The Labor Movement in the United States of America – Part 4

Presented at the May 2007 party meeting at Parma

In search of an independent role

The revolutionary soldiers on returning to their homes would find them heavily mortgaged and their families deeply in debt. Local power was concentrated in the hands of rich merchants and the landed gentry, who were busily enriching themselves speculating in land, treasury warrants and paper money. As well as major uprisings, such as Shays’ Rebellion, in response to really extreme situations, there was a growing conviction among the lower social classes that they might have won the war, but they hadn’t ‘won the peace’. Political action by these classes was held back as it was almost impossible for them to gain parliamentary representation, their right to vote being restricted by property qualifications, initially absent only in Pennsylvania.

Action taken by the working classes therefore developed in two directions: on the one hand the fight for suffrage, which sought to achieve representation in parliament to defend their interests; on the other, support for Thomas Jefferson, who was championing the approval of the so-called Bill of Rights, which consisted of ten amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing ‘the citizen’ a number of safeguards, such as freedom of the press, religion and assembly, the right to bear arms and protection from summary and arbitrary justice. It was claimed that the conquests of the War of Independence would thereby be defended from the ‘authoritarian’ tendencies of the federalists (Whigs) who, along with Hamilton, were even suspected of wishing to reintroduce the monarchy.

In fact, even then the federalists were already the party best suited to drive the economic development of the country forward in a capitalist direction, with a program that advocated a rationalization and centralization of the economy, a central bank, and measures to develop manufacture and commerce. But in the particular conditions of post-revolutionary America their initiatives were clearly premature.

Pressure from the lower classes was the decisive factor in the eventual victory of the Republican Democrats (ancestors of the present Democrats), with Jefferson becoming president in 1800. This party (for it is during these years that parties were formed in the United States) would hold onto power almost without a break until the outbreak of the Civil War. The Bill of Rights would be passed in 1791, in part thanks also to the French Revolution, which would rouse the spirits of proletarians, artisans and radicals; and also due to the increasingly blatant corruption of the federalists. And if opposition to the class in power was generally peaceful, it should be remembered that the mass of the people had recently fought a bloody war, and had learnt to use arms.

In ensuing years, thanks to the economic power concentrated in their hands, federalist circles opposed all initiatives by the Democrats, and this confirmed the latter among the working masses as its most effective defender. Thus the Democrats managed to obtain the keen support of workers and craftsmen, who joined new organizations, inter-classist but with a strong proletarian presence, which were called Democratic Societies or Republican Clubs. It was from these organizations, which were active around the last decade of the century, that support for the French Revolution emerged. But they also set about promoting suffrage, and popular education with schooling for all. Even if these societies soon disappeared, proletarian support for the Democrats continued, to the extent that workers strongly supported them during the war against England in 1812, even enrolling in the army and navy and in the corveés to build New York’s external fortifications.

From a trade union perspective, however, as we have seen, the labor organizations were generally weak and of short duration. This situation didn’t change until around 1819-1822, when a deep and widespread economic depression produced major unemployment in the big cities, destroying what little trade union associationism the class had managed to express up to that point. In 1823 there was a recovery, but throughout the twenties the workers’ circumstances were extremely difficult, prompting contemporary commentators to say that the condition of the slave was far superior. In 1829 there was another crisis followed by widespread unemployment. That proletarians were not in a strong position became evident through the spread of so-called ‘yellow dog contracts’ (chiefly amongst female workers), in which the worker signed a document agreeing not to engage in trade union activity, and if he or she did, “to forfeit to the use of the company the amount due to us at that time”. Since wages were often paid twice a year this clause had a major impact. And along with this there was already the widespread use of blacklists, the lists of workers who hadn’t behaved as their bosses wished, and who would no longer be able to find work, a least in the same State or same industry.

