A History of Trade Unionism in the United States | Page 8

of 1828, had served as a preliminary for a political movement, the General Trades' Union took especial precaution and provided in the constitution that "no party, political or religious questions shall at any time be agitated in or acted upon in the Union." Its official organ, the National Laborer, declared that "the Trades' Union never will be political because its members have learned from experience that the introduction of politics into their societies has thwarted every effort to ameliorate their conditions."
The repudiation of active politics did not carry with it a condemnation of legislative action or "lobbying." On the contrary, these years witnessed the first sustained legislative campaign that was ever conducted by a labor organization, namely the campaign by the New York Trades' Union for the suppression of the competition from prison-made goods. Under the pressure of the New York Union the State Legislature created in 1834 a special commission on prison labor with its president, Ely Moore, as one of the three commissioners. On this question of prison labor the trade unionists clashed with the humanitarian prison reformers, who regarded productive labor by prisoners as a necessary means of their reform to an honest mode of living; and the humanitarian won. After several months' work the commission submitted what was to the Union an entirely unsatisfactory report. It approved the prison-labor system as a whole and recommended only minor changes. Ely Moore signed the report, but a public meeting of workingmen condemned it.
The rediscovered solidarity between the several trades now embodied in the city trades' unions found its first expression on a large scale in a ten-hour movement.
The first concerted demand for the ten-hour day was made by the workingmen of Baltimore in August 1833, and extended over seventeen trades. But the mechanics' aspiration for a ten-hour day--perhaps the strongest spiritual inheritance from the preceding movement for equal citizenship,[5] had to await a change in the general condition of industry to render trade union effort effective before it could turn into a well sustained movement. That change finally came with the prosperous year of 1835.
The movement was precipitated in Boston. There, as we saw, the carpenters had been defeated in an effort to establish a ten-hour day in 1825,[6] but made another attempt in the spring of 1835. This time, however, they did not stand alone but were joined by the masons and stone-cutters. As before, the principal attack was directed against the "capitalists," that is, the owners of the buildings and the real estate speculators. The employer or small contractor was viewed sympathetically. "We would not be too severe on our employers," said the strikers' circular, which was sent out broadcast over the country, "they are slaves to the capitalists, as we are to them."
The strike was protracted. The details of it are not known, but we know that it won sympathy throughout the country. A committee visited in July the different cities on the Atlantic coast to solicit aid for the strikers. In Philadelphia, when the committee arrived in company with delegates from New York, Newark, and Paterson, the Trades' Union held a special meeting and resolved to stand by the "Boston House Wrights" who, "in imitation of the noble and decided stand taken by their Revolutionary Fathers, have determined to throw off the shackles of more mercenary tyrants than theirs." Many societies voted varying sums of money in aid of the strikers.
The Boston strike was lost, but the sympathy which it evoked among mechanics in various cities was quickly turned to account. Wherever the Boston circular reached, it acted like a spark upon powder. In Philadelphia the ten-hour movement took on the aspect of a crusade. Not only the building trades, as in Boston, but most of the mechanical branches were involved. Street parades and mass meetings were held. The public press, both friendly and hostile, discussed it at length. Work was suspended and after but a brief "standout" the whole ended in a complete victory for the workingmen. Unskilled laborers, too, struck for the ten-hour day and, in the attempt to prevent others from taking their jobs, riotous scenes occurred which attracted considerable attention. The movement proved so irresistible that the Common Council announced a ten-hour day for public servants. Lawyers, physicians, merchants, and politicians took up the cause of the workingmen. On June 8 the master carpenters granted the ten-hour day and by June 22 the victory was complete.
The victory in Philadelphia was so overwhelming and was given so much publicity that its influence extended to many smaller towns. In fact, the ten-hour system, which remained in vogue in this country in the skilled trades until the nineties, dates largely from this movement in the middle of the thirties.
The great advance in the cost of living during 1835 and 1836 compelled an extensive