A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century

A Short History

of the

U.S. Working Class

From Colonial Times

to the Twenty-First Century

Paul Le Blanc

Illustrations by

Mike Alewitz

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

Excerpt from The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed 1964 by Carl Sandburg, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

© 1999 Paul Le Blanc

First published 1999 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books

This edition published in 2016 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

info@haymarketbooks.org

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-669-6

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

This book was published with the generous support of the Wallace Action Fund and Lannan Foundation.

Cover design by Rachel Cohen.

Library of Congress CIP data is available.

Contents

Preface to the 2016 Edition

Preface

Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (excerpt)

Introduction: Explaining the Title of This Book

Chapter 1 Origins

Chapter 2 The First American Revolution

Chapter 3 Industrial Revolution

Chapter 4 Slave Labor, Free Labor

Chapter 5 The Second American Revolution

Chapter 6 Gilded Age

Chapter 7 Rainbow Working Class

Chapter 8 Progressive Era

Chapter 9 Corruption

Chapter 10 Hardship and Resurgence

Chapter 11 The Second World War and Its Aftermath

Chapter 12 Cold War and Social Compact

Chapter 13 American Dream

Chapter 14 Unfinished Business

Chapter 15 Rude Awakenings

Chapter 16 Where To, What Next?

Bibliographical Essay

Glossary

Timeline of the History of the United States

U.S. Labor History Chronology

This book is dedicated to

Frank Lovell

(1913–1998)

one of many who has taught and inspired me.

Preface to the 2016 Edition

It is a pleasure to see a new edition of this short history of the U.S. working class made available by Haymarket Books—particularly with a new cover that highlights the diversity of those whose lives and labor have always kept our country running. In the book’s introduction, I define what I mean by working class (a term I much prefer to the fuzziness of middle class)—it is consistent with the recent Occupy movement’s notion of the 99%, which means it refers to most of us, regardless of precise percentages. The richness in composition of today’s working-class majority is matched by the richness of our history, which this book seeks to convey.

At the present moment, a majority of the people in the United States seem to face—in some important ways—nastier realities than was the case when I was growing up. What has been made of our country and of our world, by those whose power and policies have been dominant, is shameful and outrageous and horrific. Growing numbers of people are becoming fearful, angry, and restive over this state of affairs, with a sense that things should be better than they are. This book helps to show how laboring people in the past faced similar hard times, and through solidarity and struggle they brought about many positive changes in their lives. Some of these changes are still of benefit to us today.

There is much that has happened since the first appearance of this book. Rather than attempting a fifteen-year update, we can put it quite simply: The situation of the broadly defined U.S. working class is worse in 2016 than it was in 1999. Yet there are also new strengths coming to the fore. Surveying the rich diversity of race and ethnicity that makes up our working-class majority, Martin Luther King Jr. commented back in the 1960s: We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now. This elemental understanding is shared more widely today than was the case back then, and there has also been, in our society, the deepened awareness that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment (as Karl Marx once noted). There are still, of course, powerful forces at work to set us against each other, but as the labor radicals of the old Industrial Workers of the World pointed out: An injury to one is an injury to all. The organized labor movement has seen better days, to put it mildly. But what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. History shows that hard times, sooner or later, generate hard-fought struggles through which we’re capable of winning victories and bringing better times.

It is my belief that we can learn from the past in order to shape a better future. In striving to make this so, we must draw from the inspiring vision, the great underlying spirit, that animated some of labor’s greatest spokespeople (some of whose names are unknown), who spoke and wrote and sang about a better world of freedom, truly creative labor, and genuine community that can and must be won for all of us. Elements from such speeches and writings and songs pepper these pages.

In the first edition of this book, I foolishly, absent-mindedly left out a song that has inspired many, and may inspire many more. It grew out of the great Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912, described in these pages. Women played a central role in that hard-fought but successful struggle, and for some this threw into bold relief the passion and strength of the half of humanity whose liberation from oppression is pivotal to the liberation of all. The radical poet James Oppenheim captured that revolutionary spirit in his poem Bread and Roses. My failure to include it earlier enables me to share it now as the conclusion of this new preface.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,

For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;

Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead

Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.

Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.

Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.

The rising of the women means the rising of the race.

No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes,

But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

Preface

In part, this book has its origins in my origins. Growing up in the small Pennsylvania town of Clearfield, in the 1950s and early 1960s, I learned from my father and mother, Gaston Le Blanc and Shirley Harris Le Blanc, to have a reverence for the labor movement (the organizations of the working class, especially unions), with which they had identified and which they had been part of for many years. My father worked for the United Stone and Allied Products Workers of America, AFL-CIO/CLC (though he had started off in the Unemployed Councils and Workers Alliance of the 1930s); my mother had worked for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (CIO) in the mid-1940s, and after my birth had also done some part-time work for various unions, including the Stoneworkers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, AFL-CIO. They were mainstays in Clearfield’s central labor council. Among my earliest childhood memories are union meetings, picket lines, and Labor Day parades.

