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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Recent theoretical and historical studies of working-class formation have raised important doubts about standard interpretations of the American working class. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the renewed debate over “American exceptionalism,” that unexpected combination of political conservatism and weak working-class institutions in the nation that underwent the modern world's first democratic revolution. Once it was popular to argue that American workers felt no need for collective action, either because of a classlessness that was firmly rooted in the psyche of the first new nation or because of an innate job consciousness that was able to attain full flowering only in the United States, that most bourgeois of countries. But two decades of social history have documented such a rich diversity of militant working-class activity that such explanations are now rarely invoked.
1. Recent contributions to the American exceptionalism debate include Wilentz, Sean, “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1929,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 26 (1984): 1–24Google Scholar; Nick Salvatore, “Response,” ibid., 25–30; Michael Hanagan, “Response,” ibid., 31–36; Oestreicher, Richard, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1941,” Journal of American History, 74 (4): 1257–1286 (03 1988)Google Scholar; Forbath, William E., “The Shaping of the American Labor Movement,” Harvard Law Review 102 (6): 1109–1256 (04 1989)Google Scholar; and the essays in Shafer, Byron E., ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
2. The “Thompsonian” characterization is Richard Oestreicher's; see “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940,” 1258. The quote is from Wilentz, “Against Exceptionalism,” 18.
3. Briefly, working-class republicanism is an ideology, grounded in American equal rights traditions, that asserts a fundamental contradiction between the dependence inherent in capitalist social relations (“the wages system”) and the republican system of government. Especially informative discussions of workers' extension of republican concepts are found in Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Forbath, William E., “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsm Law Review (1985): 767–817Google Scholar; Oestreicher, Richard, “Terrence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor, and Artisanal Republicanism,” in Dubovsky, Melvyn and Van Tine, Warren, eds., Labor Leaders in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); pp. 30–61Google Scholar; and Schneider, Linda, “The Citizen Striker: Workers' Ideology in the Homestead Strike of 1892,” Labor History 23 (1): 47–66 (winter 1982)Google Scholar. The Knights' appropriation of working-class republicanism is discussed later.
4. Rosenzweig, Roy, “Reforming Working-Class Play: Workers. Parks and Playgrounds in an Industrial City, 1870–1920,” in Stephenson, Charles and Asher, Robert, eds., Life and Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 150–176Google Scholar; Brundage, David, “The Producing Classes and the Saloon: Denver in the 1880's,” Labor History, 26 (winter 1985), 29–52Google Scholar; Couvares, Frank, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
5. This paragraph draws from McNall, Scott, The Road to Rebellion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chap. 1Google Scholar.
6. The best comprehensive account of the Knights of Labor is found in Ware, Norman J., The Labor Movement in the United States 1860–1895 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959 reprint of original 1929 edition)Google Scholar. Accounts associated with the “old” labor history are Perlman, Selig, “Upheaval and Reorganization,” in Commons, John R. et al. , Vol. 2, pt. 6, History of Labor in the United States (New York: Macmillian, 1918)Google Scholar; Perlman, Selig, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York: Macmillian, 1928): pp. 182–200Google Scholar; and Grob, Gerald N., Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865–1900 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969)Google Scholar. Beginning in the late 1960s, many scholars identified with the “new” labor history began to reexamine the Knights, spurred by Montgomery's, David challenge to the old labor history in Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967)Google Scholar, and aided by Jonathan Garlock's careful construction of the “Knights of Labor Data Bank” (distributed by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Science as ICPSR 0029 since the mid-1970s). Their works include Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Kealey, Gregory and Palmer, Bryan, Dreaming of What Might Be, The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Oestreicher, Richard, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Ross, Steven J., Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
7. For example: true, the Knights briefly united skilled and less-skilled behind a class banner, but its meteoric rise was followed by an equally dramatic decline, which, according to this line of argument, was the only possibility given the hostility of the American environment and the American worker to class mobilization. This is the tenor of both Perlman's and Grob's account. See “Upheaval and Reorganization,” esp. pp. 396–397 and Workers and Utopia, esp. p. 133.
