4

The Eight-Hour Strikes: 1886 and 1890

There were three hundred thousand J. W. Browns swinging hammers in the United States in 1881. Buffeted by the twin blows of mechanization and a changing industry structure, carpenters were searching for protection in an increasingly harsh and unstable work environment. The terrible depression of 1873–78, the most severe in American history to that time, put an end to remaining illusions of guaranteed security. During those years, contractors imposed whatever wage levels they wanted. Desperate carpenters worked for subsistence pay—if they worked at all. At the height of the depression, a New Yorker asked and answered his own question: “What are our carpenters doing? Nothing! . . . What have they to live on the coming winter? Nothing!”¹

As the economy recovered at the end of the decade, tradesmen considered the idea of trade unions as shelters against the ravages of the coming industrial order. Carpenters’ unions had been formed before, on the local and national levels. They had either failed or turned into unassuming fraternal societies. Peter J. McGuire, a twenty-eight-year-old socialist carpenter from New York, felt the time had arrived for a new initiative. For eight years, he had traveled the country working at his trade in order to support his true vocation of organizing. In 1881, McGuire was fresh from a successful carpenters’ strike in St. Louis. Despite his youth, he had won a national reputation among carpenters. In May, he published the first issue of the Carpenter, stating, “In the present age there is no hope for workingmen outside of organization. Without a trades union, the workman meets the employer at a great disadvantage. The capitalist has the advantage of past accumulations; the laborer, unassisted by combination, has not.”² Three months later, carpenters from eleven cities answered McGuire’s call. On the second story of a flaxseed warehouse in Chicago, they deliberated and formed the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (later changed to the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America).

None of the delegates at the Chicago convention came from Massachusetts. Nonetheless, the idea of a union caught on very quickly among the commonwealth’s carpenters. The first charter for a local union in Massachusetts was granted to a group of carpenters in Holyoke on March 1, 1882. Holyoke Local 455 was soon followed by Local 33 in Boston. In the next seven years, local unions were founded in Cambridge, East Boston, Fall River, Haverhill, Hingham, Hudson, Lawrence, Lynn, Natick, Newton, Quincy, Roxbury, Springfield, and Worcester.

In some cases, it was a matter of a few interested carpenters applying for a charter. Local 192 in Natick was organized in 1886 with only 14 members. Quincy L. U. 417 started two years later with 26 members. Some locals dissolved after a few years; others grew quickly. Local 417, for example, had a hundred members by 1895, representing about 65 percent of all the carpenters in town. Lynn Local 108, with an initial membership of 116 in 1889, claimed 636 members only four years later, which, according to the local, included “nearly every journeyman carpenter in the city.”³ Boston was the hub of union activity. Local 33 had 404 members in 1883 and doubled in size in the following ten years. Boston carpenters had the largest locals, the highest wages, and usually set the tone for union campaigns.

The shorter workday was the most pressing issue for Massachusetts’ pioneering union carpenters. By 1880, the ten-hour day was the industry standard. Tradesmen now sought to restrict the working day to eight hours to allow them more time for their families and the chance for “self-improvement.” This was a powerful attraction for nineteenth-century workers who had limited access to schools, libraries, and museums. The shorter day represented a form of liberation, an opportunity to enjoy and make something of the precious leisure time of life. Eight-hour-day advocates freely borrowed from the language of the Revolution, equating their campaign with a fight for freedom from tyranny. They drew a sharp distinction between “their time” (the eight hours belonging to the employer) and “our time.” The eight-hour movement had its own cultural trappings and symbols; people smoked “Eight-Hour Tobacco,” wore “Eight-Hour Shoes,” and sang the “Eight-Hour Song”—“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.”

The movement for shorter hours peaked in 1886, a year often referred to as “the great uprising of labor.” Never before had so many American workers acted in unison for a common goal. There were more than seven hundred strikes in Massachusetts in 1886—more than seven times the number of strikes during the previous two years. Across the country, 340,000 workers demonstrated for the eight-hour day. Scanning the national scene, the Wisconsin commissioner of labor wrote: “The agitation permeated our entire social atmosphere . . . it was the topic of conversation in the shop, on the street, at the family table, at the bar, in the counting rooms, and the subject of numerous able sermons from the pulpit.”⁴

The Brotherhood was in the forefront of the campaign. During the late winter and early spring, Boston’s Local 33 sponsored rallies, building support and enthusiasm for the eight-hour cause. In mid-April, the city’s carpenters, along with other tradesmen, formally presented their demands for the shorter workday and a new wage scale to the recently organized Master Builders Association (MBA). When the Association refused to negotiate, the carpenters declared that “the workingman’s hour” had arrived and announced plans for a strike.⁵