The coherence of the past, the meaning of the present, the hope for the future—for all of these things the labor movement was a central reference point. A union for them, and for me, meant what the word implies: the coming-together, the shared strength, of the workers. I was taught that the workers joined together to struggle against the rich, powerful, selfish employers who exploited them. Through unions they sought dignity, decent wages and working conditions, a better future. (I think they would have appreciated the pugnacious insight voiced by Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber: Unions don’t organize workers—workers organize unions.) I was taught labor songs, such as Solidarity Forever and Union Maid, which sometimes the whole family (there were also my sisters, Patty and Nora) would sing to break the tedium of a long car ride, invariably lifting our spirits with a melodic and poetic vision—expressed with spunk and humor and determination—of labor’s inspiring cause.

The working class in which I grew up was hardly a romantic abstraction. It consisted of actual people with a great variety of individual characteristics, shapes and sizes and colors, names and faces and ages, strengths and weaknesses, limitations and talents. My generation came of age in a prolonged period of unusual relative prosperity for the U.S. working class. Most of us came from families that were neither rich nor poor, and so we were taught to think of ourselves as middle class. But the incomes supporting our families came, more often than not, from one or two people who received wages or salaries from an employer who had need of their ability to labor in some blue-collar or white-collar occupation.

Some of the kids I grew up with also came from union families, and we often shared the half-understood notion that unions defended the workers and were good. But there were many in Clearfield who saw unions as corrupt, greedy, trouble-making institutions. In junior and senior high school I often found myself arguing with certain teachers and fellow students about these matters. It would have been helpful to have a book like this summarizing the history of U.S. labor and offering the actual words of some of its most eloquent spokespeople.

As I got older, I found that much of the U.S. labor movement did not conform to the idealistic vision that had animated my parents. Much of it seemed to find greater success through practices and policies that were less radical, less inclusive, less democratic. In some quarters there was corruption in the narrow sense—racketeering and gangsterism—but the more pervasive corruption involved a business unionism that turned away from the expansive vision of labor’s cause. Unions were less inclined to embrace the great majority of society’s people with the commitment to equal rights and social justice for all. So it seemed to me as a radical activist in the mid-to-late 1960s, and in the 1970s as a union member while employed as a hospital worker, welfare worker, cab driver, shipyard worker, and auto worker.

As it turned out, the realistic accommodation to the status quo and the self-satisfied narrowness which characterized so much of the labor movement in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s contributed to the erosion of its accomplishments and strength in the next two decades. Now more than ever, it is essential for those who would revitalize the labor movement to have a sense of its history and of the goals and ideals that animated its pioneering leaders and activists.

As a history teacher, I have become increasingly aware that one cannot truly understand the development of the United States except as a story largely shaped by those who labor. And while union members have always represented less—often many times less—than 40 percent of the U.S. working class, the struggles of labor’s militant minorities have sometimes contributed decisively to what has happened in our country. More than once, I have reached for a book such as this—a succinct history with those who spoke for labor in the past having their say—but I have never quite found this specific volume.

In trying to find the book I was looking for, I was fortunate to strike up a collaboration with John Hinshaw, a gifted labor historian who wrote an initial draft of this history, which I then revised substantially. As time went on, we found that the book we were collaborating on was going in different directions—at which point we agreed that the two projects (one a little more scholarly, the other a little more popular) each had value, and I moved forward to complete the one, while John moved forward to complete the other. Much of John remains in this volume, just as there is much of me, I’m sure, in the book that he has gone on to produce. At the same time, I see this as very much my own work, and I assume responsibility for any of its deficiencies.

Students and workers whom I’ve had the opportunity to teach in various classes have, in turn, helped teach me much about history and teaching as I have sought to make available and comprehensible the story of the working class. Decisive in helping to shape this book, such workers and students are also the ones whom I hope will make up the bulk of its readers, since the individual and collective realities of where they came from, who they are, and what they could become have been essential ingredients in why this book came to be.

There are others whose contributions must be acknowledged. For valuable suggestions and kind words of encouragement I would like to thank Elaine Bernard of the Harvard Trade Union Program. Two veteran activists who deserve much thanks for reading through this work and offering good critical feedback are Russ Gibbons, formerly of the United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO and for many years editor of Steel Labor, more recently of the Philip Murray Labor Institute at the Community College of Allegheny Country, and David Demarest, a professor of English at Carnegie-Mellon University who has for many years been immersed in literature related to the working class of the Pittsburgh area. From the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America there is Peter Gilmore, editor of the UE News, who provided a very useful critique of an early draft.

