A Civil Society Divided Against Itself: The Fight for Shorter Hours in Nineteenth-Century America
“In time… the benefits of our liberal institutions [will become] to us inaccessible and useless… As freemen and republicans, we feel it a duty incumbent on us to make known our sentiments fearlessly and faithfully on any subject connected with the general welfare; and we are prepared to maintain, that all who toil have a natural and unalienable right to reap the fruits of their own industry; and that they who by labour (the only source) are the authors of every comfort, convenience and luxury, are in justice entitled to an equal participation, not only in the meanest and the coarsest, but likewise the richest and the choicest of them all”
Work in Progress. A draft of this article was presented at the Political Theory Workshop, University of Chicago, January 2022.
Introduction
For workingmen across the nineteenth century, the future of free labor was uncertain. Would the demands on labor corrode the liberal institutions which made the republic free and equal? Would workingmen lack the social freedom to engage in the productive exchange of their labor? Published in 1828, the “Preamble of the Mechanic’s Union of Trade Associations” captured the nested conceptions of liberty within the shorter-hours movement: Republican freedom, the rights of freedmen, the benefit of liberal institutions, and the unalienable rights of free labor. From Jacksonian America to the Second Industrial Revolution, reformers grappled with a contradiction at the heart of the American republic: The “non-recognition and non-guarantee” of one of the “great fundamental rights of man[…], the right of labor,” meant that all “other rights [were] rendered to a very great extent unavailable and worthless.”[2] While the arrival of mass democracy in America had created the preconditions for the first labor parties in the world, voting rights alone failed to secure social liberties. As pressure on domestic production in the following decades gave rise to a dependent wage worker, debates across workingmen’s clubs, newspapers and pamphlets displayed a growing anxiety over a novel “social tyranny” and the “tendencies of modern society to sink the masses in poverty and ignorance.” [3] Among reformers’ chief concerns was control over the length of the working day—the democratic sovereignty over labor time.
The history of political thought under consideration corresponds to an interim period in American history. Before it, stands what Seth Cotlar and Eric Foner have called the early years of the American radical tradition, with Tom Paine as its central figure. This was an era of optimism about the future of the “Transatlantic Republic,” which placed America’s destiny on a different course than “European” class society.[4] At the other end, stands post-Civil War America, the Second Industrial Revolution, and the arrival of class conflict inaugurated by the Great Strike of 1877, which marks a shift in political responses to “the social question”. [5] By the end of the century, American society had been fundamentally transformed by ongoing labor strife, including its violent repression and conservative legislation that explicitly targeted labor opposition.[6] The deepening rift in these decades created an opening for Nick Salvatore’s “indigenous American radical,” Eugene Debs, and for the founding of the Socialist Party (f. 1901), which brought together Bellamyites, Populists, labor radicals and German social democrats into one political affiliation, under the Second International.[7]
The intellectual trajectory of social reform from an early republican radicalism to a social-democratic politics—from Paine to Debs—is Janus-faced rather than linear. Indeed, many of its primary concerns remain the same: independence, the right to free labor, and the common good. I will show how this democratic-republican past was ever-present, sustained by way of Paineite societies, labor periodicals and Fourth of July celebrations among laborers. While this backward-looking glance at the promises of the American Revolution guided reformers in an otherwise disorienting century, I also show how the political terms of the democratic republic were redefined under historically unprecedented social conditions. The movement for shorter hours, present across this interim period, will carry my inquiry via the history of a concrete social reform, where laborers were its primary agents and the conceptualization of liberty among their chief concerns.
By the end of the period under examination, leading advocates of the shorter working day, Ira Steward and C. Oswald Ward, reconsidered the main tenets of their political strategies. This change in understanding happened gradually with many unexpected conflicts and theoretical reconsiderations along the way, which affected their political practice. In the 1870s, Steward and Ward were members of organizations with German socialists and social democrats, with whom they found a common cause. The question presents itself: what drove these dedicated labor republicans to conclude that only a total revolution in the organization of production would result in a free society?…
Work in progress.
[1] “Preamble of the Mechanic’s Union of Trade Associations” in Mechanics' Free Press, 25 Oct. 1828.
[2] The Awl, April 5, 1845.
[3] The Awl, April 5, 1845; “Lowell Convention, March, 1845, Preamble and Resolutions” in The Mechanic, quoted in Benjamin Hunnicutt, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 38.
[4] Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (London: Oxford University Press, 1976); Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
[5] The period under consideration overlaps with what Herbert Gutman’s called the “Middle Period” (1843–1893) in American labor history, when, he argued, there was a “profound tension… between the older American pre-industrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism.” Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919,” in American Historical Review, 78: 3 (Jun., 1973), 555–6. See also Ira Berlin, “Class Composition and the Development of the American Working Class, 1840–1890” in Power & Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), where Berlin argues that this was a critical period for the development of the American labor reform tradition.
[6] Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Philip Taft and Philip Ross, “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome,” The History of Violence in America: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, 1969; William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) p. 106, fn. 30; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862–1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-–877 (New York: Harper Collins, 1988).
[7] Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
