Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233
Gregory L. Kaster, ‘Labour‘s True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877’
Gender & History, Vol.13 No.1 April 2001, pp. 24–64.
Labour’s True Man:
Organised Workingmen
and the Language of
Manliness in the USA,
1827–1877
Gregory L. Kaster
Addressing his union’s convention in 1864, Iron Molders’ president
and prominent mid century labour leader William Sylvis dismissed the
objections of ‘capitalists’ to trade unions as beneath workingmen’s
consideration. ‘And why, may I ask, should we listen to the croakings
of the opposition? Are we not full-grown men?’1
As Sylvis’s words hint and this essay will show, the movement language of organised skilled white workingmen in nineteenth-century
America resonated loudly and significantly with masculine accents.
Though not oblivious to those accents, scholars have paid them
insufficient attention. Most recent studies of labour and gender in the
period, for example, take women workers as their subject. While
revealing much about how working-class women saw themselves and
were seen by men, these histories treat the gender and gendering of
male workers only tangentially or indirectly, if at all.2 As for the many
studies of workingmen that have appeared over the last twenty years,
few deal explicitly with the topic and then, typically, in passing or in
the context of a particular community or trade.3 Moreover, the two
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
25
full-scale histories to date of American manhood both focus on middleclass men. Thus, as Ava Baron has recently observed, ‘the history of
working-class masculinity’ must still be written.4
Toward that end, this essay examines the language of manliness
that both marked and shaped nineteenth-century mainstream labour
activism from 1827 to 1877.5 The focus is on sketching, for the first
time, the vocabulary, logic, tropes, and meanings of manliness embedded in various standard labour movement texts – newspapers,
journals, addresses, trade-union proceedings6 – across fifty formative
years of craft ‘bastardization’, class formation, and movement building.7 Such an approach, which attends to manliness rhetoric wholly as
manifested in workingmen’s activism over time, seems essential to
recovering and illuminating not only its persistence, functions, logic,
and extent, but also its ‘complex associations’8 – the ways in which, as
a live language, its persistent yet fluid components were at once dense
with meaning as well as densely interrelated and thus mutually resonant. Put differently, such an approach seems essential to understanding the accents of manliness rhetoric, the world of labour activism
they both bespoke and sustained, and, not incidentally, the wider
gendered culture to which accents and activism together belonged.
Specifically, this essay asks: What notions of manliness emerge from
the period’s labour texts? What kind of collective identity did they
amount to around which skilled white male workers who dominated
the labour movement could rally and pursue their ends? What hopes
and fears did labour’s manliness rhetoric inscribe? And how did it
advance, as well as limit, labour protest?
The analysis that follows reveals a persistent, complex, problematic
language of manliness central to the activism and collective subjectivity of organised white workingmen in the fifty years covered
here. In its broad contours and basic meanings, that language was
remarkably persistent across both immediate contexts and time. On
one level, it confidently narrated and prescribed an idealised, invincible moral masculinity whose essence was male workers’ resolute,
heroic, and respectable free agency in their own concerted deliverance from oppression and abasement. This ideal beckoned as an
honourable status to be won and maintained through repeated
demonstration. Against it workingmen could measure their manhood; through it they could publicly signify themselves as not simply
workers but also men; from it they could derive both self-esteem and
assurance that their cause would prevail. In a social/cultural context
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
26
GENDER AND HISTORY
where artisan independence was giving way to exploited wage labour,
where hand work was widely scorned, and where preoccupation with
manhood was pervasive and intense, these were no small things. If, in
W. E. B. Du Bois’s phraseology, whiteness paid workingmen a compensatory ‘public and psychological wage’,9 so too did the manliness
they constructed for themselves. Indeed, as will become clear, their
racial and gender identities converged.
Even as manliness rhetoric proudly proclaimed workingmen’s
‘manly spirit’, on another level it figured their manhood as alarmingly
wanting. Running through it was an ongoing jeremiad about male
workers’ unmanly complicity in their own oppression. Virtually ignored
by labour historians, this often blistering lament registered not only
the precariousness of skilled workers’ social position, but, more
pointedly, the nightmarish prospect of their manhood publicly
humiliated and (consequently) denied. The emphasis placed by recent
historians on ‘artisan’ or ‘labour republicanism’ has obscured a crucial
fact about nineteenth-century labour discourse: it was preoccupied
at least as much with the fate of worker manhood as with that of
the republic. This gender(ed) anxiety, moreover, at once infused
and incorporated the latter concern in ways essential to understanding each.
