Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston

Epilogue

261 EPILOGUE Boston at the dawn of the twentieth century was certainly a different city in many respects from its antebellum ancestor. The previously modest-sized port had expanded nearly tenfold in population, and nearly thirty times in physical size. By 1900, immigrants and their children—many of them now Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe—constituted nearly three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants. These newcomers often flooded into the cramped flats and boardinghouses of the South End and North End, and toiled long hours in nearby sweatshops, despite the efforts of tenement house opponents to stamp out such egregious working conditions. Boston—like most American cities at that time—was a land of sharp contrasts in living conditions, and growing physical distances between the social classes. Not surprisingly, given this changing landscape of stark class relations, labor reform organizations in Boston also often looked quite different from their antebellum predecessors. The men and women who formed associations such as the NEA and the NEWA in the 1830s and 1840s came from a range of social, educational, and economic backgrounds—mechanics, “millgirls,” and ministers all had a role in leading these alliances. The groups sponsored a constant stream of conventions where those assembled debated labor reform in the broadest terms possible. In the midst of building these coalitions and of linking labor reform to a wider universe of social action, however, these pioneers sometimes lost opportunities to press the case for practical gains at the workplace. Though the demand for a shorter workday could be heard at nearly every meeting, these associations never brought all their organizational energy to bear on that essential need. By 1900, the women and men who led organizations such as the Anti– Tenement House League and the Massachusetts Consumers’ League often came from wealthier families. These groups frequently employed educated experts to investigate the conditions of labor and propose legislative remedies 262 Uneasy Allies for specific problems. The cry for shorter working hours could still be heard in the city’s tenements and sweatshops, but the eight-hour campaign had to share the stage with other labor reform strategies. What these leagues achieved in legal victories, however, came at a price: a narrowed vision of social change and a constricted leadership of the coalitions. To be sure, these changes across nineteenth-century Boston were uneven and sometimes halting. Well into the 1890s, for example, the college-educated women at the Denison House settlement actively organized female wage workers and even served as leaders of union locals. And W. D. P. Bliss’s Church of the Carpenter gathered workers and reformers together for spiritual, social , and political communion. Thus, even as expert-driven, hierarchical labor reform organizations assumed a more prominent role in Boston, remnants of earlier cross-class models still could be found in the city’s neighborhoods and churches. In Boston’s labor reform scene at century’s end, with its pastiche of labor reform groups looking to both the past and the future for their inspiration, unexpected ironies and paradoxes abounded. When reformers assumed command of some labor reform efforts, they proved to be anything but dreamy idealists. Groups such as consumers’ leagues often narrowed their focus to legislative agendas carefully crafted by lawyers and industrial experts drawing on field research and the emerging social sciences. Meanwhile, purportedly pragmatic workers got what they wished for in limited doses, as the state increased its regulation of working hours and shopfloor conditions (in some industries). Yet many of these same workers were not content with just modest legislative victories. They still believed in a broader vision of social justice and did not intend to hand over the ongoing campaign for labor reform to organizations dominated by middle-class reformers and experts. The struggles of labor reformers and activists in nineteenth-century Boston to construct stable alliances and strive for social change can offer lessons to coalition builders today. Creating cross-class organizations was, and is, just plain hard work. To bring men and women together from varying economic , educational, and social backgrounds, and get them to agree (if ever) on a common agenda and a shared strategy for achieving organizational goals, takes a great amount of time and patience. Organizing is never done in a vacuum; every member of a coalition brings to every meeting his or her own assumptions about what needs to be done and how best to do it. And those assumptions are shaped by each individual’s economic...