Black Americans and Organized Labor

A New History

Paul D. Moreno

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807148822
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Black Americans and Organized Labor, Paul D. Moreno offers a bold reinterpretation of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do -- control the labor supply. Not racism pure and simple but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions.
Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers, Isaac Myers and Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. He traces changing attitudes and practices during the simultaneous black migration to the North and consolidation of organized labor's power, through the confusing and conflicted post-World War II period, during the course of the civil rights movement, and into the era of affirmative action. Maneuvering across a wide span of time and a broad array of issues, Moreno brings remarkable clarity to the question of the importance of race in unions. He impressively weaves together labor, policy, and African American history into a cogent, persuasive revisionist study that cannot be ignored.

1 / Free Labor

The relationship between black workers and organized labor began to take shape during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The war transformed millions of slaves into free laborers and also caused a great revival of union activity, dormant since the depression of 1837. But it was not until after the war that the nation completed abolition and defined civil rights. By the late 1860s the politically established principles of “free labor” faced the challenge of the first nationwide labor organization.

BLACKS AND THE ANTEBELLUM LABOR MOVEMENT

Given the anomalous status of free blacks before the war, it is not surprising that they played almost no part in the antebellum labor movement. Free blacks in the North and the South faced habitual discrimination by white laborers, and organization often sharpened that discrimination. As early as the first decade of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania mechanics petitioned for action against the hiring out of Negro mechanics.¹ Henry Boyd, a Kentucky slave carpenter who bought his freedom, could not find work in Ohio due to journeymen prejudice. An English master who hired him found that his white journeymen threatened to quit if he employed Boyd, even if he set him to work in a separate shop. Boyd later became the owner of a bedstead factory that employed about two dozen men, black and white.² White workers north and south often petitioned legislatures to forbid the teaching of skilled labor to blacks.³ In 1831 a workers association asked the legislature to forbid slaves to learn trades as a way to increase the number of white mechanics, and in 1849 a Petersburg group pledged to refuse to work for any employer who hired blacks.⁴ English geologist Sir Charles Lyell noted that “the jealousy of an unscrupulous democracy invested with political power” was curtailing the economic success of free blacks, reflected in a state prohibition of black labor in construction work.⁵ Atlanta laborers petitioned for protection against black mechanics in 1858, and the city council passed an ordinance requiring free blacks to post a $200 bond.⁶ An Ohio mechanics association tried one of its members in 1835 for assisting a Negro to learn a trade.⁷ The city of New York kept blacks from working as cartmen by requiring that all cartmen secure licenses from the city, which never granted them to blacks.⁸

The organization of artisans in American cities in the 1830s also showed the tensions that would characterize the history of black-labor relations. Columbia, Pennsylvania, workingmen resolved to boycott employers of blacks in 1834, and job competition helped spark the Philadelphia riot of that year. As a subsequent public investigation noted, “An opinion prevails, especially among white laborers, that certain portions of our community prefer to employ colored people, whenever they can be had, to the employing of white people; and that, in consequence of this preference, many whites, who are able and willing to work, are left without employment, while colored people are provided with work and enabled comfortably to maintain their families; and thus many white laborers, anxious for employment, are kept idle and indigent.”⁹ John Campbell, an English Chartist and head of the Philadelphia Typographical Union, published a racist book, Negro-Mania, in 1851. Abolitionists did not sympathize with the white laborer in the North, Campbell claimed; instead they “encourage the negro to rob his master, but will not lift a finger in behalf of the oppressed and degraded of their own race.”¹⁰

A similar mood characterized the radical workingmen’s movement in New York City. “Most craft workers and white laborers … retained a deep distrust of the small, unskilled black community as a class of supposedly abject dependents,” one historian notes. “Outright racism, a fact of lower-class life even in good times,” was exacerbated by immigration and job competition in the 1830s.¹¹ An English socialist observed in 1844, “It is a curious fact that the democratic party, and particularly the poorer class of Irish emigrants in America, are greater enemies to the Negro population, and greater advocates for the continuance of Negro slavery, than any portion of the population in the free states.”¹²