8. The suggestion that we might usefully conceive of two moments of working-class formation was first raised by Hobsbawm, Eric in the essay, “The Making of the Working Class 1870–1914 in Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon, 1984)Google Scholar. It was taken up and pursued further in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. On the first moment of working-class formation in England, France, and the United States, see Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Viking Books, 1963)Google Scholar; Sewell, William H. Jr, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor From the Old Regime to 1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Wilentz, Chants Democratic; Amy Bridges, “Becoming American: The Working Classes in the United States before the Civil War,” in Katznelson and Zolberg, Working-Class Formation, pp. 157–196.
9. For background on the new unionism, see Hunt, E.H., British Labour History 1815–1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), chap. 9Google Scholar: Clegg, H.A., Fox, Alan, and Thompson, A.F., A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), Vol. IGoogle Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric, “General Labour Unions in Britain, 1889–1914,” pp. 179–203 in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964)Google Scholar; and “The ‘New Unionism’ in Perspective,” pp. 152–175 in Workers.
10. Hobsbawm, “The ‘New Unionism’ in Perspective,” p. 157.
11. Hanagan, Michael P., The Logic of Solidarity: Artisans and Industrial Workers in Three French Towns, 1871–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Shorter, Edward and Tilly, Charles, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), esp. pp. 150–172Google Scholar; Friedman, Gerald C., “Politics and Unions: Government, Ideology and the Labor Movement in the United States and France, 1880–1914” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1985), esp. chap. 2Google Scholar.
12. The Condition of the Working Class in England (Stanford University Press, 1968), Appendix III, “Preface to the American Edition of 1887,” p. 357.
13. Hobsbawm, “The ‘New Unionism’ in Perspective,” 157; Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France, pp. 48–50; Jeremy Brecher, “The Knights and Strikes, 1885–6,” paper presented at the Knights of Labor Centennial Symposium, May 1979, Chicago, Illinois, 6.
14. Eventually the Confederation General du Travail outlawed the practice, but it was accepted in its early, formative years.
15. See Fink, Workingmen's Democracy, chap. 2, for a discussion and list of these campaigns. The Knights were represented at the 1890 political convention that resulted in the preliminary organization of the People's party but did not officially endorse the new party until 1893, when Terrence Powderly was removed from office.
16. Wright, Carol, “An Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labor,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, I (01 1887), p. 141Google Scholar; McNeill, George E., The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971 reprint of the original 1887 edition), p. 459Google Scholar; Butler, John L., “History of Knights of Labor Organization in Pennsylvania,” Annual Report of the Secretary of Internal Affairs of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1887 (Harrisburg: E.K. Meyers, 1888), Part III, p. G 33Google Scholar; Elizabeth Daily Journal, 3/16/1886.
17. Wright, p. 157; Butler, p. G 33.
18. The first part of this paragraph draws especially from: Wilentz, “Against Exceptionalism,” pp. 13–16; Fink, Workingmen's Democracy, chap. 1; Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, pp. 115–119.
19. Because the Knights' ideology did not express a clearly drawn proletarianism, some scholars, especially those associated with the “old” labor history, argue that the Knights' program was “backward-looking,” and by implication, doomed. Gerald Grob, for example, contends that the Knights' emphasis on producer cooperatives and the abolition of the wage system was hopelessly at variance with the direction of industrial society. A similar argument has recently been advanced by Victoria Hattam in her otherwise-excellent article, “Economic Visions and Political Strategies: American Labor and the State, 1865–1869,” Studies in American Political Development 4: 82–129. The Knights, she writes, “considered themselves citizens and producers rather than workers or laborers” [p. 91, my emphasis]. As a result, she suggests, they attempted to represent both a middle-class and a working-class constituency, an effort which prevented them from functioning as a working-class movement.
