3

From Artisan to Worker

It is not a long period since some of our opposers made it a rule to furnish a half pint of ardent spirits to each man, every day, for no other purpose than to urge the physical powers to excessive exertion. . . . Now we are told that excessive labor is the only security against intemperance . . . we have only to say, they employ us about eight months in the year during the longest and the hottest days, and in short days, hundreds of us remain idle for want of work When the long days again appear, our guardians set us to work as they say, “to keep us from getting drunk.” No fear has ever been expressed by these benevolent employers respecting our morals while we are idle in short days, through their avarice.

—Boston House Carpenters, Masons, and Stone Cutters circular, 1835¹

In 1633, the court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony set a ceiling of two shillings a day on carpenters’ wages. According to John Winthrop, first governor of the colony, the court was forced to take this action because “the scarcity of workmen had caused them to raise their wages to an excessive rate, so as a carpenter would have three shillings the day.” The Puritan Winthrop worried that too much income would lead to idleness and bad habits. “They spent much in tobacco, strong waters, etc.,” he wrote in his diary, “because they could get as much in four days as would keep them a week.”²

The colonial craftsman was well paid. Even with the court’s limit, a carpenter in Massachusetts regularly earned more than twice as much as his English counterpart.³ His relative affluence stemmed from a high demand for new houses, commercial buildings, wooden ships and wharves, and a chronic shortage of skilled labor. The carpenter who brought his trade and tools from England was a man with considerable bargaining power.

The building industry in the budding towns of New England was modeled on the European guild system. Borrowing designs and building methods from the old country, master carpenters opened up shops and sold directly to consumers. As their reputations and orders expanded, masters hired journeymen and apprentices to help carry out the work. Masters, journeymen, and apprentices alike handled the tools. The division between the groups was not one of permanent status, but of age, years of experience, and level of skill. Barring unforeseen circumstances, an apprentice who stayed with the trade could expect, over time, to become a master. The rules were unwritten, but tradition held that masters looked out for the long-term welfare of journeymen and apprentices and passed on the “art” and “mystery” of the craft to the next generation.

The prescribed route of entry to the craft was through apprenticeship, a system that originated in the guild traditions of Europe and has been used with varying degrees of success ever since. Apprentices in colonial America were “indentured,” a legal process by which the guardianship of young men was passed from parents to master craftsmen. In October of 1640, for example, Thomas Millard was indentured for an eight-year apprenticeship to William Pynchon, a Springfield carpenter. In exchange for his work, Millard received room, board, and clothing and the promise of “one new sute of apparell & forty shillings” upon completion of his training. Millard left four months before his term was up. Though he lost his promised forty shillings, he did get his suit.⁴

For all the bustle and trade of the urban centers, colonial Massachusetts remained an agricultural society. As late as 1820, only one of every fourteen Americans lived in cities with a population over 2,500. The farm was the basic economic unit and most families either were self-sufficient or bartered with their neighbors. Farmers who knew how to build often headed for town after the fall harvest and stayed until the spring planting. The threat of the farmer/carpenter’s competition was a sore point for urban carpenters. “A Farmer ought to employ himself in his proper occupation,” huffed a New York mechanic in 1757, “without meddling with Smiths, Masons, Carpenters, Coopers.”⁵

Conversely, if a new house or barn needed skills beyond the farmer’s or the community’s talents, there were builders who roamed the countryside offering their services. These all-purpose carpenters who designed and built houses by pattern books, local traditions, or the seats of their pants represented an American alternative to the European guild tradition. Typically, a farm family would contract with one of these men to put up a structure in exchange for room and board and a small sum at the end of the job. In addition, the farmer supplied the materials and provided whatever unskilled help the carpenter needed.

Just as the traveling carpenter had to improvise with the materials and terrain available on each project, he was also forced to develop other sources of revenue after each building season wound down. Unlike the urban master mechanic who retired to shop work in the colder months, the rural builder needed a wider variety of skills to survive. For example, in the early 1800s many carpenters found part-time employment in the emerging shoe industry in Lynn, laying down their hammers and saws to pick up the tools of the shoemaker every winter.

