by Philip Dray
Anthony, encouraged by Sylvis’s personal commitment, and by the NLU’s embrace of women workers, if not their voting rights, told a founding meeting of the Women’s Typographical Union a month later, “Girls, you must take this matter to heart seriously now, for you have established a union, and for the first time in woman’s history in the United States you are placed … on a level with men … to obtain wages for your labor. I need not say that you have taken a great momentous step forward…. Keep at it now girls, and you will achieve full and plenteous success.”55 Unfortunately, the relationship between women workers and the NLU soon fractured irreparably during a strike by the male-dominated Typographical Union No. 6 of New York City. It was discovered that women had appealed directly to employers to teach them the skills of the striking workers. At a meeting in August 1869, Anthony addressed the allegation, saying that the opportunity for women to learn the skill was valuable and that they would have readily abandoned their seats back to the male union members once the strike was resolved. The men, however, rejected this explanation. NLU leaders attempted to intervene, but the women’s status in the NLU was already too tentative to be salvaged.56
Similarly, after a promising start, the NLU also stumbled in its efforts to include black workers. “What is wanted,” Sylvis had once said, “is for every union to help inculcate the grand ennobling idea that the interests of labor are one; that there should be no distinction of race and nationality; no classification of Jew or Gentile, Christian or infidel; that there is one dividing line, that which separates mankind into two great classes, the class that labors and the class that lives by others’ labor.”57 Karl Marx, founder of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) and a foreign booster of the NLU, had encouraged the organization’s inclusion of the freedmen as a way in which American trade unions might embody the true meaning of the Civil War, and the IWA had tried to lead by example, showcasing black labor organizations in a parade held in New York City in 1871. But as early as its founding convention of 1866 the NLU wrestled with the attempt to make black inclusion a reality, and by 1869 it had asked black delegates to form their own all-black organization. The result was the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU), whose 214 delegates gathered in Washington, choosing Isaac Myers as its president; Frederick Douglass headed the organization after 1872. “It is not without interest,” historian Rayford W. Logan notes, “that the first large-scale exclusion of Negroes by private organizations in the postbellum period was the handiwork of organized labor.”58
African American workers figure prominently in the nation’s history. It was the South’s defense of slavery, the ultimate system of cheap labor, which came to dominate the region’s politics and to influence public morality in America through the abolition movement. The debate over whether newly added territories and states would be slave or free, whether slavery would move west with the country’s expansion—at first troubling, then divisive and rancorous—led to the Civil War. Reconstruction (1865–1877) saw the freedmen become citizens, voters, elected officials, and, to a small extent, owners of property. Officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau (formally the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) assisted in the negotiation of wage contracts between the former slaves and their former masters; the bureau’s chief, General O. O. Howard, and others worked to obtain confiscated Confederate lands for the former slaves, but under President Andrew Johnson official support for land redistribution withered, and most former slaves remained propertyless, unable to escape the peonage of hired farm labor or the sharecropping system.
One of the CNLU’s first acts, after Myers had undertaken a cross-country organizing tour much as Sylvis had done, was to renew appeals to Congress to make land available to former slaves through low-interest loans. But these various efforts, however just and poetic—“owning a piece of the land that had once owned them”—ended in defeat, a misfortune in that it denied blacks economic equality, frustrating the kind of broader democracy in the region that might have enabled greater mutual interest and coalition among workers of both races.
As had been evident in its efforts with women workers, there remained a traditionalist strain within the NLU. It didn’t help that Sylvis, despite his enlightened thoughts on labor, held fairly conservative ideas on race and Reconstruction. He thought Congress’s efforts to reconstruct the South were excessive, accepted the prevalent Southern view that Northern politicians and businessmen in the South, the notorious “carpetbaggers,” were dishonorable, and favored the soonest possible reconciliation between the North and the former Confederacy. Having become enamored of the South during his peripatetic years as a labor organizer, he had been heard to speak of his interest in eventually relocating his family there.
But the real weakness in the effort to include blacks in the NLU was likely the fact that worker equality was not the chief motive; rather it was the need to deny employers the option of hiring blacks as scabs or as low-cost wage competitors. African Americans, of course, had little choice but to take what they could get; excluded from white trade unions, they were also refused access to quality jobs generally. This created a cyclical problem, in that the ordinary aspirations of black workers appeared inimical to white workers’ interests, their actions “disruptive,” which in turn diminished the ideal of their equality as men and potential union cohorts.59 While Sylvis didn’t hesitate to couch the appeal for racial solidarity among workers as “a second Emancipation Proclamation,”60 his and the NLU’s efforts had less in common with that glorious document than with the anxiety that a black peasantry would be exploited by capital to the detriment of white labor.