The language explored here both facilitated and limited labour
activism. On the one hand, it was central to skilled white workers’
collective self-identification, movement building, and resistance to
degradation. Yet labour’s manliness rhetoric was also highly problematic. Most obviously, it gendered and racialised labour solidarity
by constructing manhood in opposition to femaleness and blackness.
That construction contributed decisively to organised white workingmen’s marginalisation and exclusion of women and black workers
respectively. Less obviously, perhaps, the equation of manliness with
respectability stigmatised (implicitly at least) those workingmen –
many of them common (and immigrant) labourers – whose masculinity was bound up more with ‘rough’ than ‘respectable’ working-class
culture. In these ways, even while rallying some workers, the discourse
of manliness both reflected and affirmed divisions among working
people.
It was problematic in three other key respects as well. First, it
tended toward abstraction and oversimplification – tendencies associated with its romantic and melodramatic cast. Tension and instability
posed another problem. Optimism and confidence revealed pessimism
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
27
and doubt; mutualism encompassed crosscurrents of individualism;
and the projection of unyielding heroic manhood was undercut by a
consensual counter-representation of agency restrained. More than
mixed messages alone resulted. The first tension painted workingmen
into an ideological corner, ultimately leaving only themselves to
blame for their oppression, even as the other two blunted the radicalism of their organised activism. Finally, and most crucially, though the
language of manliness helped to rally skilled white workingmen, it
simultaneously muted class consciousness by beckoning them to an
ambivalent, double identity defined as much by manly character as by
class characteristics. Assimilationist in thrust, it insisted on manhood
as a measure of worth that transcended occupation or economic
position.
The analysis begins with manliness rhetoric’s more straightforward
features, functions, and implications, notably its simultaneous masculinisation of labour solidarity and politicisation of manliness. Its logic
and racialisation of manliness are also foregrounded in this first part.
Discussion of its negotiation of women workers follows next. The
essay then turns to the rhetoric’s less obvious and (by historians) most
neglected key components: its moralising of manliness, its ambivalent
treatment of manly agency, its homosocial preoccupation with whether
workingmen were in fact true men in their own and other male eyes,
and its gendered assimilationist accent on manly character. The essay
concludes by sketching what became of manliness rhetoric in the fifty
years after 1877. The method employed is akin to an excavation, with
the following analysis exposing and explicating ever-deeper yet
overlapping linguistic layers.
On what did white male craft workers’ manliness depend? Most
simply, the texts of their organised activism declared, on their ready
and unflinching defence – both individually and collectively – of their
rights and interests against unjust opposition, no matter how powerful the latter. This ‘manly’ stance, or rather its representation, pervaded the discourse of workingmen’s protest and, like the language
of manliness itself, remained remarkably consistent across varied
contexts and time. Labour texts regularly praised the ‘manly spirit’
(i.e., the ‘manly firmness and resolute will’) of workingmen who, in
vigorous defence of their trade unions and interests, had ‘the manhood to demand their rights’. Manliness was also invoked on behalf
of male unionists’ unfettered citizenship and partisan labour politics.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
28
GENDER AND HISTORY
An employer who discharged men because of their political views or
behaviour was a ‘tyrant of the worst kind’, resolved a pro-Jackson
meeting of New York City workingmen in 1834, while ‘the citizen
who will submit to such dictation, is forgetful of the dignity and spirit
that ought to distinguish a freeman’.10
As the tyrant/freeman polarity in the last example suggests, such
rhetoric at one level simply carried forward into the nineteenth century a politicised understanding of (white) manliness forged during
the American Revolution. That event, E. Anthony Rotundo has shown,
made antonyms of the words ‘manfully’ and ‘submissively’. Indeed,
‘the Declaration of Independence itself used the word manly to mean
resolute courage in resisting tyranny’.11
Even as nineteenth-century workingmen’s advocates echoed the
earlier masculine accents of revolutionary republicanism, however,
they invested them with new meanings. They did so in two main
ways. First, they adapted the revolutionary ideal of heroic republican
manhood to their own protest, fashioning out of it an inspiring and
legitimating masculine republican metahistory – tinged with class –
that positioned themselves as heirs to the manly spirit of 1776, stoutly
resisting their oppression by ‘domestic tyrants’. ‘Sons of Patriotic
Sires,/ Fan afresh your latent fires,/ Brave is he who now aspires,/
