Chapter Three
Anglo-American Labor Reform in Chicago

When they were active in the labor movement, the native-born and non-Irish immigrants from the British Isles were usually reformers. These workers founded and led many of the early craft unions, which often tried to establish good relations with their employers in the economic sphere and proposed legislative reform and attempted to elect sympathetic candidates to office in the political realm. But few Anglo-American workers supported actions to overturn the existing economic and political institutions; unlike the predominantly German socialists and anarchists, they accepted capitalism and representative democracy as institutions that served the interests of the working class.

It is important not to oversimplify the complex politics of the Anglo-American workers. Some labor reformers were attracted to somewhat more radical schemes, such as producer cooperatives, or flirted with socialism during the 1870s depression. Others supported various panaceas to solve the problems experienced by workers in the industrial revolution, such as Greenbackism and the eight-hour day. A small number, Albert Parsons among them, joined the socialist and anarchist movements.

But these were exceptions. Those who became revolutionaries—for example, both the native-born Albert Parsons and the English-born anarchist Samuel Fielden—had early experiences that radicalized them. Parsons had been active in the abolitionist movement and was married to a black woman, Lucy Parsons, who was one of

the most important revolutionaries of the period (Ashbaugh 1976); these experiences made it less likely that he would follow the reformist path of his fellow printers. And Fielden had been a child laborer in a British cotton mill for thirteen years beginning at age eight and had been influenced by the abolitionist movement as well (Roediger and Rosemont 1986, 57).

Anglo-American workers with unexceptional lives accepted the system as given. A variety of factors—including the impact of British immigrants, the high average economic status of the group, their acceptance of ideologies that legitimated the system, residential dispersion, and their ability to gain some political influence in the Chicago polity—convinced the overwhelming majority of Anglo-Americans that reform would be enough.

British Immigration to the City

The non-Irish immigration from Great Britain has a special importance in Chicago history because most of the native born in the city had migrated from eastern states and had British ancestors. Unlike many subsequent immigrant groups, the original English U.S. settlers did not have to adjust to a foreign identity; rather, they came as colonizers who hoped to reproduce most aspects of English society and culture in their new home (Steinberg 1981, 7). According to the best available estimate, 61 percent of the white population of the United States in 1790 were of English descent, and another 17 percent were Scotch or Irish (Steinberg 1981, 7). Ninety-nine percent of the colonists were Protestant.

There was a variety of reasons why those from England, Scotland, and Wales decided to try their luck in the United States. Underpopulation was an important problem in the early days of the colonies; many of the early immigrants were indentured servants, paupers, vagrants, and convicts who had been recruited by emigration agents to fill unskilled jobs in this country (Steinberg 1981, 10-11). Other immigrants came in search of political and religious freedom. Most of the early settlers were from the middle part of the English class structure. The lower classes (the rural poor) could not afford to emigrate, and the upper classes (the royal aristocracy) had no motivation to do so.

This petite bourgeoisie of small farmers and small businessmen

brought with them a classical liberal ideology; the more entrenched feudal beliefs, which might have encouraged viewing society in class terms, were more likely to be held by the aristocrats and serfs who had been left behind in England. Middle-class ideology rejected theories of society that emphasized the importance of class conflict and celebrated the growth of laissez-faire capitalism and a system of political democracy in which each small landowner or businessman had an equal say in the governmental process (Garner 1977, 30-33). Puritanism, with its suggestion that those who work hard will get ahead and be among those chosen by God for salvation, also found a comfortable home in this environment (Laurie 1979). These middle-class ideas had a profound impact on the Anglo-American working class.

Large numbers from the top of the British working class—skilled craftsmen—also emigrated to the United States. In fact, U.S. industrialization could not have proceeded without the British worker; there simply were not enough native-born workers with the appropriate skills. As Erickson suggests, "nearly every new industry begun in America before 1840 was fertilized with British skills." The British skilled worker was used to "nurse a new industry into life, to oversee or superintend a new factory or mill, to operate or service complicated machinery, or to add a new process or a finer make of goods to an existing industry" (Erickson 1957, 4).

No expense was spared to import skilled craftsmen from England and Scotland. Transportation expenses were guaranteed. Lucrative three- to five-year contracts were drawn up, guaranteeing the artisan high levels of pay regardless of the success of the venture or trade conditions prevalent at the time. Many others were induced to come to the United States with extravagant profit-sharing bonuses (Erickson 1957, 5).

Partly because of the power their scarce skills bestowed on them, the English craftsmen soon came to be regarded as the "prima donnas" of the labor force; they often refused to instruct native apprentices, objected to having other workers working near them, or quit to found their own businesses. Employers were even forced to bargain with the trade unions in England over wages and working conditions.

By the mid nineteenth century, British workers were being pushed as well as pulled to the United States. Problems at home

included crop failures, overpopulation due to declining death and high birth rates, and most important, the impact of industrialization on British and Scottish craftsmen (Johnson 1966, 54). The spinning jenny, water frame, mule, and power loom revolutionized the work of both the hand spinner and the hand weaver in the textile trades. The introduction of steam power moved most production into industrial cities and out of villages. Unemployment was soon as high as 50 percent for weavers and nearly as high for other village craftsmen (Johnson 1966, 54).