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass experienced antebellum labor discrimination. In 1836 Douglass went to work in a Baltimore shipyard, earning money to purchase his freedom while being “hired out” by his owner. Douglass worked as a caulker, a trade dominated by blacks, but met resentment and severe assault from the white carpenters. The slaveholders, Douglass noted, had manipulated poor white animosity against blacks in order to plunder both groups. White race consciousness prevented them from realizing that they were robbed by being forced to compete with slave labor. Douglass predicted, along the lines of Hinton Helper, that eventually poor whites would understand how slavery harmed them and would join the abolition movement. Northern antislavery leaders often made a similar argument.¹³

When Douglass escaped to New Bedford, Massachusetts, he worked as a caulker for Rodney French, but French’s white caulkers demanded that he relegate Douglass to unskilled labor.¹⁴ Back in Baltimore, lower-paid white workers broke the black monopoly on caulking and then sought to exclude blacks entirely. After appeals to the legislature failed, the whites resorted to violence. A local court ordered the dissolution of the rival caulker unions, the Association of Black Caulkers and the white Society of Employing Shipwrights. The black group disbanded, but the white organization continued to press for the replacement of black with white labor.¹⁵ The Baltimore business community argued that “Every employer should be allowed, without let or hindrance, to employ black or white men, as he may think proper, and if the white caulkers have, as is alleged, resolved that no black caulkers should work on the South side of the basin … they should be taught that such resolve cannot be carried into execution.”¹⁶ But soon after the Civil War, whites had completed their exclusion of black workers.¹⁷ Douglass’s experience left him with the impression, he told Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1853, that “Prejudice against the free colored people in the United States has shown itself nowhere so invincible as among the mechanics.”¹⁸

REPUBLICAN FREE LABOR PHILOSOPHY AND THE CIVIL WAR

When the Civil War erupted, national policymakers had not given much thought to the question of free black labor. None expected the rapid abolition of slavery—what Lincoln called the conflict’s “fundamental and astounding” result—that the war brought on. But once Republicans decided on a standard of civil equality, they easily incorporated blacks into their established “free labor” philosophy.

Historians have discerned an inherent tension in the “free labor” philosophy of the antebellum Republicans. One strand of the philosophy derived from an older, traditional, communal, and republican understanding of free labor as economic independence, best expressed in the artisan’s ownership and control of his tools and workshop. The antebellum labor movement championed this view. The other strand embraced a modern, market-oriented, individualistic, and liberal view of free labor as “self-ownership,” the right to buy and sell labor freely. The Anglo-American antislavery movement emphasized this principle.¹⁹ As a legal historian puts it, “It was the abolitionists who first lent moral sanction and rhetorical energy to the notion that the northern worker’s freedom rested simply in self-ownership and the right to sell his own labor.”²⁰

The antislavery principle grew stronger during the antebellum period and through the war. Antislavery men emphasized voluntarism as the essence of the “self-ownership” view of free labor. Put simply, labor was free when coercion was absent.²¹ This belief led many antebellum liberals to oppose slavery as well as other coercive economic arrangements like tariffs, legal monopolies, and labor unions. Denouncing trade unionists for rioting against an alleged flour monopoly in New York in 1837, Jacksonian Democrat William Leggett argued, “What, let us ask, is the very first and cardinal object of the Trades Union? To enable labor, by the means of combination, and of extensive mutual countenance and cooperation, to command its own price.”²²

To the “labor” advocates of free labor thinking, the “self-ownership” view of liberalism masked “wage slavery.”²³ They condemned liberals for failing to see that compulsion characterized even formally “free” labor relations.²⁴ While employers could no longer physically compel workers to provide labor, they retained effective coercive power by being able to deny them the means of making a living.²⁵ In this view, compulsion inhered in wage-labor capitalism.²⁶