To the birthright of the free’, went the opening verse of an 1840s
labour song by a ‘workingman’. An earlier activist, writing as Philadelphia house carpenters and other journeymen agitated for shorter
hours in 1828, warned employers to remember that journeymen ‘are
men, freemen, the sons and grandsons of men who gloried in sacrificing their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour, rather than
submit to the oppressive domination of a foreign despot’. If pushed
too far, ‘the sons of such fathers’ will ‘sound the alarm, become their
own masters [a phrase charged with craft, gender, and racial significations], and declare that they have no part in employers, nor any
inheritance in oppressors and tyrants’.12
In this collective self-representation, manliness and what David
Roediger has perceptively called ‘herrenvolk republicanism’ converged, each reinforcing the other to construct ‘the worker’ as white
male. Labour historians have recognised for some time the centrality
of ‘republicanism’to the consciousness of nineteenth-century organised workers. More recently, as Roediger’s phrase suggests, they have
also grasped republicanism’s racialised dimension. Roediger, for
example, has shown that ‘by the Age of Jackson’, which is to say
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
29
by the early labour movement, ‘freeman’ with its connotations of
‘economic and political independence’ was virtually synonymous with
whiteness. ‘Blackness meanwhile almost perfectly predicted lack of
the attributes of a freeman’. As Roediger’s mention of the ‘masculine
ending’ of the keyword ‘freeman’ suggests, labour republicanism was
not only racialised but also gendered, an aspect of it most labour
historians (Roediger excepted) have insufficiently appreciated. Indeed,
at its core was a masculine identity derived not merely from classical
republican theory’s idealisation of independent male citizens, or ‘freemen’ in American parlance, but also from the masculinised historical
consciousness at the intersection of labour’s mutually reinforcing
republican and manliness rhetorics.13
Activists also reinterpreted the masculine accents of revolutionary
republicanism by linking manly backbone and thus manhood itself to
(white skilled) workingmen’s solidarity and movement building.
Here was the movement expression of ‘the craftsmen’s ethical code
[which] demanded a “manly” bearing toward the boss’.14 Implicit
always in paeans to the manliness of organised workmen, this linkage was at times starkly, if negatively, rendered. Struggling with
employers over wages in 1834, the Journeymen Ladies’ Cordwainers
Society of New York called on ‘all … journeymen of the craft’ to join
its ranks. He who refused, the society warned, would ‘be regarded,
from this time forward, by his fellow craftsmen, as unworthy the
name of man, and a reproach to the craft which he disgraces by his
conduct’. (This appeal appeared in a labour paper called The Man.)
Three decades later the Chicago Workingman’s Advocate advised
readers to test their manliness by asking themselves two questions:
‘Am I a member of my trade union?’ and ‘Have I allied myself with
the Labor Reform party … the party which is trying to make me …
a man, in the highest sense of the term[?]’ The workingman who
answered no, spat the Advocate, was ‘a thief without courage; a man
without a manly attribute, a libel on humanity’. Another journal,
pointedly linking the public and private dimensions of worker
manhood, charged in 1877: ‘It is by neglecting or refusing to join the
organization of his trade that a workman proves himself a cruel
husband and heartless father’.15
Scabbing provoked especially acid denunciations. It threatened
efforts by others to be manly husbands/fathers and seemed,
moreover, a frighteningly grotesque expression of everything
unmanly. ‘A Song for All Good Men’ (note the title’s cross-class
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
30
GENDER AND HISTORY
moral construction of manhood), published in the New York
Working Man’s Advocate in 1834, vilified: ‘By nob [scab] we imply
everything that is knavish,/ In nob we include everything that is
slavish,/ In nob we find every thing that is vile –/ A treacherous,
cowardly monster of guile’.
We doubt of a nob – but we fear not a man;
For man is still noble, unflinching in trial –
As true in his course as the sun on its dial;
A nob is a villain, a cheat, and a knave,
Unworthy of aught but an infamous grave.
Recounting in 1870 the ‘generally obnoxious’ behaviour of one
apparently notorious New York State ‘SCAB’, the Machinists and
Blacksmiths’ International Journal denounced him (echoing the
cordwainers of nearly forty years before) as an ‘imposition on the
name of man’ utterly unlike ‘men who have had the manhood to
proclaim themselves free men’ through organisation.16
For contemporary middle-class men, to be ‘without “business”
[i.e. work-activity]’ was to be ‘less than a man’.17 Labour’s manliness
rhetoric affirmed and refashioned this middle-class gender assumption. Defining workingmen’s business as, broadly, advancing by
joining the cause of labour, it invested that class-based action with the
cross-class manly attributes of courage, energy, steadfastness, and
responsibility to one’s dependants.
