The Labor Movement in the United States of America – Part 7

General meeting January 2009

The North American Working Class and the Civil War

Another crisis

In 1857 another serious economic crisis occurred. The crisis unleashed demonstrations by the unemployed; for the first time the trade union movement put forward the demand for public works in a number of cases. The return of the crisis was accompanied by the establishment, in a large number of trades, of strike and trade union committees of a permanent nature, some of them even on a national scale.

The situation of discontent and the consequent struggles demonstrated the true nature of “free labor” for the working class. Not a single bourgeois apostle of “free labor” endorsed the demand for public works to increase employment, and in the winter of slump of 1857, those who supported private initiatives to help the unemployed were few and far between. The most eminent Republicans considered the two measures as unjustified interventions in free markets, which would have decreased proletarians’ “desire to work”: as can be seen, bourgeois rhetoric is always the same and does not sparkle with originality. Some tame journalists came to assert that a brief period “of hardship” was what was needed to bring “dissolute” workers back into line, workers who foolishly squandered their wages, keeping their families in poverty in the good times, and then, when things went bad, had the nerve to ask for public assistance. The same pen‑pushers showed their disgust for the workers when, in the course of the upturn of 1858, they moved on from demonstrations of the unemployed to holding trade union meetings. One of them wrote that “the vast majority of t he working class is a free, happy and independent class”.

No‑one would have said this, judging by the agitation that was developing in the footwear‑producing cities of New England. Apart from inadequate wages, the discontent arose from the speed‑ups following the partial mechanization of the productive process. The stitching machines had to be concentrated in the factory, and this eliminated home workers from the process; added to which all of the upstream and downstream stitching operations had to be accelerated to keep pace with the machines. The workers in Lynn and its surroundings reacted, reviving the labor union and demanding wage increases; confronted with the bosses’ refusal, in 1860 a good 10,000 workers went on strike in eastern Massachusetts. As if by magic, ethnic differences disappeared; in one city, which had been a nativist stronghold, Irish workers marched side‑by‑side with protestant comrades for the entire winter.

As a result of the trade union discrimination with regard to women, both inside the factory and outside, and of the separation from home workers, the strike was defeated and in April the workers returned to work. In reality it was not a complete defeat: what the bosses resisted most was union recognition. Some recognized it, others only conceded wage increases, others still resisted more. Thus here and there the factories started to reopen, and in the end strike was fatally finished.

But the strike took on a significance that went beyond the single event, forming a link between the past and future of the class: the radical belief that had inspired the movement thirty years earlier was turned in orators’ slogans with all its vehemence against “the oppressors of the workers” who “forged the chains of slavery and clasped them to proletarians’ wrists”. But it was also, for the first time, a strike by factory workers, not by apprentices or workers in artisan workshops, or by domestic employees and laborers, as in the past; it was the first major strike to mark the passage between artisan production and large‑scale industrial production. The strikers did not only have to confront the bosses, but also the militia, who after just a week were mobilized to escort the wagons that carried raw materials for work by strikebreakers. Not a single shot was fired, and there were no victims this time. The workers showed extreme care in preventing intemperate behavior within their ranks, to the point of prohibiting the sale of alcohol in certain zones and quarters, something that was also recognized in the bourgeois press. But the military presence anticipated much harder times, which were ushered in for workers involved in mass strikes during the so‑called “golden age”.

For the time being, economic struggles attenuated in the great mobilization for the Civil War, which the workers took part in with enthusiasm, and often with the blessing of the bosses. The main motivation was not the thirst for justice for the slave, but more often the fear that slavery threatened free labor. The justifications for the war were shared by natives and Germans, less so among the Irish who, because of their lower social status, did not see how things could get any worse for them with the victory of the South. In the absence of a class party, proletarians fell prey to the preaching of evangelicals and “free labor” activists. Other themes designed to win the support of proletarians for the war were the promise of speeding up the process of gaining citizenship, and land for all in the West. Proletarians therefore enlisted and fought, also to the point of self‑sacrifice in the early days.

The war closed a period of infancy for the workers’ movement, which left many problems open. Women, non‑specialized workers, and, at least in the South the blacks, were still discriminated against from a union perspective. Moreover the class had not succeeded in setting up a political movement that could represent it outside the bipartisan system. However, doubts about the causes of oppression had at least been overcome: no longer did workers see one sole cause in particular, such as the master, the factory boss, the financier, or even alcohol. After 1835 it was clear that oppression resulted from the system of production, and that the only defense, if not the solution, was the class union.

