From the Knights of Labor to the New World Order

Essays on Labor and Culture

Paul Buhle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317945383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection brings together the labor and cultural studies of the author over the past 20 years, during which time the fields of social history, women's history, ethnic studies, public history, and oral history have all been transformed. The essays, some rewritten or newly available and the rest original to this volume, offer important examples of historical analysis, comment on changing scholarly perceptions, and the public uses of history. By drawing upon his own research in popular culture, Yiddish periodicals, interracial unionism, oral history and a variety of other sources, the author demonstrates how the field of labor specialists has become the domain of social historians exploring a rich American past.

NINETEENTH CENTURY ORIGINS, FROM LABOR REPUBLICANISM TO ETHNIC CULTURE

THE REPUBLIC OF LABOR: THE KNIGHTS IN RHODE ISLAND

Q: What did thy masters promise for thee?

A: They did promise and vow many things in my name: First:--That I should renounce the comforts of life through working for less wages than the weavers in other towns, and starve my wife and hunger my children for the same cause. Second:--That I must not in any way try to better my condition, but be content to work at any price which they think proper to give; neither must I join the Knights of Labor as that is contrary to their by-laws. Third:--That I must bear patiently the insults of all that are put in authority over me, and a host of other things too numerous to mention.

Q: Dost thou not believe that thou art bound to do as they have promised for thee?

A: No, verily; for I have come to the determination to free myself, and to strive to get as much for my work as the weavers in other places for the same kind and quality, and that is the Knights of Labor’s duty.

Q: Rehearse the articles of thy belief.

A: I believe in the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have them do unto you--and in Honesty, his only son, who was conceived by our Common Right, born of the Virgin suffered under Cotton Treason, was crucified, dead, and buried in Rhode Island, for many years, but is now risen again, and sitteth on the right hand of Justice and Liberty.

Q: What dost thou chiefly learn from these articles of thy belief?

A: I learn to believe that the time has now arrived when I must make a firm stand for a fair share of the profits of my industry, which is nothing less than the Union List, have nine hours’ work, seven hours’ play, eight hours’ sleep, and fair wages every day.

”Labor’s Catechism,” The People (Providence), Dec. 17, 1887

The Knights of Labor remain very largely a mystery for American historians. A movement which shot across the horizon like a meteor and fell quickly into insignificance had attracted more than a half-million workers, appealed to working people across the divisions of sex, race, and ethnicity, legitimated opposition to the great industrialists, and encouraged the formation of numerous cooperatives to replace the monopolies. Seemingly out of nowhere, labor had summoned a democratic revolution--and failed.

What factors prompted the Knights of Labor to reach so far at one moment and fade away in the next? The rise of the Knights must first be seen as the expression of a profound social upsurge which found its institutional home in the labor movement but which reached far beyond the priorities and limits of trade unions themselves. This is evident in the formation of cooperatives, nurseries, and neighborhood clubs and in the political expression which the Knights gave to labor conflict. The sharpened class divisions of the Gilded Age, the result of the growing monopolization of wealth and political power, and the vastly increased scale of American industrial life prompted a vigorous contest over the American heritage. Refusing to accept capitalist domination, workingmen and workingwomen with a distinct vision of the proper development of democratic society insisted that the true producers of wealth had a natural right to its blessings and that production should be administered cooperatively, that the social order could be reorganized from within.

The Knights also insisted that democratic means would suffice to sweep the usurpers from the seats of power and therein lay a great potential weakness. With such a vision, they mobilized hundreds of labor candidates, gaining office in numerous cities, towns, and state legislatures. Intent on making local government more responsive to workers and the general citizenry, Knights in office did little to aggravate class tensions. Despite their caution and propriety, the measure of political control which they had won threatened the two-party system, threatened the power of capitalists to define the limits of acceptable politics, and prompted vigorous counterattack.

