Redeeming Time: Protestantism and Chicago’s Eight-Hour Movement, 1866-1912 by William A. Mirola (review)

William Mirola is a sociology professor at Marian University in Indianapolis, and co-editor of three previous works on religion and class. Redeeming Time is rooted in his dissertation in Sociology at Indiana University; he notes that he began the research some twenty years ago. Scholars have done little to examine the possibilities for and limits to cooperation between religion and labour. This book, examining a 50 year period in one city’s history, is a helpful contribution to this limited conversation. Labour historians have tended to underestimate the role of the clergy in the 19th century labour movement, Mirola observes, while religious historians have overvalued it.

Mirola defines the eight-hour movement as “a central narrative in American industrial development” in which we can “identify the origins of several features of the contemporary economic landscape.” (xii) These features include American Protestant churches’ limited involvement in the labour struggle, the labour movement’s focus on “pragmatic unionism,” and the growth of “the market’s untouchable morality of profit accumulation.” (xii) Mirola takes pains to argue that the failure of the clergy to take action in support of labour was not, as some would believe, inevitable. Nonetheless, this failure resulted in the loss of their moral legitimacy with respect to “the routine operations of capitalism.” (xii–xiii)

The focus on Protestants is clearly explained; the choice of Chicago, less so. Chicago workers were at the centre of national debates on the eight-hour day, a moral question that involved “beliefs about work, industrial justice, leisure, education, civic duty, and health. It was a means to ‘redeem time’ for workers.” (2) Catholics are largely ignored because they were not a significant religious group in Chicago at the time. And though the Catholic church was involved with immigrant worker issues in the city, Mirola notes, the church as a whole did not get involved with labour questions in a significant manner until after Rerum Novarum in 1891.

The book’s six chapters take a chronological approach. Chapter 1 discusses the views of Chicago Protestants in the 19th century, the emergence of various factions within the eight-hour movement, and the connections among labour reformers, employers, and clergy. Clergy saw employers as morally upright Christians, as evidenced by their business success and their church attendance. By contrast, they viewed the working class as potentially dangerous, and opposed the eight-hour day for fear that workers would use the time to drink alcohol or be immorally idle. As employers began to redefine their faith as strictly personal and limited to Sunday mornings, clergy support for them ceased to be unquestioning. Workers, meanwhile, “lacking access to other resources,” counted on churches to support their demands for an eight-hour day. (41)

Chapter 2 outlines the first eight-hour campaign in Chicago, in 1866–7, while the next two chapters focus on the period from 1873 to the aftermath of Haymarket. Over this period, the intransigence of employers and the unequal struggle between workers and employers evidenced by Haymarket resulted in growing sympathy for workers on the part of clergy. Clergy support for the eight-hour day emerged as a result. However, clergy took advantage of the eight-hour movement “to mobilize support for the temperance and Sabbatarian movements and to reinforce Protestant morality among an increasingly Catholic working class.” (116)

Chapter 5 examines the 1890s and the passage of the Sweatshop Act in Illinois. Three factions within the labour movement made use of religious rhetoric (craft unions, the Knights of Labor, and the Central Labor Union). Their importance declined as workers realized that avoiding religious justifications for the eight-hour day “allowed labor to speak a language that resonated with employers and minimized the risk of fragmenting a religiously divided labor movement.” (152) The Knights and the clu, though, saw religious rhetoric as “a means to frame a future social order based on cooperation and justice, the antithesis of industrial capitalism.” (153...