Tramps, Trade Union Travellers, and Wandering Workers: How Geographic Mobility Undermined Organized Labour in Gilded Age America, 1870-1900
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TRAMPS, TRADE UNION TRAVELLERS, AND WANDERING WORKERS: HOW GEOGRAPHIC MOBILITY UNDERMINED ORGANIZED LABOUR IN GILDED AGE AMERICA, 1870-1900 KIM MOODY Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Abstract This thesis will argue that high levels of internal migration in Gilded Age America undermined the stability and growth of trade unions and labour-based parties. Most of the traditional ‘American Exceptionalist’ arguments which asserted a lack of class consciousness will be challenged. Significant weight will be given to the racial, ethnic, and gender divisions within the American working class as a source of relative organizational weakness. As archival sources reveal, however, despite their divisions, workers of all ethnic and racial groups drawn into wage-labour in the Gilded Age often displayed high levels of class consciousness and political radicalism through their actions, organizations, and hundreds of weekly labour papers. They also showed an awareness of the problems of frequent migration or ‘tramping’ in building stable organizations. Driven by the tumultuous conditions of uneven industrialization, millions of people migrated from state-to-state, country-to-city, and city-to-city at rates far higher than in Europe. A detailed analysis of the statistics on migration, work-related travelling, and union membership trends shows that this created a high level of membership turnover in the major organizations of the day—the American Federation of Labour and the Knights of Labour. Confronted in the 1880s with the highest level of migration in the period, the Knights of Labour saw rapid growth turn into continuous decline. The more stable craft unions also saw significant membership loss to migration through an ineffective travelling card system. The organizational weakness that resulted undermined efforts by American workers to build independent labour-based parties in the 1880s and 1890s. ‘Pure-and-simple’ unionism would triumph by the end of the century despite the existence of a significant socialist minority in organized labour. Acknowledgements First I want to thank my thesis supervisors in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, John Ashworth, Peter Ling, and Christopher Phelps whose criticisms, suggestions and encouragement have been invaluable. Many others in the Department have also helped me over various hurdles intellectual, technical and administrative. Through their many comments my fellow post-graduate students have also been a source of commentary and encouragement from a variety of perspectives. I am grateful for the financial assistance from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for both my time in the doctoral program and a Research Training Support Grant which made possible the research and completion of my doctoral studies. I was fortunate to receive a great deal of help from a number of archivists and librarians. Special thanks to the following: David Hays, at the University of Colorado, Boulder Archives; Julie Herrada of the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the staff of the Tamiment Library at New York University, and the librarians at the New York Public Library Newspaper and Microfilm Department in the Schwarzman Building and the Science, Industry, & Business Library. For the love, encouragement and patience of my partner, Sheila Cohen, my enduring thanks. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Class Formation and Consciousness in Gilded Age America 38 Chapter 2: The Missing Factor: Internal Migration 89 Chapter 3: Observations and Awareness of Labour Migration 146 Chapter 4: The Rise, Fall & Revival of Organized Labour 194 Chapter 5: Why Independent Working Class Politics Failed in the Gilded Age 255 Conclusion 292 Bibliography 303 Kim Moody Introduction Migration and movement, mobility and motion characterized identity in Victorian America. A country in transition was also in transit.1 In August 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish writer then at the outset of a career that would later bring him fame with Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, crossed the United States by train. In an essay entitled ‘Across the Plains’ he described his journey in some detail. When he boarded a train in Ogden, Utah, he found himself among the mostly working class ‘emigrants’ seeking a better life in the far West, divided into three passenger cars: the Chinese in one car, women and children (presumably white) in another, and white males in the car he occupied—in some ways a metaphor for the society taking shape. With the exception of ‘one German family and a knot of Cornish miners…the rest were all American born’ and ‘they came from every quarter of that Continent.’ He saw them as fugitives who spoke of a ‘hope that moves ever westward.’ Yet, ‘as we continued to steam westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east’ whose disillusioned passengers advised the west-bound migrants to ‘Come back!’2 The great teller of tales had witnessed a small piece of a gigantic drama of humanity fleeing one circumstance in hopes of a better one, often to find the metaphoric ‘gold’ they sought to the West to be but a thin gilding hiding the grimmer reality of wage-labour much like the age itself that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner 1 Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), 7. 2 Robert Louis Stevenson, Across The Plains with Other Memories and Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892), 54-61. 1 Kim Moody called ‘Gilded.’3 This thesis will argue that this geographic mobility or internal migration—the movement of people, back and forth across the land, deemed so worthy of remark by Stevenson in his American travels—is a crucial, if largely neglected, factor in determining the relative weakness of organized labour in Gilded Age America. The working class of the late nineteenth century United States was, so to speak, formed on the run. While migration was a feature of early class formation in other countries as well, the size, scale and rapidity of this constant migration in the late nineteenth century United States far outstripped that of any European country. It was, to be sure, the wealth and power of industry and city that drew these ‘emigrants’ in many directions across the vast continent that contained the United States. But for the majority of those who were now becoming wage-workers it was a time of trial and turmoil—better on average for the native-born than the immigrant, the ‘old’ immigrants than the ‘new’, the skilled than the unskilled, the white than the black or Chinese, the man than the woman, but hard traveling anyway for most who lived from payday to payday. The condition of wage-labour was new for many, an experience radically different from the self-employment of the farm, peasant plot, or artisan’s shop where master and journeyman had once worked side-by-side. By 1879, the ‘boss’ was typically no longer someone the employee knew personally, but a man, increasingly part of an impersonal corporation, possessed of enormous financial and material wealth and now known as a ‘capitalist’. 3 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Tragedy (New York: The New American Library, 1969, originally 1873), passim. 2 Kim Moody These two emerging social classes were creating one another. Without labour there was no capital, almost anyone could have told you at the beginning of the Gilded Age. Similarly, the same people would have agreed, without capital to build the railroads, factories, and machinery there would be no work for the wage-earner. This relationship, however, was anything but equal. For one thing, the wealth created was in no way distributed equally, a fact that was becoming increasingly obvious to most. Thus, as the workers saw it, at the heart of this new relationship there was an implicit conflict over how to divide the wealth the widely held labour theory of value told the workers they had created. But that wasn’t all. The labour market in which the wage worker sought work was uncertain, highly competitive, and—with great consequence—movable. The new ‘labour-saving’ machinery seemed to make the work harder and more precarious. The capitalist employer had the power to hire and fire and, hence, to command. The term ‘wage slave’ came to capture the condition resulting from this new authority often vested in the arbitrary realm of the ‘foreman’s empire’ with its brutal ‘drive system’.4 Yet, the formation of a new permanent wage-earning class in the United States was not simply a national process. The labour markets of the US might be local, regional or national, but the workforce was drawn from around the world where huge numbers of peasants, farm labourers, and even wage workers were being displaced. 4 David Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 140, 165; Sanford M. Jacoby, Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 13-16. 3 Kim Moody As in the Old World, the built-in conflict of class formation and relations gave rise to new working class organizations with which to wage the contest on and off the job: labour unions of various sorts, Eight-Hour Leagues, weekly labour newspapers, cooperative enterprises, mutual aid societies, political organizations and parties among others. Yet, in the United States, the unions and political organizations in particular appeared weak in relation to their European cousins. Trade unions arose in the 1860s, but for the most part collapsed in the depression of the 1870s.