American Labor: A Documentary Collection

315 Pages·2004·2.036 MB·English

by  Melvyn Dubofsky, Joseph McCartin (eds.)

American Labor

merican abor: ocumentary
A L A D
ollection
C
Edited by
Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph McCartin
AMERICANLABOR:ADOCUMENTARYCOLLECTION
© Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph McCartin 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-0-312-29565-3
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2004 by
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ISBN 978-0-312-29564-6 ISBN 978-1-137-04497-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-04497-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
American labor :a documentary collection / edited by Melvyn Dubofsky and
Joseph McCartin.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Labor—United States—History—Sources.2.Work ethic—United States—
History— Sources.3.Labor movement—United States— History—Sources.
4.Labor unions—United States— History—Sources.I.Dubofsky,Melvyn,
1934– II.McCartin,Joseph Anthony.
HD8066.A728 2004
331’.0973—dc22 2003058099
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India.
First edition:
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
o n t e n t s
C
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Labor in the Colonial and Early National Periods, to 1828 7
New World Encounters 11
Indenture 15
Slavery 18
Women and Work 25
Work, Welfare, and Community Values 29
Artisan Labor 32
Workers’ Grievances and Early Union Organization Debates 34
2. The Rise of Free Labor, the Factory System, and Trades
Organization, 1828–1877 43
The Artisan’s World 47
The World of Slave Labor 51
Early Factory Labor 53
Women’s Work: Servants and Millgirls 60
Immigrants 64
Organizing Trade Unions 67
A Broader Reform Agenda 75
From Slavery to Freedom 80
Postwar Hopes for the Emancipation of Free Labor 84
3. Workers in a Maturing and Industrial Society, 1877–1914 89
Immigrants to Industrial Society 95
Working Women and Children 104
Immigrants, Tenements, and Sweated Labor 110
Knights of Labor 115
American Federation of Labor 119
Black Workers and Unions 129
Radical Alternatives 134
4. Wars, Depression, and the Struggle for Industrial Democracy,
1914–1947 139
Workers in the Era of the Great War 143
Post-War Backlash 149
vvii Contents
Workers and Unions in the 1920s 154
Immigrants from Mexico 167
The Great Migration 174
Depression 176
Industrial Union Upsurge 187
World War II 194
5. The Era of the Postwar Social Contract, 1947–1973 207
Labor’s Cold War 213
Embourgeoisement in the 1950s? 217
AFL-CIO 222
Working Women 228
Race and Civil Rights 231
Vietnam War and Counterculture 240
New Militancy 245
Public Employee Unionism 251
6. Era of Economic Change and Union Decline, Since 1973 257
Feeling the Economic Crunch 263
Globalization and De-Industrialization 265
Declining Support for the Welfare State 270
Discontents of Factory Life 274
Working Women’s Struggles 279
New Immigrants 284
The Persistence of Dangerous Work 289
Brave New Workplaces 290
The New Anti-Unionism 292
Efforts at Union Reform and Revival 299
Facing the Future 303.
Index 000
c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
A
M
any individuals helped make this volume possible and it is our pleasure
to thank them here. First, we would like to acknowledge the help of several
research assistants who aided us in gathering, reproducing, and formatting
many of the documents used in this volume as well as carrying out
other tasks essential to the book’s completion. They are: Tina Braxton,
EdDonnelly, Nicole Manapol, Adam McKean, Kevin N. Powers, and Adam
Smith. Without their help, the job of assembling this material would have
been far more arduous than it turned out to be. We would also like to thank
Eric Arnesen and the anonymous readers for Palgrave Macmillan for their
comments on the plan for this volume. They helped us clarify our approach
to this project in important ways. And we would especially like to thank our
colleagues in the field of U.S. labor and social history, whose research helped
direct us toward the most important evidence documenting the history of
American workers. To those even marginally acquainted with the field, the
influence of dozens of our fellow historians should be evident throughout
this volume.
Without the early encouragement of Debbie Gershenowitz, our original
editor at Palgrave Macmillan, we might not have undertaken this volume.
And we are indebted to Brendan O’Malley for stepping in to see the project
to completion.
Finally, Joseph McCartin would like to thank his spouse, Diane Reis, and
his daughters, Mara and Elisa, for their continuous love and support during
the time this project preoccupied him.
ntroduction
I
N
early eighty years have passed since John R. Commons and his associates
at the University of Wisconsin gathered and published the first multivolume
collection of documents concerning the social history of American industrial
society. As might be expected, their eleven-volume compilation, entitled A
Documentary History of American Industrial Society, devoted several vol-
umes to the subjects of workers, labor movements, and labor politics. For
decades it provided a starting point for students of the history of American