On May 1, seven thousand carpenters, painters, and plumbers shut down Boston’s construction sites. Their tactics were simple. As long as craftsmen from neighboring towns and states could be kept out of Boston, the employers would be cut off from an adequate supply of skilled labor. Local 33 immediately sent notices to Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces urging carpenters to stay away. Local unions in Somerville and Chelsea guaranteed that their members would not scab; Cambridge carpenters went one step further, pledging one-third of their pay if needed. Carpenters working for the McNeil Brothers struck their jobs in Lenox and Newport, Rhode Island, to prevent the firm from transferring them to its Boston sites.⁶

Other workers—clothing workers, tailors, and cigar makers—joined the strike, virtually paralyzing the city. Nonstriking workers provided additional support. Railway employees ripped down contractors’ advertisements for strikebreakers and warned the striking carpenters whenever a trainload of scabs pulled in. But it was the carpenters themselves—often picketing job sites up to sixteen hours a day—that made the strike. They watched the night trains and the boats from Nova Scotia. On a typical day during the walkout, one group of strikers stopped six strikebreakers on the St. John’s steamer while another sneaked on board the Pavonia and “with an instinct of which only carpenters are capable, spied one solitary Swedish carpenter.”⁷ The unions never stopped organizing. At a mass meeting on May 7, two hundred nonunion men were sworn in. Even the strikebreakers were treated generously, usually offered the choice of union membership or train fare back home.⁸

The masters were not idle. Lacking the unionists’ public support, they consolidated their forces. While the carpenters of Local 33 and their allies in the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners met in crowded workingmen’s halls around the city, the MBA assembled at the plush Parker House. Their position was uncompromising. MBA Secretary William Sayward announced that the employers were ready to put up with the strike for the entire summer before they would permit “conferences or agreements with societies that thrust themselves in between the workmen and the employer.” Benjamin Whitcomb, president of the MBA, was blunter: “We can stand it better than they can.”⁹

The carpenters’ vigilance extended into the second week of the strike. They picketed by day and plotted strategy at nightly meetings. On May 10, 225 picketers persuaded thirty men to leave a job while another group worked the docks, turning back strikebreakers from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Savannah, Georgia.¹⁰ Weekly mass meetings at the Columbia rink drew up to three thousand strikers, but eventually the MBA’s stubborn stance took its toll on the workers’ morale.

Though a few of the city’s small contractors granted the eight-hour day, the unions found it difficult to crack the larger builders’ unity. When Norcross Brothers agreed to work nine hours, the MBA quickly forced the straying firm to retract its offer. On May 17, the unions lowered their demand from an eight- to a nine-hour day. The MBA refused to consider the union’s new position. Sensing victory, MBA spokesmen announced that building employers would sooner go out of business than sign any agreement.¹¹

Over the next few days, union leaders abandoned the battle. Concluding that the membership was not prepared for the lengthy strike it would take to overcome the MBA, they admitted defeat at a May 20 mass meeting. The decision shocked the crowd of two thousand. Cries of “no, no,” “we won’t do it,” and “don’t give in” echoed around the rink. As speaker after speaker recommended a return to work, the strikers reluctantly accepted their verdict.¹²

Many of the speeches that night were bitter. George Rothwell, president of the carpenters’ executive committee, attacked the arrogance of the contractors. “You have lost the confidence of the men who worked for you,” he charged. But others, like A. A. Carlton of the Knights of Labor and venerable labor leader George McNeill, argued that the strikers’ show of strength had brought a moral victory. “This was not a strike but only a notice of what is to come,” argued McNeill. “We go back to take in reinforcements and supplies.”¹³

The final statement by the strikers, adopted overwhelmingly at the meeting, reflected both anger and hope for the future. Accusing the contractors of “galling abuses,” the resolution declared that the very term “master” in the title of master builder was “foreign and offensive to our sense of citizenship.” The carpenters also had some harsh words for the steady stream of strikebreakers, whom they labeled “a curse to humanity and a blight to their fellow craftsmen.”¹⁴

Finally, the strikers called for improved organization to stop, once and for all, the MBA from “stamp[ing] their heels on our heads and eat[ing] the whole oyster of our labor while they throw to us the shells.”¹⁵ The seventeen-day strike had brought hardship and no victory. It was small consolation—but the only one they had—for the strikers to know they had fought against long odds.

In 1886 they met a rabble. In 1890 they met a band of drilled and tried trade unionists.