Thus we see how this language politicised worker manliness by
simultaneously representing labour solidarity and agency as manly.
Describing ‘hombria’, the concept of manhood adhered to by
‘laborers’ in Spain’s Andalusia region during the past century,
anthropologist David Gilmore has noted its ‘[strong] political coloration’. ‘Among peasants and workers, manliness is expressed not only
by loyalty to kindred but also by loyalty to the laboring class and by
an active participation in the struggle for workers’ rights’. Somewhat
similarly, labour-movement texts in nineteenth-century America
represented workingmen’s full engagement in the cause – whether on
the economic or political front, or both – as at once the expression
and safeguard of their manhood.18 Repeated over and over again as
part of recurrent labour activism, language like the foregoing relentlessly masculinised working-class solidarity, labour protest, and their
varied institutional expression in trade unions, political parties, and
reform associations. In the process, manliness took on resonances of
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
31
class while the category ‘worker’ and workers’ collective identity –
both universal subject and group subjectivity – were gendered (and
regendered) masculine.
We discern too something of manliness rhetoric’s logic. On one
hand, the rhetoric celebrated and assured. It paid tribute to – and
figured as exemplars – workingmen whose backbone had been, or was
presently being, tested and found not wanting. More abstractly,
it simply proclaimed the manliness of organised workers as incontrovertible fact. Both kinds of celebration doubly assured by simultaneously affirming workingmen’s manhood and (we will see)
representing it as the guarantor of their triumph ahead. The same
rhetoric, however, also admonished and excoriated. Hence the
execratory evocations of unmanly workers quoted above – imaging
intended to alter, by denouncing, the behaviour of such workers,
even as it bolstered, by warning, their manly opposites.
In part, these seemingly mutually exclusive tones or moods – the
one celebratory and upbeat, the other censorious and dark – registered
different moments in workingmen’s ongoing protest – namely,
victories (imminent or won) and defeats (looming or come to pass).
Yet, like the language they inflected, they resist neat correlation with
specific contexts or occasions. Nor were they as disconnected as might
first appear. Often present simultaneously (witness, for example, the
Machinists and Blacksmiths’ editorial on scabbing), either alone
always implied the other. The tension between them, manifest or
latent, lent the language of manliness emotive power, protean
applicability, and thus effectiveness as a mobilising discourse. That
tension, moreover, indicates the rhetorical tradition Sacvan Bercovitch
has termed the American jeremiad. In keeping with the jeremiad’s
logic and moods, labour’s manliness rhetoric, as will become even
more clear below, combined prophetic assurance with anxious castigation, optimism and hope with pessimism and doubt.19
Incessant figuring of manly workers did more than simply mirror
workingmen’s numerical and political dominance of organised labour
activism. It simultaneously naturalised their dominant position. Put
differently, it not only reflected but distorted reality since rhetorically
it left little space for women either as workers or labour activists.
Moreover, it informed and was informed by the general response of
male trade unionists to women workers.
From William English of the Philadelphia Trades’ Union in the
1830s to William Sylvis in the 1860s, male unionists, when they
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
32
GENDER AND HISTORY
acknowledged women workers at all, typically depicted them as
victims whose ideal (and natural) place was the home. Appropriating the ascendant middle-class ideology of domesticity or separate
spheres, they assumed that ‘woman, gentle woman! was given to
man as a blessing and an helpmate’. Her true destiny, in Sylvis’s
evocation of the domestic pedestal, was as ‘presiding deity of the
home circle’, ‘queen of the household’. Tragically and grotesquely,
though, the ‘grasping avarice’ of employers and capital combined
with ‘cruel necessity’ to force ‘defenceless’ women into ‘manual
labour’, thereby degrading womanhood and deranging family
life.20
Paradoxically, male unionists’ desire to reverse this perceived awful
state of affairs could prompt them to support the self-organisation of
women workers.21 English, for example, called on workingwomen,
‘aided of course by the stronger sex’, to form their own ‘Female
Trades’ Union[,] and a formidable one it would be too’. Then women
would be enabled, through repeated wage increases eventually
encompassing them all, to ‘live on less labour’ until ultimately their
places were taken by well-paid men. Freed ‘from … that kind of
labour … designed for man alone [emphasis added]’, wives could
focus on their ‘families’ and ‘homes’, while single women could
prepare ‘for the more sober duties of wives, mothers, and matrons’.
