The Beginning of the Labor Movement

There was no unified response by Chicago's working class to the problems caused by industrialization. Many workers never became active in labor politics at all. Among workers who did become active in the movement, there were important variations in ap-

proach. Some argued for reform, saying that the city's economic and political systems could meet the needs of the working class with some minor adjustments; others suggested that only a revolution, a new system, could meet those needs. These differences created severe factionalism that made unified working-class political action difficult at first and later impossible.

The reform tendency was founded in 1864 when a printers' strike led to the formation of the city's first trades assembly. The Morning Post had attempted to hire and train forty women compositors to work at cut rates. Using the exclusive strategy typical of elite craft unions, the Chicago Typographical Union no. 16 decided to strike and boycott the paper; the idea of including the women in the union was never considered (Chicago Typographical Union minutes 1864).

Boycotts require mass support, so the Chicago Typographical Union strikers tried to secure the cooperation of other unions; they called a meeting of all the union members in the city, paying the expenses of hall rent and brass band. Not wishing to alienate their friends in high places, the Chicago Typographical Union invited the mayor of Chicago to preside over the meeting and the editor of the Evening Journal to be the principal speaker (Inland Printer June 1886, 287-88). By the next year, the coalition that was formed as a result of this strike, the Chicago General Trades Assembly, had eighty-five hundred members in twenty-four unions (Pierce 1957, 3:168).

Also founded in 1864 by the Chicago Typographical Union was the Workingman's Advocate, the first significant labor journal in the city.^[*] Edited by a leader of the printers union, A. C. Cameron, the Advocate was the primary voice of the Chicago labor movement until it ceased publication in the mid 1870s.

The Trades Assembly and the Advocate did not attempt to challenge the underlying basis of Chicago's economic and political systems. Both had relatively privileged constituencies—the city's best organized, best paid, most stably employed labor aristocrats. The paper and the General Trades Assembly fought for candidates

* The man in the title of the paper and in the name of many of the period's workers associations indicates the discriminatory nature of the movement. There were few attempts to organize women workers but many successful attempts to exclude them from the crafts.

and for legislation to ameliorate the plight of the workingman in Chicago and not for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism or representative democracy. Variation in economic conditions meant that the trades assembly was sometimes strong, sometimes weak, and sometimes nonexistent; but throughout the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, the assembly was the crucial advocate of labor reform in the city.

Labor movement factionalism was based on ethnic group membership, not only on economic factors. Many of the city's early unions, the Trades Assembly, and the reform tendency itself were dominated by the native born (Schneirov 1984, 18). Apprenticeships were given primarily to the sons of members or to the sons of members' friends and relatives; women, convicts, children, and non-Anglo immigrants were largely excluded from union membership. An exception was made for those of English, Welsh, and Scottish birth, who were often included in craft unions due to their skilled backgrounds, union organizing experience, and cultural similarity to the native born.

One response by non-Anglo immigrants to their exclusion from the elite native-born unions was to form ethnically based unions in each trade. These ethnic unions remained a crucial part of the labor movement throughout the period, providing an organizing base for an alternative to the Anglo-American labor reform tendency.

The first group to form such unions was the Germans, one of the biggest ethnic groups in the city with large numbers in the skilled working class and a tradition of guild organization. As early as the 1850s, Germans formed unions of the coach makers, carpenters, tailors, and cabinetmakers; and the German Trades Assembly actually was founded seven years before the largely Anglo General Trades Assembly. The German assembly had a membership of one thousand in 1865 (Pierce 1957, 2:166-67), and two thousand members and a weekly paper by the spring of 1869 (Schneirov 1984, 37).

Certainly, there were some German advocates of labor reform. But from early on, many Germans were sympathetic to ideologies that asserted the need for more basic changes in the economic and political systems. Marxist ideas gained popularity because a number of political refugees of the German workers revolt of 1848 settled in Chicago. Among these "forty-eighters" was Josef Weydemeyer, a friend and correspondent of Karl Marx. These Germans published

a Marxist paper called Der Proletarier as early as 1853 (Pierce 1957, 2:186). The German Trades Assembly became an important forum for these revolutionary pronouncements, as did the German Social Democratic Turnverein, which were German nationalist gymnastic societies.

In 1858, representatives of German workers in the city appeared at the first congress of the International Workingmen's Association, which had been organized in New York the year before. The platform passed at the conference held that the right of revolution was guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and that scientific, technical, commercial, and industrial progress had reached a stage that necessitated a change in the American form of government. They demanded the right to organize unions, protested against the treatment of labor by capital, and attacked political party platforms and private charity programs as offering no remedies for the working class (Pierce 1957, 2:186). As early as the 1860s, there were important political differences between organized Anglo-American and German workers.

Also in the sixties, a new ideology, called Lassalleanism, began to compete with Marxism for the allegiance of the city's German workers. Lassalle stressed political action as the key to the emancipation of the working class and scorned trade unions as impotent, even irrelevant. Political action was seen as crucial because it could force the government to grant aid to workers' producer cooperatives, making these worker-owned institutions competitive with existing capitalist-owned firms. Eventually, Lassalle proposed, workers would control entire industries and markets, especially if the government could be forced to break up the monopolies that were beginning to dominate some industries (Foner 1955, 2:414).

Marxists rejected this analysis, arguing that a workers party should not be formed until it could successfully influence elections and that the party would not be able to do that until it was based in a strong trade union movement. So there was a running, seesaw battle from the sixties until the eighties in the Chicago labor movement between Lassalleans and Marxists, that is, between political action advocates and economic action advocates. Which group dominated depended on the business cycle. During expansion periods, trade unions had many members and were strong because of the greater demand for labor; this led to the domination of the

Marxist position. During depressions, Lassallean ideas were dominant because weak unions rapidly disintegrated, economic action was precluded, and political action was viewed as the only viable remedy.

Certainly, the primary appeal of Lassalleanism was to German workers. But some of the native born, most notably A. C. Cameron, of the printers union, flirted with Lassallean ideas (Pierce 1957, 2:188). Marxism, however, with its much more critical view of the capitalist economic and political system, never achieved significant allegiance from the native born.

Thus, the organizational and ideological context of the labor movement in the early seventies was as follows. Anglo-American skilled workers, that is, the native and British born, were organized in a trades assembly that advocated mild legislative reform as a response to the plight of the working class. Some progressive Anglo reformers advocated stronger measures such as cooperation to deal with the workers' plight. German workers were organized into the German Trades Assembly; Marxist, Lassallean, and reform ideologies and organizations competed for the allegiance of these German workers. The unskilled, including many of the city's third most numerous ethnic group, the Irish, were largely unorganized.