—Harry Lloyd, vice-president Local 33¹⁶

The commitment and sacrifices of workers throughout the nation in 1886 stunned the business world and surprised cautious union officials. Thousands of rallies, walkouts, and strikes—many of them spur-of-the-moment actions—demonstrated the powerful appeal of the eight-hour day. Surging rank-and-file sentiment persuaded labor leaders to prepare for another bout with employers. Planning was the key. The spontaneous nature of many of the protests had shaken up whole cities, but it had not necessarily brought victory.

Delegates to the 1888 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention voted in favor of a coordinated series of actions for May 1, 1890, and instructed the executive board to devise the most effective strategy. The board elected to commit the Federation’s resources to the single strongest union instead of sponsoring a number of scattershot demonstrations. The obvious candidate was the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBCJA), an organization described by AFL head Samuel Gompers as the “best disciplined, prepared, and determined” force in the labor movement.¹⁷

Gompers’s judgment was accurate. The UBCJA had thirty-two thousand members in 1888 and an annual budget of $67,000. The union had 464 locals representing every state of the union (including 40 in Massachusetts).¹⁸ Presented with the responsibility of leading the fight for the entire labor movement, General Secretary McGuire and the other national officers granted locals in a dozen cities use of the Brotherhood’s sizable strike fund. Though carpenters ultimately struck in 141 cities, it was these union strongholds that carried the brunt of the battle.

Tension in the Boston industry had not eased since the 1886 walkout. The MBA had instituted a nine-hour day the following year “in order to rationally test the question of whether ten hours per day is too long for men to labor.” But this carrot had been accompanied by a stick. The builders warned that if workers chose to strike, “then we shall feel at liberty to return at once to the old standard of ten hours.” The MBA also drew up a Code of Working Principles that insisted on complete employer “control and authority.” Under the code, contractors promised to fire tradesmen who refused to work with a nonunion employee or install materials without a union label. They rejected on-the-job organizing pressures and emphatically declared that “no person outside the employment of said contractor shall be allowed to represent [the employees].”¹⁹

The MBA had not wavered in its hostility to unionism. By 1890, carpenters were eager to rearm for combat. Boston’s carpenters had chartered additional locals in Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, East Boston, and Brighton. Once again, they set the wheels of protest in motion. This time, however, unions in the rest of the state were not content to stand back and provide support for their big-city brethren.

Carpenters in Lynn fired the first shot, refusing to work past 5 P.M. after April 1. Almost immediately, the contractors agreed, granting the nine-hour day plus a 25- to 50-cent-a-day wage increase. Eight-hour meetings were held in Fitchburg, Lawrence, Milford, Salem, and Taunton. Locals in Gloucester, Haverhill, Malden, Leominster, Lowell, and Waltham all won a nine-hour day after briefly going out or threatening to strike. In Springfield, eight hundred carpenters marched on April 17 and heard George McNeill predict that when the carpenters won, the other trades would fall in line “one by one,” bringing about a universal eight-hour day. In Worcester, twenty-five hundred tradesmen rallied at Mechanic’s Hall on April 18, preparing to join the Boston carpenters for a May 1 strike.²⁰

In Boston, the unions spent April readying the membership and garnering support from outside sources. Every church in the city received a letter requesting at least one pro-eight-hour sermon from the pulpit before the end of the month. Union meetings reached new attendance heights. Overflowing into stairwells and waiting rooms, meetings lasted far into the night as dozens of new members were initiated and old-timers debated strike plans. As organizing reached a fever pitch, the Boston Globe editorialized that the city could expect “the greatest labor demonstration ever seen.”²¹

The employers had made their own preparations. Since 1886, the Master Builders Association had spun off organizations for each branch of the industry, ready to take on their own group of tradesmen. The Carpenters Builders Association (CBA) informed its employees that it had no intention of discussing demands for a shorter day. All of the unions’ carefully arranged plans were suddenly jeopardized when Norcross Brothers locked out their freestone cutters in mid-April. In the face of mounting labor militance, the MBA had decided to, as one contractor said, “take the bull by the horns” and raise the specter of an industrywide lockout. Norcross had adopted a tough antilabor policy since their moment of weakness in 1886. Their action against the freestone cutters, a small and highly skilled craft that had won the eight-hour day, was a challenge to the other trades’ resolve. Orlando Norcross stated that he would rather fight the trade union movement “forever” than make any concessions.²²