While the politicians attacked at one level -- variously employing gerrymanders, racial invective, and crude ethnic politics -- major industrialists, the federal government, and the press combined to break strikes, legitimate blacklisting, and propagate anti-radical “red scares” (as they would be known later). With the failure of labor leadership in the face of the new and aggressive employer associations, the political and industrial pressures proved to be more than the fledgling movement could withstand. Too trusting in the power of the electoral process to correct industrial exploitation, naive about the capacity of small-scale cooperatives to supersede the giant corporations and unable to mobilize the political potential of the poor, the Knights were beaten. Universal male suffrage had no automatic economic counterpart, because no political system by itself could equalize the power of a railroad baron and a poor immigrant worker. By their credulous faith in the democratic process, the Knights had tested its limits.¹

Labor’s revolt in the 1880s nevertheless effected important industrial and political changes. Industrial autocracy had been permanently modified by the increasing enforcement of child labor laws, by shorter hours for at least a minority of workers, and perhaps most of all by the memory of what labor under duress might do. The Democrats and Republicans searched more extensively for the workingman’s support, offering ethnic groups in particular a share of political power in return for maintaining order. But the promise of some fuller emancipation, a democratic revolution from the hometown city hall up through the nation’s capital, gradually faded from view.

Labor’s own political voice, echoed through the agrarian People’s party in the 1890s, a weak Socialist party in the 1910s, still later the Democrats’ PAC and COPE, never again attained the simple clarity, directness, and volume of the labor party movement in the 1880s. The “New Immigrants” arriving from eastern and southern Europe, likewise African Americans in their trek to the northern cities, would find political representation only through the sufferance of a Democratic party completely compromised by old-line political machines and allied with elements of the rich. If labor subsequently found its greatest advances through union movements and its greatest satisfaction in the “apolitical” social life of blue-collar communities, the cause might be laid in no small part to the defeats of the 1880s.

Rhode Island offers a unique field to analyze the growth and decline of the Knights and to fathom the limits of politics. Here, foreign-bom male workers could not vote without first meeting a property qualification. Largely disenfranchised, the state’s predominantly English and Irish workers therefore found the Knights an organizational locus for an encompassing cultural, social, and political movement. Because the industrial crisis corresponded to a political crisis in the state, the inextricability of the two proved more obvious than elsewhere, the results more definitive.

1.

The rise of the Rhode Island Knights is best seen against the economic and social backdrop of the post-Civil War era. From 1865 to 1885, the state reached its stride as a world-class player in the production of textiles. Overwhelmingly dominated by a manufactury concentrated in few hands, Rhode Island had been at the center of cotton production since the 1790s and rapidly expanded into wool and worsted in the 1860s. By the mid-1880s, over $23 million was invested in Rhode Island cotton mills, nearly $9 million in wool and worsted, sustaining a work force of 36,000 men, women, and children stretching from the metropolitan sites of Providence and Pawtucket to the bucolic mill towns of Manville, Quidneck, and Arctic.²

With the state’s industrial expansion, Rhode Island elites displayed the industrial and political self-confidence characteristic of the Gilded Age. Old family fortunes grew through shrewd investment as a majority of Rhode Island industrialists reaped the benefits of their well-to-do origins. In a few cases, men of middling origins, like Benjamin B. Knight and Hezikiah Conant, rose to financial power. Industrially forward-looking and “progressive,” the state’s mill owners encouraged the technological innovations that promised continuing success and with the superb arrogance of wealth erected the largest cotton mills of their time in Manville and Lonsdale. Industrial might was easily translated into political power. “In no other state,” writes a student of the field, “was such a small proportion of the population in command.”³

This domination was reinforced, first, by the crushing defeat of reformers following Thomas Dorr into the brief but spectacular “Dorr War” of 1844. In the most widescale and (if barely) armed civil revolt since Whiskey Rebellion, crowds seeking a government based on universal male suffrage rather than property qualification were turned back by a state militia, their leaders jailed.⁴ A generation later, the Civil War loaned the ruling clique of Republicans a renewed legitimacy and sweeping political supremacy. The Democrats meanwhile remained badly divided between dissident Yankees and the mostly voteless Irish. Republicans supported the tariff desired so badly by the crystallizing elite and manipulated liquor dealerships to control votes. By the 1870s, two political giants emerged. Nelson Aldrich, later Republican champion in the Senate, and Charles “Boss” Brayton, state political magician, led their party in thwarting reform challenges for nearly two generations.⁵

The working people of Rhode Island, largely foreign born, uneducated, and unskilled, had little opportunity to participate in the state’s industrial or political rule. By the end of the 1870s, Rhode Islanders of foreign stock outnumbered the native bom, and by the mid-1880s formed well over 60 percent of the state’s population, with some 40,000 Irish, 20,000 British, and 20,000 French Canadians actually bom abroad. Extraordinarily Catholic for the times -- nearly double the national average of 6 percent -- the state also had a high rate of illiteracy, about 15 percent among Irish and nearly 40 percent among French Canadians.

