The history of the National Labor Union (NLU) shows both labor’s high hopes for radical change and the difficulties of achieving it. Founded in 1866 at a labor convention in Baltimore, the NLU drew together a large network of local and national unions of metal workers, coal miners, clothing and shoe makers, construction workers, typographers, and other trades. The NLU supported union organizing, producer and consumer cooperatives, and political action for a range of goals: making eight-hour workdays the law in every state; reforming the banking, currency, and tax systems to benefit people of small means; abolishing convict labor; securing the distribution of public lands to homesteaders; and building a National Labor Party to work for these and other reforms.
William Sylvis was instrumental in the NLU’s formation. Born in 1828, one of twelve children of a poor white wagon maker in rural Pennsylvania, he began an apprenticeship at the age of eighteen in a local iron foundry. When the foundry went out of business a few years later, and now married with a family to support, he moved to Philadelphia. In 1855, he joined Philadelphia’s Stove Molders’ Union, and became one of its leading organizers. In 1859, he helped found the National Molders’ Union, which collapsed at the outbreak of war when its members—including Sylvis—joined the Union Army. By 1863, he was back home, working to revive the union, which elected him president. A tireless organizer, he travelled thousands of miles to organize molders in city after city, living on donations from members of new locals. The union became one of the strongest in the country: In 1864, it stopped a New York City company from operating a foundry at Sing Sing prison with convict labor bought from the state for 40¢ a day (the Molders’ rate was $3 a day).
As a leader of the National Labor Union, Sylvis worked like a demon, sustained by strong views. “Capital blights and withers all it touches. It is a new aristocracy, proud, imperious, dishonest, seeking only profit and exploitation of the workers.” But “Labor is the foundation of the entire political, social and commercial structure . . . the attribute of all that is noble and good in civilization.” So “Let our cry be REFORM. . . . Down with a monied aristocracy and up with the people.” He hoped that by organizing workers’ cooperatives, “we will become a nation of employers—the employers of our own labor.” Elected NLU president in 1868, he literally worked himself into the grave, dying suddenly shortly before the NLU’s 1869 convention.
The NLU preached and sometimes practiced labor solidarity across gender and racial lines. Several women’s unions participated, including the newly founded Daughters of St. Crispin, the female counterpart of the shoemakers’ Knights of St. Crispin, and the first national union of women industrial workers. The NLU held the first national labor convention to endorse organizing workingwomen, urging them to join existing unions or build new ones to force employers to “do justice to women by paying them equal wages for equal work.”
The NLU never endorsed women’s right to vote. Though it did seat Elizabeth Cady Stanton from the Women’s Suffrage Association at its 1868 convention, but relations with the suffragists were uneasy. Some women unionists—the New York and Massachusetts Daughters of St. Crispin, for example—supported woman suffrage; others argued that working women could better their lives more effectively by organizing unions than by agitating for the vote.
The early career of Augusta Lewis illustrates the complexity of gender relations. After starting as a newspaper reporter, she learned typesetting, and in 1867 went to work as a typesetter for the New York World. At the time, about 200 women worked as typesetters in the city’s print shops, though the National Typographical Union (NTU) barred them from membership. That December NTU Local 6 struck the World when members were ordered to set type for another newspaper that other local members were striking. The women typesetters stayed on the job, and the paper hired more women to replace the strikers. When the World settled with Local 6 in September 1868, most of the women were fired. Lewis quit in protest, and within days joined a small group of women workers and prominent suffragists (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) to start the New York Working Women’s Association, dedicated “to act for the interests of its members, in the same manner as associations of workingmen now regulate the wages, etc., of those belonging to them.” A week later she called a meeting of women typesetters to discuss unionism, and the Women’s Typographical Union was founded on October 13, 1868, with Lewis (not yet twenty-one years old) as president.
Lewis forged an alliance with the men’s local. They supplied financial assistance and a meeting hall; in turn, the women boycotted employers who paid women less than men for the same work. When Local 6 went on strike for higher pay in book and specialty print shops in January 1869, the Women’s Typographical Union refused to work for these shops, and encouraged other women typesetters to shun them too. Susan B. Anthony saw a different kind of opportunity. Backed by print shop employers, she started “training schools” where women could learn typesetting and be quickly readied to replace strikers.
In June 1869, at the insistence of Local 6 leadership, the NTU chartered the Women’s Typographical Union as an official local. And when Anthony went to the National Labor Union’s 1869 convention as a representative of the New York Working Women’s Association, Lewis prompted a challenge to her credentials, arguing that the Association was not a true friend of organized labor. The convention declined to seat Anthony as a delegate.*
Labor solidarity across racial divisions proved harder to practice. The NLU’s founding convention’s final statement ended with stirring words:
What is wanted 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 or nationality; no classification of Jew or Gentile, Christian or infidel; that there is but one dividing line—that which separates mankind into two great classes, the class that labors and the class that lives by others’ labor.
But beginning with this same convention, the NLU repeatedly called for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the United States, considering them naturally submissive workers who happily undercut American wage standards and working conditions.