In 1774, carpenters in Boston issued a “book of prices,” a slim volume of rules of work and a list of recommended prices for various types of work. This book (and similar manuals in other cities) was intended to stabilize building practices by cutting down on competition between carpenters. While publication of piece rates may have bred cooperation among masters, it unintentionally promoted conflict in the presumably harmonious relationship between masters and their journeymen and apprentices. “The rates were often kept secret by the master mechanics,” writes labor historian Walter Galenson, “to prevent their employees, who were usually paid by the day, from knowing what their profits were.”⁶

Strains appeared in the assumption of common interests between masters/journeymen/apprentices. Master carpenters increasingly defined themselves as employers. In a 1791 account, the masters described their role as “procuring materials, superintending the workmen, and giving directions,” as well as “providing tools for the different kinds of work and shops in which it may conveniently be performed.”⁷ To the degree that the master acted as a contractor, journeymen and apprentices inevitably responded as employees. In 1825, close to six hundred Boston house carpenters went on strike for a ten-hour workday. The masters, not ready to play the part of employer to the hilt, expressed “surprize and regret” at the journeymen’s actions. In rejecting shorter hours, they claimed to be baffled by the strikers’ demand: “Journeymen of good character and of skill, may expect very soon to become masters, and like us the employers of others; and by the measure which they are now inclined to adopt, they will entail upon themselves the inconvenience to which they seem desirous that we should now be exposed!”⁸

The puzzled master carpenters did not fight the strike single-handedly. Boston’s merchants and capitalists hired the masters to build their expanding capital stock. This powerful group of men—about to reveal itself as the pivotal force in the industry—saw the strike in a larger context, as a potentially infectious virus that might inspire other Boston-area workers. These “gentlemen engaged in building” (as they styled themselves) shared none of the masters’ confusion. They warned that a successful strike would surely “extend to and embrace all the Working Classes . . . thereby effecting a most injurious change in all the modes of business.”⁹ At a meeting on the evening of April 21, they agreed to refuse work to any striking journeyman or any master who accepted the strikers’ terms.

The spirit of rebellion was in the air. After all, these were the same Boston carpenters who, a generation earlier, were credited with the idea of dumping the tea in Boston Harbor. In 1832, the ship and house carpenters of Boston and Charlestown tried again. On May 23, they drafted a statement outlining their grievances. We work from sunrise to sunset for an average of $1 a day, the carpenters complained, while losing one-third of a year’s work due to foul weather. From that day on, they announced they would work only ten-hour days from March until September. This time the merchants and ship owners were even better organized. They declared a lockout of the strikers and raised the staggering sum of $20,000, which they made available to the masters. Accordingly, the master ship carpenters were able to offer $2 a day (twice the normal wage) to forty journeymen who would break the strike.¹⁰

The persistence of Boston’s carpenters fueled a general labor uprising in the 1830s. The movement for a ten-hour day swept across New England to New York and Philadelphia. Between 1833 and 1837, building trades workers went on strike thirty-four times, and almost three hundred thousand wage earners of all kinds joined trade unions or mechanics’ associations. Seth Luther, Boston house carpenter, won nationwide fame as a labor reformer with the distribution of his Address to the Working Men of New England. Luther signed the circular of Boston’s carpenters, masons, and stone cutters when the city’s tradesmen struck for the ten-hour day once more in 1835. Yet, despite all the labor activity, the results were familiar. After seven long months, the Boston strike collapsed.

The strikes of 1825, 1832, and 1835 failed to shorten the workday, but they did succeed in changing the carpenter’s view of his industry. The protests had exposed the shifting relations between working carpenters, masters, and merchant capitalists. The bond between masters and journeymen, once taken for granted, had been frayed by the political alliances formed by masters and merchants in each of the three strikes. In the pre–Civil War United States, apprentices and journeymen could still reasonably expect to eventually become, and could therefore identify with, masters, but the actors in the building industry were leaving the guild traditions behind and entering a new phase. As the 1835 circular put it, “We should not be too severe on our employers, they are slaves to the Capitalists, as we are to them. The power behind their throne is greater than the throne itself.”¹¹

The Panic of 1837 crushed the labor organizations and economic aspirations of Massachusetts carpenters, but the following decade brought another burst of building activity across the state. In Newburyport alone, 832 new homes were built in the late 1840s on top of a previously existing stock of just 600 houses.¹² The boom-and-bust pattern continued for the rest of the century. From 1866 to 1906, the volume of building activity shot up by 250 percent, an upsurge that included wild swings of unbridled expansion and sudden crashes. The pace of new construction was part of a country in change. Railroads connected once remote towns and villages, mechanical inventions wiped out entire handicrafts and extended the factory system to new industries, as the United States traveled from a sea of self-contained communities to a unified nation linked by modern communication and transportation systems.

Carpenters in Massachusetts were respected members of their communities in the mid-1800s. Their work was a “calling,” not just a job, and their pay rates reflected this position. Figures from Essex County in 1875 show that though the average carpenter worked only slightly more than seven months a year, his annual income was 41 percent higher than that of factory workers and 49 percent higher than that of common laborers. In fact, among skilled craftsmen, only blacksmiths and machinists received more—and they worked year-round. The wages secured the carpenter’s social status in his community. Unlike the dependents of a semiskilled or unskilled workman, writes historian Stephan Thernstrom, the artisan’s “wife and children were under much less pressure to enter the labor market themselves to supplement the family income.”¹³

Along with the demand for construction skills, the Industrial Revolution brought some troubling problems for the carpenter. By and large, the work had not changed since the 1700s. If anything, the knowledge required had been complicated by the growing number of wealthy homeowners whose tastes expanded from the spartan designs of the colonial era to the elaborate detail work of Victorian buildings. In any case, from stark warehouse to lavish mansion, the carpenter still fabricated doors, windows, stairs, trim, and mantels by hand.

