7

Birth of the Business Agent

In the summer of 1883, an unusual notice appeared in the New York City daily newspapers. The text informed the city’s contractors that, from that day on, they were to hire union workers exclusively. In accordance with the notice, a contractor named Corr was pressed to dismiss two nonunion derrickmen on a midtown Manhattan project. Corr refused and two hundred craftsmen walked off the site. After two days of intensive negotiations, the workers returned to Corr’s revamped all-union job. The walkout was successful, but, more significant, the action marked the first time that union building tradesmen conducted a strike through the offices of a full-time union representative—the walking delegate.¹

James Lynch, an officer in the United Order of Carpenters, was the union spokesman in the Corr dispute. He later wrote that his appointment as walking delegate was a move made “in desperation.” Lumpers and piecework contractors had invaded New York City bringing with them scores of untrained nonunion carpenters. The unions had tried unsuccessfully to organize the new arrivals by traditional haphazard methods. Discouraged by their failure, leaders of the Amalgamated Building Trades Union created a new and permanent union office devoted to actions on behalf of the city’s organized tradesmen.²

The need for such a position had long been apparent. Militant craftsmen who voiced grievances against building employers were often sent packing. Discrimination against early union activists was common. In 1881, a New Haven, Connecticut, carpenter reported that local contractors shared a blacklist not only of union activists but of any workers who left an employer in order to seek higher wages elsewhere. Many of the young UBCJA locals dug into members’ pockets to help out brothers who had been fired for organizing. Extensive blacklists, however, kept the numbers in need on the rise and made that solution an expensive demonstration of solidarity.³

If only to preserve local unions’ treasuries, another approach had to be found. The New York experiment offered a direction. Instead of draining the members’ resources for a potentially endless list of martyrs, the New York unions had opted to pay one regular salary. These funds supported the walking delegate (later known as the business agent), a man whose livelihood depended on the union, not the employer. In theory, therefore, his immediate interests lay as an advocate for the membership. Unlike the vulnerable rank-and-file member, he could confront employers forcefully and vigorously without jeopardizing his own weekly pay. Initial success in New York won attention elsewhere. P. J. McGuire told the 1888 national UBC convention that walking delegates were operating in fourteen cities.⁴

In October 1887, Boston’s Local 33 elected Chelsea-born Joseph Clinkard as the state’s first walking delegate. In July of 1889, two other Boston locals joined Local 33 in selecting Clinkard. Over the next few years, until his untimely death in 1894 at the age of forty-one, Clinkard wore several different hats as the principal spokesman for the city’s carpenters. He served as district organizer, general agent for the Boston District Council of Carpenters, and president of the Boston Building Trades Council. Other Boston walking delegates, including C. E. Jordan, J. W. Comstock, and George LaSeur, carried out their duties under Clinkard’s protective wing.⁵

The walking delegate was the chief executive officer of the local or district council. He managed the finances, balanced the books, and reminded members to pay their dues. He represented the union in public forums or in private negotiating sessions with employers. He brought up members on charges and called and led strikes. His primary task, however, was to patrol his jurisdiction through weekly visits to the members on the job. At the site, he inspected working conditions, hunted for nonunion workers, determined if union rules were enforced, and listened to workers’ grievances. If everything was in order, he continued his tour to the next project. In cases of unfair employers or violations of trade rules, the walking delegate took the heat off individual carpenters and argued their case directly to the contractor.

Walking delegates and business agents also functioned as the chief organizers for their locals. Whether they signed up new members or won dismissals of nonunion workers, they were mandated, as Quincy Local 762 agent John Cogill put it, to get “every man that works with carpenters’ tools in the United Brotherhood.” Like most other members of the Brotherhood, Cogill understood the value of achieving complete organization. “Not until then,” he stated, “will we be able to call ourselves secure.” The most active locals insisted that each member act as an organizer, encouraging friends and relatives in the trade to join the union fold. But ultimately, the agent was held responsible for accomplishments and setbacks. The best agents, recognizing the mobility of the workforce, knew their work was not limited to their locals’ geographic boundaries. In a letter to the Carpenter, Cogill noted that his local’s firm control of Quincy’s carpenters had prompted him to organize another local north of the city to prevent outside nonunion carpenters from threatening Local 762’s position. After a winter of nightly home visits to unorganized carpenters, Cogill had convinced thirty men to apply for a charter from the national office and confidently predicted that another forty members would join the new local within four months.⁶