Valuable reactions and suggestions on a later version were forthcoming from Michael Yates, who teaches Economics at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown and Labor Studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. A fine labor historian and friend of many years—Mark McColloch, who heads up the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus—reviewed the manuscript in its final stages. Another friend, Dan Kovalik on the legal staff of the United Steelworkers, also shared information and advice, and his enthusiasm and commitment to the cause of labor were a pleasure to behold. Lisa Frank, a fine teacher and colleague in the History Department of Carlow College, also offered encouraging feedback on this project. So did two other friends who have been doing much to deepen our understanding of the North American working class, Paul Buhle at Brown University and Bryan Palmer at Queens University (Canada). The friendship of Carol McAllister—an ethnographer doing exciting work studying family support programs among low-income layers of the working class—has also been invaluable. Frank Lovell, a veteran of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific (AFL) and the United Auto Workers (AFL-CIO), with more than six decades in the labor movement, has been a close friend and a valued teacher, and I dedicate this book to him.

—Paul Le Blanc

April 1998

Postscript (May 21, 1999):

I would like to thank those at Humanity Books who helped with the production of this volume, including Mary A. Read, Tracey Belmont, and Eugene O’Connor. I would like to express my warm thanks to labor muralist Mike Alewitz, whose artistic vision—blending grace and humor—provides an imaginative counterpoint to the text.

Frank Lovell died before this book could be published, but it is a consolation that he was able to read the book in manuscript and knew that I was dedicating it to him. Attending the 1997 AFL-CIO Convention and the 1998 Socialist Scholars Conference with this insightful, admirable working-class militant are among the fond memories that I have of someone who was such a good friend for twenty-five years. He will be missed—but he is part of the still-continuing story reflected in this book.

Carl Sandburg

The People, Yes (excerpt)

Who knows the people, the migratory harvest hands and berry pickers, the loan shark victims, the installment house wolves,

The jugglers in sand and wood who smooth their hands along the mold that casts the frame of your motor-car engine,

The metal polishers, solderers, and paint spray hands who put the final finish on the car,

The riveters and bolt-catchers, the cowboys of the air in the big city, the cowhands of the Great Plains, the ex-convicts, the bellhops, redcaps, lavatory men—

The union organizer with his list of those ready to join and those hesitating, the secret paid informers who report every move toward organizing,

The house-to-house canvassers, the doorbell ringers, the good-morning-have-you-heard boys, the strike pickets, the strike­breakers, the hired sluggers, the ambulance crew, the ambulance chasers, the picture chasers, the meter readers, the oysterboat crews, the harborlight tenders—who knows the people?

Who knows this from pit to peak? The people, yes. . . . 

You do what you must—this world and then the next-—one world at a time.

The grain gamblers and the price manipulators and the stock-market players put their own twist on the text: In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread.

The day’s work in the factory, mill, mine—the whistle, the bell, the alarm clock, the timekeeper and the paycheck, your number on the assembly line, what the night shift says when the day shift comes—the blood of years paid out for finished products proclaimed on billboards yelling at highway travelers in green valleys—

These are daily program items, values of blood and mind in the everyday rituals of the people. . . . 

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

There are men who can’t be bought.

There are women beyond purchase.

The fireborn are at home in fire.

The stars make no noise.

You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.

Time is a great teacher.

Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

the people march.

In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for

keeps, the people march:

Where to? what next?

—Carl Sandburg

introduction

Explaining the Title of This Book

A history of the working class in the United States should, first of all, give a sense of what is meant by the working class in the United States. It means most of us who live in the United States of America—which, unfortunately, has not been the focus of a majority of history books that claim to tell the story of this country. This doesn’t make sense, because without the working class there would be no United States. (From a certain point of view, this history book deficiency does make sense, given the biases built into our business-dominated culture.)

The working class includes employed people and their family members whose living is dependent on selling labor-power (the ability to work) to employers for wages or salaries; many of these working people are neither rich nor poor but middle income (sometimes misleadingly labeled middle class), whose living standards have generally stagnated and declined over the past two decades. It also includes the poorly employed and unemployed working-class sectors living below the poverty line, receiving either starvation wages or welfare payments. It includes those who—after decades in the labor force—now face an uncertain future in their retirement years. And it includes young people, many of them students, who represent the future of the country and of its working-class majority.

An economic historian named Michel Beaud, surveying the development of various industrial capitalist countries, focused his attention on the proportion of the active population, or labor force, receiving wages in those countries. He noted, in the United States in 1880 the figure was 63 percent. Of course, the working class of that time was different in many ways from today’s—which encompasses perhaps 80 percent of the population (with many fewer agricultural workers and private servants, but with a greatly expanded white collar and public service sector). We will want to look at how this working class grew, was changed, and also how it changed our country through its own labor and struggles.

The struggles of the U.S. working class have added up to a general struggle for a better life, for more control over one’s own situation (which is what the word freedom means), and for a general reality characterized by majority rule, or rule by the people—which is what democracy means. While the United States is often seen as having that type of government, however, democracy in this country has been profoundly affected by the fact that concentrations of economic power have been in the hands of the wealthy few. Unequal economic power naturally translates into unequal political power, and that undermines a genuine government by the people. The top layer of society, no more than a few percent of the population, consists of those who make their living through the ownership of big business corporations that dominate our economic life. Below this super-rich minority there is a somewhat larger layer of smaller business people, managers, lawyers, doctors, etc., who are also relatively wealthy. It