First organized economic movements

As early as 1823, signs of a proletarian awakening were all around. In March 1823 in New Orleans a group of printers organized themselves into a trade union, prompted by the “low ebb to which the fraternity has been reduced by not receiving regular pay from their employers”. Soon workers in various trades in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston and other cities were organizing and putting forward demands for increased wages and shorter hours, and threatening to strike if their terms were not met. The process of unionization continued till the end of the decade and in 1827 there the crowning moment occurred with the foundation of the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia. This wasn’t just a new union but an inter-category union which represented a higher level of class consciousness, involving a recognition by it members that everyone, regardless of their trade, had common problems that could only be solved by struggling together, in a united effort of all proletarians, as a class, against the common enemy. It was framework which united workers under one roof, prefiguring the Camere di lavoro and trade union federations of the future; and it is in fact from this date that the American trade union movement is usually considered to have got underway.

The Mechanics’ Union arose out of the ten-hour movement, which would spread like wildfire between 1825-1835 although it was already in existence before the first permanent unions were formed. Indeed as far back as 1791 the Philadelphia carpenters had gone on strike for a ten-hour day and for overtime pay.

The most important demand to be raised in the course of that decade was therefore the limitation of the working day. As a rule the working day was from dawn to dusk and yet, inhuman as these hours were, they only represented the minimum, and the entrepreneurs had no scruples about extending them. In Paterson, New Jersey, for example, a factory regulation required women and children to start work at 4.30 in the morning; in the factories of Peterboro, and at other places in New Hampshire, the custom arose of using artificial light, so that work could start an hour before dawn; a practice the workers called “the creation of two evenings in one day”.

In 1828, again in Paterson, the first recorded factory strike in the USA took place, and this too was linked to working hours: In response to the proposal to move the lunch hour from 12 to 1, the operatives, mainly children, went out on strike. As one observer stated, the children were afraid that if they assented to the change “the next thing would be to deprive them of eating at all”.

And a few years before, around 1825, a number of sailors and carpenters organizations, and builders’ unions, had launched a fierce struggle for the reduction of the working day in Maine and Baltimore.

There were a lot of isolated struggles, defeated due to lack of communication between the various local organizations. They had to struggle not only against the influence of the masters, but also against public opinion. Hypocritical attempts was made to persuade the workers that the ten hour day would be bad for them; it would “exert a very unhappy influence on our apprentices, by seducing them from that course of industry and economy of time, to which we [the employers] are anxious to inure them,” and it would “expose the Journeymen themselves to many improvident temptations and improvident practices”. Trade unions, said the employers, were “un-American” (a term still used today): they had been brought over from Europe by foreigners who carried with them “a spirit of discontent and insubordination to which our native Mechanics have hitherto been strangers”. If allowed to grow, these combinations of labor would injure all classes, inasmuch as they gave an artificial and unnatural turn to business and tended “to convert all its branches into monopolies.”

There were a lot of isolated struggles, defeated due to lack of communication between the various local organizations. They had to struggle not only against the influence of the masters, but also against public opinion. Hypocritical attempts was made to persuade the workers that the ten hour day would be bad for them; it would “exert a very unhappy influence on our apprentices, by seducing them from that course of industry and economy of time, to which we [the employers] are anxious to inure them,” and it would “expose the Journeymen themselves to many improvident temptations and improvident practices”. Trade unions, said the employers, were “un-American” (a term still used today): they had been brought over from Europe by foreigners who carried with them “a spirit of discontent and insubordination to which our native Mechanics have hitherto been strangers”. If allowed to grow, these combinations of labor would injure all classes, inasmuch as they gave an artificial and unnatural turn to business and tended “to convert all its branches into monopolies.”

