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Print Culture and the San Francisco Labor Movement, 1880-1889

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Print Culture and the San Francisco Labor Movement, 1880-1889 San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks Master's Theses Master's Theses and Graduate Research Fall 2010 Radical Reading: Print Culture and the San Francisco Labor Movement, 1880-1889 Marie Louise Silva San Jose State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses Recommended Citation Silva, Marie Louise, "Radical Reading: Print Culture and the San Francisco Labor Movement, 1880-1889" (2010). Master's Theses. 3894. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31979/etd.ucxp-cm3h https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/3894 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Master's Theses and Graduate Research at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RADICAL READING: PRINT CULTURE AND THE SAN FRANCISCO LABOR MOVEMENT, 1880–1889 A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Library and Information Science San José State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Library and Information Science by Marie Louise Silva December 2010 © 2010 Marie Louise Silva ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Designated Thesis Committee Approves the Thesis Titled RADICAL READING: PRINT CULTURE AND THE SAN FRANCISCO LABOR MOVEMENT, 1880–1889 by Marie Louise Silva APPROVED FOR THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSITY December 2010 Dr. Debra Hansen School of Library and Information Science Dr. Anthony Bernier School of Library and Information Science Melodie Frances, MLIS School of Library and Information Science ABSTRACT RADICAL READING: PRINT CULTURE AND THE SAN FRANCISCO LABOR MOVEMENT, 1880–1889 by Marie Louise Silva Labor historians have documented the extraordinary growth of unionism in 1880s San Francisco and its lasting impact on the city’s political and industrial landscape, emphasizing the San Francisco labor movement’s impressive organizational and political accomplishments. Little attention has been paid, however, to the blossoming of radical print culture that accompanied and inspired the organizational campaigns of the 1880s. Informed by developments in the fields of labor and book history that emphasize the cultural agency of workers and working-class readers, this study addresses this gap in the historical record, reconstructing the history of radical print culture in 1880s San Francisco through a close reading of two San Francisco labor newspapers, Truth and the Coast Seamen’s Journal, as well as other primary sources. This study shows that the San Francisco labor movement, like other Gilded Age reform movements, valued education as a primary instrument of social improvement. To promote working-class education, San Francisco labor organizations established alternative print institutions in the 1880s. Among these institutions were two seminal labor newspapers, Truth and the Coast Seamen’s Journal , which provided working-class readers with unprecedented access to radical texts and created a public forum for the voice of the emerging labor community. More specifically, these newspapers sustained a new ideal of reading, identified by this study as “radical reading,” that welded elite, popular, and religious literary models into a powerful critique of industrial society. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Lovingly dedicated to my parents, whose integrity, hard work, and commitment to justice inspired this study. Heartfelt thanks to Debra Hansen, Anthony Bernier, and Melodie Frances for their insightful critiques and unfailing support. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 “Educate! Agitate! Organize!”: Foundations of Labor Culture 18 2 “A Chapter in Human Heroism”: The Labor Press 52 3 “Let us read, let us discuss, let us educate ourselves”: Radical Reading and Working-Class Fraternity 92 4 Conclusion: Looking Forward 129 Appendix A Labor Literature 147 Appendix B “Salutatory” 155 Bibliography 157 vi Introduction In the late nineteenth century, working-class San Franciscans built the mightiest labor movement in the country, securing their stake in the economic, political, and cultural life of the city for generations. The 1901 election of the city’s—and the nation’s—first union mayor, Eugene E. Schmitz, represented the dramatic culmination of decades of labor struggle, during which working-class San Franciscans forged not only a formidable political alliance, but a vibrant, diverse, and distinctly working-class intellectual culture. Beginning in the 1880s, this indigenous labor culture blossomed in an efflorescence of newspapers, books, pamphlets, lectures, discussions, libraries, and reading rooms dedicated to the noble cause and great question of labor. From the Knights of Labor to the Coast Seamen’s Union, labor organizations with diverse and often unstable ideological interests were united in their commitment to education as both a means and an end of their organizational efforts, laying the groundwork for the triumphant labor movement of the early twentieth century. Particularly influential among these organizations was the International Workmen’s Association (IWA), founded by the young editor, printer, and union organizer Burnette G. Haskell in San Francisco circa 1883. Among the “especial declared objects” of the IWA were “to print and publish proper literature,” “to establish a labor library,” “to establish a lyceum for the discussion of labor topics,” “to circulate proper literature,” and “to educate each other by group meeting and discussion.” 1 As the IWA’s objectives suggest, the development of a critical, articulate, and self-consciously 1 “Now, Act!,” Truth , May 19, 1883. 1 working-class intellectual culture through alternative print media and educational institutions was at the very center of the labor drive of the 1880s—and of the lives of the union organizers and labor intellectuals who so dramatically shaped the early San Francisco labor movement. While labor historians agree that a singular, deep, and articulate class consciousness characterized the culture of the early San Francisco labor movement, no labor scholarship has explicitly addressed the role of alternative print media and educational institutions in the development of class consciousness in San Francisco. Nor have the respective literatures of labor and book history traced the intertwined histories of labor newspapers, printing presses, literature, libraries, and working-class reading in nineteenth-century San Francisco despite promising historiographical developments that emphasize the cultural agency of working-class readers. In an effort to address this gap, this thesis will reconstruct the history of radical working-class print culture in San Francisco in the heady decade of the 1880s through a close reading of two seminal labor newspapers, Truth , established by Burnette G. Haskell in 1882, and the Coast Seamen’s Journal , founded in 1887 as the official newspaper of the powerful Coast Seamen’s Union. Illuminated by other sources, including diaries, personal papers, and union records, these two newspapers reveal surprising ideological intersections, ambivalences, and contradictions within the labor movement itself and in relation to bourgeois and popular culture. In particular, contributors to Truth and the Coast Seamen’s Journal 2 explored the relationship between education, literary culture, and social change with an enthusiasm rivaling that of their elite cultural competitors. 2 Inspired by the work of Michael Denning, this study will raise, if not resolve, two large questions, around which a host of other questions inevitably cluster: What practical and discursive role did print culture play in the San Francisco labor movement of the 1880s—and in the rise of a distinct, oppositional working-class culture? What do the products of that culture reveal about the complex and evolving “consciousness,” or collective imagination, of their producers and consumers in a time of rapid social change? 3 By addressing the role and significance of print culture in the San Francisco labor movement in the formative decade of the 1880s, this study will have modest implications for the fields of labor and book history, making new connections between divergent disciplines. It will argue that working-class education—grounded in “radical reading”— was central to the development and objectives of the San Francisco labor movement, which was engaged in a critical project to restore, redeem, and transform national culture. 4 While stressing the radicalism of the local labor movement, it will show that the line between labor and bourgeois culture in San Francisco was surprisingly ambiguous; 2 See Dee Garrison, Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876 –1920 (New York: Free Press, 1979), for a discussion of nineteenth-century library leaders’ faith in education as an antidote to social unrest. 3 In his Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), Michael Denning raises similar questions about the role of the dime novel in the nineteenth-century working-class imagination. 4 In his Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1983), John L. Thomas examines the significant contributions of reformist writers George, Bellamy, and Lloyd to this redemptive project. 3 institutions and personalities occupied a multiplicity of seemingly contradictory positions, employing similar rhetorical strategies in
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