Here was a programme whereby women, through their own ‘formidable’ trade unionism, would voluntarily organise themselves out of
work and thus set male–female/family relations right again. Such was
English’s articulation of the ‘family wage’.22
Even the broad-minded William Sylvis, who by 1867 supported
woman suffrage and who was open to women’s participation in the
National Labor Union (1868–75), which he served as first president, shared at bottom English’s perspective. According to the 1860
census, about 15 per cent of all women worked for pay, though
perhaps twice as many participated variously in the labour market.
Thus Sylvis may have recognised more clearly than English three
decades earlier that women’s wage work ‘outside of the domestic
circle’ would not soon disappear. Still, he was no less certain of its
unnaturalness and devastating consequences for not only family life
but also, he intimated, civilisation itself. Though he advocated
separate unions and cooperative enterprises for workingwomen, and
acknowledged women’s ‘indomitable perseverance’ in winning public
recognition of their educational and political ‘claims’, he also
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
33
represented women workers specifically, and ‘woman’ universally, as
‘the weaker sex’ whose ‘natural protector’ was man.23 Twenty years
earlier, Teresa Murphy has shown, the workingmen who participated in New England’s ten-hour-day movement sought to involve
women, but only as subordinate moral auxiliaries whose virtuous
presence would legitimate male labour activism. At the same time,
their publications offered melodramatic depictions of the female
worker as helpless victim of her villainous employer.24
The point is not that English, Sylvis, and other male trade unionists
were simply confused or, worse, hypocrites bent on shoring up their
labour market position and patriarchal power at women’s expense.
For one thing, their ironic, melodramatic juxtaposition of true and
exploited womanhood, with the latter’s connotations of sexual violation,25 was one way of fashioning a critique of labour’s exploitation
(and exploiters) suffused with compelling gender resonances which
lent legitimacy to their cause.
We would be mistaken, however, to treat those tropes as functioning merely to legitimate or, worse as just suggested, to mask ‘real’
male interests. Rather, we need consider them part of the larger
language of manliness examined here. Read (and ‘heard’) that way,
they bespeak the serious, complex, uneasy efforts of activist skilled
male workers to reconcile their ongoing masculine construction of
their work (witness English’s remarks), their movement-building
protest, and their fellow workmen and themselves with a reality that
called that same construction into question: namely, the presence of
wage-working, exploited women, some of whom engaged in precisely
the kind of solidaristic organising deemed the essence of honourable
manhood by organised workingmen.
Male trade unionists negotiated this problem on the rhetorical,
ideological, and psychological levels by styling themselves the
‘protectors’ of such women. Whatever threat women workers
presented their manhood was thereby imaginatively transposed into
its opposite – an opportunity to exercise heroic manly chivalry. Teresa
Murphy speculates that melodramatic representations of female
workers in New England labour papers in the 1840s were likely
meant more for men than women since they implied the need for ‘a
male hero whose job it would be to confront the villain and save the
helpless heroine’. Exhorting moulders/workingmen to just such
action, Sylvis lamented that ‘“the fairest portion of God’s creation”
is left to struggle in their weakness, with no manly hand extended’
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
34
GENDER AND HISTORY
to save them. Men must act, he warned, or ‘capital will … unsex’
woman (and, perhaps the fear was, man as well). ‘Manhood, honor,
humanity, gallantry alike’, he indignantly asserted, ‘revolt at’
women’s oppression.26
Notwithstanding male trade unionists’ remarks regarding workingwomen, their language on the whole had in fact little to say about
them. Denial may thus have been another, surely effective way in
which workingmen psychologically negotiated the challenging reality
of women workers.27
Nor is this surprising if we bear in mind Michael Kimmel’s important insight that ‘American men define their masculinity, not as much
in relation to women, but in relation to each other. Masculinity is
largely a homosocial enactment’.28 Organised workingmen’s language
bespoke an intense preoccupation with their manliness as measured
against other men both less and more powerful or secure than they,
as well as against their own actual behaviour and condition. While this
preoccupation on occasion referenced directly (and otherwise implicitly) the concerns about family and women workers just discussed,
its primary focus was always on the public homosocial world where
manhood was (and is) asserted, tested, and recognised or refused.