The immigrant groups together inevitably monopolized the largely unskilled industrial positions, from weavers to burlars, back boys to piecers. Irish and French-Canadian children, some as young as seven or eight, supplied the bulk of the state’s child labor. The work of their older sisters and mothers gave Rhode Island the highest percentage of female workers in the nation. Women, one-third of the state’s work force and approximately 40 percent of all mill operatives, were concentrated in jobs like cotton card-room operatives, weavers, spoolers, and worsted burlars. The few skilled positions available, like wool sorting, mule spinning, and loom fixing, were largely claimed by a few thousand British and Irish workers, many trained in Britain’s textile industry.⁶

The textile mill, the “mother of industry,” had thus produced the unskilled, undifferentiated labor of twentieth-century production and created the veritable prototype of the unskilled machine-tender. The character of textile production in the last decades of the nineteenth century tended to undercut the significance of the remaining skilled labor, while intensifying the work for all and offering low wages even during times of booming profits.

Cotton mills, where job categories had been initially established and the proportion of female employees had been highest (roughly 60 percent for the 1870s-1880s), entered a slow transition from mule spindles tended by skilled mule spinners to ring spindles suited to unskilled (often women and children) mass workers. Wool production, losing a portion of its market to worsteds, went through a parallel process of phasing out the skilled jackspinners. Worsted production, peculiarly subject to standardization and high-speed machinery, employed the highest percentage of unskilled labor.

Meanwhile, all mill industries participated in the intensified competition of the late nineteenth century. Factory overseers operating with considerable autonomy gained their reputations by “pushing” their workers, driving down piece-rates and thereby money wages to the bare standard of living possible, thanks mainly to falling prices of food and clothing. The fines system, inaugurated by factory owners for the essential purpose of quality control, became in the hands of unscrupulous supervisors a means of driving the pace of work to the edge of intolerability while undercutting wages still further.⁷

The conditions of the millworker, harsh even by contemporary standards, were harder to bear because of the rarity of advancement and the sheer futility of hopes for escape. Written in the mid-1880s, the following description of Rhode Island mill life expresses well a widespread sense of sadness and near-desperation:

Life in a factory where any textile industry is carried on is perhaps, with the exception of prison life, the most monotonous life a human being can live…[a weaver] has got at least six looms to tend. They are arranged in a double row and his position is between them. He passes from one to the other. He must keep his eyes on them all and be ready to “change the shuttle” when the “filling runs out.” He tramps thus back and forth up and down his “alley” for five hours, with no time to sit down and rest for a moment. After dinner he resumes his position at the looms and repeats the story and this goes on day after day, week after week, for months and years, the same round of toil, with little or no change from year end to year end, realizing even by this unremitting toil just sufficient to feed and clothe himself and his family, and however desirous he may be to save a little sum for a rainy day he finds himself unable to do so.

This is the lot of the weaver. There is not a particle of the romantic in his life….⁸

Against this tyranny, millworkers relied upon their old-world traditions and a thin strain of Yankee democratic heritage to nurture a legitimacy for resistance. Many British and Irish workers had passed through industrial towns (especially Lancaster) on the way to the United States, acquiring a union heritage along with a skilled trade. Their fellow craftsmen had managed to gain scattered industrial recognition in the Old Country and set about early to acquire similar status in Fall River, Massachusetts, the “Little Lancaster” bordering upon Rhode Island. Even English and Irish-American workers detached by generation or particular experience from this union tradition had contact with those who recalled the old ways.

Politically, the resentments which had led to armed rebellion in the Dorr years had been transmuted by population shifts and the development of industrial-urban society. But the Dorrite demand of “Equal Rights” for all citizens gained new life among the immigrants. “Free-Born Englishmen” expressed surprise that America seemed l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Nineteenth Century Origins, from Labor Republicanism to Ethnic Culture
• Main Trends and Byways
• Media with a Message
• Index