Such arguments, I believe, mistakenly assume that the discourses of modern labor movements break radically and irrevocably with the conceptual categories of past struggles. Rarely does this occur; much more frequently, as I attempt to demonstrate below, it is the case that newer understandings of social divisions are layered on top of older ones. Moreover, arguments like Hattam's ignore the way that this layering shifts over time: the Knights' interpretation of social divisions was not the same in 1886 as it had been in 1869, or even in 1883. (See note 21 for some evidence of this; for an expanded discussion, see Voss, Kim, The Making of American Exceptionalism: Workers, Employers, and the Knights of Labor, forthcoming 1993, Cornell University Press, chap. 2.)Google Scholar.
20. It is possible to trace the increasing clarity with which the Knights distinguished workers from employers. In the Knights' initiation ceremony, which was written in 1869 by Stephens, the Order declared that it had “no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism with necessary capital.” By 1883, when Robert Layton, the national secretary of the Order testified before Congress, he stated that capitalists were ineligible for membership although employers who respected labor (which he and other Knights defined as paying union wages, abiding by union rules, and having experience as a wage-earner) could join. And by 1886, Knights' members in Newark, New Jersey were preventing all employers from marching in Labor Day parades. (Along similar lines, Oestreicher reports that by 1885 any labor leader in Detroit who tried to deny the existence of class conflict was going against the current of the labor movement. See Solidarity, p. 133.)
Quotes are from Cook, Ezra, publisher, Knights of Labor Illustrated (Chicago: Ezra A. Cook, 1886), p. 30Google Scholar; Report of the Committee of the Senate Upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885), Vol. I, pp. 2, 5. The actions of Knights' members in Newark are documented later.
21. On republicanism and the French labor movement, see Aminzade, Ronald, Class, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Toulouse, France (Albany State University of New York Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Moss, Bernard H., The Origins of the French Labor Movement 1830–1914: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Reid, Donald, The Miners of Decazeville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. On the use of producerist categories, see Perrot, Michelle, Workers on Strike: France 1871–1890 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), esp. 223Google Scholar. Socialist thinking, too, often showed the influence of producerist categories. Haupt notes that French socialists often depicted the petite bourgeoisie as in a “precarious and poverty stricken condition,” and as the victims of large-scale capitalist exploitation. See Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, “The Petite Bourgeoisie in France, 1850–1914: In Search of the Juste Milieu?” in Crossick, Geoffrey and Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, eds., Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth Century Europe (London, Methuen, 1984)Google Scholar.
22. Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 5, esp. pp. 117–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobsbawm, Workers, p. 260.
23. As a British labor journalist put it in 1897, “Men grope in a kind of linguistic bewilderment until the phrase monger comes along, and gives them a proper form of expression.” Quoted in Asa Briggs, “The Language of ‘Mass’ and ‘Masses’” in The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs, Vol. I, p. 45.
24. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States 1860–1895, p. 25.
25. Wright, “An Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labor”; Jonathan Garlock. “A Structural Analysis of the Knights of Labor” (Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1974).
26. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States 1860–1895, p. 66.
27. Voss, Kim, “Labor Organization and Class Alliance: Industries, Communities, and the Knights of Labor,” Theory and Society, 17 (1988): pp. 329–364CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28. The account of the General Executive Board's actions following Haymarket comes from Salvatore, Nick, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 68–69Google Scholar.
29. Oestreicher, Richard, “A Note on Knights of Labor Membership,” Labor History, 25 (I): 102–108 (winter 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30. Perlman, “Upheaval and Reorganization,” and A Theory of the Labor Movement.
31. Ulman, Lloyd, The Rise of the National Trade Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 374–377Google Scholar.
32. Foner, Philip, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 2, (New York: International Publishers, 1955), pp. 157–160Google Scholar.
33. Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy; Richard J. Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation; Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge.