By the terms of labour’s manliness rhetoric, workingmen fully
engaged in the cause were not simply fired with ‘manly spirit’; they
were also necessarily, as the title of the song about ‘nobs’ put it, ‘good
men’. The keyword ‘man’ and its various forms thus carried not only
gender and class but also cross-class moral connotations. As an
authoritative late nineteenth-century American dictionary noted,
‘Manly … is the word into which have been gathered the highest
conceptions of what is noble in man or worthy of his manhood’. Its
synonyms were ‘honorable, highminded’. By contrast, the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) reveals, ‘unmanly’ meant ‘dishonourable
or degrading to a man’.29 Labour’s language of manliness thus
constructed polar moral identities – manly/honourable/virtuous,
unmanly/dishonourable/vicious. These bore the same relationship
to each other as the language’s two moods of optimism and pessimism; existing in tension, one always implied the other. And as this
polarity indicates, such moralising (like representations of exploited
women workers and chivalrous workingmen) invariably took
melodramatic form. Phrases like ‘an imposition on the name of
man’, ‘a thief without courage’, ‘a libel on humanity’, for example,
denounced unmanly workers in the compelling linguistic conventions
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
35
of melodrama30 – compelling because symbolic, emotional, dichotomous, and pervasive in the popular culture – even as those phrases
prescribed values and behaviour by calling to mind the virtuous
opposite of what they signified.
Behind such moralistic language lay the ‘concept of character’ and
one of its defining imperatives, ‘duty’. ‘Character’ was central both to
American culture generally and manhood specifically in the nineteenth century. Its emphasis ‘was clearly moral’, an emphasis the
word duty, prominent in the vocabulary of character, reinforced. If,
as one turn-of-the-century dictionary noted, ‘manly’ typically
modified ‘character’, the latter concept (to which we will return later)
was distinguished by, in Stefan Collini’s phrase, an ‘intimate dependence on a prior notion of duty’.31
For nineteenth-century middle-class men, development of a ‘sober
sense of duty’ both measured and guided their transition from
boyhood to manhood, from unmanly to manly.32 In this regard they
were not alone. Few keywords in organised workingmen’s discourse
were as pervasive as duty.33 The Working Man’s Advocate in 1829,
exhorting workers to cease being pawns of party politicians: ‘it is a
duty you owe to yourselves and your posterity – a duty you have too
long left unperformed – that you select men who will represent you’.
Ely Moore, president of New York’s General Trades’ Union,
reminding that body in 1833: ‘Remember, then, fellow mechanics,
that the man who attempts to seduce you from your duty to yourselves, to your families, and your brother mechanics, by misrepresenting the objects of the Union, offers you not only an insult, but an
injury!’ (‘Seduce’ here carries suggestive, if unintended, implications,
most tellingly a homophobic equation of neglected duty with emasculating sexual surrender to another (feminised?) man’s seduction.)
The Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International Journal in 1871,
praising the newly organised men of Logansport, Indiana, whose
backbone it had previously criticised: ‘they have come out manfully
… they dared to do their duty like men’. And William Sylvis,
forecasting for his union the rich rewards of duty done rather than
shirked:
A bright and glorious future is before us. We have but to act the part of men,
go forward in a spirit of honesty, truth, and brotherhood, and secure the
blessings in store for us, and which always fall to the lot of those who do their
duty. The road of progress is marked out plainly before us, and the finger of
duty points unerringly the way. Let us but follow it; let us but do our duty, and
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
36
GENDER AND HISTORY
carry forward to the most ample success this great work [of labour’s elevation],
and our names will be held in grateful remembrance, and handed down from
generation to generation, to the last syllable of recorded time.34
These examples suggest the multiple connotations and functions of
duty in labour’s lexicon of manliness. It connoted, the OED tells us,
‘moral obligation; the binding force of what is morally right’, and
clearly that is the meaning most apparent here.35 Its repeated invocation at once infused labour activism with high moral purpose and
figured workingmen’s participation as a momentous responsibility –
to themselves, to one another, to family, to ‘posterity’ – no true man
would neglect or evade. It served, thus, as an elastic, multivalent
gendered rallying cry that at once mobilised, disciplined, and legitimated. It lent itself equally well to generalised calls for solidarity and to
more focused appeals for workingmen’s political and/or economic
unity. At times it took on quite specific associations, thereby directing
workingmen’s attention and imparting special urgency to immediate
objectives, as when the Sons of Vulcan (the iron puddlers union)
declared in 1874: ‘Our duty is plain, we should move for a curtailment of our hours of toil’.36
Workingmen and their leaders, in short, not only echoed but
added to the word’s middle-class meanings. For them, duty connoted
not solely, or even chiefly, the male breadwinner obligations so central
to middle-class manhood and domesticity.37 Just as important if not
more so, though clearly bound up with the former, were the workingman’s obligations to the cause of labour generally and the good of
generations to come. More concretely and immediately, his obligations to his trade union, his organised ‘brothers’ across trades, and
his interests, shared with them, as a workingman. Within labour
texts, then, duty served most broadly to condense and reinforce the
parallel conflation of manhood and solidarity already discussed.