The NLU’s solution of encouraging equality but not integration, urging the formation of separate black trade unions, “was a first halting note,” according to W. E. B. Du Bois. “Negroes were welcomed to the labor movement, not because they were laborers but because they might be competitors in the market, and the logical conclusion was either to organize them or guard against their actual competition by other methods. It was to this latter alternative that white American labor almost unanimously turned.”61 The recommendation of a specially formed NLU Committee on Negro Labor reveals the hamstrung quality of the members’ deliberations: “While we feel the importance of the subject, and realize the danger in the form of competition in mechanical Negro labor,” the committeemen concluded, “yet we find the subject involved in so much mystery, and upon it so wide diversity of opinion amongst our members, we believe that it is inexpedient to take action on the subject.”62 Du Bois cites the NLU’s failure to bridge the divide of race as a fatal misstep. Relegating the black worker to a role as “a competitor and a prospective under-bidder” and asking him, “when he appeared at conventions … to organize separately; that is, outside the real labor movement,” was nothing less than “a contradiction of all sound labor policy.”63
Thus the NLU proved no better than the rest of the nation at fulfilling Reconstruction’s ideal of integrating America’s newest citizens into society, and the mistrust and disunity between white and black laborers only deepened as Reconstruction itself flagged and ultimately collapsed in the late 1870s. One supplemental problem was that blacks were politically aligned with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and Grant and of Emancipation and the franchise, while many white laboring men adhered to the Democratic Party, which was strong in cities and had stood up for immigrants against nativist parties such as the Know-Nothings. “It is useless to attempt to cover up the fact that there is still a wide gulf between the two races in this country,” a labor writer of the era concluded. “For a time at least they must each in their own way work out a solution to this labor problem.”64
Given these divisive issues, as well as an organizational platform unsuited to the rough-and-tumble of the post–Civil War economy, the NLU’s survival would have been doubtful under any circumstances, but its leadership suffered an unanticipated blow in late July 1869 when William Sylvis died suddenly at age forty-one. “Sylvis!
The National Calamity!” a labor newspaper exclaimed at his abrupt disappearance, noting that his passing “cast a veil of despondency upon the whole working class.” It was said he had worn himself out by his monumental exertions on behalf of workingmen, although one biographer offered the more prosaic explanation that his end had come due to “his nervous habit of rapid eating.”65 Whatever the cause, he was borne to his grave as one of the nation’s original labor martyrs, having so completely committed his resources to his work that his widow was forced to borrow money to pay the undertaker.
In the year of Sylvis’s death, the NLU drifted to the cause of monetary reform as a panacea for struggling workers and farmers, and in 1872 it made alliance with the greenback contingent that joined a doomed presidential challenge by publisher Horace Greeley. The NLU’s turning away from its signature labor campaigns confused and alienated many of its members; black affiliates, of course, almost exclusively remained loyal to Grant. With the labor base of the organization fractured, the NLU soon dissolved.
Some eulogized the departed Sylvis as “Our Lincoln” and remembered wistfully when such an allusion had not seemed at all far-fetched, for there had indeed been talk of promoting him for national office. He had, it so happened, been the first American laborite to suggest the creation within the government of a national Department of Labor. Alas, such attainments were not to be, but Sylvis had done much and performed heroically. With the iron molders he had cobbled together elements of the modern national labor union—the administration of geographically far-flung locals; the staging of massive labor conventions; the maintaining of union officials on salary. He had established standards for membership and the management of union finances. Having suffered both a workplace injury (molten iron had spilled into his boot) and a family crisis (his first wife had died of typhoid at age twenty-nine), he had also helped pioneer ways in which unions could serve as benevolent agencies for injured or sick workers and their families. His efforts within the NLU were similarly groundbreaking, promoting broad union inclusion and solidarity across all trades. Finally, he was likely the first national labor leader around whom there grew a cult of personality—his tireless wanderings over America, his unbending faith in the potential of organized labor, contributing to his becoming a legend in his own lifetime.
MINERS PERFORMING the arduous task of extracting anthracite coal from the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania could rely on one very dependable ally: the rat. When the rodents were seen scurrying toward a mine’s surface, the men inside knew a collapse of the ceiling or its support timbers was imminent. But a disaster at the Avondale mine just south of Scranton on the morning of September 6, 1869, caught even the rats off guard, when a wooden structure encasing the entryway caught fire and tumbled into the shaft, filling the tunnel with smoke. Avondale being a single shaft mine, the trapped miners below had no other means of exit. As word of the accident spread, wives and children from the miners’ village came on the run, as did brother miners from nearby sites. Frantic efforts began at once to dig an alternate way into the Avondale, to no avail. By early afternoon it was certain all 179 of those below ground had perished by asphyxiation.
One of the only labor officials on the scene was John Siney. An Irish immigrant who had come to the anthracite region during the Civil War, Siney had founded the Workers Benevolent Association (WBA), the area’s first miners’ union, which by the time of the Avondale fire had thirty locals and thirty thousand members. On the day of the tragedy he rushed to the site directly from an NLU meeting in Philadelphia. Mounting a box to address the dead miners’ kin and colleagues, he did not disguise his fury that all the victims would be alive had the mine operator taken the precaution of providing an emergency exit. “Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country,” Siney exclaimed, “but do not longer consent to die like rats in a trap for those who take no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.” Would the mine’s owners themselves “unhesitatingly” go down in their own mine? No, Siney assured, they would surely not do so without another avenue of escape. “What they would do for themselves,” he insisted, “they must be compelled by law to do for their workmen.”66
The agony of the Avondale disaster was compounded by the fact that a few months earlier reformers had introduced in the state legislature a bill to mandate better ventilation of coal mines and to assign mine inspectors for each mining county in Pennsylvania. Samuel G. Turner, the senator from Luzerne County, where Avondale was located, had done the coal operators’ bidding and helped engineer the measure’s defeat in committee. In the wake of the fire, Turner, knowing his political career and perhaps even his life were at risk, joined with Siney of the WBA to push through the Pennsylvania Mine Safety Act of 1870, which, among other features, demanded that every mine have at least two means of entrance and exit.