The technological innovations that had transformed the textile and shoe industries were eventually applied to the building trades. Steam power and the circular saw had mechanized wood-cutting to uniform sizes by 1815, but at that time all the dressing and fitting of the lumber was still done on the building site or in the shop. After 1840, however, the floodgates of change opened. Factories with new machines—cut-off saws, mortising and tenoning machines, borers, compound carvers, and power sanders—revolutionized woodworking. For a number of years, hand labor and machine production existed side by side. In 1872, John Richards, chronicler of the industry, reported: “It has been an even race, to say the least.”¹⁴ By the end of the century, the race was over, and hand millwork had been left in the dust.

In Empire in Wood, an excellent history of the Carpenters Union, Robert Christie compared hand- and machine-produced blinds, doors, ceiling boards, flooring, and stairs during the period from 1848 to 1896. He found that machines reduced production costs by 90 to 97 percent!¹⁵ With this incentive, entrepreneurs lost little time investing in planing mills, sawmills, and furniture factories. New York State had fifty-eight planing mills worth $131,000 in 1850; fifty years later it was a $22-million industry.¹⁶

Along with the menace of the factory, the Industrial Revolution spun off a threatening new family of building materials. Cast-iron replaced wooden beams beginning in 1852, and by the turn of the century, the inventions of structural steel, reinforced concrete, and the elevator laid the groundwork for the modern skyscraper. In 1906, a building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was finished without a stick of wood in it. As wood-free city skylines became more common, one carpenter lamented, “When one looks at the enormous amount of iron, steel and other hard materials which enter the construction of modern buildings, I am tempted to ask . . . what sort of a future this trade has before it.”¹⁷

The industry was changing in other ways. The opportunities for profit generated by economic growth attracted a group of investors who knew nothing of the building process. Whether they had access to large capital reserves or simply managed to get a ninety-day builder’s loan, they pushed the masters aside and stepped in as the new employer. This new type of contractor, sometimes a former master but more often a ward politician or a speculator, knew little of craft pride and the remaining guild traditions of loyalty between masters, journeymen, and apprentices.

Unable to supervise the work directly, these contractors turned to the system of “lumping.” The lumper, as labor journalist John Swinton described it, “takes a whole job at a certain figure; he then sublets it to another, who, in turn, parcels it out to others, who do the work in as rapid . . . a manner as possible—tearing and rushing to get it done. They all have to make a profit, at the expense of the buyer and the laborer.”¹⁸ The lumper worked piece-rate and usually focused on one aspect of the trade. Specialization became sufficiently common that, shortly after the Civil War, a carpenter reported to the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor that the all-around carpenter had given way to four distinct trades—stair building, framing, finishing, or sash, blind, and door making.¹⁹

The new breed of contractor emphasized speed and production. John Bicknell, secretary of the Amalgamated Building Trades Council of Boston, estimated that building tradesmen were expected to double their past output.²⁰ The rapid changes severed personal connections between builders and employees. At one time, a carpenter might have worked for a single master for twenty or thirty years; by the late nineteenth century, he might have as many as twenty or thirty employers in one year.²¹

At the turn of the century, a Connecticut carpenter named J. W. Brown looked back at the previous five decades of his trade. In the past, he wrote, “when an employer hired a carpenter, he would, as a general rule, send his team after his [tool] chest and have it taken to the shop. And as long as the man worked for him the employer felt himself under a moral obligation to keep him employed steadily, and when a rainy day came he always provided for him in the shop or elsewhere.” Today, Brown continued, all the carpenter needs is a “collar box” of tools, which goes to the job not in the employer’s team but on the carpenter’s back. Arriving on the site, the carpenter does as he is told—putting a floor on some brick block or nailing up factory-fitted trim. He spends a few weeks “picking at such a job,” packs up his tools, “and takes up his march again.”

Brown recognized the carpenter he described as a new kind of tradesman, one who had lost a sense of certainty that he would become a master and carry on the guild heritage. He also knew that the volcanic Industrial Revolution had left a changed social system in its wake—the era of modern capitalism, an era of sharply separated social classes whose interests were often in conflict. What was happening to the carpenter was just one chapter in the story of the making of the American working class. For Brown, this meant that the carpenter had become “accustomed to look upon himself not only as a wage worker for life, but as an appendage to a monstrous machine for the production and distribution of wealth.”²²

Working Lives/Union Life: The Early Years