In the Spring of 1827 workers in Philadelphia were stimulated by reading a pamphlet which invited them to raise the level of their political and trade union struggles, and to organize libraries, reading rooms and a labor press, etc. The pamphlet concluded by calling for action to establish the ten-hour day throughout the city. The carpenters were quick to respond to the call and, commenting on the anonymous authors of the pamphlet, they stated “they believe that all men have a just right, derived from their creator, to have sufficient time in each day for the cultivation of their mind and self-improvement”. Other workers in Philadelphia viewed the strike as their own, saying that “thousands yet unborn” would reap the advantage. The strike was defeated but it taught the workers that only united action of all workers could win the battle against the employers. Hence, in the fall of 1827, fifteen unions would form the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, with the aim of averting “the desolating evils which must inevitably arise from a depreciation of the intrinsic value of human labor”.

This federation of trade unions, which survived until 1831, dedicated much of its energy to political action and inter-category solidarity. Its example was followed in 1831 by the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen. This, too, arose out of the struggle for the reduction of the working day, evidently an aspect of the workers’ condition on which there was no difficultly in reaching agreement. But if by now the ten-hour day had been won in New York and to some extent in Philadelphia, in New England the workers still worked from dawn to dusk.

The New England Association first convened in Boston in February 1832 and drew up a constitution. One of its first provisions was that all of its members, except working farmers, should pledge themselves to work only ten hours a day with no reduction in wages. Since it was quickly realized that it would be impossible to enforce this provision, a war chest was set up to relieve any member thrown out of work for abiding by the pledge. But it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the $20,000 which the employers had put aside to break the Boston ship-carpenters strike for the shorter working day. Soon this organization, too, would turn to political action. But its most important contribution to the labor movement in the United States was the fact that it made the first attempt to include every group of workers in a single organization – factory workers, laborers, and skilled mechanics. The true union, the founders of the Association believed “should embrace every citizen whose daily exertions from the highest Artist to the lowest laborer are his means of subsistence.”

While economic demands were of interest to proletarians mainly insofar as they addressed particular circumstances, the popularity of the struggle for the ten-hour day among workers remained more or less constant, and would play a central role in encouraging their association. As we have seen, Boston was the scene of two strikes in the building trade, in 1825 and 1830, in pursuit of this aim. In 1833 it was Baltimore’s turn, and two years later the Boston workers resumed hostilities, this time supported by 16 trade associations from the General Trades Union (GTU). But this time resistance also came from within, from the master craftsmen, small employers who had been admitted to the GTU. The latter assembled a committee charged with assessing the chances of success of a general strike, which produced a report recommending that struggles should be conducted by each trade separately!

Despite this ‘friendly’ advice the workers pressed on with their plan for a general stoppage in all sectors, and on May 1^st, after some sectors had gone ahead anyway, a well-attended meeting was held in Julien Hall in Boston. Resolutions declaring the natural right of workers to “dispose of our time in the way we deem conducive to our happiness” served as introduction to the main speaker, Seth Luther who in a passionate speech stated that it was unacceptable that “any man or group of men could claim (…) that we should grind away as we have done until now under the old system of labor relations”. The new system of “republican” labor, boding moral and cultural relief to the worker – he assured an enraptured public – was within its grasp. Luther’s words, reprinted and distributed throughout the North-East as the “Ten Hours Circular”, would trigger an explosion of strikes which was unequalled until the great railway disputes of 1877. The struggles spread South, to Philadelphia and beyond, and to the West, as far as Cincinnati. By the end of June many local strikes had ended in success, their objectives obtained, and the workers found they had all the more reason to celebrate the 4^th of July that year. And yet in Boston, the city where it had all began, the employers and big merchants would somehow manage, for the third time in ten years, to get the better of the movement.

In the winter of 1836-37 the ships carpenters won the ten-hour day for reparation works, then in 1840 for the building of new ships. In New York, as in New England, the movement for the reduction of the working day revealed a lively fighting spirit, and achieved major results. In some workplaces the ten-hour working day had been obtained by 1832 and by 1836 by the whole of the shipbuilding sector. In Philadelphia, after some limited successes in 1833, there was a successful general strike. Likewise in Baltimore where at the start of 1836 the General Trades Union sent to the United States Congress the first memorandum calling for the ten-hour working day in all public works, but without success. It was then the turn of the stonemasons to enter the ten hours struggle. Certainly there would have been other major successes if the crisis of 1837 hadn’t hit the workers’ organizations, setting them back for several years. But in any case the movement survived and this was important for workers’ morale in these difficult times.

