By this time thoughtful laborers had learned the futility of programmes that attempted to reform society.They had watched the birth and death of many experiments.They had participated in short-lived cooperative stores and shops; they had listened to Owen's alluring words and had seen his World Convention meet and adjourn; had witnessed national reform associations, leagues, and industrial congresses issue their high-pitched resolutions; and had united on legislative candidates.And yet the old world wagged on in the old way.Wages and hours and working conditions could be changed, they had learned, only by coercion.This coercion could be applied, in general reforms, only by society, by stress of public opinion.But in concrete cases, in their own personal environment, the coercion had to be first applied by themselves.They had learned the lesson of letting the world in general go its way while they attended to their own business.
In the early fifties, then, a new species of union appears.It discards lofty phraseology and the attempt at world-reform and it becomes simply a trade union.It restricts its house-cleaning to its own shop, limits its demands to its trade, asks for a minimum wage and minimum hours, and lays out with considerable detail the conditions under which its members will work.The weapons in its arsenal are not new--the strike and the boycott.Now that he has learned to distinguish essentials, the new trade unionist can bargain with his employer, and as a result trade agreements stipulating hours, wages, and conditions, take the place of the desultory and ineffective settlements which had hitherto issued from labor disputes.But it was not without foreboding that this development was witnessed by the adherents of the status quo.
According to a magazine writer of 1853:
"After prescribing the rate of remuneration many of the Trades'
Unions go to enact laws for the government of the respective departments, to all of which the employer must assent....The result even thus far is that there is found no limit to this species of encroachment.If workmen may dictate the hours and mode of service, and the number and description of hands to be employed, they may also regulate other items of the business with which their labor is connected.Thus we find that within a few days, in the city of New York, the longshoremen have taken by force from their several stations the horses and labor-saving gear used for delivering cargoes, it being part of their regulations not to allow of such competition."The gravitation towards common action was felt over a wide area during this period.Some trades met in national convention to lay down rules for their craft.One of the earliest national meetings was that of the carpet-weavers (1846) in New York City, when thirty-four delegates, representing over a thousand operatives, adopted rules and took steps to prevent a reduction in wages.The National Convention of Journeymen Printers met in 1850, and out of this emerged two years later an organization called the National Typographical Union, which ten years later still, on the admission of some Canadian unions, became the International Typographical Union of North America; and as such it flourishes today.In 1855 the Journeymen Stone Cutters' Association of North America was organized and in the following year the National Trade Association of Hat Finishers, the forerunner of the United Hatters of North America.In 1859 the Iron Molders' Union of North America began its aggressive career.
The conception of a national trade unity was now well formed;compactly organized national and local trade unions with very definite industrial aims were soon to take the place of ephemeral, loose-jointed associations with vast and vague ambitions.Early in this period a new impetus was given to organized labor by the historic decision of Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts in a case* brought against seven bootmakers charged with conspiracy.Their offense consisted in attempting to induce all the workmen of a given shop to join the union and compel the master to employ only union men.The trial court found them guilty; but the Chief Justice decided that he did not "perceive that it is criminal for men to agree together to exercise their own acknowledged rights in such a manner as best to subserve their own interests." In order to show criminal conspiracy, therefore, on the part of a labor union, it was necessary to prove that either the intent or the method was criminal, for it was not a criminal offense to combine for the purpose of raising wages or bettering conditions or seeking to have all laborers join the union.The liberalizing influence of this decision upon labor law can hardly be over-estimated.
* Commonwealth vs.Hunt.
The period closed amidst general disturbances and forebodings, political and economic.In 1857 occurred a panic which thrust the problem of unemployment, on a vast scale, before the American consciousness.Instead of demanding higher wages, multitudes now cried for work.The marching masses, in New York, carried banners asking for bread, while soldiers from Governor's Island and marines from the Navy Yard guarded the Custom House and the Sub-Treasury.From Philadelphia to New Orleans, from Boston to Chicago, came the same story of banks failing, railroads in bankruptcy, factories closing, idle and hungry throngs moving restlessly through the streets.In New York 40,000, in Lawrence 3500, in Philadelphia 20,000, were estimated to be out of work.
Labor learned anew that its prosperity was inalienably identified with the well-being of industry and commerce; and society learned that hunger and idleness are the golden opportunity of the demagogue and agitator.The word "socialism" now appears more and more frequently in the daily press and always a synonym of destruction or of something to be feared.No sooner had business revived than the great shadow of internal strife was cast over the land, and for the duration of the Civil War the peril of the nation absorbed all the energies of the people.
