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

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION I From the early 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century, more than a dozen labor reform organizations emerged and later disappeared in the streets, halls, and tenements of Boston.1 These groups brought together men and women from widely divergent economic and educational backgrounds— including ministers, “millgirls,” and machinists—to campaign for better working conditions and dignity for all who labored. This book is the first study to analyze comprehensively how these workers and reformers struggled to build cross-class labor reform alliances in a nineteenth-century American city. In particular, this monograph pursues fundamental historical questions about the impact of class, gender, and ethnicity on the ideological arguments and institutional structures and strategies of this reform impulse as it evolved throughout the nineteenth century. What motivated working-class activists and middle-class reformers to join together and create cross-class organizations devoted to the cause of labor reform? What internal debates and external pressures caused these groups to break down (even as new alliances formed); and how did these forces change over the course of the nineteenth century? What did workers and reformers learn about building coalitions, exercising political power, and struggling for social change within these complex and volatile alliances; and can those lessons still speak to activists and reformers today? American historians have been studying nineteenth-century labor reform organizations ever since the nineteenth century; but they have never developed a comprehensive analytical framework for understanding these groups, nor have they rigorously traced their evolution over the entire century. Pioneers in the field of American labor history placed cross-class labor reform organizations in the context of much broader institutional studies of trade union development. These “old” labor historians emphasized conflict between 2 Uneasy Allies pragmatic union leaders and utopian reformers who distracted organized labor from basic workplace issues—wages, hours, collective bargaining rights— with unrealistic radical schemes. The “new” labor history broke down the old dichotomy of workers versus reformers and argued for a more nuanced understanding of these complex cross-class labor reform coalitions. More recent studies were often narrower in their chronological scope but far more encompassing in their analysis of both the tensions and the cooperative bonds between working-class activists and middle-class reformers. These historians clearly demonstrated that the static bipolar model of practical workers and idealistic reformers does not apply to nineteenth-century labor reform groups in which men and women often shared organizational leadership, pragmatic goals, and visionary ideals. But these new explanatory frameworks still did not provide a coherent chronological scheme for tracing historical development throughout the nineteenth century or offer a rigorous analysis of the campaign’s evolving structures and strategies. This book, by tracing cross-class labor reform organizations in Boston from the 1830s to 1900, provides just such a chronological account across much of the nineteenth century and explains organizational changes over time. What emerges from this investigation is a narrative of both progress and declension that spans nearly three-quarters of a century. The backdrop to this story is the ebb and flow of struggle year upon year to assemble and hold together crossclass alliances. Labor reform organizations existed in a continual state of formation , disintegration, and reconstitution decade after decade. Individual activists and reformers reappeared constantly in an ever shifting constellation of leagues and associations. Endlessly debating the very meaning of labor reform and the best strategy to secure justice for workers, wrestling with questions of religious influence and labor protest, facing constant external political opposition and economic constraints, and searching for a place to call home, these coalitions endured enormous ongoing strain. This continual organizational struggle, however, was not entirely inchoate . As the nineteenth century progressed, both workers and reformers searched for strategies that would give more political and moral leverage to the labor reform crusade. They argued about focusing on the workplace itself and the hours of labor, on direct action more than just debate, on legislative lobbying, and on the city of Boston and its poorest neighborhoods. But such ideological consistency and clarity, and organizational coherence and continuity, were not easily achieved—and, once secured, often came with unintended costs and limitations. To be specific, this study reveals that the labor reform campaign in nineteenth-century Boston had two phases: one from its origins in the early 1830s through the 1870s, and the second beginning in the 1870s and extending to the end of...