34. For example, in Workers on the Edge, Ross argues that the Knights' ability to forge a strong sense of solidarity resulted from the decision made by Cincinnati's mayor to call out the local militia in the course of the May Day strikes. This act so outraged Cincinnati's workers, who felt that they were law-abiding while those in power were not, that they temporarily transcended their separate and often opposed identities as citizens and workers. However, because this unity was based on actions taken by those outside the working class, it did not hold, and the Knights collapsed amid increasingly bitter battles over ideology and tactics.
Since few mayors reacted to the May Day strikes by calling out the militia, it is difficult, at this juncture, to weave Ross's explanation for the Knights' failure into a more general explanation.
35. These dates were chosen to cover the period of greatest Knights' activity and to minimize missing data. Two hundred three local assemblies were active in this period and were originally included in the analysis; nine were later dropped because of missing data. In total, 97% of all New Jersey locals were founded between 1879 and 1895.
36. Dissolution dates were coded as follows: For locals that had their charters revoked by the national office, and for those that were formally declared “lapsed” because of failure to pay dues, the dates of these events were recorded. For other locals, there is no known date of termination. In these cases, I assigned dissolution dates according to the last reference I found in either national or local sources.
37. For histories of the Knights in New Jersey, see Troy, Leo, Organized Labor in New Jersey (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1965)Google Scholar and Voss, Making of American Exceptionalism, chap. 3. The figure on the proportion of total manufacturing workers organized in the Knights is based on information given in Tenth Annual Report of the New Jersey Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industry (Somerville, NJ: The Unionist-Gazette Printing House, 1888), p. 15.
38. Voss, “Labor Organization and Class Alliance.”
39. All measures of the local union movement were constructed as time-varying covariates.
40. Further details about the industry classification can be found in Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism, Appendix 1. The term “local industry” is used rather than simply “industry” because I mean to refer only to the workers in a single town. For example, the workers employed in Paterson's silk industry constitute one local industry and the workers employed in Jersey City's silk industry compose another.
41. Election information was gathered from Fink. Workingmen's Democracy, pp. 28–29, John Swinton's Paper, and local newspapers. I am indebted to Leon Fink for providing additional information about the dates of elections reported in his book.
42. For example, see Lipset, Seymour Martin, Trow, Martin A., and Coleman, James S., Union Democracy (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1962), pp. 170–186Google Scholar; Gordon, David M., Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 116–126Google Scholar; Elster, Jon, Making Sense of Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 355Google Scholar.
43. Hanagan, Michael, The Logic of Solidarity (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 22Google Scholar.
44. Other arguments have also been made which would lead one to expect that one-industry towns might encourage longevity. McDougall, Mary Lynn, “Consciousness and Community: The Workers of Lyon, 1830–1850,” Journal of Social History,” 12 (1978), pp. 129–145Google Scholar; Walkowitz, Daniel J., Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–1984. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Griffen, Clyde and Griffen, Sally, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-nineteenth-century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 12–13Google Scholar, all suggest that because one-industry towns concentrate large numbers of workers who share similar life changes and grievances, they tend to strengthen solidarity. Others, however, have pointed out that workers are more vulnerable to employer power in one industry towns. (See, for example, Hareven, Tamara K. and Langenbach, Randolph, Amoskeag (New York: Pantheon, 1978.)Google Scholar
45. Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, pp. 172–187. To fully assess the impact of ethnic diversity on the failure of Knights' locals, one would need two other types of information: data on the ethnic composition of the industry and the local assembly. Unfortunately, this information simply does not exist.
46. Reduced models eliminate clearly nonsignificant variables in order to stabilize coefficient estimates for the significant factors.
