Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [863]
The new model union bade farewell to what it now saw as the socialists’ Utopian fantasies. It would fight only for carefully delimited targets: better wages, hours, working conditions. Gompers made clear to capitalists that they had nothing fundamental to fear from unions such as his. At a Senate investigation in 1883, Strasser was asked what the Cigar Makers’ ultimate ends were. “We have no ultimate ends,” he replied. “We fight only for immediate objects—objects that can be realized in a few years.”
The Cigar Makers’ new policy set them on a collision course with the Knights of Labor, the largest working-class organization in the city. The Knights, formerly a clandestine operation, had flowered with the economy: national enrollment had shot from under ten thousand in 1878 to over seven hundred thousand by 1886. American workers were attracted by the Knights’ hybrid attention to the immediate and the Utopian. Despite Grand Master Terrence V. Powderly’s disapproval of strikes—he thought them too easily crushed—the Knights walked out repeatedly in the mid-1880s in pursuit of very specific goals, often with considerable success. But the Knights were also convinced that capitalism—and its associated evils of degraded crafts, fevered competition, rapacious individualism, and urban squalor—threatened the artisan-yeoman republic. They believed that an alliance of the “producing classes” could regenerate America and transform it into a cooperative commonwealth.
The Knights regarded exclusionary craft unions like the Cigar Makers as shortsighted. Labor had to organize not just skilled craftsmen but semiskilled industrial workers and unskilled day laborers as well. The Knights were ecumenical on other fronts too, embracing Protestants and Catholics, whites and blacks, natives and immigrants, men and women. When Knights of Labor telegraphers struck Western Union in 1883, they demanded equal pay for equal work, well aware that females made up a quarter of the Morse operators at 195 Broadway. The Knights’ definition of the “producing classes” was so all-encompassing that it included manufacturing employers as well. Indeed the only people not entitled to sup at labor’s table were bankers, brokers, speculators, gamblers, and liquor dealers.
Most New York workers adopted one or another of these positions, and sometimes more than one. Many individual Socialist Labor Party members joined the New York Knights, even though they felt culturally and politically ill at ease there. In socialist eyes, the Knights failed miserably to grasp the inevitability of class struggle, and its temperance schemes dismayed lager-loving Germans. Gompers’ Cigar Makers opposed the Knights altogether, resenting their embrace of semiskilled working men and women who, in the cigar trade, were replacing skilled craftsmen like themselves. They also thought it foolish to treat bankers rather than industrialists as labor’s chief enemy.
THE FIRST LABOR DAY
In January 1882 Robert Blissert, an activist in the Knights of Labor and the Tailors Union, led a rally at Cooper Union that led to formation of a citywide trades’ assembly. Within weeks, a core group of a dozen unions had constituted the Central Labor Union (CLU) of New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. The CLU grew as rapidly and spectacularly as had the Knights (who composed roughly half the CLU’s members). By 1884 thirty-six unions were affiliated. By 1886, spurred by the mid 1880s panic and recession, over two hundred organizations, representing perhaps fifty thousand workers, had joined New York’s “parliament of Labor.”
The Central Labor Union, like the Knights, was ecumenical. Its ranks included craft-based printers