A union which almost succeeded had been broken by the crisis of 1837 and by the penetration of bourgeois propaganda in the form of protestant evangelical preaching, utopianism, “free labor” ideology and ethnicity, the latter unleashed by the strong waves of immigration following the crisis. There was much left to do, but now it was the war that made its voice heard above all the others.

Volunteers for the front

The antislavery attitude of the American proletariat was confirmed in taking a position on secession, first hidden and then openly realized, initially by South Carolina and then by the other Southern States. The workers who gathered in meetings and conventions of various sizes and importance proclaimed their wish to maintain the country in its entirety, and their disgust with the Southern slaveholders, at times expressing the same sentiments towards the northern profiteers. Delegates from the Southern States, such as Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky also participated in the workers’ assemblies and spoke out against secession, declaring the world of labor’s loyalty to the Union.

Therefore it is no surprise that the first to respond to Lincoln’s appeal for the recruitment of volunteers were indeed workers of all trades. Workers from Lowell made up the first corps for the front, followed by Wisconsin lumberjacks. The De Kalb regiment, entirely comprising German employees, departed for the front on 8 July 1861, followed not far behind by the “Garibaldi Guard” comprising Italian workers from New York, the “Polish Legion” and an Irish company, also from New York. Workers represented nearly half of the Northern armies, while, as we have seen, at the time they were a numerical minority of the population of the 34 states; the Senate later calculated that between 500,000 and 750,000 workers had left the factories of the Northern States to become soldiers.

Since the total number of factory workers was less than a million, it was a drain on resources which put various productive sectors in difficulty, footwear in particular, with factories that actually had to close precisely when orders were increasing disproportionately. Therefore the participation of the working class in the war was fundamental for the North’s victory, and remarkable when compared to the low numerical weight of the class compared to the total population; it repeated a phenomenon that had already occurred at the time of the War of Independence, although at the time the class was numerically insignificant.

The most conscious part of the class, the trade unionists (of the time!) and members of the Communist Club of New York were particularly active; William Sylvis, who had already distinguished himself as the leader of the iron molders’ union, organized the regiment that was the first to hasten to the defense of Washington, threatened by the Southern counter‑offensive. Eminent socialists such as Willich, close friend of Marx, Rosa, Jacobi and Weydemeyer achieved high rank in the hierarchy of the Union army. Apart from their enthusiasm these workers and socialists, who, despite often being born abroad were ready to give their lives for the ideals that the North was defending, boasted a considerable military experience acquired in 1848 or, as with many Italians, in Garibaldi’s army; experience which was lacking in the rest of the population.

The abolitionist enthusiasm was not limited to American proletarians; also across the Atlantic the defeat of the South was regarded as an objective for workers’ progress. “It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes,” wrote Marx in the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association (1864) “but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic”.

And yet the blockade imposed by the Union navy on the Southern ports in 1862 started to be effective, and ever less cotton reached English spinning mills. This brought about a crisis in the sector and a consequent high level of unemployment (more than 30% in the large manufacturing centers); but contrary to the expectations of the slaveholders, no voice was raised by workers’ representatives for an intervention in favor of the Confederacy. On the contrary, even if many workers in England did not have the vote, their meetings and rallies expressed themselves against intervention with such clarity that the government did not dare to interfere in the conflict.

Many historians are agreed in considering that this English non‑intervention was the main cause of Lincoln’s change of course in the debates on slavery: in fact, during the first year of war he had not dared to take a single measure against the “property” of the slaveholders in the areas under Union army occupation; on the contrary, he had disowned those generals who had freed the slaves. In 1862, however, he approved a series of measures in favor of the slaves, culminating in the Proclamation of Emancipation of January 1, 1863; for a deeper analysis of these aspects and all others relating to the Civil War, see Capitalist development and the American Civil War, in “Comunismo”, n. 56, July 2004.

Workers and Copperheads

The workers, therefore, were not against the war, especially at the start, nor even against conscription, but rather against its class character, which meant that it was the poor who enlisted, while the rich could sit back in the rear and enrich themselves further. The law on conscription, adopted in 1863, was discriminatory: one could avoid enlistment by finding a substitute, or by paying a tax of $300. This was a sum representing more than a year’s wages for a proletarian, but acceptable to a bourgeois: and certainly there was no shortage of unemployed proletarians who accepted the exchange to guarantee their families’ survival.