47. This figure was obtained by adding up the number of clerks, storekeepers, physicians, and teachers in the mixed assemblies. It is possible that some of the trade assemblies included employers; the New Jersey Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industry, Tenth Annual Report, 1887 (Sommerville: Unionist-Gazette Printing House, 1888) (hereafter NJBSLI) does not indicate whether the members of the trades assemblies are employers or employees. However, there is little evidence in any of the newspapers or other sources I have found on the New Jersey Knights that many employers joined the Knights. The few I have uncovered were labor activists like the editors of the New Jersey Unionist and the Trenton Sunday Advertiser.
48. Employers in one-industry towns frequently organized boards of trade and boards of manufactures that functioned much like employers' associations. Thus, it is likely that the one-industry-town variable is partially measuring the impact of employers' organization.
49. Although the inclusion of time periods adds to the complexity of Table 2, it also improves the model's fit greatly. Period effects were not estimated for the models reported in Table 2 because there were too few cases to support a more complex model.
50. Models were run in which the values of the coefficients for wage differentials and number of establishments were allowed to vary, but their values were so similar that the model reported in Table 3 constrains the coefficients to be the same in the two time periods.
51. In general, these findings are plausible and can be interpreted in a relatively straightforward manner. However, the coefficient for percent female requires additional comment. The percentage of the female labor force in the local industry has a large and positive effect on survival in the post-1886 period. Two very different interpretations of this result are possible. First, it may be that the gender composition of local assemblies reflects the gender composition of the labor force, in which case this finding would indicate the viability of locals with female members in the difficult post-1886 period. The work of Alice Kessler Harris and Carole Turbin is suggestive in this regard; both argue that while women workers were more difficult to organize, once organized they could be much more militant than men. (See Out to Work [New York: Oxford University Press, 1982] and “Beyond Conventional Wisdom: Women's Wage Work, Household Economic Contribution, and Labor Activism in a Mid-Nineteenth Century Working Class Community,” in Groneman, Carol and Norton, Mary Beth, eds., To Toil the Livelong Day [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987], p. 58.)Google ScholarBut it is equally likely that the membership of the local does not reflect the composition of the local industry; in that case, this finding would suggest that male workers had an additional incentive to maintain organization when the threat of female substitution was great. To get a rough indication of which interpretation fits the evidence, I generated a list of all less-skilled locals that survived five years or longer and identified the eight of these that were located in local industries with higher-than-average percentages of females. I then matched these with the membership data on the locals given in the 1887 Report of the New Jersey Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of these eight locals, one was an exclusively female local, four had some female representation (varying from a low of 5 percent to a high of 29 percent), one had no female members, and two could not be matched. Thus, it appears that the coefficient for percent female should be interpreted as indicating that locals with female members tended to survive longer.
52. Bonnett, , Employers' Associations in the United States (New York: Vantage, 1956)Google Scholar; Hilbert, F.W., “Employers' Associations in the United States,” in Hollander, Jacob H. and Barnett, George, eds., Studies in American Trade Unionism (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1906), pp. 183–217Google Scholar.
53. Voss, “Labor Organization and Class Alliance.”
54. Holt, James, “Trade Unionism in the British and U.S. Steel Industries, 1880–1914: A Comparative Study,” in The Labor History Reader, ed. Leab, Daniel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 166–196Google Scholar.
55. Jacoby, Sanford, “American Exceptionalism Revisited: The Importance of Management,” pp. 173–200 in Jacoby, S., ed., Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers (New York: Columbia University Press), 1991Google Scholar. See also Jonathan Zeitlin, “From Labour History to the History of Industrial Relations,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 40 (2), pp. 175–176.
56. Hobsbawm, Workers, p. 161.
57. Fox, Alan, History and Heritage: The Social Origins of the British Industrial Relations System (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 189–190Google Scholar.
58. Stearns, Peter N., “Against the Strike Threat: Employer Policy toward Labor Agitation in France, 1900–1914, Journal of Modern History, 40 (1968), 474–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerald Friedman, “The Decline of Paternalism and the Making of the Employer Class, France, 1870–1914,” in Jacoby, Masters to Managers.