workers and their organizations. Today, there is no documentary collection
in print that aspires to provide even an introductory survey-level exposure to
U.S. labor history.
The lack of such a collection is all the more glaring when one considers
the dramatic scholarly resurgence that has redefined the field of labor history
over the past three decades. Informed by the new social history, as well as by
insights from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and political and legal
history, that scholarly resurgence has generated not only a vast quantity of
monographs reorienting labor history, but fine survey texts that offer over-
arching narratives of American working-class history. Two of those texts have
been written by one of this volume’s co-editors: Melvyn Dubofsky’s
Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865–1920 (Harlan Davidson,
1996, 3rd ed.); and Labor in America: A History (Harlan Davidson, 2004,
7th ed.). Two other excellent surveys merit mention: James R. Green, The
World of the Worker: American Labor in the Twentieth Century (Hill and
Wang, 1980) and especially Robert Zieger and Gilbert Gall, American
Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century (The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002, 3rd ed.). The massive two-volume survey compiled
by the American Social History Project, Who Built America? also offers
much to students.
Yet, there is a dearth of supplemental documentaries that can introduce
students to the history of American workers through more direct exposure
to the voices and the records of the past. Indeed, no comprehensive collec-
tion of documents on the subject of American labor currently remains in
print. Jerold Auerbach’s excellent set of documents entitled American
Labor: The Twentieth Centuryis now out of print. Leon Litwack’s documen-
tary history of American labor recently went out of print for a second time.
Eileen Boris and Nelson Lichtenstein’s book on labor for a series on
“major problems” in United States history, includes a number of excellent
22 American Labor: A Documentary Collection
documents yet it is not really a documentary collection; instead, it is a hybrid
that devotes as much attention to historians’ contradictory readings of the
past as it does to the limited selection of documents it reprints. The
American Social History Project has produced a CD-ROM to accompany
Who Built America? that offers students an opportunity to read primary doc-
uments (as well as sample music, graphics, and visual evidence). But it does
not easily lend itself to classroom use or provide documents of more than a
page in length.
The lack of a viable one-volume documentary collection in American
labor history is all the more glaring when one considers how much the study
of labor history has changed since Commons’s team did its work. Today the
field of labor history encompasses culture as well as economics; household
relations as well as industrial relations; women as domestic workers as well as
factory workers; and black, Chicano, and Asian workers as well as white
workers. In this comprehensive single-volume compilation of documents we
seek to integrate institutional labor history with aspects of social history, to
chart changes in both trade union and managerial practices, and to integrate
the economics and politics of labor history.
In order to survey American labor history through the documentary
evidence, we have divided the volume into six chronological periods, each of
which has been chosen with an eye to its historical integrity as well as to
facilitate classroom use.
The first period, which covers the years from the establishment of colonial
North America to 1828, examines changes that occurred in the organization
of work and the behavior of workers during this period of nation-building.
It examines the varieties of labor—agricultural, artisanal, common, free,
slave, and indentured—that coexisted in North America from its coloniza-
tion by Europeans through the beginnings of the market revolution that
would transform work life on the continent. And it reveals both the impact
of the American Revolution and the outcome of workers’ early struggles for
the right to organize.
The second period, covering the years from 1828 to 1877, traces the rise
of the factory system, the struggle between free and slave labor, the growth
of national trade unions, and the emergence of a free labor economy. It was
during this period that the United States emerged as a society within which
industrial capitalism became the driving economic force. This section traces
the process of proletarianization that led to the making of a U.S. working
class; it examines the tensions between free and unfree labor that marked the
beginning of this period, and the difficult and in some ways incomplete tran-
sition to free labor that was visible by its end. It also traces the emergence of
the first national workers’ organizations, from the National Union of Trades
in the 1830s through the National Labor Union of the post–Civil War
years. Finally, it introduces students to the dynamics of race, ethnicity, and
gender that would shape workers’ lives and efforts to organize during this
formative period.