Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [482]
The General Trades Union swiftly established a vivid presence in the city. On Evacuation Day (November 25) of 1833—the “anniversary of our entire liberation from foreign thralldom”—the GTU’s now twenty-one member organizations underscored their separation from former craft masters by parading, four-thousand strong, along the Bowery and Broadway. For the first time in New York City’s history, organized labor was independently on the march.
The new movement sprouted a panoply of union songs, banners, and insignias. It launched a newspaper—the Union— to complement George Henry Evans’s popular Working Man’s Advocate, his new prolabor organ the Man (1834), and the editorial support offered by the Sun and Transcript penny papers. In 1834, moreover, New York workers formed (and dominated) the National Trades Union (NTU), a clearinghouse for reports on the state of labor around the country. It too started up its own paper, the National Laborer.
Though dominated by native-born journeymen, the GTU reached out to newly naturalized immigrants in the city. To discourage ethnic division in its ranks, the organization prohibited discussion of religion and eschewed organized politics.
Not everyone was welcome in New York’s house of labor, however. Blacks and women were left outside; indeed the GTU and NTU opposed female labor altogether. Having seen employers use women operatives as wedges to transform the textile, shoemaking, and tailoring trades, the men insisted that women’s place was in the home, supported by adequately waged fathers or husbands. The tailoresses once again made bold to disagree, with one seamstress demanding: “If it is unfashionable for the men to bear the oppression in silence, why should it not also become unfashionable with the women?” The sewing women attempted once more to organize on their own, but faced with male unionists’ stubborn patriarchy, their efforts proved evanescent.
GTU-backed strikes mounted steadily between 1833 and 1835. Many skilled journeymen, day laborers, sailors, and canal workers won higher wages and better conditions. New York workers also pushed successfully for a ten-hour day. Skilled shipwrights, then- labor irreplaceable in the booming riverfront yards, won the right to hang their own “mechanics bell” at the corner of Stanton and Goerck streets, on a twentyfive-foot-high tower next to Isaac Webb’s yard. Signaling the end of each ten-hour day, the bell overrode the customary “dark to dark” schedule, and President Jackson ordered the Navy Yard to adopt the new standard.
One of the GTU’s most vehement demands was the abolition of prison labor, which undercut wage levels and forced laborers to compete with “felons and scum.” Stonecutters and masons were incensed that New York building contractors could purchase marble cut and hewn at Sing Sing. The Manufacturers of Marble Mantels and 325 journeyman marblecutters joined in petitioning the state legislature to outlaw the practice. The GTU also condemned the “State Prison Monopoly.” All to no avail.
When the newly established New York University contracted in January 1833 to purchase prisoner marble for their University Building going up on the east side of Washington Square, workers resorted to direct action. On the evening of October 24, 1833, roughly 150 men marched to the Broadway and 4th Street marble works of Elisha Bloomer, a contractor notorious for his use of prison products. Hurling rocks and brickbats, the crowd smashed Bloomer’s doors and windows and broke some marble mantels. The mayor called out the Twenty-seventh Regiment,