Approximately thirty thousand Englishmen and Scotchmen came to the United States from 1853 to 1860, over forty-four thousand from 1861 to 1870, sixty-four thousand from 1871 to 1880, and nearly one hundred ten thousand from 1881 to 1890 (Johnson 1966, 347). Many wound up in Chicago. Non-Irish immigrants from the British Isles made up as much as 8.3 percent of the Chicago population in 1850, then declined to 5.7 percent in 1860, 5 percent in 1870, and 3.6 percent in 1880 and 1890 (Beijbom 1971, 114). Data on the class and skill backgrounds of migrants are unavailable for the nineteenth century; statistics for the first decade of the twentieth century indicate that over 38 percent of British migrants were professional and skilled workers, the highest percentage skilled of any immigrant group (U.S. Senate 1911, 4: 28).

The many British craftsmen who immigrated to the United States and to Chicago brought their strong trade union traditions. The nature of that tradition is the subject of a stimulating debate among English social historians (Anderson 1980; Calhoun 1982; Foster 1974; Thompson 1963). The weight of evidence, according to both non-Marxists such as Calhoun (1982) and Marxists such as Anderson (1980), suggests that early radical resistance to British industrialization was based on a strong reaction by the trades to the undermining of their economic and social status. But these revolutionary sentiments were transformed by mid century into Chartist reformism. Such moderate politics were based on the political leadership of a segment of the British working class, the labor aristocracy, which had been able to gain a privileged economic and social position through strong union control of certain crafts.

Engels had recognized this phenomenon and commented on it as early as 1852 in a letter to Marx. As he suggested in his preface to the Condition of the Working Class in England:

The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers are each of them a power, to the extent that ... they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. (Engels 1958, 368)

Lenin later echoed this sentiment: "The English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie" (Lenin 1966, 252).

Perhaps alone among the working classes in the industrializing nations, the British labor aristocracy had moved into a stage of accommodation to capitalism at the time of the industrialization of Chicago. Musson (1976) points out that labor aristocratic unions developed early in English history in the iron, engineering, and cotton industries among the millwrights, steam engine makers, textile machine makers, iron founders, boilermakers, and cotton spinners. The main concerns of these unions were wages, hours, apprenticeship regulations, and working conditions in their particular trades. Collective action across trade lines occurred only when support was needed for strikes, not out of class consciousness.

This British model of labor economic and political action was familiar to many of the skilled workers who immigrated to Chicago, and it was implemented in the city's printing, machine, and construction trades. The British Amalgamated Society of Engineers had a union with ninety-seven members in Chicago by 1866; the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters had three hundred members in the city by 1870 (Schneirov 1984, 37). These and other Chicago unions instituted another characteristically British innovation: benefit systems. These systems explicitly favored self-interest over class consciousness as a means of promoting active union membership and participation. The Workingman's Advocate commented as follows regarding this new model unionism: "Perhaps the strongest reason why such a feature [benefit systems] has proven successful is that self-interest controls, to a great extent, all human action; and

when the benevolent is combined with the protective, as in this instance, selfishness, if no more honorable instinct, prompts active and continued membership" (July 4, 1868, cited in Schneirov 1984, 38). The great impact of new model unionism is indicated by the fact that a variety of unions, including the iron molders, sailors, shoemakers, bricklayers, tailors, printers, stonecutters, painters, and ship carpenters, implemented benevolent features between 1869 and 1872 (Schneirov 1984, 39).

Ethnic Segmentation in the Chicago Labor Market

New model unionism was effective in elevating the economic status of a certain portion of the Chicago working class. But because of its stress on self-interest and trade interests, the use of the model inevitably created severe economic disparities within the working class as a whole. Craft unionism, as practiced by the British-and native-born elite, excluded from their trades everyone except close male friends and relatives. Their control of many of the elite craft unions—as in printing, the machine trades, and construction—meant that Anglo-American workers, both British and native born, were on the average more privileged than other European immigrants.

Table 9, which shows the occupational structure of each of the major ethnic groups in the city for 1870, 1880, and 1890, illustrates that the most privileged group by far was the native born of native-born parents. Next in status come the British immigrants, then the Germans, the Scandinavians, and finally the Irish. The native born manage to place an extraordinarily high percentage in the middle and upper classes, about 45 percent for the three census years, compared to approximately 30 percent for the city as a whole. The British do less well in this regard; they are close to the city averages in the upper and middle classes, placing from one-quarter to one-third in that category.

Another measure of status is the capacity to avoid the city's worst unskilled jobs; again the native- and British-born groups do very well in this respect. Both have about one-quarter in the category in 1870 and about one-fifth in 1880 and 1890, compared to around one-third for the city as a whole. The British, although not able to enter the middle and upper classes in large numbers, partially

compensate for this failure by having a high proportion in the labor aristocracy (around one-third) compared to the city average (one-fifth).

The elite position within the working class enjoyed by the native born and British is shown by the extent to which they dominated the labor aristocratic trades in the city. They were 73 percent of the printers, 69 percent of the railroad workers, 60 percent of the machinists, and 63 percent of employees of manufacturing establishments; but they represented only 26 percent of laborers. Railroad industry data also indicates that the native born and British were a low proportion of the low-status railroad laborers and freight handlers and a high proportion of the elite trades—engineers and conductors (Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics Report 1884).

The result of this pattern of occupational representation was that Anglo-Americans—native born and non-Irish immigrants from the British Isles—dominate the occupational categories in the upper reaches of the class structure. The native born alone account for over half of the upper-middle and upper classes in all three census years and from one-half to two-thirds of the lower-middle class. If British immigrants are included as part of this English-speaking, largely Protestant elite, the percentages balloon to around two-thirds of the middle and upper classes. Within the working class, this elite ethnic group was also well represented within the labor aristocracy; over half were native born or British, and well over half of the two lower-working-class groups are from non-Anglo ethnic groups.

