Reorienting Labor History
SCHELL, ERNEST H.
Reorienting Labor History Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 By Bruce Laurie Temple. 273 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Ernest H. Schell Since the publication in 1963 of E.P. Thompson's...
...Soon the revivalists came into the fold as well and the GTU, embracing the skilled and unskilled, won a 10-hour day following a series of successful strikes...
...Despite their having laid aside the Bible and the flag, however, they were unable to avoid competing on the hustings and within a year their political rivalry had eviscerated the assembly...
...Carpenters and printers organized more successful trade unions with particular appeal to journeymen...
...As a result, the story of labor in America is being retold with a better understanding of its place in the ideological and social development of the country at large...
...They took frequent holidays and enjoyed the camaraderie of taverns, fraternal societies, and the city's numerous volunteer fire companies...
...They were the most individualistic and at the same time the most deferential of all wage-earners...
...On the whole, Laurie has done a remarkable job with the extant resources...
...In 1847 the old style of radical organizing was briefly rekindled when displaced master craftsmen in the shoe and clothing trades were brought into the new United Brotherhood of Tailors, a body that collaborated with English and German unions...
...True, by 1850 about 60 per cent of the work force was employed in firms with over 26 employees, but many of these so-called factories were simply large workshops...
...Thompson's pathbreaking study, The Making of the English Working Class, labor historians have focused increasingly on culture and class consciousness to reconstruct the life of the working man and woman...
...Since revivalists and traditionalists mostly stayed away, the radicals, putting their nativism and evangelicalism behind them, emerged as leaders of the Assembly...
...The radicals were the prime movers of the early labor movement: In 1827 they organized the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations, the first alliance of craft unions in the country, and in 1834 they formed the General Trades' Union of Philadelphia, representing over 50 unions and 10,000 workers, many of them traditionalists...
...English and German immigrants who tried to infuse radicalism with new blood ran up against the nativist prejudices of the old radicals, preventing a successful coalition...
...Many of the former radicals, in fact, became active in the American Republican Party and classified the immigrants as unproductive leeches...
...They spent their few leisure hours in lyceums and discussion groups, where they were introduced to the labor theory of value...
...Laurie labels the working man according to type, but fails to fully explore where his ideas came from, or what they meant in the world beyond Philadelphia...
...Laurie begins by noting that during the first half of the 19th century, the city quintupled in size to nearly half a million people, owing to migration from the surrounding countryside and to immigration from Ireland, England and Germany...
...The traditionalists included artisans employed in small shops, Irish immigrants working as semi-skilled hand-loom operators and unskilled laborers...
...But either their voices were muted by the major parties, or their independent efforts to win support at the polls proved ineffective...
...In the Old World, working-class parties were formed as European workers struggled to gain the ballot...
...An example is this valuable portrait by Bruce Laurie of the craftsmen, journeymen, factory hands, and laborers in a major industrial city, Philadelphia, during the antebellum period...
...The Trades' Convention that year voted to form a cooperative grocery store, and in the next two years it created cooperative workshops for shoes, clothing and hats, but all of these were wiped out in the recession of 1849...
...Unfortunately, the more articulate members of the working class are less clearly represented...
...Politics, Laurie concludes, was the early American labor movement's severest handicap...
...The "revivalists," who sought salvation through personal piety and abstinence from alcohol, consisted mostly of journeymen who had become master craftsmen, semi-skilled factory workers or laborers who had migrated from the surrounding rural areas...
...Laurie does an admirable job of identifying the leading Philadelphia radicals of the period he is covering, but aside from a brief description of the "producer ideology," gives too little sense of the variety of their theories of labor and society...
...Radical revivalists in the cabi-netmaking, stone-cutting, plastering, and bookbinding trades followed suit...
...Not inclined to initiate organized protests against wage cuts or working conditions, this group was nevertheless susceptible to radical exhortations...
...The labor movement in general was crippled by the long slump in 1837-43...
...When prosperity returned, Philadelphia's work force was sharply divided along religious and ethnic lines...
...The "radicals" were native-born, self-educated deists or Unitarians who worked as master craftsmen or tradesmen in the sweated crafts...
...Nor does he mention at all the influence of such figures as Robert Dale Owen in the campaign for free public schools, or of George Henry Evans and the New Agrarianism in the 1851 Assembly of Associated Mechanics and Workingmen...
...In 1851 the Assembly of Associated Mechanics and Workingmen, representing 30 trades, convened in Philadelphia...
...Attributing economic success to personal effort, they viewed unionization as subversive...
...Turning to social values and cultural identity, Laurie divides Philadelphia's workers into three groups: revivalists, traditionalists, and radicals...
...In their view, only manual workers created wealth and merchants and financiers, whether exchanging goods or accumulating capital, were parasites feeding off the producing classes...
...Workers fought each other rather than their employers...
...Laurie's book succeeds as social or "new" labor history because it focuses so well on working conditions and on the workingman's religious and community life...
...This enabled it to provide ample cheap labor for the textile outfits, iron works, machine tool foundries, shoemaking establishments, printing houses, and construction trades that dominated the local economy...
...One of the book's most useful sections shows that the introduction of large-scale industrial organization did not readily displace the craftsmen...
...Steeped in an ideology that was preoccupied with the electoral alliance between legislators and capitalists, radicals sought to politically undermine the state's support of banks and trade...
...As a contribution to the general history of the labor movement, though, it is disappointing because of its parochial intellectual scope...
...in America, where workers had won the vote a generation before the birth of the labor movement, such parties were absent...
...But it suffered defections after the initial goals were won, and what was left of it was destroyed by the Panic of 1837...
...Though he lacked sufficient evidence to discuss the role of women and blacks systematically, he has been particularly successful at depicting the "inarticulate," the traditionalists who manned the fire companies and engaged in the street riots that so often disturbed antebellum Philadelphia...
...Partisan activity, moreover, offended many of the radicals' working-class allies, for at the time politics was a highly-charged affair intimately connected with ethnic and religious ties...
Vol. 63 • July 1980 • No. 13