The movement against Chinese labor started in California, where it had been brewing since the 1850s, when white miners formed vigilante gangs to drive Chinese miners from the gold fields. In the 1860s, the Central Pacific Railroad hired 12,000 Chinese men—90 percent of its construction force, and paid at two-thirds the going rate for white laborers—to build the western run of the first transcontinental railroad. By 1870, close to 50,000 Chinese immigrants lived in California—12,000 of them in San Francisco.
Eastern and southern employers also experimented with using Chinese immigrants to replace other workers. In 1870, when the Knights of St. Crispin (mostly Irish immigrants) struck Massachusetts shoe factories for higher wages and the eight-hour day, a North Adams factory owner fired the strikers and replaced them with Chinese workers brought from San Francisco. An attempt to form a Chinese lodge of the Knights collapsed in mounting racial hostility, and the strike collapsed too, in North Adams and nearby towns. Over the next few months, Chinese workers recruited by labor contractors on the West Coast also replaced white workers in a steam laundry in Belleville, New Jersey, and a cutlery factory in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Black workers were affected too: some plantation owners in Louisiana and Mississippi tried replacing black workers with Chinese, though they found the Chinese all too quick to respond to mistreatment with mass protests.
In fact the NLU stereotype of Chinese was quite undeserved. In 1867, Chinese laborers staged an exceptionally large and brave strike for a favorite NLU cause—the eight-hour day. Five thousand Chinese men blasting tunnels and laying track through the Sierra Nevada mountains downed their tools and told their boss, “Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for China men.” As white workers scabbed, the Chinese held out, and finally returned to work only after the Central Pacific blocked the wagons carrying food to the strikers’ remote
mountain camps.
The NLU was somewhat more consistent with black workers: it endorsed organizing black workers from the start, and by 1869 delegates from black organizations were attending NLU conventions. Nonetheless, the NLU never made an effective alliance between black and white workers, and almost none of the federation’s constituent unions admitted black workers.
In December 1869, Isaac Myers, leader of Baltimore’s Colored Caulkers’ Trade Union Society, joined other labor activists and black reformers in Washington, D.C., to found the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU). The call for this convention had come out of the State Labor Convention of Colored Men of Maryland the previous July. State and local meetings convened across the country to select delegates and discuss issues to be addressed by the national federation. Response was especially enthusiastic in the South, where large local meetings convened in Macon, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina. Like many local meetings, the Macon convention itself produced a network of local unions and a statewide Colored Mechanics and Laboring Man’s Association.
Delegates from eighteen states came to Washington. They proposed to work for equal employment opportunities for black workers. They called also for equality before the law (equal access to public schools, eligibility for jury service). They sought land for freedpeople. They endorsed the Republican Party as the best (though imperfect) safeguard for freedpeople in the South. But the CNLU remained a labor organization. Its key goal was expressed in the organization’s newspaper, the New Era, on January 13, 1870:
By argument and appeal addressed to the white mechanics, laborers and trade unions of our country, [and] to our legislators and countrymen at large, to overcome the prejudices now existing against us so far as to secure a fair opportunity for the display and remuneration of our industrial capabilities.
Compared to the NLU, the CNLU took a broader view of racial solidarity. Black workers also worried about Chinese competition. At a local meeting held in November 1869 in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, a resolution condemning the use of “contract Chinese or Coolie labor” that was “forcing American laborers to work for Coolie wages or starve, and crowding us out on all sides, and reducing the workingman to a state worse than slavery.” But the local meeting in Macon passed a resolution extending “the right of fellowship to John Chinaman or any other man,” and the national meeting agreed:
With us, too, numbers count. . . . Hence, our industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations, so as to rear . . . a superstructure, capacious enough to accommodate . . . the Irish, the Negro, and the German laborer . . . the “poor white” native of the South . . . the white mechanic and laborer of the North . . . as well as the Chinaman.
All together could “aid in the protection and conservation of their and our interests.”
The CNLU also addressed the woman question; it too arose at the meetings preceding the national convention. At the meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, an unnamed working woman complained that “in all your deliberations, speeches, and resolutions, which were excellent so far as the men are concerned, the poor woman’s interests were not mentioned or referred to.” The meeting responded by naming a woman to Newport’s delegation to Washington. Nevertheless, though some CNLU activists (like school teacher Mary Ann Shadd Cary) campaigned for votes for women, the federation never formally endorsed women’s suffrage.
Isaac Myers and his comrades hoped to coalesce with the white NLU, but that never happened. From 1870, the NLU concentrated on its National Labor Party project, running candidates in 1872. But black labor leaders and activists supported Radical Reconstruction in the South, and remained committed to the electoral success of the Republican Party. The CNLU survived into the late 1870s, mainly as a paper organization that endorsed Republicans.
Labor organizations everywhere faced harsh repression when the economy collapsed following the Panic of 1873. Five thousand businesses closed, unemployment soared, and employer resistance escalated—more and more often coordinated by city-wide and industry-wide employers’ associations. Countless locals and several national unions were entirely wiped out; the rest shrank sharply. In 1870, more than thirty national unions functioned, and union membership totaled about 300,000; by 1877, just nine national unions remained, and union membership had fallen to less than 50,000. In the latter year only one-fifth of the U.S. labor force had steady, full-time jobs.
