The Dawning of American Labor: The New Republic in the Industrial Age
The Dawning of American Labor: The New Republic in the Industrial Age
by Brian Greenberg (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018. xii, 220 pp., Bibliographical Essay and Index)
Book review by Melvyn Dubofsky, Distinguished Professor of History & Sociology Emeritus at Binghamton University, SUNY.
This is perhaps the final publication in a series now more than half a century old that originated under the editorial aegis of John Hope Franklin and Abraham Eisenstadt, both now deceased. In theory, if no longer in practice, it forms the third and final part of a triptych that covers the history of workers and their organizations in the United States from the founding of the United States in 1787 to the present. Greenberg’s volume carries the story from 1787 through the era of Reconstruction and Randi Storch concludes the narrative by examining the years from World War I to the present. For about forty years, the three editions of my contribution, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920, treated the middle of the story. When John Wiley purchased the series from Harlan Davidson several years ago, however, my volume disappeared. Because it remains easy to find copies of my book, Greenberg’s contribution means that students and other interested readers now have available in compact form a complete history of workers in the United States from its founding to the present that encapsulates the finest contemporary scholarship on the subject.
In four chapters plus a Prologue and an Epilogue, Greenberg succinctly tells the tale of nearly a century of change in how working people labored, what they earned in compensation for their efforts, and how they defended or advanced their place in society. In common with contemporary scholarly conventions, he pays due attention to the influences of gender and race. Somewhat oddly, however, his prologue introduces the end of the story not its beginning by focusing on the “year of violence” 1877, which might be characterized as a precursor to the era of industrialization not its realization. Indeed, the four core chapters of the book treat workers, their lives, and histories in a largely pre-industrial society. Chapter One, “Artisans in a New Republic,” describes skilled masters, journeymen artisans, young apprentices, and common laborers in a nation that remained decidedly agrarian and rural. According to Greenberg and the scholars on whom he relies, masters, journeymen, and apprentices all aspired to achieve a competence not a fortune and to maintain a status as independent, self-reliant individuals in a people’s republic. Common laborers, by contrast, lacked the attributes of independence because they had neither skill nor property, the usual attributes for republican citizenship. As population grew between 1787 and 1825, markets expanded and a gap began to open between master artisans, some of whom became merchant manufacturers, and journeymen who toiled for masters as wage laborers and apprentices who came to threaten the earnings and security of journeymen. In response, journeymen formed trade societies (early unions) to defend their interests by negotiating with masters over the price (not wage) for their labor (as yet journeymen did not identify as wage workers), the insistence that masters employ only society members, and limiting the use and abuse of apprentices. Masters countered their journeymen by locking them out and turning to courts to enjoin striking society members, as happened to cordwainers (shoeworkers) in Philadelphia and New York. The depression of 1819-1823 led the early unions to disappear as unemployment grew and union treasuries emptied.
Chapter Two, “Labor in the Age of Jackson, 1825-1843,” relates an oft-told tale. As the young nation rebounded from depression, the beginnings of a transportation revolution, whose most notable achievement was the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 linking the Atlantic seaboard to the Midwestern interior, broadened consumer markets and tied Northeast, Midwest, and South together in a common market. Market expansion led merchant manufacturers to establish larger workshops in which the gap between employers and employees widened; it encouraged wealthy New England and Middle States merchants to invest their capital in water-power driven factories, of which the most notable were New England textile mills. So Greenberg tells the tale of the men mostly but also women who created the Jacksonian labor movement, a movement that both fostered unions that bargained with employers and a political labor movement that used the vote to demand free public education, the elimination of imprisonment for debt, and even the redistribution of property. Once again, however, an economic depression that began in 1837 and ushered in the hungry forties destroyed a nascent labor movement.
Chapter 3, “The Industrial Worker in Free Labor America,” focuses on how market growth led Lynn, Massachusetts merchant shoe manufacturers to move the production of footwear from domestic family sheds to workshops where masses of cordwainers were supervised more intensively, and then to factories where traditional skills were diluted and production accelerated. In response first to more rigid discipline and then to technological dilution of traditional skills, shoe workers turned to unionization and in 1860 participated in what was then the largest strike yet undertaken. In this chapter Greenberg also discusses how immigration and race subverted working-class solidarity. US-born Protestant workers rioted against and denigrated Irish and German immigrant Catholics. And white workers, US and foreign-born, refused to join hands with the small number of free black laborers, preferring to enjoy what W.E.B. DuBois and David Roediger called “the wages of whiteness.” Despite the lack of solidarity, mostly skilled white workers rebuilt the unions that had collapsed in the aftermath of the depression of 1837-43, only themselves to succumb when the next depression struck in 1857.
In his final chapter, “From the Civil War to the Panic of 1873,” Greenberg describes how northern workers rallied to the defense of the Union, price inflation and a tighter labor market led to the rebirth of unionism, and workers and reformers both fought for an eight-hour workday and tried to build a national labor movement (the National Labor Union). Finally, in an epilogue, Greenberg returns to the theme of his Prologue, how the coming of industrialization caused worker mobilization in mass strikes and the creation of a radical national worker organization, the Knights of Labor, committed to solidarity and the reform of capitalism as it existed.
There is little more that Greenberg can cover in less than two hundred pages of text. If there is any criticism to be directed at the author, it consists of his insistence that the US was an industrial nation both before and just after the Civil War and his failure to stress how central plantation slavery was to the economic growth of the antebellum nation. Absent slavery and the production of cotton, it is unlikely that the first major US industry, the production of cotton textiles, would have occurred when and where it did.