At a meeting in Boston In 1832, the merchants and ship-owners decided to “discourage and rein in the illegal craft associations, formed to restrict the freedom of individuals regarding their hours of work”, laying stress on the “noxious, corrupting tendency of these associations, as well as the senselessness of their requests, especially where skilled workers are highly regarded and well remunerated”. Eventually they decided not to take on qualified workers who were members of the associations, and to boycott any master craftsman who employed these workers. The New York merchants – and at the time almost all ship-owners were merchants as well – approved similar resolutions, lamenting the fact that the workers “are idle for two or three of the day’s most precious hours”. A Boston newspaper wrote that “to remain idle for several hours, during the most fruitful hours of morning and evening, will certainly lead to intemperance and ruin”. The employers didn’t confine themselves to meetings and to the boycotting of the workers’ resolutions, but had recourse also to much sharper weapons, in pressing for the intervention of the courts, the police and the militia.

In 1829 workers involved in the construction of the Chesapeake-Ohio canal were arrested for going on strike, although they were released soon afterwards. In 1833, in Geneva in the State of New York, some cobblers were charged with conspiracy and thrown into Gaol. In 1836, In New York, twenty one tailors who had gone on strike were tried and fined between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars each; the honorable judge declared that “this isn’t simply a conflict between workers and entrepreneurs, but a struggle on which depends the harmony of the entire union”. And in the same year there was the City mayor, even more ‘practical’ in his approach, who called out the militia against Dockers who were on strike for an increase in wages and a reduction of hours, forcing them back to work at the point of a gun. And analogous events took place in Philadelphia.

In the meantime, however, the movement had assumed such impressive dimensions that it was attracting the attention of the politicians. Almost every week workers met together in packed assemblies in the major cities and industrial districts of the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine. Strikes were very much the order of the day when President Martin van Buren enacted the famous Ten Hours decree, which the shipyards in Washington enforced on April 10 1840 with the announcement: “By order of the President of the United States is instituted from today a working day of ten hours in all public establishments”. Van Buren’s decree was the first legal measure favoring the workers of the United States, and the first official recognition of their demands.

Political Struggle

Towards the end of the 1820s the worsening of workers’ living conditions, and the declining position of craft labor described earlier, gave rise to a broad worker’s movement across the North-central States. Discontented with the ideology of ‘free labor’, workers began to look for alternative explanations and possible ways to defend themselves from a real attack that was underway which was undermining the living and working conditions of proletarian families. Thus out of this wish to avoid falling victim to the greed and egotism of the bosses did both political and trade union associations arise. Bourgeois historians refer to this wide-ranging and multi-faceted movement as “radicalism”, but in fact it was a feverish bustle of actions, theorizations, experiences, betrayals and partial intuitions which formed a kind of womb in which the embryo of the American working class, and its consciousness, was gestating.

The immediate problems requiring attention were clear to all: low pay, which was steadily decreasing even further, and intolerably long hours, with its inevitably debilitating consequences. A number of intellectuals turned their minds to these problems, some from the bourgeois class but many from the proletariat, generally skilled workers who were well-read and with good communication skills. Amongst these can be named Seth Luther, John Commerford, William Gilmore and John Ferral; all workers’ leaders who combined enlightenment ideas with knowledge of recent innovations in the realms of science, technology and political economy. There was also Thomas Skidmore, who saw the solution to social problems as lying in the distribution of the land.