59. Friedman, ibid.; Bonnett, Employers' Associations in the United States.
60. Friedman, Gerald, “The State and the Making of the Working Class: France and the United States, 1880–1914,” Theory and Society, 17 (1988), 403–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61. See also Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France, pp. 28–45.
62. In New Jersey the only federal intervention in this period occurred in the course of the Knights' 1887 general strike against the coal companies. The courts put the railroads into receivership and then used the receivership as a way of protecting strikebreakers. Workers saw this intervention as merely one more trick of the corrupt, monopolistic railroads; they did not view it as state action. Similarly, available evidence suggests that injunctions were sometimes threatened but rarely actually used.
63. Samuel H. Popper, “Newark, N.J., 1870–1910: Chapters in the Evolution of an American Metropolis” (Ph.D., New York University, 1951); Nichols, Jeannette Paddock, “The Industrial History of New Jersey in the Middle Period” and “The Industrial History of New Jersey Since 1861,” in Kill, Irving S., ed., New Jersey: A History (New York, The American Historical Society, 1930), pp. 593–615 and 892–940Google Scholar.
64. Hirsch, Susan E., The Roots of the American Working Class (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
65. Newark Evening News [hereafter, NEN], 4/26/84; NEN 4/28/84.
66. New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, 170; NEN, 11/26/1887.
67. NEN, 6/12/1888; United States Bureau of Labor, The The Third Annual Report: Strikes and Lockouts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1888), pp. 332–342Google Scholar.
68. Nearly one half of all strikes in 1886 involved less-skilled workers; ibid.
69. In addition, leather manufacturing stood at the center of Newark's diverse economy, quite literally in that many other industries depended upon the by-products of leather processing. Trimmings from hides were sold to Newark glue factories; splits found a ready market in the trunk factories; shoe manufacturers bought trimmings and roundings for insoles; and chemical factories purchased hide shavings, which were an essential ingredient for making prussite of potash for Prussian blue. See Popper, “Newark, N.J.,” pp. 28–29.
70. NEN 5/10/86.
71. NEN, 5/11/86.
72. NEN, 1/5/87; New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 258–261. The majority of the workers who toiled in Newark's leather factories were of Irish and German origin. In 1880, nearly a third of the labor force had been born in Ireland and a fifth had immigrated from Germany. German workers were found disproportionately in skilled positions while Irish immigrants were employed largely as unskilled laborers. See Popper, “Newark, N.J.,” p. 27; Clark, Victor S., History of Manufactures in the United States, Vol. 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), p. 465Google Scholar; U. S. Senate, Immigrants in Industries (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911), p. 39Google Scholar.
73. NEN, 1/6/87, 1/7/87; New York Times, 1/7/87.
74. For further evidence, see Voss, Making of American Exceptionalism, chap. 6.
75. NEN, 4/9/85.
76. NEN, 6/24/1885, 7/24/1885, 7/27/1885, 9/6/1886, 9/7/1886.
77. Perlman, “Upheaval and Reorganization,” p. 414.
78. Employers' Associations file, study data; see also, NEN, 5/17/1886.
79. Bonnett, History of Employers' Associations. p. 258. In the words of one legal historian, the repeal of the conspiracy law was the Magna Carta for unionism in New Jersey. It was the most important legislative victory ever won by the New Jersey Labor Congress, a state labor federation dominated by the Knights. See Newman, Philip Charles, The Labor Legislation of New Jersey (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943), pp. 65–68Google Scholar, and Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism, chap. 3.