Before the unions established hard-and-fast labor practices in the industry, employer abuses were multiple in type and widespread in practice. Builders who verbally agreed to respect a standard wage scale commonly undercut the rate by privately demanding kickbacks or distorting the total numbers of hours worked by individual craftsmen. To counter these and other employer maneuvers, walking delegates paid surprise payday visits to witness the opening of the pay envelope. Unaccustomed to intervention by outsiders, contractors rarely welcomed the union representative. In the first years of the new office, walking delegates were harassed legally and physically. In 1892, contractor James Emery literally threw Cambridge Local 183 agent Maloney off an Emery project. Though the local eventually won a minor lawsuit against the contractor, considerably more than Maloney’s pride had been hurt in the incident. The job description, therefore, called for a particular kind of individual. As Luke Grant, author and one-time member of the Chicago Building Trades Council, suggested, the “attitude of employers not only made the walking delegate a necessity, but in a degree determined his qualification. He had to be a man possessed of physical courage, who would not be intimidated.”⁷

Hostility to the walking delegate was not initially restricted to employers. Nonunion workers feared his presence and some union members resented his role. A conscientious business agent who insisted on work-rule enforcement was liable to embarrass union men who had curried favor with the boss by ignoring union regulations. And inevitably, accusations of selfish ambition and easy living accompanied a union representative’s abandonment of the tools. James Lynch evaluated his job in largely negative, if somewhat self-serving, terms:

I found the position of walking delegate anything but a pleasant task. Although naturally of a peaceable disposition I was plunged into a continual war. My presence on a job was an irritation to the employer as well as the nonunion men, and not infrequently some of the union men envied me, not realizing the sorrows of my lot. I retired, after serving four terms.⁸

Within a few years, Maloney’s tussle and Lynch’s sorrow were small potatoes in comparison with the abuse poured on the heads of business agents. The acceptance of unionism in the industry implied the institutionalization of the walking delegate’s office and power. The agent became the lightning rod for antilabor sentiment from every corner. Frank Foster of the Labor Leader complained that the new union official had been publicly convicted as “the promoter and instigator of labor troubles, the ever-present thorn in the side of industry, the arbitrary dictator who rules with merciless power the poor wights under him, the blatant demagogue who is responsible for strikes, lockouts, riots.”⁹

Despite the criticism, the office of business agent was often a plum. Like other elective or appointed posts in the labor movement, the position offered an alluring path out of the daily trials and tribulations of the laboring life. Big-city business agents called the shots for a battalion of tradesmen and spent their days negotiating, conversing, and hobnobbing with people considerably higher up the social ladder. The appeal of an office that enabled ambitious working-class men to leave behind the hazards of manual trades should not be underestimated. The fleeting appointments as foremen and/or superintendents represented the outside limits of upward mobility for most carpenters, so leadership of a trade union was a rare prize to be seized and cherished.

The post occasionally offered other gains besides improved status and self-worth. Larger contractors cut deals with business agents in order to consolidate and improve their position in the market. Sweetheart agreements, i.e., the promise by union tradesmen to work only for employer association contractors in exchange for a closed shop, squeezed out nonassociation builders and added to the agents’ leverage. Contractors courted the union officials, sometimes sweetening a cooperative relationship with individual rewards. Walter Ohlschager, a Chicago architect, claimed that he always incorporated a 1 percent surcharge for union graft when he estimated building costs. Though Ohlschager’s rule of thumb represented a token investment for builders or owners, such a sum looked positively princely to men striving to escape working-class poverty. Luke Grant insisted that most walking delegates were decent, honest, and effective union representatives. But, he admitted, the opportunities in major cities could be heady. The newly elected agent, he wrote, “finds himself suddenly transformed from a position of servitude to one of authority. He has a small army of men at his command. With an exaggerated opinion of his own importance, he is apt to abuse his power before he realizes his responsibility.”¹⁰

Legendary characters like the Ironworkers’ Sam Parks in New York and the Steamfitters’ “Skinny” Madden in Chicago contributed to the popular portrait of the corrupt walking delegate. Their audacity and unscrupulous tactics brought them considerable wealth and undisputed power within their unions. Parks had a personal “entertainment committee,” which once boasted of ninety assaults on dissenting union members in a two-month period. But his long term in office actually rested more on his ability to pressure employers. The Ironworkers won record wage increases during his reign. As one ironworker put it, “Sam Parks is good hearted, all right. If he takes graft, he spends it with the boys.”¹¹

Hostile journalists and public figures made few distinctions between the effective use of a powerful union office and outright corruption and demagoguery. A sufficient number of early business agents did indeed abuse their powers, but their ranks were largely limited to a handful of big cities where the sheer volume of construction justified “payments for peace” in an employer’s calculations. Nonetheless, the Parkses and the Maddens of the building trades titillated the public’s imagination and made for exciting newspaper copy.