Anglo-American workers were also more widely dispersed throughout the occupational structure; other ethnic groups tended to be confined to a small number of low-status job categories. The truth of this proposition can be shown through the use of a statistic that measures the degree to which each ethnic group was evenly distributed throughout the occupational structure. Using such a dispersion measure on the detailed occupational categories of the 1880 Census reveals that the native born were most evenly distributed with a low score of .33, Germans have a score of .53, Scandinavians have a score of .70, and the Irish have a score of .95.^[*] The high scores of the Irish and Scandinavians reflect the fact that the Irish and Swedes in the city were generally of peasant background; former peasants were heavily concentrated in undifferentiated unskilled categories in the census (such as "laborer").

The Anglo-American worker was in a privileged economic position throughout the period when compared to first-generation immigrants. But what about the second generation? Unfortunately, the 1870 and 1880 Censuses have no breakdowns for the first and

second generations. However, the 1890 Census did report on occupation for the native born of native-born parents, and the comparison with second-generation immigrants is most instructive. The native born of native-born parents are the elite of the Chicago class structure, placing a remarkable 55 percent of their number in the middle and upper classes and having only 17 percent in the unskilled working class. Those of foreign-born parents do much less well, placing 36 percent in the middle and upper classes and having one-fifth of their number in the unskilled category.

Richard Sennett's analysis of a middle-class community on Chicago's West Side reinforces this conclusion. Using city directories to trace the occupational status of fathers and sons in Union Park, Sennett concludes: "The situation of the sons of the foreign-born was ... clear-cut. Starting from a base similar to that of the children from native families, they had a steadily worsening position in their occupational profiles, relative to sons of native-born fathers" (Sennett 1974, 228).

Thus, there was an ethnically segmented labor market in Chicago in this period; ethnic origin was highly correlated with position in the labor market. The average differences in occupational status were reflected in income levels that varied according to ethnic group. Figures for overall earnings have been obtained from the 1884 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report. Unfortunately, this report, based on voluntary submissions, heavily overrepresents the skilled categories within the working class. The BLS report indicates that the Chicago working class was 47 percent labor aristocrat, 31 percent low-status skilled, and 22 percent unskilled. The 1880 Census, a much less biased source because it used census takers and not voluntary returns, indicates that the working class was probably closer to 26 percent labor aristocrat, 34 percent low-status skilled, and 40 percent unskilled. Thus, the BLS report overestimates the average income of any ethnic group with a large proportion in unskilled laborer positions.

To correct for this problem, earnings means were weighted using the more accurate 1880 Census proportion for each ethnic group within each working-class sector. This procedure results in British-born workers having the highest earnings, at $598 a year, followed by the native born, with $549, Scandinavians with $517, Germans with $476, and Irish with $447. The unweighted Bohe-

mian figure is $436. Although there is little census data on Bohemians, manuscript census analysis and BLS returns indicate that their occupational statuses and earnings were similar to those of the Irish (Schneirov 1975).

The fact that the British worker seems more privileged than the native-born worker should not come as a surprise. The BLS report included only data on the working class, within which the British had the highest proportion in the labor aristocracy of any ethnic group (44 percent in 1880 compared to 31 percent for the native born and 26 percent for the city as a whole). But outside the working class, the British were much less able to penetrate the middle and upper classes than were the native born. In other words, the ability of the native born to reach the middle and upper classes is not reflected in these income figures. If average earnings across all classes could be computed, the native born would probably have a higher average income than any group because of their high proportion in the top classes in the city.

The average of over $400 for the Irish and Bohemians conceals the fact that many unskilled laborers made much less than this, probably around $350 to $400 per year. For 1882, unskilled laborers in the city made an average of $386 per year, and railroad laborers made $367. Less than half of what many of the elite working-class trades made, this was generally not enough to support one's family (Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics Report 1882).

There are at least two possible explanations for these ethnically based earnings differences. Hechter's (1975, 1978) cultural division of labor thesis would predict that they were due to these ethnic groups' having different occupational distributions and thus different earnings. Ethnic competition theory (Olzak and Nagel 1986) would propose that they were due to wage discrimination based on ethnicity, that certain ethnic groups made less than others when they worked in the same jobs in the same trades.

Table 10 reports on earnings by head of household for each ethnic group in the city for 1884, controlling for working-class sector. These figures should be interpreted with caution because the numbers involved are small. The most dramatic fact is the high earnings for all the ethnic groups in the labor aristocrat category, yearly earnings often $200 to $300 higher than those in the unskilled and low-status skilled jobs. The key to earning power was the ability to

enter an elite trade rather than ethnic group per se. In other words, occupational distribution, not wage discrimination, explains the earnings differences between various ethnic groups.

There was no strict ethnic caste system in Chicago in this period; position in the class system or even within the working class was not strictly determined by ethnic group. But certain groups, especially the Anglo-American workers, were more likely to succeed in the Chicago labor market. This was primarily because they could enter and succeed in the higher status crafts, not because of wage discrimination within occupational categories.

One explanation for the reformist politics of the Anglo-American workers would then be that they simply understood that the system was working in their interests. Why should they challenge an economic system that was meeting their needs? The difficulty with this argument is that the economic situation of Anglo-American workers was much more varied than their almost invariably reformist politics.

In other words, such a proposition fails to account for the reformist politics of lower status skilled and unskilled Anglo-American workers. Why would native-born cigar makers support reform politics despite the fact that the business cycle and mechanization would soon destroy their union, indeed would soon destroy the trade itself? The answer is that the politics of native-born cigar makers were influenced by a variety of noneconomic factors, including residential patterning, cultural and ideological beliefs, and Anglo-American workers' ability to influence the political system.

Residential Dispersion of the Anglo-American Workers

Residential patterning is crucial to understanding political mobilization because community-based social networks were often used in the mobilization process. The Chicago labor movement certainly did not confine itself to workplace networks in its political organizing efforts. Community-based networks were especially important in the more militant movements; both the 1877 general strike and the 1880s anarchist movement were mobilized in foreign-born residence areas. The pattern of residential concentration or dispersion varied significantly by ethnic group. The more dispersed groups,

such as the Anglo-Americans, tended to accept more moderate politics; the groups concentrated in more ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods were more likely to espouse revolutionary politics.

The process of ethnic residential settlement is illustrated in Maps 1, 2, and 3, which show the settlement pattern for selected ethnic groups for 1860, 1870, and 1900.^[*] The maps do not indicate population densities; no neighborhood was ethnically homogeneous. Rather, the noted areas were neighborhoods or communities with distinctive ethnic institutions: stores, clubs, bars and saloons, social organizations, and so on. White areas represent the primary settlements of the native born.

The 1860 map indicates clearly the propensity of the native born to settle near the city's center along the lake and on the West Side; this was to be a pattern throughout nineteenth-century Chicago history, as succeeding maps indicate. These two areas contained the city's most desirable housing, which the native and British born were able to obtain because of their higher average economic status. Apartment buildings were constructed near the central business district (CBD) as early as 1868. These "family hotels" or "French fiats," as they were called at the time, allowed the worker to "keep up appearances" by avoiding living in a small, low-status cottage (Pierce 1957, 3: 57-58). Living in or near the CBD also meant proximity to many of the city's higher status jobs, which the Anglo-American workers could reasonably expect to acquire.

As Sennett has suggested, the alternative, living in the river wards, was not desirable for other reasons:

Most large cities are located on or near rivers; in the case of Chicago, the Chicago River's two branches converge at what was then the center of town. In the nineteenth century, the river was used as an open sewage and refuse canal; that meant it smelled. To someone with a sensitive nose and ample means, it was an obvious move to get as far away from the river as possible, on open high land like that of the West Side. (Sennett 1974, 12-13)

Another reason Anglo-American workers did not want to live in the river wards was that they did not want to be near the rapidly

* These maps are from the Chicago Department of Development and Planning publication Historic City and are based on census data, parish and congregation records, and general histories of Chicago.

Map 1.
Chicago ethnic community settlement pattern, 1860.

Source. Department of Development and Planning of Chicago, Historic City:
The Settlement of Chicago (Chicago: Department of Development and Planning
of Chicago, 1976), p. 15.

Map 2.
Chicago ethnic community settlement pattern, 1870.

Source. Department of Development and Planning of Chicago, Historic City:
The Settlement of Chicago (Chicago: Department of Development and Planning
of Chicago, 1976), p. 39.

Map 3.
Chicago ethnic community settlement pattern, 1900.

Source. Department of Development and Planning of Chicago, Historic City:
The Settlement of Chicago (Chicago: Department of Development and Planning
of Chicago, 1976), p. 61.

growing residential areas of newly arrived immigrants; such non-Anglo, Catholic immigrants were considered bad neighbors because they were viewed as dirty, uncouth, uneducated, immoral, and generally un-American.

As in the occupational sphere, the native born had more residential choices than the foreign born. Some lived in the CBD, but the native and British born were more likely to be able to afford the more expensive, spacious, newer housing in the city's outer wards. Many Anglo-American families chose the West Side because it offered good transportation to CBD jobs (Hoyt 1933, 91); a number of them, for example, acquired neat, single-family homes in the West Side community of Union Park (Sennett 1974).

An index of residential segregation using the 1884 Chicago School Census documents the greater residential concentration of the city's Irish and German residents. The index varies from o to 1, with ethnic groups that are more concentrated in fewer wards having a higher index than those more dispersed in a higher number of wards.^[*] The results are .41 for the Germans, .48 for the Irish, but only .28 for the native born.

Katznelson (1981) has argued that the separation of work and home, which occurs with residential dispersion, has a moderating impact on the worker's politics. He argues that militant movements are nearly always based simultaneously in both workplaces and communities.

Another reason this residential pattern may have contributed to the moderation of Anglo politics is that it meant that Anglo-American workers lived in class-heterogeneous neighborhoods. Living in the peripheral, more prestigious communities meant that Anglo workers were more likely to interact with and identify with middle-class residents. They were more likely to accept moderate, reformist, middle-class ideas about the system than were foreign-born workers, who lived in exclusively working-class residence areas.

Cultural Factors

Certainly, the institutionalization of new model unionism, ethnic segmentation in the labor market, and residential dispersion all played roles in Anglo-American workers' acceptance of reform politics. But there were other reasons as well. Anglo-American workers, even when they faced nearly insurmountable economic problems, generally accepted a hegemonic ideology (Gramsci 1971). This ideology suggested that those in low-status jobs making little money were undisciplined, lazy, stupid, or drank too much beer or whisky; it blamed economic problems faced by the largely Protestant Anglo-American worker on competition from the Catholic foreign-born peasantry. It suggested that radical ideas were un-American, that they were espoused by crazy foreigners who had no understanding of American institutions.

Many Anglo-American workers accepted a cohesive ideology that convinced them to accept the system as given; it included a strong work ethic, nativism, temperance, and a virulent antiradicalism. Each part of this ideology will be reviewed in turn, beginning with the work ethic, but the individual components were not really separable in practice.

One good way of studying this hegemonic ideology is to examine the beliefs of the city's native-born printers in the Chicago Typographical Union no. 16. The printers were the leaders in the reform union tendency; their beliefs about the source of such economic problems as unemployment or low wages, as well as their proposals about how to solve those problems, were important because these printers held dominant positions in the various labor assemblies formed throughout the period. Many of them expressed their thoughts on these questions in the Inland Printer , which the union endorsed in 1884 (Chicago Typographical Union no. 16 minutes May 25, 1884), and they received dozens of letters supporting its opinions from printers in the city. The first issue suggested it was "by and for printers in the Midwest." The statements in the journal are the best source of evidence on the beliefs of the English-speaking printers in Chicago.

The printers in the Chicago Typographical Union no. 16 generally aspired to higher economic status; many hoped someday to own an office of their own and believed it was a real possibility. One means to such status was to work hard.

Look around the office where you are working. You will see a fellow who, whenever there is any fun going on is in for having a time of it for a day or two. If there is any extra work or unpleasant task to do, he is ready to swear that as there is no pay in it he is not the fellow for it.... His luck will be just to occupy the same position if not a poorer one, as long as he lives. If you want to have good luck, make it yourself. (Inland Printer February 1884, 11)

More than hard work is needed to lead one down the road to success; one must also be educated.

The printer must read up on his trade in order to be proficient. Who would employ a physician or a lawyer who did not keep up in his respective profession? The condition in the craft in a degree accounts for the low wages paid, and one of the first steps toward advancement is to increase our knowledge. More reading will produce better workmanship, and better workmanship will bring better wages. (Inland Printer March 1884, 8)

[A printer ought to] possess such a general knowledge of scientific subjects to make him a worthy member of the cultured classes, and bring him closer to the mental level of the individuals which are accustomed to come and go in any of the large printing establishments. (Inland Printer September 1885, 538)

Printers did aspire to become members of the "cultured classes," and they had many of the same social attitudes as those of Puritan middle-class background or orientation. They believed that self-improvement through hard work and education could lead to upward mobility.

The day has passed when the members of the craft can safely be sneered at on account of the place they occupy, either in society or the vast machinery of the business world. Whatever of odium may have been attached to the men composing it... has been effectively silenced in these later years. Now printing can boldly throw down the glove and challenge comparison with any and every trade or profession for sobriety, respectability, the calling to high places of trust and honor, as it has ever been able to do for education, intelligence, genius and the rare dowry of brains. (Inland Printer July 1886, 607)

The printers' beliefs and striving for status made sense; they were perhaps the most powerful and privileged trade in the city. But their influence went beyond their trade; because of their powerful union and their positions of influence in the various trades assem-

blies, they convinced many in the lower status trades to accept the idea that education and hard work would lead to upward mobility.

The Anglo-American cigar makers, for example, rejected the revolutionary politics of the Progressive Cigarmakers Union in favor of an analysis of their condition emphasizing that mobility based on individual effort was possible. "What position are we, the cigarmakers, to hold in society? Are we to receive an equivalent for our labor, sufficient to maintain us in comparative independence and respectability to procure the means with which to educate our children and qualify them for playing their part in the world's dream?" (Cigar Makers Official Journal January 1882, 31).

The cigar makers asserted that the purpose of their union was

to rescue our trade from the condition into which it has fallen, and raise ourselves to that condition in society to which we as mechanics are justly entitled... to place ourselves on a foundation sufficiently strong to secure us from further encroachments, and to elevate the moral, social and intellectual condition of every cigarmaker in the country. (Cigar Makers official Journal January 1882, 31)

Such hope for bettering their economic condition through improving the morals and education of every cigar maker was unrealistic; structural factors—technological advances and tenement house cigar manufacturing—would soon destroy the jobs of even the most moral, best educated, and hardest working cigar makers.

Employers made the same argument concerning hard work and education; it was obviously to their benefit to convince their workers to work hard and accept the notion that failure in the labor market was due to employees' individual deficiencies rather than employer decisions or problems within the capitalist system as a whole. Some of the most effective employer attempts to disseminate these hegemonic ideas were made by powerful railroad companies to the overwhelmingly Anglo-American engineers and conductors.

Railroad management tried to convince all their workers that the road to success lay in working hard for the day when the worker would be promoted to a higher place in the company. Firemen were told they would someday become engineers; brakemen were told they had only to wait for the time when they would be conductors; engineers and conductors were counseled that they had a good chance to become top managers. The management-oriented

Railway Age (August 21, 1885, 533) made this argument: "When

vacancies occur, promotions will be made from the most competent and deserving men of our own line. Remember there is always room at the top, and the officers who have obtained the highest rank in the service are those who have worked their way up from the lowest round of the ladder." The journal argued that hard work was the means to such mobility: "The young man who enters the railway service determined to make it the business of his life, who in twisting a brake or throwing coal into the fire bay, studies to do it in the best possible way and who shows himself interested in whatever work is given him and competent to do it will sooner or later find his full reward" (Railway Age May 15, 1884, 308).

Railway Age even published a biographical dictionary of railroad officials to provide examples of what hard work could do for these "poor boys." These biographies did indeed show that many of the top railroad officials had worked for a time at lower levels of the companies. The fact that there were far fewer jobs at the top than at the bottom, thus restricting the chances for advancement, was not emphasized, however. In 1880, the Illinois Central, for example, had 1 division superintendent, 1 assistant division superintendent, and 4 train masters in their Chicago division, which included 55 conductors, 100 brakemen, 60 baggagemen, 80 switch-men, and 172 laborers (Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics Report 1880, 216-17). Few of the unskilled and semiskilled would be able to move up, but the workers could be convinced to work hard and not complain about working conditions if they thought they had a chance for individual upward mobility.