80. For example, see the speech by Charles Litchman reported in the NEN, 8/25/1887.
81. The arguments over political action followed the campaigns of two labor candidates in the 1886 election. With little preparation, the Trades Assembly sponsored two labor candidates — one (a Knights' member whose platform was the Order's Declaration of Principles) for a congressional seat, and one for a state assembly seat (NJBSLI, 1887; NEN, 11/03/1886). The assembly candidate lost by a mere six votes and the congressional candidate (whose opponents included Newark's mayor and the incumbent congressman) came in third with 16 percent of the vote (NEN, 11/3/1886). Given the circumstances, both candidates placed respectably, but nonetheless the electoral loss precipitated acrimonious debates over political action in several meetings of the Trades Assembly, as well as the withdrawal of three craft unions (NEN, 11/11/1886).
Conflicts over trade autonomy were precipitated, as elsewhere, by the growing hostility between the Cigar Makers' International Union and the national leaders of the Knights. There were two local assemblies of cigar workers in Newark (LA 3044 and LA 6040) and many, if not all of their members, were also members of the Cigar Makers' International Union. Because of its proximity to New York City, Newark cigar makers were parties to the daily ins and outs of the dispute. Nonetheless, Knights' and Trade Assembly leaders were able to keep the conflict from spilling over to the local labor movement until February 1887. But when it did spill over, it was a source of bitter debate, and tended to pit many German workers (who supported the ICMU) against the Knights (NEN, 2/24/1887, 2/26/1887, 3/3/1887, 3/23/1887, 3/31/1887, 4/7/1887). Although a face-saving compromise was eventually worked out whereby ICMU members could rejoin the Knights, this came only after the collapse of one local assembly, a loss of membership from many others, and lasting tension in the Trades Assembly over the issue of trade autonomy.
The continuing debate over Haymarket, the fairness of the trial, and calls for clemency when the death sentence was imposed also exacerbated tensions among Newark's workers, although not to the extent that Oestreicher reports for Detroit. See Solidarity and Fragmentation. pp. 199–211.
82. There are no reliable membership statistics for late 1886, or early 1887, so it is difficult to document the timing and scope of the membership loss. NJBSLI reports that there were 7,000 members at end of 1887. The General Assembly Proceedings put the membership of DA 51 (in good standing) at 4,766 in July 1887, but this certainly underestimates Newark total Knights memberships both because several locals were by then affiliated with NTAs, and because other locals were behind in their dues.
83. As in Detroit, the consequences of each dispute caused dissension within each faction of the labor movement as often as they pitted one organization or ethnic group against another. See Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation.
84. Some cigar workers stayed with the Knights by becoming members of LA 1364.
85. There may have been an earlier effort to organize the employers, but if so, it was a weak and unstable association. See Bonnett, History of Employers' Associations, 279.
86. NEN, 8/11/1887.
87. NEN, 6/8/1887; New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 228–229; Journal of United Labor, 9/241887, Perlman, “Upheaval and Reorganization,” p. 415.
88. NEN, 6/11/1887, 7/25/1887: New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 258–261.
89. Evidence that the LMANJ was having trouble recruiting employers can be found in the NEN 5/9/1887. J. H. Halsey told the reporter that “[t]he manufacturers also organized a short time ago and wanted us [Halsey and his partner] to join them…. We thought we had better paddle our own canoe, and declined to join.”
90. NEN, 7/14/1887.
91. NEN, 7/14/1887; John Swinton's Paper, 7/31/1887; New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 228–229.
92. NEN, 7/26/1887.
93. NEN, 7/28/1887.
94. NEN, 7/26/1887, 7/27/1887. This estimate seems high; in the actual course of the strike, nowhere near that amount was raised.
95. NEN, 7/27/1887. 7/28/1887.
96. NEN, 8/1/1887, 8/2/1887, 8/3/1887.
97. NEN, 8/4/1887.
98. It is difficult to get reliable statistics on the number of workers who actually went out in the two shops because this itself became a source of constant dispute in the newspapers. On August 8, the Knights reported that all but 14 of the 250 employees struck at T. P. Howell's shop, and 70 out of 73 men struck Patrick Reilly & Sons. The employers denied this, Howell claiming that half his men were at work (NEN, 8/8/1887). There was probably some exaggeration on both sides, although, at least initially, it appears that the employers were exaggerating more. After all, they flatly refused to let employees look in their shops despite the fact that if they were telling the truth, they had every reason to have this reported. Additionally, it is known that they went to great lengths to obtain strikebreakers. Overall, the New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, 260–261, records that 1,255 workers struck/were locked out of a work force of 1,800.