In 1894, Rudyard Kipling published the widely read “The Walking Delegate” in The Century magazine. Kipling’s short story crystallized the elements that formed the negative image of the new building trades union officer. In his allegorical tale of the animal kingdom, an interloping yellow horse disrupts the pastoral idyll of a group of Vermont horses. Spouting nonsense about “Man the Oppressor,” the outsider rails against “invijjus distinctions o’ track an’ pedigree” as barriers to “the inalienable rights o’ my unfettered horsehood.” The other horses ignore his rantings and efforts to divide the group. But when the yellow horse proves to be lazy as well as foolish, the hard-working and conservative Vermonters “keep school” with him and pound a lesson into his hide.¹² Kipling’s trotting delegate is coarse, divisive, slothful, and indifferent to the basic American pride in individualistic values.

Not all of the labor-related fiction of the era was so blatantly antiunion. But even the sympathetic literature reflected popular concern with graft in the building trades. Leroy Scott’s novel The Walking Delegate, published in 1905, is a sensitive, if melodramatic, presentation of life in the New York City Ironworkers’ Union. Scott zeroes in on Buck Foley, the three-thousand-member local’s walking delegate. Foley’s character is clearly modeled on Sam Parks, yet Scott rejects the superficial stereotypes that Kipling and others favored. In Scott’s portrait, Foley is tough and perceptive. He used his native street smarts to rise from the ranks, winning sizable wage packages from employers based on a sophisticated understanding of the growing importance of steel skyscrapers. “Until his union had put up the steel frames the contractors could do nothing—the other workmen could do nothing. A strongly organized union holding this power—there was no limit to the concessions it might demand and secure.”¹³ The very lack of those limits proved to be Foley’s undoing. After four years of exemplary leadership, he began accepting bribes. Soon his lust for money outstripped all other concerns. He organized a clique of thugs to intimidate opponents and ensure his continued stay in power.

Scott’s book reflected a need felt by friends of labor to condemn the presence of trade union corruption. Foley becomes, in effect, Sam Parks. Yet Scott managed to be understanding as well as critical of Foley’s pact with the devil. His story is one of an ambitious and tenacious worker, led astray by visions of grandeur. The plot of the book and the other characters demonstrate Scott’s underlying sympathies with the working ironworker. Tom Keating, hopelessly brave, principled, intelligent, and talented with the tools, is the hero. Initially a Foley supporter, Keating challenged the walking delegate for union leadership, precipitating a torrent of dirty tricks and violence. The story’s villain, though, is not Foley, but rather James Baxter, the wealthy socialite and president of the Iron Employers’ Association. Baxter, a man who stops at nothing, enticed Foley to sell out the big strike. Scott’s condemnation rests squarely on the shoulders of the oily, suave, and manipulative contractor who has none of the excuses of derailed working-class aspirations to explain his evil actions away.

The flood of damning publicity forced the rest of the labor movement into a difficult position. Mindful of the gains directly attributable to the office of walking delegate, labor spokesmen outside the building trades were reluctant to join the critical chorus. The acknowledged presence of corruption, however, diminished the labor movement’s ability to garner broad-based support through general appeals for social justice for American workers. Some unions looked the other way. The United Mine Workers Journal, for example, compared the righteousness of walking delegates to “Peter and Paul in their sacred work.” But few unions adhered to the pure-as-driven-snow line. Most labor leaders fiercely defended the bulk of walking delegates while admitting the reality of abuse. The Street Railway Employees’ Gazette recognized occasional “over-officious” behavior but firmly declared that the creation of the office was “evidence of progress in the trade unions.” Nonetheless, the mounting damage was severe enough to warrant a resolution at the 1902 AFL convention calling for an investigation of union graft. Though the proposal was defeated, a number of delegates felt such an action was necessary in order to refocus public attention on the central issue of workers’ rights.¹⁴

The misguided highlighting of graft among walking delegates was not just a case of overemphasizing a few bad apples who spoiled an otherwise admirable barrel. Corrupt business agents operated in New York and Chicago because those were among the few cities sizable enough to afford illicit opportunities. Generous payoffs made sense only in situations of massive construction efforts. Even in cities like Boston, business agents never carried the weight of a Sam Parks. Whether it was a matter of personal integrity or lack of opportunities, formal accusations of corruption never surfaced against carpenters’ walking delegates in Massachusetts. While men like Joseph Clinkard and John Potts of Boston or W. J. LaFrancis of Springfield were influential citizens in their communities, sharing podiums with politicians and civic leaders and wielding significant power, they did not fit the Kiplingesque image of the “labor boss,” ready to shut down an entire metropolis on a moment’s whim.