Discontent spread across large layers of the proletariat, but the revolt against conscription of July 13, 1863 in New York, a few days after the start of the compulsory draft, does not seem to have been purely a workers’ movement, although in some cases the social boundaries were wearing thin. It was undoubtedly the result of “Copperhead” propaganda, the name given to the “Peace Democrats”, a faction of the membership of the Democratic Party in the North, who were against the war, and who often acted as a Southern fifth column. The turmoil caused serious destruction of goods in the city, and the death of more than 400 people, many of them blacks. But after a careful investigation the Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association of New York, which included typographers, carpenters, woodworkers and hatmakers, rejected the reconstruction of the events that attributed responsibility for the turmoil to the workers. After having accused a section of the bourgeoisie as the instigator, a document concluded: “The workers of New York did not revolt. A few ruthless and dissolute men, who oscillate between the penitentiary and the dark dens of crime, are not the representatives of the workers of the metropolis”.

But in reality the Copperhead propaganda did not fail to take hold on just a small part of the class, which was rightly unhappy about the war. Indeed, everything showed that the poor were becoming even poorer, and the rich even richer. After a brief period of crisis due to the loss of the Southern markets, and a good $300 million in now unrecoverable credit, the situation changed for the bourgeoisie when the government started to issue orders for military supplies. A new class of millionaires was born, whose fortunes were in large measure the fruit of the terrible corruption of the entire history of America. We have spoken of “shoddy” cloth, which fell to pieces in the rain; but also rifles which exploded in the soldiers’ hands, sand in place of sugar, rye as substitute for coffee, shoes with cardboard soles are some of the grossest and rarely prosecuted examples of the love of country of a bourgeoisie which piled up wealth while it cynically sent the proletariat to the massacre. This is not the place to go into the details about this epic of unbridled profiteering, which also took advantage of the Homestead laws, with land that almost always ended up in the hands of speculators and railroad companies, and the speculation in paper money, which rapidly devalued.

At the same time the living conditions of the proletariat worsened quickly and drastically. Speculation and inflation drove up the prices of foodstuffs, clothing and rents at persistent rates, while salaries stayed the same or increased only imperceptibly. The prices of manufactured goods increased during the war years at an average of 100% per annum; but if you look at the basic necessities, these increased in price even more strongly: a liter of milk, which cost 1.5 cents in 1861, cost 10 cents in 1861, and the same applied to butter, meat, coal etc.

The bosses’ offensive also promoted the approval in 1864 of the Contract Labor Law, which legalized contracts made abroad for importing manpower; by virtue of this law imported workers could not be recruited into the army, and found themselves, once they arrived, in the condition of servants employed in colonial times. These workers were often used, before the law was repealed in 1868, as scabs to wear down strikes.

Wartime strikes

As ever, the working class does not undertake struggles because it is impelled by a rebellious spirit, but because it is forced to do so to defend its living and working conditions. Even more so in a country at war where, while we have seen with how much unscrupulousness the bourgeoisie took every opportunity to make profits, by legal or illicit means, proletarians took up the cause of the war as their own, and were certainly not happy about interrupting production. But neither could they accept being literally reduced to hunger by a class, the bourgeoisie, which certainly did not set an example of patriotism (except of course being patriotic in words when they had to persuade hundreds of thousands to slaughter each other, while paying a devalued soldier’s wage, among other things). Thus, by and by, as prices increased without wages following them, and without the government doing anything to remedy the situation, recourse to economic struggles became inevitable.

When strikes occurred, the bosses, as one would expect, did not hesitate to dust down their hypocritical patriotic rhetoric, above all in sectors directly tied to military activity, which were especially numerous close to the front. How can we produce boots, coal, bullets or caps if the workers go on strike? The Union generals did not fail to reply to these heartfelt appeals in the states where their troops were operating, prohibiting workers’ organization, forbidding pickets, protecting scabs, and drawing up blacklists. And for those who did not adapt and dared to go on strike, they were far from reluctant to make arrests without trial, deportations of entire families, or forced return to work at bayonet‑point.