Education was viewed as a way of getting ahead, but an effort to get educated substituted individual for collective economic or political action. Railway Age was explicit about the fact that education would exert a conservatising influence on the railroad worker:

Nothing is more certain than that the sole influence powerful enough to prevent the gradual separation of the people of this country into classes—with a vast, dull-eyed hopeless multitude of toiling serfs at the bottom—is education.... The man who has received the full benefit of these institutions has no need to loudly assert that he "is as good as any capitalist," for everybody knows that he is and he never imagines that anyone will doubt it. To such men capital will concede their rights as a matter of course.

The communistic movement will end when the educating influences

here succeed in enlightening the vast multitudes. (Railway Age June 25, 1885, 402-3)

The work ethic and the supposed leveling influence of education were important components of an ideology that convinced workers they had a real chance to make it through their own efforts. But another important piece of the hegemonic ideology of the period was nativism , defined by John Higham (1977, 4) as "intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., 'unAmerican') connections." At various times in Chicago history, nativism was linked to anti-Catholicism, antiradicalism, and the temperance movement. Immigrants became scapegoats and were held responsible for all the ills society faced: depressions, revolutionary movements, unemployment among the native born, drunkenness, political corruption, gambling, prostitution, and poverty.

Nativist attitudes had various institutional expressions. The anti-immigrant "Know-Nothing" parties, such as the American party, often competed for political office in early Chicago history. The Anglo-American working and middle classes created the nativist American Protestant Association. The upper class founded the United Order of Deputies, which viewed the foreign born as "uncivilized heathen from pre-industrial lands" (Schneirov 1984, 276). The Protestant City Missionary Society placed a full-time missionary in the Southwest Side Pilsen community in order to convert Bohemian freethinkers (atheists) to Christianity; the Catholic church viewed its priests in the Irish stockyards district in a similar way (Schneirov 1984, 276). Even trade unions, such as the carpenters, viewed their organizers as missionaries (Schneirov 1984, 277).

Immigrants were thought to be immoral; that was considered the real reason for their problems and those they supposedly caused the Anglo-American workers. Anglo-American labor reformers viewed their movement as a means of uplifting the mass of lazy, impulsive, poor, immoral immigrants. Eight Hour Association leaders in the mid 1880s successfully appealed directly to Protestant religious leaders to support their movement for hours reduction, which they suggested would also result in the "moral reform" of the immigrant (Schneirov 1984, 439).

America , the Native Citizen , and the British American were nativist newspapers that argued against Catholic customs and lifestyles and for immigration restrictions (Funchion 1976, 21).

These organizations and papers successfully convinced many Anglo-American workers that the economic and social problems they faced stemmed from Catholic immigration; as a result, the new industrial capitalist system itself was not blamed for those problems. The nativist, antiradical sentiment of the Chicago English-language press is clear in this statement in the Chicago Daily Herald about Italians, Russians, and Poles: "This country extends a cordial welcome to honest, industrious, and intelligent people from all parts of the world (China excepted), but it cannot afford to become a land of refuge for criminals, paupers, and barbarians, whose highest ambition is to overthrow law and authority of every kind" (Feldstein and Costello 1974, 171).

The Anglo-American workers expressed much hostility toward their foreign-born brothers and sisters, some of it because of the economic competition the latter represented. The printer A. C. Cameron's attack on the foreign born when the Trades and Labor Assembly rejected Central Labor Union affiliation is a good example of nativism within the city's labor movement:

I am one of those who do not think it a crime to be an American, or worse than murder to speak the English language. I am opposed to any movement toward joining with those that carry the red flag of Socialism of Europe to the democratic republicanism of America. The Trades Assembly will be certainly smirched if it takes on such a responsibility. (Chicago Tribune May 3, 1886, 16)

Nativism was also tied to opposition to the more militant ideas and tactics within the labor movement, thus effectively reducing the likelihood of native-born acceptance of revolutionary ideas. The close ties between nativist and antiradical sentiments are shown in the following quotes from the Chicago Times and the Chicago Tribune :

To put into practice the criminal doctrine of the "red flag" by Germans, Czechs, Poles, or any stranger to our shores is offensive foreignism. (Chicago Times , quoted in Illinois Staats Zeitung May 25, 1887, 3)

The way to prevent the spread of communism here is to close our seaports against the further ingress of European vagabondage. Perhaps we might enact laws whereby no one should be permitted to emigrate here who could not show sufficient credentials as to his not having been either a thief, a pauper, or a vagabond in the country from which he comes. Had there been some such law in force, eleven-twelfths of those communistic

gentlemen in our city would never have reached our shores. (Chicago Times February 19, 1874, 44)

The Chicago Tribune suggested the following about a speech made by the socialist candidate for mayor, Ernst Schmidt, in 1879:

It was an appeal to them to encourage a feeling of enmity to the law and government of this country.... This speech would have been an impudent, insolent, disgraceful harangue delivered by anybody, but delivered by a man of alien birth of alien principles, to an alien audience, in a foreign tongue, was doubly infamous and scandalous and can find no sympathy from the great mass of Germans.... Schmidt will soon discover how universal is the American abhorrence of socialism and of the blatant ignorance on which it is founded. (Chicago Tribune June 25, 1879, 25)

Many problems, including the poverty of the foreign born, were blamed on immigrants' propensity to drink beer and whisky. In the seventies and eighties, the largely Anglo-American, upper-class Protestant Citizens Association, the Union League Club, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Citizens League for the Prevention of Sale of Liquor to Minors lobbied for temperance legislation, for the passage of Sunday closing laws, and even for Prohibition. The Anglo-American printers clearly accepted the idea that drinking was one of the reasons for the low economic position of many of those in the city's working class. "Absolute sobriety is a prime essential to success, and a drunken printer is a foul disgrace to the art and all the high and honored names it has canonized" (Inland Printer July 1886, 609).

