windows were often nailed shut. The legislators of the investigating committee duly went to see the Lowell mills for themselves, interviewing owners’ representatives and observing firsthand conditions in the workrooms.

  The committee’s conclusion was that Massachusetts factory workers enjoyed circumstances superior to those in Britain, where “the whole family go into the mills as soon as they have sufficient bodily strength to earn a penny [and] never come out until they die.” By comparison, the Lowell girls “are farmers’ daughters,” well raised and educated New Englanders of strong constitution, who earn a few hundred dollars in the mills, then “depart for their homes, get married, settle down in life, and become the heads of families.” The health of the operatives at Lowell, they decreed, was generally as good as elsewhere in the population. The committee’s most sympathetic finding was an acknowledgment that abuses existed, but its report insisted that “the remedy is not with us.” In any case, legislative intervention in the workplace was deemed inappropriate because resulting reforms would harm the ability of Massachusetts industrialists to compete with mills in other states not burdened with such mandates; similarly, the committee proclaimed that matters relating to hours and wages were not the state’s business but private issues to be resolved between the workers and the company.121

  Bagley and her cohorts interpreted the rebuff as an affront to female workers. They believed they had been patronized and ultimately refused by the legislature because women lacked the vote, and thus could have little impact on the elected officials who manned the committee. Their turnouts, aimed at affecting the mill owners economically, had taken them only so far; in the political sphere, as well, they now concluded, their lack of suffrage severely limited their impact. “Your actions are in perfect keeping with the ruling spirit of the times,” a mill worker wrote with evident sarcasm to the legislature. “You are no doubt, true to the interests of wealth and monopoly…. Your sapient heads are very busy in forming laws to protect, uphold and upbuild the rich.”122 A Voice article noted that women workers had “at last learnt the lesson which a bitter experience teaches, that not to those who style themselves their ‘natural protectors’ are they to look for the needful help, but to the strong and resolute of their own sex.”123 Part of their ire turned on William Schouler, who they believed had helped torpedo their petition. The LFLRA targeted him for special retribution, caricaturing him as “the tool sent by the Lowell Corporations to the Massachusetts Legislature,” and took credit soon after when Schouler lost his bid at reelection, thus “consigning him to the obscurity he so justly deserves.”124

  Further efforts to gain a statewide ten-hour law, including one Massachusetts petition bearing ten thousand names, persisted throughout the 1850s. But it proved difficult for the workers to maintain any leverage against the mill owners because European immigrants, who were far less likely to make demands or sign a petition, were increasingly being hired in the mills. While New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Connecticut did produce some version of a ten-hour law by the 1850s, and some manufacturers independently reduced hours, a law shortening the workday to ten hours was not enacted in Massachusetts until 1874.125

  MILL WORK HAD BROUGHT American women out of the home and into the workplace, and their resolve to have a say in their treatment, in particular their advocacy for the ten-hour day, had now carried them into the public sphere. Increasingly their activism was concerned with issues other than fair wages and decent hours of work; articles about education, marriage, equal pay, and women’s suffrage began to appear in the Voice of Industry. There was more to life than “a dress, a pudding, or a beau,” Huldah Stone, secretary of the LFRA, asserted,126 while her colleague, Mehitable Eastman, placed the advocacy for women’s working rights in the context of broader social reform. “Never while we have hearts to feel and tongues to speak,” she told the group,

  will we silently and passively witness so much that is opposed to justice and benevolence. Never, while a wretched being is crying to us for succor, from the alleys and dens of our cities—from our crammed manufactories, and workshops, from poverty-stricken garrets and cellars … Never shall we hold ourselves exempt from responsibility.

  While the impetus for the historic founding of the American women’s movement at Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20, 1848, came largely from individuals active in the abolition cause, the struggle of women workers was both an inspiration and a relevant part of the agenda; as Seneca Falls was a manufacturing town, young female workers from a local glove factory filled seats at the gathering. Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Hunt, Lucretia Mott, and Mott’s sister, Martha Coffin Wright, the meeting at the town’s Wesleyan Chapel was hailed by Stanton as “the first organized protest against the injustice which has brooded for ages over the character and destiny of one-half the race,”127 although in deference to the perceived impropriety of female-led public meetings, Mott’s husband, James, was drafted to serve as chairperson.