99. NEN, 8/8/1887.
100. NEN, 8/11/1887; New Brunswick Daily Home News 8/8/1887, 8/11/1887.
101. New Brunswick Daily Home News, 8/11/1887; NEN, 8/15/1887.
102. NEN, 8/11/1887, 8/23/1887.
103. NEN, 8/29/1887.
104. Popper “Newark, N.J.,” p. 73.
105. New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 42–46.
106. NEN, 8/16/1887.
107. The firms were Geo. A. Halsey, T. P. Howell, and Blanchard Bros. & Lane. See NEN, 8/11/1887; New Brunswick Daily Home News, 8/11/1887. At this time, T. P. Howell was exporting more patent leather than all other manufacturers in the United States combined, and Blanchard Bros. & Lane's was one of the largest employers in Newark.
108. NEN, 8/9/1887, 8/10/1887.
109. NEN, 8/10/1887.
110. NEN, 8/11/1887.
111. New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 258–261.
112. NEN, 8/15/1887.
113. NEN 8/11/1887, 8/15/1887, 7/19/1887. In 1885, Congress had passed a contract labor law after heavy lobbying by labor. It prevented employers from importing workers under contract to the United States. On August 15 the LMANJ told reporters that it would wait until the European workers it was hiring as strikebreakers were in the United States before it asked them to sign a contract. That way, it would avoid problems with contract labor laws. But on August 19, Knights' members were able to convince the Commissioner of Immigration to prevent six workers from entering the country because of suspected contract-labor-law violations. On August 24, the manufacturers retaliated against the Immigration Officers by filing a grievance against them for aiding the Knights (NEN, 8/24/1887).
114. NEN, 8/20/1887.
115. NEN, 8/25/1887.
116. New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 258–261.
117. NEN, 8/29/1887.
118. NEN, 9/2/1887.
119. New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 258–61.
120. New Jersey Bureau of Statistics, Tenth Annual Report, pp. 231. The decline of the Trades Assembly is chronicled in the Newark Evening News throughout 1888 and early 1889; and the disarray of the Knights' strike efforts is evident especially in accounts of the brewers' strike that occurred in April 1888. See also the April issues of the New Jersey Unionist.
121. Offe, Claus and Wiesenthal, Helmut, “Two Logics of Collective Action,” in Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
122. Again, the French case is instructive. In the late nineteenth century, French workers also tried to use divisions between small and large employers to win strikes. In 1901, for example, striking filemakers refused to negotiate with any employer who had not actually worked as a filemaker. As Michael Hanagan notes, workers claimed that other employers wouldn't understand the issues, but this was actually a ploy to appeal to smaller manufacturers. Similarly, Donald Reid notes that workers often sought the support of middle-class employers and shopkeepers in Decazeville. It is useful to remember Joan Scott's remark about Chartism when considering that American and French workers attempted to enlist small employers as allies in their strikes: “political movements develop tactically, not logically, improvising appeals, incorporating and adapting various ideas to their particular cause.” Hanagan, The Logic of Solidarity, p. 188, and personal communication; Reid, Miners of Decazeville; Scott, , “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (spring, 1987): 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
123. I stress that this is only the beginning of a new explanation. In particular, the portions of the explanation which rely on the Newark case — that is, the argument about what happened once the employers organized — will have to be verified and amended by studies of confrontations between the knights and employers' associations in other communities. It would be especially important to examine such confrontations in a much larger city, like New York, and a smaller, one-industry town like Paterson or Bayonne.
124. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, esp. pp. 157–160.
125. Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation.