Fight Like Hell

The Untold History of American Labor

Kim Kelly

• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781982171070
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A 2022 New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A 2022 Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
A 2022 BuzzFeed Book You'll Love
A 2022 LitHub Favorite Book of the Year "Kelly unearths the stories of the people-farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees—behind some of the labor movement's biggest successes." — The New York Times A revelatory, inclusive history of the American labor movement, from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly. Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor's relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this assiduously researched work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that history and shows how the rights the American worker has today—the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job—were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears. Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon's warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland's Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s.Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight Like Hell shows what is possible when the working class demands the dignity it has always deserved.

1 THE TRAILBLAZERS

We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery.

—SARAH BAGLEY, NINETEENTH-CENTURY LABOR LEADER

There is no one location or event that can lay a definitive claim to the founding of the American labor movement, but what is certain is the enormous debt it owes to women. Many of the crucial early battles between labor and capital have been swept aside or lost to history for lack of documentation—or, perhaps, a lack of interest in the many instances in which men did not play a lead role. In the late nineteenth century, early labor organizations like the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World welcomed women workers into their ranks, but their relatively inclusive outlook made them outliers in the broader labor landscape. For centuries, the idea of women performing waged labor was restricted to the poor and working classes, and was a downright radical notion for those higher up the social ladder. At the turn of the century, “ladies” were still expected to stay home, marry as soon as possible, tend to the household, raise children, and be a helpmeet to their husbands. Coventry Patmore’s immensely popular poem, “The Angel in the House,” outlined this ideal in lines of clunky, purpled verse that idolized the sacrifice and utter devotion of his dear little wife (who, like so many others, probably had few other options available to her than to fawn over a self-important man in exchange for financial and social stability):

Man must be pleased; but him to please

Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf

Of his condoled necessities

She casts her best, she flings herself.

During the Victorian era, in the words of Bowling Green University’s Dr. Susan M. Cruea, “Upper- and middle-class women’s choices were limited to marriage and motherhood, or spinsterhood.” For middle- or upper-class women, nearly any deviation from this norm was viewed as socially suspect unless the woman became a governess for a wealthier family (and even then, people would talk). For those who could afford it, domestic work like cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and the endless drudgery of laundry was outsourced to hired help. The poor and working-class women they hired also shouldered the burden of those tasks for their own households, their unpaid labor dismissed as essential but valueless “women’s work” (which, of course, remains an endemic issue a century later). Waged labor was seen as the exclusive realm of men, and for most middle- and upper-class women, the thought of earning money for their toil was wholly foreign; they had been raised to depend on their fathers, then their husbands, or whichever male family member was available (their own opinions on the matter notwithstanding). Self-determination and even basic education beyond appropriately ladylike pursuits like sewing and dancing were frowned upon by the upper crust. No proper lady would be caught dead asking to be paid for an honest day’s work. (Sex workers were a different story altogether, but given their low social standing and the criminalization of their labor, they could scarcely lay claim to being involved in “respectable” society).

Of course, these standards were applied specifically to native-born white women, whose status as a protected class separated their experiences from those of working-class women of color in the U.S.—particularly Black women, whose relationship with work in this country began with enslavement, violence, and forced labor. Following Emancipation, their lives were still often defined by exploitation, abuse, and wage theft. Whether held in bondage or living freely, Black women were expected to work from the moment they were old enough to hold a broom; white society could hardly be coaxed to recognize their basic humanity, let alone to shield them from harm in the workplace.

But these women were hardly alone. By the 1830s, the American genocide against Indigenous people had been well underway for decades, and the few Indigenous women allowed into the workforce were treated abominably. As immigration ramped up during the middle of the nineteenth century, women workers from other ethnic groups—including, but not limited to, Irish immigrants fleeing a colonial famine and Russian Jews seeking to escape brutal repression—were also targeted by the ruling class’s white supremacist paternalism, attuned to uphold the privilege of its housebound Victorian angels. But that restrictive social fabric quickly began to fray as the Industrial Revolution took flight. Middle-class white women, seeking autonomy and a stronger hand in the economic outcomes of their lives, began to seek work outside the home. And that demand for autonomy, as radical as it was back then, required radical action.

On a balmy spring 1824 day in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 102 young women launched the country’s very first factory strike, and brought the city’s humming textile industry to a standstill. The day prior, eight local textile mills had jointly announced plans to extend their employees’ already grueling twelve-hour workday to fourteen, and to slash wages for weavers, the workers who operated the power looms upon which the mills’ cloth production depended. The factory’s owners targeted the weavers, all between the ages of fifteen and thirty, specifically because of a belief that they were naturally docile, and would accept this latest affront to their dignity without question.

They could not have been less correct in their assumption. Not only did those same disenfranchised, overworked young women orchestrate the strike, but similar bands of workers would go on to do the same in other mill towns across New England and the Northeast throughout the nineteenth century.

Joined by several hundred of their male coworkers as well as sympathetic members of the public, the women blockaded the mills’ entrances and loudly declared their intention to stay out of work until the new orders were rescinded. Back then the word “strike” was still alien in this context, so these women instead described their actions—walking off the job to protest management decisions—as a “turnout.” That Pawtucket turnout lasted for a week, during which the strikers blocked mill entrances, threw rocks at mill bosses’ mansions, and protested in the streets. The Pawtucket Journal breathlessly reported that a “tumultuous crowd” visited the “houses of the manufacturers, shouting, exclaiming and using every imaginable term of abuse and insult”; at one point, an unidentified party set fire to one of the mills. The fire rushed anxious mill owners to the negotiation table, and their offers of compromise officially ended the strike on June 3 of that year. The women of Pawtucket and their allies had won this first battle, but their “turnout” was just the opening salvo in a much longer war for textile workers’ rights.

One of those striking Pawtucket mills, Slater Mill, holds the distinction of being the country’s first cotton-spinning operation. Its England-born owner, Samuel Slater, had spent his early years working in a cotton mill, learning how its machinery operated and absorbing the cruel management tactics that underpinned Britain’s industrial boom. When he decamped to the U.S. in 1789, he arrived with a memorized cache of designs swiped from British industrialists like his mentor, Jedediah Strutt (an underhanded feat that earned him the nickname “Slater the Traitor” back home); he then sold them to Rhode Island industrialist Moses Brown, and began his own prodigious career in textiles. By 1793, Slater Mill was in full operation, staffed in part by local children aged between seven and thirteen years old. As the business expanded, Slater devised “the Rhode Island System,” hiring entire families en masse. His “system” proved both effective and influential. By 1860, more than half of the mill workers in all of Rhode Island were children. He initially sought out the children of unhoused or incarcerated people to build up his workforce, but finding them too costly to house and feed, he began to encourage local working-class families to quite literally bring their children to work with them instead.

Slater’s child laborers were paid between 40 and 60 cents (roughly $13 now) per week, and were expected to work up to sixteen hours per day. Lured by the promise of industrialization, thousands of families left their farms and flooded into mill towns across New England. Mill owners welcomed the influx of cheap labor, but as the machinery itself became larger and more complex, child labor became less viable. Instead, factory bosses turned to another pool of cheap, exploitable labor: young women.

By the time of the Pawtucket mill strike, their sisters of the loom had already been sweating away in mills across New England for more than a decade. Boston businessman Francis Cabot Lowell opened his first cotton mill in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814, and revolutionized the industry with a fully in-house production process that turned raw cotton bales into finished cloth ready to ship down South or overseas. He, like Samuel Slater, also toured England to learn the tricks of the trade. He was especially impressed by Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, a device that mechanized the textile-making process and allowed factories to vastly reduce their labor needs.

Lowell also recognized the terrible human cost of Britain’s industrial leap forward. He resolved that his facilities would operate differently than the “dark Satanic mills” William Blake described in one of his epic poems at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and that his workers would be treated morally. Compared with the way his peers operated, Lowell’s paternalistic goal was a fairly noble one, but of course the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In this instance, Lowell’s road led straight into the cacophonous purgatory of a nineteenth-century cotton mill.

THE MILL GIRLS OF LOWELL, MASSACHUSETTS

The appeal of young women to the factory owner was not limited solely to their low wages and supposed docility. Industrialists saw them as a transient or temporary workforce that would stick around for only a few years before leaving to get married, preventing the formation of a potentially problematic permanent working class in the mill cities. The first wave of “mill girls” were of hardy Yankee farm stock, the daughters and granddaughters of the American Revolution. Some were driven by the economic necessity of supporting family back home, saving up for a wedding, or funding their brothers’ educations; others went for the sake of adventure, or at least in hopes of finding a new kind of life outside of the kitchen or the fields. It also offered the chance to be paid for their labor for the first time in their lives—and in cash, to boot.

These women workers were expected to follow a strict moral conduct code in and outside of work, to attend church regularly, and to room in company-controlled boardinghouses, where they shared rooms with up to seven other women at a time and lived beneath the watchful eye of a house matron. Workdays were long, dusty, and loud, with twelve to fourteen hours hours spent standing before a screaming spinning machine or power loom, breathing in cotton fibers and the stench of oil lamps. Accidents were common, and workers often lost fingers or other limbs; others were scalped, their long tresses yanked into a machine’s gaping metal maw. Brown lung disease, the raw cotton equivalent of asbestosis, ran rampant in poorly ventilated mills. Managers nailed the windows of boiling hot factory floors shut, seeking to keep thread at maximum pliability while ignoring the well-being of those working it.

