Volatile Alliances: Middle-Class Reformers and Working-Class Activists in Nineteenth-Century Boston

In November 1865, the ardent abolitionist and acclaimed orator Wendell Phillips told a group of Boston workers meeting in Faneuil Hall in support of the eight-hour workday that, throughout all his years of antislavery activity, he had opposed the idea that the “laborer must necessarily be owned by the capitalists or individuals.” As that struggle for the ownership of labor appeared to be ending “we fitly commence a struggle,” Phillips declared, “to define and arrange the true relations of capital and labor.”¹ The demand for an eight-hour workday was a key goal of the newly invigorated labor movement after the Civil War. In Massachusetts, the eight-hour movement was chiefly identified with Ira Steward, a prominent official of the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ International Union. In the summer of 1869, Steward and other labor activists, along with middle-class reformers, founded Boston’s Eight Hour League. By then, Steward and Phillips were well acquainted, and, like Steward, Phillips underscored the benefits to the community if workers had greater leisure. Echoing a precept basic to Steward’s reform creed, Phillips identified eight hours as “the first measure to be urged and the first rule to be established.”²

Steward and Phillips had a public falling out in 1872. In May of that year, the Eight Hour League, under Steward’s direction, censured Phillips, charging that the patrician reformer’s expansive rhetoric and agenda were “distracting public and political attention” and, as a result, were undermining the factory operatives’ current campaign for ten-hour legislation (p. 142). Phillips, in anticipation of the league’s censure, had already persuaded the Massachusetts Labor Union to pass a resolution that appeared to deliberately snub George McNeill, Steward’s closest ally and president of the Boston Eight Hour League. Shortly after Steward and Phillips’ personal and political breakup, the vigorous coalition of worker-activists and middle-class labor reformers in Massachusetts became hopelessly fragmented, a point that David Zonderman makes in Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston, his illuminating study of Boston’s labor reform movement from its origins in the 1830s to the dawn of the twentieth century.

Uneasy Allies traces the often-tenuous cross-class alliances that Boston’s middle-class reformers forged with working-class activists during the nineteenth century. In his well-researched and highly informative study, Zonderman chronicles the activities of the numerous labor reform organizations that campaigned for better working conditions and the dignity of labor in Boston during this period. Unlike David Montgomery, who’s magisterial Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) explained the underlying ideological and political meaning of labor reform, Uneasy Allies follows the tactical debates and evolving structures and strategies that dominated Boston’s labor reform movement. Zonderman’s account is one of uneven progress and internal tensions through the century’s middle decades and of decline by century’s end.

Boston in the 1830s was a thriving port city of more than sixty thousand inhabitants. The broad-based labor reform coalitions that began to form in these years championed both immediate and more utopian goals. Early labor reformers agreed that securing a shorter workday was a necessary first step to achieving more extensive social change. The key questions that animated the first cross-class alliances continued to energize the cross-class labor reform movement in Boston throughout the nineteenth century: whether to focus on immediate improvements in working conditions, especially the shorter workday, or on long-term changes in the social structure; whether to function primarily as educational or as activist organizations, and, if the latter, whether to agitate for an improved workplace or to engage in electoral politics; and whether to concentrate their efforts on local, state, or regional labor reform.

Boston’s first cross-class labor reform organizations emerged as alternatives to the city’s struggling trade unions and workingmen’s parties. Founded on February 16...