Most interesting are the positions of William Heighton, a cobbler born in England: he formulated an elementary theory of value, which “derives from the labor of the working class”, a class within which he included unskilled workers, which was quite an advanced position for the time. And maybe it was partly due to him that Philadelphia, the city where he worked, was characterized then and later by its trade union organizations which accepted these pariahs of the working class, who elsewhere were highly discriminated against, along with women, children and afro-Americans. According to Heighton, the ills of American society derived from the greed of the land-grabbers following the War of Independence who, having taking the levers of power into their hands, created laws which favored the exploitation of wage labor. What constituted the workers’ weak point was their lack of knowledge and culture. According to Heighton, the process of capitalist production, which he called the “system of individual interest and competition”, and which according to Adam Smith resulted in the production of opulence and wealth for all, brought only misery and no prosperity to the worker.

But none of these radicals can really be considered socialist. None of them launched an attack on private property, or envisaged a society without classes. And neither were the employers condemned en bloc, but only the greediest and the most powerful members of their class. What is more, apart from Heighton, none of them took into account the weakest strata, such as the unskilled workers, women, children, and afro-americans both enslaved and free. These radical thinkers, even if for the most part expressions of the world of labour, didn’t move beyond the realm of discussion and the attempt to explain the new social relations; with the non-scientific methods available, they attempted to make sense of the new world taking shape around them with the cultural baggage of the enlightenment thinkers and the new science of economics. They were neither revolutionaries nor trade union activists, but they still played a role, sometimes unintentional, in the rise of the workers associations in the first decades of the 19^th Century.

The Working Men’s Party

The emergence of the North American labor movement, with the contents we have just described, appeared initially then with the formation of the Working Men’s Party in Philadelphia in 1828. After this and other political organizations, which were ambitious yet lacked substance and had little following within the class, there followed the season of trade unionism, which began in 1833 with the foundation of the General Trades’ Union of New York. In a few years the movement had grown and spread along the entire Atlantic coast and into the Mid West, only to be brought to a standstill, as we have seen, by the 1837 economic crisis. The vacuum left by trade unionism would be filled, for seven miserable years, by petty bourgeois political wheeler-dealers and evangelical preachers. Class struggle on a large scale only resumed towards the end of the 40’s when the economic upturn and the influx of immigrants injected new blood into the labor movement; a revival which continued until the Civil War. But the struggles rarely managed to break out from the immediate circles in which they were arose, nor leave behind them a lasting organizational inheritance. In a class whose members were replaced at a very rapid rate, only rarely did class experience crystallize into a consciousness which could be transmitted in a temporal and geographical sense. Proletarians would therefore be easy prey to bourgeois ideology, namely, free laborism, the renunciation of organized trade unions, the influence of the church, and indifference to the slavery question.

Slavery in the South was a good symbol of class divisions which existed among the white rulers as well, but the workers were rather lukewarm about opposing it. For many slavery was a last defense against having to do the really unpleasant jobs, and was a system which by keeping the blacks segregated and subjugated enabled the poor whites to identify with the rich, giving them a false sense of equality with the bosses. But slavery, in actual fact, created some very real problems for the white proletariat. The slaves used in industry kept wages low, and could also be used to break strikes, as happened in 1847 in the Tredegar iron works in Richmond, when white strikers were sacked and replaced with slaves. The labor movement in the South was always very weak, and all too often its only aim was to exclude blacks from manufacturing activity.

In the field of politics, too, the working class was strongly conditioned by external factors. Whereas in Europe the right to vote was obtained only after long struggles throughout the 1800s, in the United States the movement for universal suffrage between 1815 and 1840 managed to extend the electorate to 80% of the adult male population. Thus there wasn’t that focus on politicization which had brought European workers together, nor did workers’ parties of any great significance arise. Thus on the eve of the industrial revolution political affiliation didn’t really reflect membership of a class, or only to a negligible degree. And for the same reason the class consciousness of the American proletariat remained at a much lower level compared to his brothers and sisters across the Atlantic.