The frequent hostility of the antebellum labor reformers to the antislavery movement demonstrated the tension between the two theories. In the early Philadelphia labor movement, cordwainers denounced the undemocratic application of English common law to workers. “At the very time when the state of the negro was about to be improved, attempts were being made to reduce the whites to slavery,” the Philadelphia Aurora complained.²⁷ Similarly, the New York General Trades Union saw abolitionism as a conspiracy to depress white wages.²⁸ Labor editor George Henry Evans claimed that the abolitionists’ goal was to reduce “both Northern workers and Southern slaves to the lowest level of wage dependence, and to anarchical competition with each other, for the privilege of doing the drudgery of capital.”²⁹ When Orestes Brownson came to address the problem of poverty in the North, he argued that slave labor was less oppressive than wage labor. The slave’s “sufferings are less than those of the free laborer at wages” who “has all the disadvantages of freedom and none of the blessings,” Brownson claimed.³⁰

Some antislavery activists shared the labor view and attempted to unite the antislavery and labor movements. The New York City Workingmen’s Party sought the abolition of both chattel and wage slavery in its 1829 platform. While the evangelical individualism of most abolitionists led them to embrace market competition, some evinced a collectivist view of Christian brotherhood that made them suspicious of the free market. But such critics were few, and though there was some shift from liberal to labor views over time, the liberal version of free labor was the dominant one by and through the Civil War.³¹ Most abolitionists belittled the “wage slavery” view and regarded the differences between southern slavery and northern (or English) free labor as obvious, “as far apart as the poles,” due to the absence of coercion and availability of legal protection.³² Real slavery was distinguished by physical coercion, most abolitionists argued. “All these distinctions may be resolved into this fundamental difference,” the abolitionist National Era noted, “the free working man owns himself; the slave is owned by another.”³³ Free labor might bring distress and dependency, but it was not equal to slavery. “Grant that he is obliged to labor hard, labor long; still, he labors to provide himself a subsistence, to rear a family,” another antislavery paper noted. “He is under no physical coercion, and thus escapes essential and perpetual degradation.”³⁴

Some labor leaders pressed the “wage slavery” argument so far that they sounded like apologists for chattel slavery.³⁵ However much John C. Calhoun, as the “Marx of the Master Class,” may have envisioned an alliance between southern planters and northern capitalists to hold down black slaves and white workers, he actually got more support from northern labor activists than from northern businessmen. Calhoun was “one of the visionaries of the southern slavocracy who conceptualized the possibility of an alliance between the pro-slavery South and the burgeoning union movement in the North,” an AFL-CIO official said recently; he “repeatedly attempted to convince southern plantation owners to make common cause with the burgeoning union movement of the North against the industrial capitalists.”³⁶ Abolitionists tried to distance themselves from the early labor movement. William Lloyd Garrison denounced class resentment in the inaugural issue of the Liberator, excoriating the effort “to inflame the minds of our working classes against the more opulent, and to persuade men that they are contemned and oppressed by a wealthy aristocracy.”³⁷ Attributing class resentments to envy, he concluded that workers suffered more injustice from other workers than from their employers.³⁸ The abolitionist editor relegated “wage slavery” arguments to the “Refuge of Oppression” column, the section of the paper set aside for pro-slavery opinion.³⁹ Frederick Douglass also refused to let a wider labor agenda absorb the antislavery movement. He dissented vehemently from Fourierist John A. Collins’s equation of property with slavery and “accused Collins, not without plausibility, of ‘imposing an additional burden of unpopularity on our cause’ when Collins attempted to introduce socialist ideas at abolitionist meetings,” a biographer notes.⁴⁰ Most commonly, abolitionists made individualist and liberal arguments that furthered the distance between organized labor and blacks. Believing that employers’ economic interests would overcome racial prejudice, many abolitionists advised blacks to underbid white workers rather than attempt to join their unions.⁴¹

Though the Republican Party made more of an appeal to the working man than the abolitionists had and derived its principles from a wider range of sources, its members generally shared the self-ownership view of free labor. Most agreed with Massachusetts chief justice Lemuel Shaw’s landmark 1842 opinion in Commonwealth v. Hunt, that workers had the right to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 / Free Labor
• 2 / From Reconstruction to Jim Crow, 1877–1895
• 3 / Blacks and Labor in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920
• 4 / From Progressivism to the New Deal, 1920–1935
• 5 / The New Deal and World War
• 6 / The Civil Rights Era, 1950–1965
• 7 / The Affirmative Action Dilemma, 1965–Present
• Conclusion
• Appendix. “Divide and Conquer”: The Folklore of Socialism
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index