The Struggle for Equality

Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction

Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, Jennifer L. Weber, Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair, Jennifer L. Weber

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780813931777
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

This collection of essays, organized around the theme of the struggle for equality in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also serves to honor the renowned Civil War historian James McPherson. Complete with a brief interview with the celebrated scholar, this volume reflects the best aspects of McPherson's work, while casting new light on the struggle that has served as the animating force of his lifetime of scholarship. With a chronological span from the 1830s to the 1960s, the contributions bear witness to the continuing vigor of the argument over equality.

Contributors >: Orville Vernon Burton, Clemson University * Tom Carhart, Independent Scholar * Catherine Clinton, Queen's University Belfast * Thomas C. Cox, University of Southern California * Bruce Dain, University of Utah * John M. Giggie, University of Alabama * Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University * Joseph T. Glatthaar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Brian Greenberg, Monmouth University * James K. Hogue, University of North Carolina, Charlotte * Judith A. Hunter, State University of New York, Geneseo * Ryan P. Jordan, University of San Diego * Philip M. Katz, American Association of Museums * Monroe H. Little, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis * Peyton McCrary, U.S. Department of Justice * Jerald Podair, Lawrence University * Jennifer L. Weber, University of Kansas * Ronald C. White Jr., University of California Los Angeles

III

THE LONG RECONSTRUCTION

Wendell Phillips and the Idea of Industrial Democracy in Early Postbellum America

BRIAN GREENBERG

In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.

Unwieldy and immense, who shall hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan?

WALT WHITMAN, Democratic Vistas (1871)

In April 1869, Wendell Phillips, an ardent abolitionist and acclaimed orator, outlined his labor reform philosophy to a committee of the Massachusetts legislature holding hearings on a proposal to create the first state bureau of labor statistics in the United States. In his testimony, Phillips articulated the ethical principles that he believed underlay the economic questions before the legislators: “Our institutions,” Phillips told the committee members, “rest on the laboring classes, and the purity and independence, individuality and personal self-respect of that body is the cornerstone of our republican institutions.” Yet more and more, “one of the great evils which that class has to combat” was the vast corporations, such as the New York Central and Erie railroads, that employed them and “by their power nearly destroy their independence.” Throughout his career as a labor reformer, Phillips sought ways to make the power of incorporated wealth “consistent with the Welfare of the State.”¹

In the decade following the end of the Civil War, Phillips was a principal actor in the labor reform movement’s revolt against a “wages system” that he believed threatened to make workers as subservient to their employers as chattel slaves had been to their masters. To resist the development “of a permanent laboring class, set off and divided from the rest,” Phillips both fought for legislative enactment of an eight-hour workday and endorsed the formation of producer cooperatives, that is, worker-owned enterprises.² In 1870, although more comfortable with his enduring role as a moral agitator of the political system, Phillips agreed to run for office, campaigning to become governor of Massachusetts under the banners of the Labor Reform and the Prohibitory parties. As a labor activist in the immediate postbellum era, Phillips contributed to the effort to reconstruct nineteenth-century industrial society, to answer Walt Whitman’s call to “bridle leviathan.”³

MANY CONTEMPORARIES OF WENDELL PHILLIPS shared his apprehension over the “labor problem,” the perception that industrial expansion was producing a permanent wage-earning class. To avert a class crisis, Phillips embraced the republican notion that, as the labor historian David Montgomery has noted, “all men and women were bound by moral obligations to each other’s welfare.”⁴ Phillips’s republicanism was grounded in the idea of competence, or “the promise of moderate comfort and lifelong economic independence,” that was assumed to be the birthright of all Americans.⁵ Yet in his conviction that the growing concentration of wealth in America posed a threat to economic justice and equality, Phillips also anticipated the indictment of capitalist industrialism associated with Henry George, the Knights of Labor, and Eugene V. Debs in the late nineteenth century. In particular, Phillips articulated a worldview compatible with the conception of industrial democracy identified with Henry Demarest Lloyd, the author of Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), who was an indefatigable campaigner against John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire and all trusts in America.

As a young man, Lloyd had met Phillips, whom he claimed as an intellectual forebear, characterizing the passionate reformer as “the greatest social thinker.”⁶ The concept of “industrial democracy” that emerged in the 1890s generally referred to various schemes to provide for the collective ownership of the means of production.⁷ Speaking at an economic conference in 1889, Lloyd declared, “‘Political democracy must be backed by industrial democracy’ after the overthrow of industrial popes or czars ‘or all democracy becomes impossible.’ ”⁸ Phillips insisted, as would Lloyd, that the political promise of America could be fulfilled only after the eradication of the evils associated with industrial autocracy.

Phillips’s optimistic and egalitarian commonwealth standard of justice was founded on the ideal of the independent citizen living in a community of relative equals.⁹ “What we need,” as Phillips envisioned it, “is an equalization of property,—nothing else. My ideal civilization is a very high one, but the approach to it is the New England town of some two thousand inhabitants, with no rich man and no poor man in it.”¹⁰ In his idealized view of the relative equality of an earlier era, Phillips was asserting the principle that the new industrial life had to be infused with a commitment to the commonweal.¹¹ As a labor reformer in the immediate postbellum years, Phillips adopted a republican variant of industrial democracy that sought to ensure that the United States remained a nation in which there was no distinction among the economic, social, and political rights due each member of the community.