Boston’s walking delegates may not have been charged with graft, but that hardly exempted them from merciless criticism. In the midst of an unresolved dispute in 1889 at Boston’s Tremont Theater site, Joseph Clinkard ordered a walkout of the project’s carpenters. Clinkard had acted to force compliance with union work rules, but a columnist for the Boston Record viewed the matter differently. Scornfully deriding Clinkard as “The Walking Delegate, in a plug hat and ponderous watch chain,” the writer accused him of arrogant power-hungry behavior and, worst of all, the sin of interfering with a contractor’s right to conduct his business as he saw fit.¹⁵

Perhaps the most celebrated controversy whirling around the city’s business agents was the one engineered by Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot. In the midst of the open shop drive of 1903–4, Eliot delivered a stinging attack on unionism in a well-publicized address at the Pauch Gallery Mansion in Brooklyn. The Harvard president charged that “labor unions have wrought more disaster on our country than the Civil War.” He singled out the building trades and their walking delegates as wreaking particularly disastrous havoc.

The building trades unions in Boston demand that they decide who shall get certain jobs; that the specifications be submitted for their approval first; that the unions get a certain amount for the awarding of work to certain contractors. Then the walking delegate gets his piece. And if at any time a new combination springs up in their respective unions, a like amount of money must be paid to them as to the old clique; and if such is not forthcoming work is stopped and the contractor is left with the building unfinished until he accedes to the union’s demands.¹⁶

Needless to say, Eliot’s words provoked an uproar. The Boston Building Trades Council and the Carpenters’ District Council called special meetings to draft a response. Local 33 Business Agent John Potts dismissed Eliot’s remarks as ignorant misstatements and challenged him to prove his allegations.

I don’t know of a single business agent in Boston who ever got as much as 10 cents from an employer. . . . The employers and business agents in this city don’t do business that way. . . . If President Eliot knows of any particular cases here in Boston where the walking delegates have been dishonest, why don’t he name the cases and make the matter public, so that the men can be brought into the courts, if necessary. He should not make a sweeping statement as he has, casting a slur on every walking delegate or business agent in the city.¹⁷

Pressured from all sides to clarify his comments, Eliot agreed to defend himself in a special meeting on February 7, 1904. Over two thousand angry unionists converged on Faneuil Hall to attend what the Boston Globe labeled a “Trial by Labor.” Under heated questioning, Eliot failed to substantiate charges of illegal conduct but refused to revise his basic antiunion ideology. The patrician president’s commitment to a laissez-faire liberalism was unswerving as he attacked both trade unions and employer associations as restrictive and “exhibitions of class selfishness.” His comments failed to placate the audience. On the contrary, when he termed scabs “a fair type of hero,” the Harvard president ensured that the controversy would not die.¹⁸

As long as distinguished figures like Charles Eliot continued to demean the walking delegate, the taint of demagoguery and corruption covered everyone who occupied the office. For those business agents who labored outside major urban centers, the characterization of raw unbridled power must have bordered on the ludicrous. Most locals could not even afford the luxury of a paid full-time official. Union officers worked in the field suffering the same scrapes, injuries, and falls as every other member and conducted union business in the evenings or on weekends. Old minutes of the meetings of Greenfield Local 549—a good-sized and well-organized local—indicate the enormous chasm between the temptations of big-city union office and the hassles of the small-town equivalent. Until 1910, Local 549 functioned without a walking delegate. That year the local established the post on a one-half day every-other-week basis. The rest of the time, the new officer worked at his trade. Since only a fraction of his duties could be performed in the time allotted, the position turned into a twenty-four-hour job, tucked into any available free moment. The first three candidates, Brothers Barton, Dwyer, and Parnell, each burned out after single terms of one year and “positively refused” to serve again. Parnell cited lack of time as the reason for his resignation. Though members appreciated the walking delegate’s contributions, the rewards were minimal. An April 1913 meeting voted Parnell a box of cigars. Finally, after three consecutive resignations, no one could be recruited for the post. In October 1914, the local empowered the union president to appoint (against their will, if need be) any member to the position of business agent.¹⁹

The Sam Parkses and “Skinny” Maddens grabbed headlines and confirmed antilabor convictions. But their thirst for wealth and power obscured the real significance of a new stratum of union officialdom. Even in the big cities, the typical business agent was not a criminal as much as he was the trade union movement’s equivalent of a political ward boss. He mediated between employer and employee, settling grievances and regulating labor relations on the job. He knew the members and he knew the contractors. As the only person with a direct pipeline to both sides, his access to and control of information gave him a prominence unmatched by any other figure in the industry. And when the union had established some form of hiring hall, he distributed the building trades unions’ version of political patronage, i.e., construction jobs. In the words of Robert Hoxie:

The peculiar duties of the walking delegate are such as to give him easy ascendancy over the rank and file. He looks out for employment for them; his duties lead him over the whole local field of labor, he knows where jobs are and how to get them, he can keep a man at employment, or he can keep him from it. . . . Clearly he is a man to keep on the right side of, and to keep “in” with. . . . He is a specialist in labor politics, with favors to give and to withhold.²⁰