Employers took advantage of racial divisions among workers to procure scabs during strikes. In June–July 1874, white coal miners in southern Ohio’s Hocking Valley struck against a wage cut, and mine owners imported black workers to replace them. The following October, the St. Bernard Coal Company in Earlington, Kentucky, recruited a mostly black scab force to replace striking white miners. The color line could also be crossed in the other direction. In April 1877, black stevedores in Richmond, Virginia, struck the Powhattan Company shipping firm against a 25 percent wage cut. The company immediately hired forty white scabs, and police escorted them to work, dispersing a black crowd that had gathered to enforce the strike.
Where the workers cooperated across the color line, they were stronger. In April 1873, black workers led a strike for four months’ back pay by about a thousand trackmen—both black and white—on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad near Beckley in southern West Virginia. This was an especially militant strike; the trackmen seized a switching station, wrecked a locomotive, and blocked tracks with stones and stumps. But only a few months later, in November, with the depression now underway, 200 black Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad laborers on a tunnel project near Richmond, Virginia, also struck for back pay, about two months’ worth. Within days the company had replaced them with newly-arrived Italian immigrants. The strike was lost, and the black strikers lost their jobs and their back pay.
WHOSE GOVERNMENT?
In the South, state and local governments could not bring force and law fully into the service of employers until Radical Reconstruction was brought down. In August 1876, black workers on the rice plantations in South Carolina’s Combahee River district staged a mass strike for cash wages instead of chits good only at plantation stores. Ten strikers were tried before a black judge in Beaufort, South Carolina, and set free to the applause of supporters gathered in front of the courthouse. The planters finally agreed to pay cash wages, as required by state law. That fall’s state elections overturned Reconstruction in South Carolina and foreclosed any possibility for such victories in future.
As the South descended into its long night of apartheid, state and local governments elsewhere also rushed to repress labor unrest. During the hungry winter of 1873–74, labor activists in New York City organized mass meetings and demonstrations demanding public assistance to the unemployed. On January 13,1874, thousands of men, women, and children rallied in Tompkins Square on the city’s Lower East Side, expecting to be addressed by Mayor William Havemeyer. Instead, the mayor sent the police, who charged into the Square without warning, clubbing right and left as mounted officers chased down people fleeing through the side streets. Hundreds of demonstrators and bystanders were injured, several arrested and sentenced to prison terms for resisting arrest. The city’s unemployed movement stalled and dissipated in the wake of this brutality.
In eastern Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad enlisted local courts in its assault on labor activists in the anthracite mines that produced fuel for the railroad’s locomotives. The miners’ union—the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association—disintegrated in 1875 when it lost a long and bitter strike against a 20 percent wage cut. But Franklin Gowen, the Railroad’s president, was not satisfied with the union’s defeat; he wanted to get the strike’s grassroots leaders, the Irish American miners whose ethnic fraternal lodge, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, harbored labor activists after the WBA’s demise. Gowen hatched an elaborate plan. In 1873, he hired James McParlan, a detective from the Pinkerton Agency (which specia
lized in labor activists and political radicals), to infiltrate the Hibernian lodge in Schuylkill County. During the 1875 strike, Gowen placed stories in the newspapers alleging that a secret society of Irish immigrants calling themselves the “Molly Maguires” conspired to destroy American society by starting labor uprisings and attacking the forces of law and order. In 1876, McParlan surfaced to charge nineteen miners with murder. Gowen arranged to serve as prosecutor in several of the trials. Carefully screened juries ignored the inconsistencies in McParlan’s testimony, and all the miners were convicted. Their public hangings began on June 21, 1877.
The miners in Schuylkill County had hardly finished burying their dead when the Great Railroad Strike swept across the country, taking the railroad magnates by surprise. Railroad workers had absorbed wage cut after wage cut, amounting to over 60 percent since the Panic of 1873. Their strikes were broken up by Pinkerton agents, and their fraternal brotherhoods blacklisted. When the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad imposed a new 10 percent cut on Monday, July 16, only forty firemen and brakemen in Baltimore refused to work, and were quickly dispersed and replaced. The strikers gathered at Camden Junction outside the city, stopped a freight train, and were again dispersed by police.
But at Martinsburg, West Virginia, a couple dozen more firemen left their freight trains, and a crowd gathered in support. When the mayor arrested three leaders, the crowd freed them. When the company tried to send out freight trains with new firemen, the brakemen walked off, and the strikers blocked the trains. On Tuesday, B&O officials called on Governor Henry M. Mathews, who ordered two companies of militia into Martinsburg. The militiamen refused to fire on the strikers. The strike spread to other junctions, and by the end of the day 500 men were out, joined by 200 boatmen on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, and the freight blockade at Martinsburg had stalled 70 trains with 1200 cars, many fully loaded.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 14