The lockout had its intended effect, throwing the building trades into an uproar. Carpenters walked off Norcross’s Ames Building job in sympathy, only to return at the direction of the union officers. Masons refused to follow their leaders’ orders for a similar action at the Norcross State Street Stock Exchange job because the carpenters continued to work. By the time the Amalgamated Building Trades Council convened on April 13, the fissures in trade harmony were opening. Meeting in crowded Pythias Hall, the delegates ordered each union’s walking delegate or executive officer to call his tradesmen off every Norcross site in New England. “This is our answer,” said one unionist, “to the declaration of war on the part of the employers.” Those who spoke in favor urged the combined trades to drop the May 1 deadline and join the carpenters in an immediate industrywide strike for the eight-hour day.²³

Though the carpenter delegates voted for the Pythias Hall strike call, Local 33 officials reconsidered in the next few days. Fearing that a premature walkout would disrupt the original eight-hour strategy and jeopardize national union support, Walking Delegate Joseph Clinkard refused to pull carpenters off Norcross jobs. The bricklayers were also unwilling to participate. Without the support of the two largest crafts, the Building Trades Council’s war plans fizzled. The Brotherhood’s locals returned to their original plans, finalizing strike arrangements during the last two weeks of April. But with the Norcross lockout, the MBA had exhibited potent weapons in its arsenal.²⁴

As the sun rose on the morning of May 1, one hundred small building contractors put two thousand carpenters to work on an eight-hour basis. The larger member firms of the Carpenters Builders Association refused to negotiate, but it seemed only a matter of time before their eighteen hundred employees would have the shorter day as well. The strikers were well organized and had the financial backing of the national union, other AFL unions, and an assessment on the wages of those union carpenters working for non-CBA employers.

Bulletin boards at strike headquarters at the Tremont Temple directed members to their picket duty. Strikers who answered morning roll call and picketed daily were entitled to strike pay—$5 a week for married men; $4 a week for unmarried men. Fifteen hundred turned up at Tremont Temple the first day.²⁵ Spirits were high at a mass meeting that night in a hall “packed to suffocation.” Picketers reported on the day’s successes to cheers of approval. A week later, the mood was unchanged. John White, president of Local 33, boasted: “It will only be a short time when we shall have eight hours and we can say, ‘we are the people.’”²⁶

As in 1886, stopping the strikebreakers was the key to victory. The Brotherhood had expanded across the border and their new Canadian locals acted to cut down the influx of carpenters from Quebec and the Maritimes. Knowing that, the contractors had redoubled their recruiting efforts, focusing on rural areas that were freer of union influence. Every day union scouts patrolled the docks and depots; every day pickets checked the job sites.

May 2. Chief of pickets reports that picketers convinced forty-eight more men to walk off their jobs. Contractors forced to offer extra pay to those who remained.

May 4. Twenty-five hundred carpenters out of a total of thirty-eight hundred now are working an eight-hour day.

May 5. Strikers notice carpenters’ tool chests on board a Nova Scotia steamer. Committee of strikers dispatched to Commercial Wharf. Soon after, they return to union hall having signed up eight strikebreakers “amid tremendous cheers from the large gathering in the hall.” Other nonunion carpenters, recruited by CBA employers, join the union when informed of the strike situation. Some of the smaller CBA contractors begin to break away. Three hundred more granted eight hours.

May 6. Clinkard claims the availability of strikebreakers is so low that a contractor who had advertised for scabs was forced to look for workers at the strikers’ headquarters. A newspaper reports that another firm was so desperate for help that it bailed a man out of the Deer Island prison. Despite the strike’s effectiveness, the CBA refuses to negotiate.

May 8. Daily picket report claims sixty more men pulled off jobs.

May 9. Local 33 leader William J. Shields returns from the national union office in Philadelphia with strike funds. He describes huge membership gains across the country and reports the “money is rolling in.” The strike is now a “question of endurance,” he claims.

May 12. Fifty-five more nonunion carpenters walk off a job, and twenty new members are initiated into Local 33. Another member of the CBA breaks ranks, declaring he could no longer stand “being dictated to by men who had accumulated fortunes out of their carpenters and who were too stubborn to grant a fair request.” One of his single employees, now able to return to work, offers his job to a married union brother who needs it more.

May 13. Reports of dissension continue to filter out of the CBA. “Some of the smaller builders are beginning to grumble . . . and say that the big fellows are eating them up.”

May 15. Seven more strikebreakers are confronted at the Nova Scotia boat and are persuaded to join the union.

