Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [785]
Other workers, realizing a crucial test of strength was at hand, rallied to the builders’ support. When bricklayers at the new Arnold Constable site insisted on a shorter workday, plasterers and painters walked off as well. Traveling committees went to Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Philadelphia, dissuaded scabs from coming, and got union locals there to provide money and roughly a thousand jobs for their beleaguered New York comrades. The Workingmen’s Union organized a mammoth street procession, headed by two thousand bricklayers, and held a militant rally at Cooper Institute. By 1869 a majority of builders were working eight hours. So were federal employees at the Navy Yard, thanks to the Radical Republican Congress and the Grant administration.
The gains proved difficult to sustain, however, thanks in part to Jay Gould. In the slump that followed the unraveling of his gold corner in September 1869, many employers successfully forced hours back up to ten, so the unions turned again to politics. In the fall of 1869, claiming that “both of the existing parties are corrupt, serving capital instead of labor,” the Workingmen’s Union, the Arbeiter Union, and the Irish unions combined to run independent labor candidates. Their electoral initiative was defeated, as were others in 1870 and 1871, so they had to rely on workplace battles to wring concessions on wages and hours from employers.
MARXISTS, FEMINISTS, AND THE MONEY POWER
Many unionists believed labor’s ills were exacerbated by the financial system. New York workers watched the shenanigans on the Stock Exchange, probed the impact of the new banking system, and called for a change in monetary policy. Before the war labor had fought for hard money against the depreciated paper notes issued by banks. Now, with bondholders clamoring for a return to the gold standard, unions backed paper currency. What linked labor’s old “hard” and new “soft” money programs was the insistence that control over currency should be taken from banks and given to government.
The soft money policy was adopted by the new National Labor Union, established in 1866, when officers of nine national unions—all residents of the metropolitan area—met in New York City. The union aimed to coordinate labor activity on a continental scale, support the eight-hour day, and fight the “Money Power.” When Republicans (and Wall Street Democrats) triumphantly passed the Public Credit Act guaranteeing a return to specie payments, many workingmen decried a bondholder victory engineered (they were darkly convinced) by “the Rothschilds and their agents here.”
Another set of participants in the postwar labor movement, the German socialists, supported both the eight-hour day and currency reform but argued that such piecemeal single-issue strategies were doomed from the start, that only a broad-based attack on the entire capitalist order could succeed. The sole survivor of the prewar movement, Friedrich Sorge’s Communist Club, affiliated itself with Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) and in the late 1860s received reinforcements when radical brewers, metalworkers, and printers arrived from Germany. Radical intellectuals arrived as well—followers of Ferdinand Lassalle—who proposed organizing cooperatives, a shopworn approach to which they gave a new twist. Co-ops, Lassalleans argued, could compete with capitalist firms if they got financing from the state, so workers should use the ballot to attain political power.
In 1868 New York’s Marxists and Lassalleans joined forces and plunged into politics. Their platform called for the eight-hour day, currency reform, a progressive income tax, and equal rights for men and women. They got nowhere electorally. But digging