Temperance also had a tremendous impact on the railroad trade. By the seventies, alcohol was banned even off the job for most railroad employees (Lightner 1977, 161). The Anglo-American elite brotherhoods accepted the temperance argument; both the Order of Railway Conductors and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers made drinking a sufficient cause for dismissal from their organizations. Those dismissed for drinking were blacklisted by both the employers and the unions (Railway Age October 10, 1884, 668).

The temperance ideology, like the work ethic, was used to good advantage by powerful railroad employers, who argued that their interest in it was solely because of the danger that drunken railroad employees might cause accidents. But the fact that they often required total abstinence indicates they may have had other motives;

enforcing this requirement for one's workers had the effect of barring workers from pubs and saloons, where much union organizing and working-class political activity took place.

Acceptance of this hegemonic ideology—the work ethic, nativism, temperance fanaticism, and antiradicalism—was promoted directly by employers under the cover of their supposed concern about their employees' "morals." Perhaps the most interesting attempt along these lines was railroad managements' creation of railroad Young Men's Christian Associations (YMCAs). By the late seventies and early eighties, railroad companies were contributing heavily to and serving on the boards of the YMCAs, which established centers that lured railroaders by the promise of clean beds, hot baths, and comfortable reading rooms. There the men were forced to listen to "edifying lectures, Bible study groups, and hymn feasts to nourish the spirit" (Lightner 1977, 275). The Illinois Central Railroad donated $600 to the Cairo Illinois Y in 1882 in order to "accomplish some good in that ungodly place" (Lightner 1977, 276). Managers could rest assured that few unions would be organized in such settings; and it is unlikely that Lassalle, Marx, or Bakunin were featured in the reading room.

The railroad managers did not do this solely to make their men more religious. They increased the influence of morally "correct" self-improvement associations among the railroaders in order to prevent the rise of more economically oriented, class-conscious trade unions.

The company which can afford to see that their engines are carefully supplied with coal and oil and kept in their best repair can equally well afford to take pains that their men shall have needed rest and a chance to get proper food at reasonable rates and the advantages afforded by a Christian Association. I rejoice that no guild of railroad men is likely to sink to the level of mere trades unions, the sole object of which is to affect the prices of labor. (Railway Age June 15, 1882, 331)

Managers understood the economic value of successful attempts to control the morals of their workers.

All railroad officials will bear cheerful testimony to the value of the work of the railroad Young Men's Christian Associations. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, the work pays.... A temperate man is better than one who is godless. One of the best engineers I ever knew, a man who

could be relied upon for any emergency, whose engine never was in trouble and who was always ready to obey orders and perform whatever duty was there expected of him, never got on his engine without a testament in his pocket and is now filling a pulpit most acceptably in a Christian church in this state. Such men make good men from a purely business standpoint, and every agency that tends to the development of such men is of value and deserves the hearty support of the railroads. (Railway Age March 19, 1885, 185)

Undoubtedly, "emergencies" were considered to include running trains during the course of strikes by other railroaders.

The railroad managers supported forty-six Railway Ys by 1882, donating $50, 000 annually to maintain them (Railway Age July 13, 1882, 387). The Chicago branches of the Ys were extremely active; in 1883, they reported over eighty-five thousand visits to their facilities, many of which included attendance at meetings, education classes, Bible classes, gospel meetings, lectures, and so on. During the same year, over a thousand books were withdrawn from their libraries, over a hundred thousand papers, tracts, and pamphlets were distributed, and over twenty-seven hundred visits were made to railroaders at workplaces and homes by YMCA staff members (Railway Age January 24, 1884, 61).

Certainly, the Ys had a significant impact on the lives of Chicago's railroad workers; many must have spent much of their leisure time in these institutions. Similarly, requiring the use of company hotels, company stores, and company restaurants was also economically profitable for the companies because it both generated revenue directly and limited railroaders' ability to find a time and place to organize against the companies.

The great resources at the railroads' disposal allowed them to experiment in efforts to control the patterns of association of their men, their drinking, the ideas workers had concerning their work, their chances for upward mobility, their attitudes toward foreign workers and toward their superiors, and their religious beliefs. These efforts successfully promoted individualism, a work ethic, a lack of class consciousness, and nativism in the railroad workers.

The acceptance of a cohesive, multifaceted, hegemonic ideology by a large portion of the Anglo-American working class was based on the ability of employers and aristocratic trade union leaders in the Trades and Labor Assembly to convince workers that the system

worked for those who worked hard, got educated, stayed sober, and were God fearing and that those who did not make it were mainly lazy, uneducated, drunken, Catholic peasants. Foreigners who suggested otherwise were labeled irrational radicals with little understanding of the fine American institutions that provided such tremendous economic opportunities.

Political Access for the Anglo-American Worker

Unlike many of the foreign-born workers, especially the Germans, there was little in the relationship of the Anglo-American workers to the Chicago political system to make them conclude they should become revolutionaries and overthrow the state. Anglo-American votes usually counted, and police repression was visited mainly on those of non-Anglo background; this convinced Anglo-American workers to lobby for the passage of legislation favorable to the working class or, failing that, to try to elect sympathetic candidates to office.

Organized labor's first political successes came as early as 1866, when the ward-based eight-hour leagues associated with the Trades Assembly elected aldermen who supported the eight-hour demand in five out of sixteen wards. The city council passed an eight-hour law that same year, and with the support of the governor and attorney general, the state passed it in 1867 (Schneirov 1984, 20-21). Despite strikes designed to gain compliance, the laws were not enforced. But the Anglo-Americans felt encouraged by the fact that they had elected aldermen who passed legislation shortening the workday.