  Property rights for women; the right to make contracts, to bring lawsuits, and to testify in court; equality in marriage; the moral double standard affecting men and women; and improved access to education and employment were among the many challenges addressed in the discussions. Women’s suffra
ge, though controversial, was also included. A hundred people—sixty-eight women and thirty-two men, including Frederick Douglass, who was vocal in supporting the plank for the women’s vote—signed the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. Abolitionist periodicals, as well as Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, applauded the event, although many daily papers mocked the gathering as aggressive and improper, calling the participants “sour old maids,” or worse.

  The Seneca Falls convention laid an agenda for the women’s rights movement in America. As that campaign developed throughout the 1850s and beyond the Civil War, and as more women left the home to toil for wages, the transformative experience of New England female textile workers would frequently be repeated, the travails of industry for women workers reinforcing the obvious link between the struggle for equality on the job and women’s desire to confront gender inequity in its myriad forms.128 An influential book by the reformer Caroline H. Dall, Women’s Right to Labor, which appeared in 1860, advanced the idea that women’s “economic emancipation” ultimately relied upon their access to paid work. “Women have, from the beginning, done the hardest and most unwholesome work of the world,” Dall wrote; calling the notion that men must take care of women “an absurd fiction,” and citing as an example of female fortitude the report that the previous winter several women had ice-skated on the Merrimack “from Lowell to Lawrence, with a head wind; and one or two made the ten miles in forty minutes.”129

  Having done much to propel women’s issues out of the factory, Sarah Bagley began to extricate herself from the world of textile mills and labor politics by the late 1840s. In February 1846 she met Francis Smith, a representative of the telegraph service about to be introduced in Lowell. Impressed with her facile language skills and comfort with the new technology, Smith hired Bagley as the first female telegraph operator in America. On February 21, when service was initiated in Lowell, Bagley tapped out the town’s first messages to the outside world. Disarming concerns that women couldn’t be trusted to work in telegraph offices because they were unable to keep secrets, Bagley excelled in the position, and was soon relied upon to assist people in not only sending but writing their telegrams. Later she ran the telegraph office at Springfield, Massachusetts, although she left upon discovering that she was being paid two-thirds what her male predecessor had received. Relocating to Philadelphia, where she joined the staff of a Quaker home for prostitutes and disadvantaged women, she met and married James Durno, a manufacturer of herbal medicines. The pursuit of homeopathic cures and other alternatives was at the time a kind of reform campaign itself—a concerted departure from horrendous standard medical practices such as purging, blistering and bleeding, and the reliance on morphine and laudanum as anesthetics. In 1851 the couple became homeopathic physicians and promoters of alternative, nonobtrusive forms of healing, working out of their brownstone home in Brooklyn Heights, New York.130

  Lowell’s golden age also dwindled to an end, as a downturn in the national economy in the late 1850s brought a slowdown, as well as layoffs, to the mills. The fame of the Lowell girls and of Lowell as an industrial showplace continued to draw both American and foreign visitors, but by the time of the Civil War, “the town finally ceased to exercise its former charm on the curious.”131 Now when female mill workers went home to their farms and families, they and their younger sisters did not necessarily return, as textile jobs went increasingly to newly arrived immigrants from Ireland, Poland, and French Canada. Whereas in 1836 native New Englanders made up about 95 percent of the employees at one large Lowell mill, by 1860 the figure was less than 40 percent, and by 1900 only 8 percent of the Lowell workforce was nonimmigrant.132 A tragic marker of the waning of New England’s industrial innocence came on January 10, 1860, when a building collapse and fire at the Pemberton textile mill in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, killed eighty-eight workers and injured hundreds more. An investigation revealed that the Pemberton’s owners had disregarded warnings about the mill’s structural deficiencies.

  The Lowell Miracle, which had turned New England’s “pie-fed angels” into workers, then into labor activists and even proto-feminists, had provided, in ways the town’s founders never dreamed of, a convincing demonstration of how American workers would respond to industrialization. In terms of actual union organizing, however, the results were germinal at best. Strikes took place, with little gain, the ten-hour petitions met limited success, and in the end no enduring trade unions were formed.133 The experience of the immigrants who took over the looms of Lowell would differ greatly from that of their Yankee predecessors. Instead of being prominently displayed as examples of fair industry in a democratic republic and accorded a degree of respect as equals, the immigrants became an anonymous, interchangeable labor force, much like the Irishmen who’d been brought by Kirk Boott to build the mills in the 1820s and relegated to a ramshackle “paddy camp.” It was this less trusting, less generous relationship between mill owners and workers that would characterize the nation’s industrial labor relations in the coming years.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HELL WITH THE LID OFF