The Copperheads did not hesitate to fan the flames of discontent, but it is unclear to what extent they had lost their influence over the attitudes of open class dissatisfaction among groups of workers, which we would still support today. The Copperheads would have had greater success if it had not been for Lincoln himself, who seems to have intervened to prevent the most serious injustices. Thus Lincoln again had the support of the workers for the reelection of 1864, beating the Democrat McClellan.

The war came to an end in the spring of the next year with the defeat of the Southern armies. Strengthened by the knowledge that they had made a decisive contribution to victory, Northern workers did not fail to remind the dominant class what they expected for the future. Among the resolutions adopted on the occasion of a mass rally in Boston on November 2, 1865, one declaimed: “We rejoice that the rebel aristocracy of the South has been crushed, that… beneath the glorious shadow of our victorious flag men of every clime, lineage and color are recognized as free. But while we will bear with patient endurance the burden of the public debt, we yet want it to be known that the workingmen of America will demand in future a more equal share in the wealth their industry creates… and a more equal participation in the privileges and blessings of those free institutions, defended by their manhood on many a bloody field of battle”.

The worst years were 1861 and 1862; already in 1863 it began to seem clear that the workers had bargaining power which could be exploited to take back from the bosses at least part of what had been taken away during the wartime emergency. Production was at full speed and it was not easy to find workers. Strikes began to multiply, with much higher levels of success; moreover, after victorious strikes it was normal for a union structure to remain in place, and this was especially true for the sectors with a high female presence, like those of cigar and clothing manufacture. It is calculated that in 1864 around 200,000 workers joined unions, a little under 20% of the entire industrial workforce. At the same time there was a notable push for the creation of national unions, even if with very varied characteristics: alongside the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which declined the strike weapon, there were very combative unions, like that of the National Union of Iron Molders, led by William H. Sylvis.

Sylvis was a great trade union organizer. The first problem to be confronted
was funding, which was to be ensured with annual contributions made with the
issuance of personal membership cards. This was needed to manage funds for
strikes, strategically important in the long union struggles. He set up a record
of members and centralized organization; among the principles that guided him
were the alliance with the blacks, equal pay for men and women (to be admitted
into the trade unions), the union’s political autonomy and international
workers’ solidarity. He fought against spontaneous and unprepared strikes, which
dissipated energy and were almost always defeated. Sylvis, practically always
penniless, travelled across the length and breadth of the country to create the
organization (ten thousand miles, using the means of the time), and was the
founder and first president of the National Labor Union. His work inspired many
national unions of the time, which followed his example to grow
organizationally. He died in poverty in 1869 (the family did not even have
enough money for his funeral) at the age of 41, having become the
International’s representative in America. He remains one of the great figures
of the American workers’ movement.

The bosses’ counter‑offensive was not late in coming. We have already spoken of blacklists, lockouts, “yellow dog” contracts, and the importation of European contract labor for strikebreaking; we have also recalled the use of the army, locally, to force workers to return to work. A further resource for the bosses was the employment of convicts, whom they paid at 10‑15% of the union rate. In New York an entrepreneur moved a foundry to Sing Sing; he was defeated thanks to the struggles led by Sylvis, but in many other cases the unions did not manage to block the maneuver. Many states approved laws that limited the right to strike and unionization, and those who took part in pickets received six months in jail. Other laws conferred on railway companies, and subsequently also those in the minerals and iron and steel sectors, the right to create private police forces, thereby legally establishing territory outside of the laws of the State, despotic statelets within the largest democracy in the world. There were also states that passed more progressive laws, but the difference in this case was that the laws were all disregarded.

While the national unions, with few exceptions, were not very effective during the war years, the working class found its point of contact and organization in the struggles within the Trades Assemblies, which brought together all unions in a given locality. These did not have their own funds, but carried out various networking, political, propaganda, boycott and training activities. An example is the action that took place in the course of the iron molders’ strike in San Francisco. Knowing that the bosses had enlisted strikebreakers in the East, the representatives of the city’s Trades Assembly sent representatives to meet them to explain the reasons for their strike; when the ship docked in San Francisco the strikebreakers refused to work under these conditions and joined the union. The bosses acknowledged he defeat and conceded wage increases.

The dynamism of the Trades Assemblies is also demonstrated by the attempt that they themselves initiated to create a national organization: their position, which allowed the embrace of a wider scope than that of a single trade, clearly showed that this was the path to follow to strengthen the workers’ movement. The initiative concluded with the founding of the Industrial Assembly of North America (1864), which was however very short‑lived because of the weakness and inadequate penetration of the national trade unions within the class.