By the 1880s, Anglo-American reformers had developed what Schneirov (1984) calls "political collective bargaining," the public sphere counterpart of their cozy relationship with employers in the private sector. The idea was to use the large numbers of working-class voters as leverage in bargaining with party bosses for the enactment of moderate labor legislation and other benefits.

Many Anglo-American workers rejected the militant proposals of German socialists and anarchists but accepted a close relationship with the Democratic party and with Mayor Carter Harrison, who had defeated both the employer-supported Republican and German working-class-supported SLP candidates in 1879. In the

fall elections of that year, the Trades and Labor Council and the Greenback party endorsed Harrison, thus contributing to the defeat of socialist Ernst Schmidt. Harrison remained in office until 1887, supported by many middle-class as well as Anglo-American and Irish working-class voters.

Anglo-American workers supported Harrison because he was willing to back moderate reform proposals and because he was willing to appoint them to patronage jobs. Soon after his election, Harrison appointed six Greenbackers and eight-hour advocates in the Trades and Labor Assembly to city jobs; and he appointed many more labor reform leaders to jobs as factory and health inspectors later in the 1880s (Schneirov 1984, 350).

These labor leaders viewed their positions as good platforms from which to pursue reform; they were, however, denounced for a "sordid betrayal of class ideals" by the remains of the Socialist Labor party (Schneirov 1984, 124). Relations between the German socialists and the Anglo-American Democrats on the city council were not improved when the predominantly German socialists were denied the privilege of appointing election judges. Knowing that this meant they would be unable to prevent election fraud against their party, the socialists walked out.

Working-class political strength, especially in the Anglo-American and Irish communities, meant a decline in the political power of the city's upper-class employers. The employer-dominated Citizens Association and various political reform clubs lamented the rise of "political corruption," which came with the rise of machine politics ; but what upset them most was their inability to get the city administration to take their side in labor disputes. In 1885, the Citizens Association noted that police could not be used to suppress "rioters" (sic ) because they were also voters (Schneirov 1984, 373). There was some truth to their charge; the Trades and Labor Assembly often successfully lobbied city hall to support their strikes. For example, in 1882, Harrison refused to send police to support a streetcar company during a strike by largely Anglo-American conductors and drivers; in 1884, largely Irish police refused to intervene in a strike by Irish iron molders (Schneirov 1984, 373-74).

The fact of political access for the Anglo-American working class had political consequences; it created and sustained support for moderate labor reform. As the next chapter illustrates, the city's

Irish workers enjoyed even greater levels of political influence and, not coincidentally, also supported reform labor politics.

Conclusions

One explanation for the reformist politics of many Anglo-American workers would be that it was in their interest to accept the system because it gave them economic advantages. This group's overall position was excellent; many of their number were in the middle and upper classes, and the economic prospects of Anglo-American children were the best of any group in the city. Even those confined to working-class positions were often in the labor aristocracy because Anglo-Americans dominated exclusionary new model unions in the Chicago labor market.

It is not too surprising that Anglo-American labor aristocrats were conservative in their dealings with both their employers and the political system; that they emphasized upward mobility for themselves, their families, and their trade and rejected class-conscious alternatives; and that they aspired to middle-class status and respectability. Their vulnerability to middle-class Protestant ideals and arguments may have been reinforced by residential patterning in the city because aristocrats were likely to live in dispersed, predominantly Protestant, middle-class communities. Here they were far from their workplaces and far from the possibility of social interaction with their foreign-born co-workers, interaction that might have strengthened class identification.

But this argument cannot be used to explain why lower status Anglo-American workers accepted reform politics because such workers' economic prospects were often bleak. The explanation of their acceptance of reform politics lies in their belief in a hegemonic ideology that was borrowed from the middle class and articulated by labor aristocrats in the various trades assemblies. This ideology blamed individuals for their low economic position; the poor were assumed to be immoral, to lack a strong work ethic, to have failed to educate themselves, or to be drunks, atheists, or Catholics. Broad religious differences were also a crucial basis for political divisions between reformist Protestant Anglo-Americans in the Trades and Labor Assembly and freethinking Germans and Bohemians in the revolutionary Central Labor Union.

The ethnic political fragmentation was also reinforced by nativism, which suggested that the economic problems facing American workers were due to competition from the foreign born rather than basic defects in the capitalist system of production. Nativism was reinforced by ethnically based labor market segmentation and residential segregation, as well as by language differences, which made it unlikely that most Anglo-American workers would interact extensively or meaningfully with non-Anglo workers.

Thus, Anglo-Americans generally accepted a conservative collective bargaining approach in both the economic and political spheres, and they tended to reject class-conscious, revolutionary German trade unionism, socialism, and anarchism. Even though it was not working for them, low-status Anglo-American workers saw no reason to reject an economic system that was working for their reference group —Anglo-American members of the labor aristocracy and the middle class. Their reformist tendencies were reinforced by a positive political experience, especially in the 1880s—the election of a sympathetic mayor, the appointment of labor reformers to patronage jobs, and mayoral and police support for some of their strikes.

Most Irish workers also rejected revolutionary politics. But an argument that the Irish did this because the economic system worked for them is even harder to sustain than in the Anglo-American case. The Irish as a group had the lowest economic status of any ethnic group in the city. The Irish did not accept Puritan-oriented, middle-class ideologies; they were in fact one of the groups against which nativist, temperance, and anti-Catholic attacks were directed. What then explains the reform politics of the Irish workers in Chicago?