In spite of the strict rules that dictated much of their day-to-day existence, many women found that life as a mill girl did allow for a great deal more personal freedom than life on the farm. They enriched themselves in worker-organized “Self Improvement Circles,” places where former farm girls could discuss literature, art, and philosophy after attending lectures from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It wasn’t freedom, but for that first wave of women, who would have otherwise languished in isolation on faltering family farms or been consigned to lives of domestic drudgery, it was at least something new.

Mill operators also oversaw the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine written by and for the workers themselves. The publication started off as a collection of lighthearted poems and essays, but as time went on and conditions inside the mills deteriorated, notes of dissatisfaction and even rebellion crept into its pages. This shift in tone was thanks in no small part to Sarah Bagley, a talented weaver turned firebrand labor activist. Born in rural Candia, New Hampshire, in 1806, Bagley came to Lowell at the age of thirty-one to work at the Hamilton Manufacturing Company. She was initially won over by the promise of the mills, writing cheerful essays like “The Pleasures of Factory Work” for the Offering, but as the harsh realities of the workplace became apparent, her attitude changed. She witnessed her first labor action—a walkout over a proposed wage cut—in 1842, and by 1844, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) had been founded, with Bagley serving as its first president and one of its loudest voices. As an activist, Bagley’s main focus was the growing demand for a ten-hour workday. Federal workers had won it in 1840, and skilled workers in various industries had done the same years earlier, but the mill girls were still working up to sixteen hours a day for paltry wages, and they were sick of it.

Textiles were booming, but New England as a whole struggled through economic depressions throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Mill owners constantly sought to cut costs—usually by docking workers’ pay, or closing up shop unexpectedly. Dissatisfaction and anger began to spread throughout the ranks of mill workers, and labor unrest became much more common, building off that first strike in 1824. In 1834, mill managers in Lowell cut worker pay by 12.5 percent and ordered boardinghouses to begin packing eight women into each room; hundreds of women workers walked out, but the owners were able to quickly crush the strike. However, it soon spread to nearby Dover, where eight hundred others walked out over a similar pay cut: they formed strike committees, held mass rallies, and placed an ad in the local newspaper castigating the Cocheco Mill owners for treating their workers like “slaves.” These strikes were unsuccessful, but the women pressed on with an ongoing wave of labor actions that culminated in the formation of the Factory Girls Association, which soon boasted twenty-five hundred members across New England. Though the bosses crushed their efforts once again and the FGA fell apart after the strike, these women had made an important contribution to the growing class consciousness among women workers.

Between 1842 and 1844, public opinion of the mills—once heralded as a utopia for godly young women—curdled as more reports on their actual working conditions surfaced. Mill bosses reacted with alarm, and sent their agents farther and farther afield to lure impoverished young women into their employ. “There are hundreds of young females shipped from this State every year to the factory prison-houses, like cattle, sheep, and pigs sent to slaughter,” one Portland, Maine, newspaper lamented, as they were sent to labor “in the polluted and polluting manufacturing towns where they are prepared for a miserable life and a horrible death in the abodes of infamy.”

Mill owners next turned to hiring immigrants, taking advantage of their marginalized social status to exploit and mistreat them as they saw fit. The first group of immigrant workers to enter New England’s mills were the Irish. They were routinely paid less than their Yankee counterparts, and suffered virulent discrimination, prejudice, and anti-Catholic violence from their new neighbors. Hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrated during the 1840s and 1850s as potatoes rotted in the fields and the Great Famine starved their homeland. These workers arrived malnourished, penniless, haunted by British colonial terror, and desperate for work; mill owners welcomed them with open arms and turned-up noses. Tensions sometimes arose between the Irish workers and the remaining Yankee women, who had been engaged in protests and strikes over the same conditions the Irish accepted out of intense need and a profound lack of options. It was an early foreshadowing of conflicts that would be seen time and time again in the American labor struggle—different groups of marginalized workers were pitted against one other as profit-obsessed business interests scrambled to hire the most vulnerable people they could get their hands on. The Irish would be followed into the mills by workers from Quebec, from Greece and Germany, from Russia and Poland and Italy and the Netherlands and Croatia and many others. Each new group of immigrants arrived eager to work, unaware that they’d soon be ground up by the mills.

“THE BLOOD OF SOULS IN BONDAGE”

Sarah Bagley and her LFLRA continued to advocate for the cause at conferences and women’s conventions across New England, with a focus on bringing over male counterparts to join in pressuring legislators on issues of workers’ concern. White men, unlike women of the time, held the threat of their votes as well as their labor to stir up ...