May 18. Non-CBA contractors request sixty-five strikers to work at eight hours, but many refused the work “so desirous were they to remain in the fight.”²⁷

Throughout the month, the leaders of the CBA ignored the unions’ demands and tried, as best they could, to fill their jobs. Despite their exhausting efforts, the unions simply did not have the resources to stem permanently the steady tide of strikebreakers. By mid-June, the union was forced to admit that most job sites were staffed.²⁸ Even with the added pressure of a walkout of bricklayers and building laborers, the CBA maintained its unyielding posture. Responding to an offer of mediation from the State Board of Arbitration, E. Noyes Whitcomb, president of the CBA, wrote a curt three-line note on June 23 dismissing the state’s interference. In its subsequent report, the Board noted ruefully that its efforts had “no perceptible influence” on the conflict. The union had welcomed the Board’s attempts, and its failure deflated the carpenters’ hopes of victory. In fact, soon after Whitcomb’s rejection the strike “began to show signs of dissolution.”²⁹

On July 12, the strike committee advertised the availability of carpenters for hire. The $5 weekly strike benefit was no longer enough; the men were feeling the pressure of two and a half months without a pay envelope. The financial strain of strike support was also taking a toll on the national union. When the Boston District Council complained of inadequate help, the General Executive Board in Philadelphia tersely pointed out they had already sent $9,600. The Board went on to ask, sarcastically, who had “ordered them out on strike.”³⁰ The strikers knew time was running out. Carpenters in thirty-six other cities had won the eight-hour day, but Boston’s large employers showed no signs of bending.

Breaking with the open character of the strike, all the Boston locals met secretly on July 23. At a mass rally the following night, union officials confessed their inability to continue support to the struggling strikers. The strike was not called off, but members were free to go back to work. The union tried to make the best of a deteriorating situation. Spokesmen transformed the mass walkout into a “harassing plan of guerrilla warfare” in which “no contractor will know when his job will be struck and all his operations impeded.” The plan proved ineffective. A carpenter’s banner in Boston’s massive 1890 Labor Day parade reflected the unchanged hours of work, declaring eight hours was still “our future time.”³¹

Worcester’s carpenters had no more luck than their Boston brothers. They had decided to delay a May 1 strike hoping their contractors would voluntarily grant nine hours. When the employers refused, one thousand union and two hundred nonunion carpenters laid down their tools on June 23.³² The strike paralleled the course of the Boston walkout. Several small contractors accepted the new schedule, but the big builders, again led by Norcross, stood firm. “I shall sign no union agreement,” proclaimed James McDermott, “for I have nothing to do with any union as I run my business myself.” J. G. Vaudreuil was no more conciliatory. “The only way to settle the strike is for the strikers to go to work.”³³

Hundreds of picketers patrolled construction sites and guarded the Union Railroad Station. Dozens of Canadian and New Hampshire strikebreakers were turned away, but contractors managed to slip others by, particularly “P.E.I. [Prince Edward Island] and Nova Scotia men,” according to one striker. For a few weeks, the picket lines held firm and the union gained considerable public support. When the contractors asked for legal restraints on the picketers, the Worcester police refused to make arrests.³⁴

Boston’s protest had been consistently peaceful. Worcester’s carpenters showed less reluctance to take matters into their own hands. Picketers attacked strikebreakers and scattered tools on job sites. Local 93’s leader C. D. Macomber spent much of his time bailing men out of jail and paying fines on trespassing and other charges.³⁵

A shortage of money proved fatal. The national union made a special $1,000 contribution to Worcester, but the rest of the Brotherhood’s relief funds had been earmarked for other cities. In fact, McGuire was outraged when the Worcester local sent out a nationwide appeal for aid implying authorization by the General Executive Board. He admired their firmness, he wrote in the Carpenter, and he would not discourage any financial support. But he took special pains to point out that help for Worcester was “entirely optional.”³⁶ After eight weeks, the strikers returned to work on a ten-hour basis.

Both the Boston and Worcester strikes had been impressive demonstrations of the rank-and-file’s staying power and an affirmation of principle in the workers’ willingness to sacrifice an hour’s pay for the sake of an idea. George McNeill praised the Boston strikers for their unprecedented action, “the first time in history . . . that workers voluntarily asked to reduce the hours of labor at their own expense.” That the city’s carpenters fell short of their goal was testimony not to their failings but to the intransigence of the city’s building employers. In 1886, MBA chief William Sayward (who, by 1890, was head of the National Association of Builders as well) stated that the conflict involved far more than “the superficial question of eight hours.” The union agreed, noting that the work stoppage was “not so much a matter of hours and wages as a matter of recognition.” In other cities contractors had granted shorter hours with little fuss. In Massachusetts, Sayward and his colleagues rejected the union’s right to speak for their employees on any matter concerning working conditions. They accepted a summer of economic chaos rather than lose a battle of principle.³⁷