Gender and class converged in a word that demanded and evoked
workingmen’s resolute manliness in and through organised, united
labour activism.
Appropriately enough, then, the concept of duty was, over time,
woven tightly into the institutional fabric of workingmen’s
organisations, and nowhere more so than in the national unions
(among, for example, printers and iron moulders) that arose mid
century. National laws and constitutions spelled out the duties of
subordinate unions and their members along with penalties for
neglecting them. Presidential addresses and convention proceedings
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
37
regularly intoned solemn reminders of the weighty duties attendant
on the office of president and devolving in turn on the delegates
assembled.38
Duty was an especially useful concept enlisted on behalf of nascent
national unionism. It served to symbolise and promote bonds of
manly solidarity between national leaders and rank-and-file members
of subordinate unions, between delegates to the national and their
constituents, and also, no less crucial, between far-flung rank-andfilers themselves. ‘Now, Bros.’, wrote a correspondent to the Coopers’
Monthly Journal, reporting on that organisation’s progress in Illinois,
‘let us be true to ourselves and true to our duty; our own interest
demands it – our duty to our families demands it’.39 The notion of
manly duty fostered national trade-union consciousness; more significantly, it helped to gender as masculine not only the act of
solidarity but its institutional trade-union practice at all levels, even as,
in the process, duty (both word and deed) was itself politicised and
classed.
Even as they promoted labour solidarity, however, these same
invocations of duty also acted to exclude those – women, blacks, and
recent (especially unskilled) immigrants – who fell outside the full
republican citizenship duty implied. In short, it was white male
workers, native-born and naturalised, whom duty called.40
Still other important connotations and functions of the call to duty
can be discerned in the remarks of Moore and Sylvis. Moore’s
reference to ‘duty to yourselves, your families, and your brother
mechanics’, echoed by the Coopers’ Journal correspondent forty years
later, illustrates how the concept usefully linked, indeed blurred the
boundary between, the public world of labour activism and the
private sphere of family life. Responsibility to one’s ‘brothers’ in craft
and union was synonymous with responsibility to one’s familial
dependants. Duty, in other words, simultaneously connoted fraternal
ties between workingmen and the patriarchal authority/obligation
inextricably bound up with not only workingmen’s status as providers
but also their collective mobilisation in defence of that position. For
workingmen, its constant iteration, like the occasional related summonses to their chivalrous ‘duty as men’, no doubt heightened the
stakes of their organised activism by impressing on them, in effect,
that the political is familial, and patriarchal.
Duty could also carry millennialist connotations of workingmen’s heroism and certain victory. Thus Sylvis rosily anticipated the
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
38
GENDER AND HISTORY
not-too-distant day when moulders/workingmen would become the
deserved objects of veneration down through the ages, all because,
like men, they followed the admonitory, unerring ‘finger of duty’,
and because, having done so, they inevitably and heroically brought
their ‘great work’ to its triumphant close. Prescriptive and prophetic,
duty here evoked not only the sober self-discipline essential to movement building, but also, no less critical to sustained mobilisation,
the ‘glorious’ outcomes contingent on its fulfilment. Put differently, and distinct from middle-class manhood’s ‘sober sense of
duty’, it evoked at once the ascetic demands and romantic promise
of engaged and (in the nineteenth-century sense) progressive worker
manhood.