The National Labor Union

The failure of the Industrial Assembly did not erase from the class the awareness that isolated efforts conducted locally could not in any way resolve the huge problems that afflicted the American proletariat. The idea of setting up a structure, an organizational tool, capable of conducting struggles in defense of the interests of the working class, also beyond the scope of pure demands, therefore began to make inroads among the most enlightened representatives of the proletariat: a Labor Party. We have seen how associations with political scope had been born in the 1830s (Working Men’s Party) and 1840s (National Reform Association), but whose objectives were derived more from the imagination, often utopian, of the personalities who supported them, rather than being based on an analysis of the general situation of the working class, which by now also had a history spanning several decades and experience that it could refer back to.

In Europe the experience of parties was already advanced, and the many German immigrants, who were highly active in the country’s proletarian organizations, certainly contributed to the development of the idea of a modern party in America. Moreover the International Working Men’s Association, or First International, had come into existence in 1864, and started to make itself known outside of Europe.

In 1866 some leaders of large unions, including Sylvis, agreed to convene a national Convention to take place on August, 20 in Baltimore. On this day the 60 delegates, who represented local, national and international unions, Trades Assemblies and Eight Hours Leagues, were greeted with a huge banner that read, “Welcome Sons of Toil – From North and South, East and West”. Around 60,000 workers were represented, for the most part from the east, but also from Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit. Louis, Detroit.

Most of the work was carried out by committees on various questions. The report of the Committee on Unions and Strikes was important: while it defined strikes as damaging for workers, and to be pursued only when all other methods showed themselves to be inadequate, it exhorted the most widespread unionization possible, of skilled as much as of unskilled workers, and the creation of unions and union sections wherever possible in all sectors, in addition to the wider internationalization of existing unions. Since, given their status, the unskilled would have had difficulty in joining many existing trade unions, the Committee proposed the creation of a Workingmen’s Association that they could join, which would be represented in the national congresses.

Political activity was debated by the Commission on the Eight Hour Workday and Political Action: left the option of participating in the activity of political parties to local decision. The proposal was criticized by the delegates because its acceptance would have made the congress a political organization. At this point the representative of the German workers of Chicago intervened, who, while denying that the existing parties could advance workers’ interests, asserted that a new party of labor had to be established. Amid applause from the audience, the proposal was included in the Commission’s report.

Other resolutions were adopted, even if those of the two Commissions received
more attention: in reality the Convention raised all of the substantial issues
for the American workers’ movement that would remain valid for many years to
come.

It proclaimed the boycott of the products of prisoners’ labor so long as they did not receive normal wages. It demanded the improvement of workers’ living conditions and the clearance of slums. It wanted the creation of technical schools, libraries, high schools; the granting of land to individual settler communities; support for the workers’ press: the creation of cooperatives; support for working women.

There is a letter about this from Marx to Kugelmann, dated October 9, 1866, which reads: “I was exceedingly pleased at the American workers’ congress, which took place at the same time in Baltimore. The watchword there was organization for the struggle against capital, and, remarkably enough, most of the demands I had put up for Geneva were put up there, too, by the correct instinct of the workers. In fact it was thanks to taking a position on the 8‑hour workday by the Convention that the Geneva Congress of the International, which took place just two weeks later, transformed the demand into the “general platform of the workers of the whole world”.

There were however shortcomings in the Convention’s resolutions that would contribute towards shortening its life. The first error was really the lack of consideration for the strike weapon: even if the class had recently suffered a series of defeats, this had reinforced the solidarity which had brought about the Convention itself; while the class had little experience with arbitration, which was to substitute for the strike, the resolution hindered agreement on measures for mutual financial aid in the case of prolonged struggles. The other serious shortcoming lay in having carefully avoided the question of black proletarians, having addressed, however timidly, the question of women. Besides this, no organization capable of functioning came out of the meeting. Sylvis, who had not been able to participate owing to his poor health, was very critical on these last points.

The organizational aspects were improved at a subsequent Convention, in Chicago in 1867, but the National Labor Union as such really only saw the light of day in 1867, when Sylvis was elected its president. In just a few months the number of members ran into hundreds of thousands, thanks to a promotional tour by the president.