IN NOVEMBER 1865, Wendell Phillips told a group of Boston workers meeting in Faneuil Hall in support of the eight-hour workday that throughout all his twenty-nine years of antislavery activity, he had opposed the idea that the “laborer must necessarily be owned by the capitalists or individuals.” He predicted that the “struggle for the ownership of labor is somewhat near its end; and we fitly commence a struggle to define and arrange the true relations of capital and labor.”¹² The demand for an eight-hour day was the first labor reform question after the Civil War to develop mass support among workers. The slogan “EIGHT HOURS, A LEGAL Day’s Work for Freemen” was emblazoned on the masthead of Fincher’s Trades Review, an important national labor newspaper of the day.¹³ The New York State Workingmen’s Assembly, organized in Albany in 1865, was committed to establishing the eight-hour standard through legislation, and the National Labor Union, a postbellum attempt to form a national labor congress, also endorsed the eight-hour day as part of its reform agenda.¹⁴

In Massachusetts, the eight-hour movement was identified with the union activist Ira Steward, a prominent leader of the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ International Union. Steward, along with other labor reformers, founded Boston’s Eight-Hour League after the Civil War. By 1865, Steward and Phillips were well acquainted, and the abolitionist was clearly indebted to the labor leader in his understanding of eight-hour reform.¹⁵ Focusing on the general benefits to the community if workers had greater leisure, Phillips identified eight hours as “the first measure to be urged and the first rule to be established.”¹⁶ Phillips, like Steward suspicious of the alleged “iron law of wages,” observed that American workers earned higher wages than did workers in England because “the rate of wages really depends on what the workman thinks will buy him the necessities of life.”¹⁷ An educated working class would, Phillips believed, finally recognize its own worthiness. The working man should be able to earn wages at a level sufficient that “he can command leisure, go to lectures, take a newspaper, and lift himself from the deadening routine of mere toil.”¹⁸ To Phillips, passage of an eight-hour law represented a moral commitment by the community to ensure that workers in industrializing America would achieve a competency—an income sufficient to support their families in modest comfort, to enable them to survive inevitable hard times, and to provide for their retirement.¹⁹

Although Phillips agreed with Steward about the relation of leisure to wages, the abolitionist leader was particularly interested in the eight-hour movement as the first step in a campaign to educate and organize workers as independent citizens. Phillips called on workers to unite politically to win the eight-hour day. He urged them to “go into the political field, and by the voice of forty thousand workmen say, ‘We mean that eight hours shall be a day’s work, and no man shall go into office who opposes it.’ “²⁰ Phillips took issue with those who criticized the labor movement’s alleged “rush into politics.”²¹ Rather than riots in the streets or disorder and revolution, “the people have chosen a wiser method,—they have got the ballot in their right hands, and they say, ‘We come to take possession of the governments of the earth.’ ”²² For Phillips, the answer to the control over the ballot box exercised by capital was not less democracy, but more.²³

Workers in Massachusetts hailed Phillips’s Faneuil Hall speech on eight hours. The Daily Evening Voice, a labor newspaper published in Boston, printed and sold copies of his address for workers to read. The Voice called Phillips a prophet who would “instruct and guide [workers] in the new course that was before them.”²⁴ Soon the Voice was suggesting that Phillips represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, and by August 1866, the labor paper was leading efforts to have the newly formed Workingmen’s Party nominate him to Congress from Boston’s Third District.²⁵ In Phillips, the Voice declared, workers would find a representative “whose every sentence the toiling masses of the whole world . . . shall receive with a blessing for the orator and with a brotherly feeling for his constituents.”²⁶ Both the Workingmen’s Party and the Republican Party canvassed the district and, according to the Voice, found that the residents there wanted to be represented by Phillips.²⁷

The Voice feared that Phillips would not accept nomination by either party despite the support for his candidacy. As an active Garrisonian abolitionist throughout the struggle against slavery, Phillips had opposed mixing partisan politics with moral reform. But his attitude toward politics had become more flexible by the 1850s, as had his understanding of the importance of public opinion and the role of the agitator in defining public issues.²⁸ Phillips’s appeals to workers to look to the ballot box to achieve the eight-hour day reveal that he had come to appreciate the possibilities for reform under a system of “universal” suffrage that included African Americans, if not yet women.²⁹

Phillips’s proposed candidacy received at best a lukewarm reception in various organs of contemporary Radical Republican opinion. The Commonwealth, which was a Boston paper begun during the Civil War to build sentiment for an emancipation proclamation and was now closely allied with the Republican Party, observed that it could not help but think that Phillips’s field of usefulness lay outside of party politics. It added that many of his friends were advising Phillips to avoid the risk of defeat.³⁰ A much harsher assessment of Phillips can be found in the Boston Transcript: “Mr. Wendell Phillips’ recent coquetry with the eight hour movement has cost him the respect of many of his former friends.”³¹

In mid-September 1866, the Workingmen’s Party nominated Wendell Phillips for Congress, resolving that in Phillips it recognized “a true, consistent, able, and eloquent exponent of the Labor Reform movement.”³² Nonetheless, Phillips quickly declined to run. Dissatisfied with his response, the Voice declared, “We believe a mistake was made by Mr. Phillips in declining the nomination, and cannot feel reconciled to the event.”³³ In refusing the nomination, Phillips appears to have accepted that he should remain independent of all political alliances: “It seems to me that I can in present circumstances serve our cause better out of Congress than in it.”³⁴ Although unwilling to be a candidate for office, Phillips remained very much engaged in the political movement for labor reform.

By 1868 eight states had enacted eight-hour laws, and Congress had made eight hours the standard working day for federal gov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: James M. McPherson and the Struggle for American Equality
• I. Sectional Conflict
• II. Civil War
• III. The Long Reconstruction
• Notes on Contributors
• Index