The movement which first devoted itself to objectives which were common to the class as a whole, and which therefore avoided being dominated by the parties and ideology of the bourgeoisie was the agitation for the ten-hour day, which started around the end of the 1820s. In the summer of 1827, the skilled workers of Philadelphia, straightaway after the defeat of a strike of building workers for a reduction in the working day, packed into an assembly called by William Heighton. It was on his initiative that the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations was formed, which began by confederating all the unions in the city. At a general meeting of the Mechanics’ Union in 1828 Heighton’s proposal to form a Working Mens’ party was upheld. It was an example followed a year later by the radicals in New York. Here, in the one city where the ten hour working day had been won, they were spurred on to political activity by an offensive on the part of the employers to overturn this victory. A committee was formed by Thomas Skidmore which continued to meet even after the danger had passed. The committee soon took the decision to participate in the municipal elections of 1829 under the banner of the Working Men’s Party.

In New England, the extreme length of the working day had become an obsession for the workers since the mid 1820s: twice in five years the builders of Boston had been defeated in strikes for the ten-hour day. They looked to a solution in the political party. But, after a brief spurt of activity at a local level it fizzled out before the end of the year, along with those in New York and Philadelphia for that matter. Not so the question of working hours: at a meeting in Providence in the Autumn of 1831 “the absolute and unconditional right” of capital to fix working conditions was rejected, and a subsequent meeting in Boston was set for the following February, which would generate the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and other Working Men.

These organizations shouldn’t however be judged by today’s standards. Particularly In the countryside and in the small towns they were “workers’ parties” in name alone, consisting rather of small groups hurriedly thrown together in response to elections, and disbanding immediately afterwards. Many were led by failed professional politicians attempting to re-launch their careers, or entrepreneurs, young lawyers etc., looking to get into politics. In the larger cities, on the other hand, the influence of the crafts sector was usually quite considerable. Often the executive bodies included skilled workers, and these introduced into their platforms demands which were genuinely radical and proletarian, as well as ones which were moderate and rather far-fetched. The most common demands were for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, of having to participate in the territorial militia, of forced labour; and the calls for a less costly legal system, fairer taxation and for rights of pre-emption for the payment of wages in case of bankruptcy. Sometimes there were calls for an improvement in the urban infrastructure, for the water and sewage systems enjoyed by the wealthy districts to be extended to the workers’ areas. A constant theme was protection for the small craftsman and the small farmer who directly cultivated his land from the greed of the big industrialists and speculators, and calls for ‘a republican education’ for children.

The Working Men’s Party, however, was a shooting star in the night-sky of politics. They had good results in Philadelphia in the 1828 elections, and did even better in the following year, obtaining over 30% of the vote. But by 1830 the movement there was entirely defunct. Similar favorable results were obtained in New York in 1829, but there, too, within two or three years internal divisions had brought the party to a premature end. Dilettantism, isolation, and the careerism of many of the leaders were the factors which would bring about the disbanding of these proto-organizations.

And if the parties of the bourgeoisie and the landlords were also in a certain sense a novelty at that time, they certainly had no lack of political talent, or resources, and enjoyed greater opportunities in terms of spreading their influence and gaining a following.

The national-republican journalists made common cause with the evangelical preachers in defining the members of the Working men’s party as “infidels” and “Jacobins”. The democrats were more cautious, hoping to reap the harvest which the Workers’ Party had sown; before long they had radicalized their language and inserted measures in their programme supporting debtors and the reform of the militia, along with other initiatives which attracted workers votes towards their party.

One of the reasons for the failure of the Working Men’s Party was the inactivity which other workers’ organizations, namely the co-operatives and the unions, fell into at the time, which discredited themselves mainly due to their leaders getting involved in political wheeler-dealing. An abiding consequence of this was a certain diffidence of the workers towards any political alternatives to the two main mass parties.