  THE LIVES OF THE SHOEMAKERS OF LYNN, a Massachusetts seacoast town, differed markedly from those of the textile mill operatives of nearby Lowell. Whereas in Lowell large-scale industry had arrived all at once in the 1820s, Lynn and the surrounding towns of Marblehead and Salem had a workshop tradition of shoemaking dating back to the seventeenth century; Lynn was well known as a shoemaking capital by the time the first treadle sewing machine appeared there in 1852. The mini-industrial revolution set in motion by that technological event produced in turn the first nationally watched labor battle in U.S. history. Twenty thousand shoe workers abandoned their workbenches for three months, the largest and longest work stoppage in pre–Civil War America, in what one headline termed the “Beginning of Conflict Between Capital and Labor.”1

  Because shoemaking was originally a home-based craft, it had been natural for the head of the household, in fulfilling his orders, to enlist family members to assist; women’s familiarity with garment-making made them natural partners. The men, known as “cordwainers” or “jours,” short for “journeymen,” cut the leather and cobbled the basic shoe, while the female outworkers, known as “stitchers” or “fancy stitchers,” sewed the delicate leather “uppers.” The women toiled in farm kitchens while the men and boys worked together in small outbuildings known as “ten-footers.”

  The sewing machine rudely disrupted this long-established system by greatly increasing the pace at which uppers could be sewn. Shoe factories furnished with rows of sewing machines opened in Lynn; uniform shoe sizes were introduced, as were shoe boxes to safeguard the product on its way to market. There had been centralized workshops before, known as manufactories, where the old traditions of apprentice, journeyman, and master still held sway; but the newer term “factory” implied something different, a place of workers and bosses, ordered by strict hours and oversight and the hum of machines. These “shoe mills” exercised the same effect on rural New England women as had the Lowell textile industry, drawing them to Lynn; as “machine girls” working the treadle devices, they earned substantially more than the women who stitched shoes at home. By 1860, only 25 percent of the shoe workers were Lynn natives, and many of the local journeymen and skilled home stitchers had been driven from the family hearth and backyard ten-footers to occupy factory benches in town. The transition was resisted, but local shoe production doubled as a result of the new technology.2

  This transformation coincided with the advent of the railroad and the opening of new national markets for Lynn shoes, and brought dramatic social and economic changes to the town. At Lowell, the intent of the Boston Associates had been to safeguard manufacturing’s reputation by shielding workers from its deleterious effects; in Lynn the emphasis was on meeting industrialization’s challenges and ensuring needed levels of production with a strengthened communal sense of morality, diligence, and hard work.3 The custom
of shoe workers to enjoy daily portions of rum mixed with raisins and sugar, or “black strap,” a concoction of rum and molasses, was done away with, as were the festivities that had traditionally marked the days upon which apprentices reached their majority and became journeymen. Lynn became one of the first communities in New England to enforce a total prohibition on liquor. Temperance was urged as a cure for malingering and other vices ranging from thievery to domestic abuse. New laws also went on the books prohibiting gambling, profanity, and swimming in the nude.

  The impulse to rein in unproductive habits joined a heightened intolerance for the indolent and the poor. Families of modest means were no longer allowed to draw goods on credit, authorities enforced compulsory school attendance, and life in the almshouse became more unpleasant. Even the physical world constricted. Between 1830 and 1860 developers nibbled away at the public lands around Lynn, turning nearby sea reaches into a summer haven for the Boston gentry. Some of the areas overrun were beaches long favored for swimming and clam-hunting. To make matters worse, it was soon evident that the affluent newcomers had no wish to mingle with the town’s residents, one estate owner going so far as to install a pack of vicious dogs in order to keep the locals away.4

  In the pre-factory era a worker looked forward to his “competency,” the amount of savings that would carry him into old age or disability. With the new system factory owners, not independent workers, controlled hours and wages as well as the availability of work, and a “competency” was no longer a sure thing; in its stead loomed the potential humiliation of living one’s aged years as a pauper, supported by the church or public relief. Lynn shoemakers were displeased by this loss of egalitarian balance, angry that they, the actual producers of the town’s wealth, were forced to see their share of the shoe business’s material rewards diminish even as their futures grew more uncertain.