Despite the legislature’s swift response to Avondale, mine cave-ins and other disasters in the region continued to take their toll. In Schuylkill County, which lay at the heart of the anthracite region, 556 mine deaths occurred in the years 1870–1875, with more than a thousand men left injured or maimed. Visitors to southeast Pennsylvania’s five-hundred-square-mile coal district frequently described the miners’ villages not just as poor and tumbledown, but as uneasy, haunted places where women prayed and watched fearfully as their men headed toward work each morning. Every child knew the popular rhyme,
Oh Daddy, don’t work in the mines today,
for dreams have so often come true;
Oh Daddy, dear Daddy, please don’t go away;
I never could live without you.67
Prior to industrialization, miners carried their own tools and worked relatively autonomously all day at the coal face, often hiring their own laborers. But the old craft skills had been rendered obsolete by the coming of machines that blasted and undercut the rock. At the same time, the mining companies’ demands on an individual worker’s daily tonnage increased. Where a miner in the 1860s might be expected to personally extract 2.5 tons of coal per day, within a generation this amount had grown to 9 tons per day, and ultimately, in the 1920s, to 16.5 tons. Technology, instead of making the miner’s life easier, gave mine operators the ability to squeeze more coal from their property, and greater effort from the men who daily descended into the earth.
John Siney and the WBA brought much-needed relief and comfort. In addition to the Mine Safety Act, Siney’s union helped establish the first miners’ hospital in Schuylkill County, arranged for union funds to pay sick or injured miners, or their burial costs, and supported the widows and families of men killed or stricken. It also oversaw enforcement of a new state-approved eight-hour-day law and worked to abolish the use of scrip payment to miners.
But Siney and the WBA were not the only organization important to the miners. An Irish fraternal order, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), was active in the social and cultural life of the region. Several of its leading members owned popular crossroads saloons; some were colorful outsize figures, known for their physical daring, a few claiming roots in the Irish independence struggle. In the WBA the Irishmen tended to be the most defiant, lobbying the union to take strong positions. Like many a fraternal lodge, the AOH practiced secretive membership rituals that piqued public curiosity and suspicion. When the Hibernians gathered one night in a village school, local residents feared they had come “to deliberate upon the business of house and head smashing,” an assumption fueled by the hill country tradition of fierce Irish American resistance to authority associated with a ruthless gang known as the Molly Maguires.
The original Molly Maguire, a legendary Irish nationalist rebel and anti-landlord vigilante, according to journalist Louis Adamic, “was a barbaric and picturesque character [who] blackened her face and under her petticoat carried a pistol strapped to each of her stout thighs.”68 She reputedly led her followers to commit anti-British terrorism, sometimes disguised as women. Historians disagree as to whether such a person
ever really existed, but Molly’s inspiration accompanied Irish emigrants to the New World. Beginning with the large Irish emigration to America in the late 1840s, there were rumors of the appearance of “Molly Maguires” in New England, and in southeast Pennsylvania “Molly Maguirism” became a euphemism for any mayhem or violent disorder suspected of having been carried out by rebellious Irish (although the malefactors were sometimes known by other names, such as the Buckshots, the Ribbonmen, the Sleepers, or the White Boys).
The terrain of Schuylkill County, desolate, forbidding, its coal settlements linked by lonely mountain roads, proved ideal for tales of shadowy characters and midnight knocks on the door. As in their native land, the identity of the suspected outlaws was guarded by a prevailing code of silence among fearful residents. Benjamin Bannan, editor of the Miners Journal, published in Pottsville, the seat of Schuylkill County, became in 1857 the first to record that “Molly Maguires” were active in the anthracite region. A few years later, with the coming of the Civil War, they were alleged to be involved in aiding local Irish lads to resist conscription, the young men hiding in the hills until the contemptible army “enrollers” departed. Once, the story was told, Molly Maguires forcibly stopped a trainload of hapless conscripts headed down the mountain for Harrisburg, freeing them to return home.
This rebellious spirit entered into labor matters as well. In December 1862 a force of “Mollies” invaded a mine, roughed up scabs, and shut down a company store. But the desperadoes also preyed on miners. “If we are called upon to work after dark, these rascals lie in wait for us on our way home, and with the treachery of an assassin pounce upon us in the solitude of the night,” complained a miner worried about being relieved of his pay packet. Thus the name Molly Maguire became associated with almost every variety of mischief in the coal lands, from petty crime to labor troubles to the treasonous harassment of government officials.