Above all, however, duty – which according to the OED referenced
not simply moral obligation but also the action or act such obligation
impelled41 – signified the necessity and power of workers’ collective
manly agency. It demanded, as Sylvis’s admonition to ‘act the part of
men’ hints, action invigorated by right and will. David Montgomery
noted three decades ago that Civil War-era labour reformers adhered
to the ‘Wesleyan notion of “free agency”’, yet labour historians since
have not followed up on his insight. Lost in the ensuing emphasis on
labour republicanism and its constitutive concepts of virtue, corruption, independence, and equality has been the significance of agency
as a central, recurring trope in organised workingmen’s gendered
discourse.42
In 1834, for example, the Journeymen Ladies’ Cordwainers Society
of New York exhorted ‘every journeyman of our branch’ in the area
to resist mightily an effort by employers to cut wages. Whether or
not the workers prevailed was essentially up to them. ‘Our destinies,
and those of our families … are, to a very great extent, in our own
hands’, the Society warned. ‘If poverty, disgrace, and wretchedness
should await us, then, the fault will be with us, and the consequences
must abide upon our own heads’. An 1870 editorial titled ‘Unpalatable Truths’ in a leading labour paper similarly sought to rouse
workingmen by affirming the as yet unrealised transformative power
of their own wrongly neglected agency: ‘There is no truth plainer
than that every people make their own condition, and deserve and are
fit for no other … The “hewer of wood and drawer of water” class are
self-appointed’. Addressing the moulders’ convention, recall, William
Sylvis asked: ‘Are we not full-grown men? Are we not capable of
taking our destiny into our own hands?’ Trade-union leader, labour
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
39
editor, and Sylvis associate Jonathan Fincher supplied the pointed
answer when, in the pages of his important Trades’ Review, he
reminded workingmen that they were ‘the arbiters of their own
destiny’.43
Manly workers must, thus, dutifully and concertedly help themselves. Doing so, manliness rhetoric foretold, virtually assured the
triumph of their cause. Though enunciated wrongs and objectives
varied, this representation of invincible collective agency did not. An
1828 article in the Philadelphia Mechanics’ Free Press confidently
proclaimed: ‘If the producers of real wealth would but assume their
rights, and act with brotherly union, all the privations and poverty
which usury and speculation brings [sic] upon them at this time,
would soon be purged from the body politic’. ‘[Workingmen] are
awakening to vigorous action’, announced the fiery and ubiquitous
New England trade unionist Seth Luther eight years later. ‘“On
to the rescue”, is the cry from all points of the compass, and woe
betide the oppressor when the bone and sinew move in SOLID
COLUMN’. The Boston Daily Evening Voice, begun by striking journeymen printers in the 1860s, called on workingmen to ‘unite … shoulder
to shoulder’ against ‘the aristocracy of wealth’: ‘You can triumph if
you will [emphasis added]; and if you do it not you are mean, and
deserve all the contempt which the purse-proud aristocrats heap upon
you’.44
Such pronouncements might seem at first but another hackneyed
variant of the period’s pervasive self-made-man talk.45 They might
even appear to support the argument of some historians that workingmen embraced hegemonic liberal, not mutualist/republican,
values.46 Certainly, like liberal discourse, they bespoke fervent faith in
the boundless possibilities of self-determination. We know, moreover,
that like middle-class men, many workingmen and their leaders were
tempted by the lure of self-made advancement.47
Yet matters are not so simple. For one thing, the debate about
workingmen’s values has obscured the ambiguous, simultaneous
presence of both individualism and mutualism in labour discourse/
ideology.48 The Journeymen Ladies’ Cordwainers’ Association
quoted earlier, for example, evoked individual selves (and families)
through its plural phraseology about ‘our destinies, and those of our
families’ resting largely in ‘our own hands’. Yet the collective ‘our’
modifying ‘destinies’ and ‘hands’ simultaneously invested the association’s statement with mutualistic import, reinforced in turn by the
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
40
GENDER AND HISTORY
specific surrounding context of journeymen organising to resist a
lowering of their wages. And what are we to make of a dedicated
trade unionist like William Sylvis who both preached the necessity
and virtues of ‘association’ and offered as worthy exemplars
unspecified self-made men who ‘commenced their career[s] with no
capital but their bone and muscle’?49 Even apparently unambiguous
mutualistic affirmations of workingmen’s efficacy – like Sylvis’s
question to the moulders’ convention, ‘Are we not capable of taking
our destiny [note the singular] into our own hands?’ – were less
clearly so than might first appear. Given the slippery, resonant
character of language and speech, they inevitably echoed to some
degree the concurrent exaltation of individual agency surrounding
the cult of self-made men.
Most relevant here, the debate over workingmen’s values has
missed the extent to which this ambiguous mixing of individualism
and mutualism derived from organised workingmen having to negotiate a problematic gender imperative, one that middle-class men of
business did not similarly confront. This involved constructing themselves as men while taking account of both the mutual dependence
on one another crucial to their movement-building and the personal
independence that defined self-made manhood.50 The problem was
compounded by longstanding artisanal reverence for economic independence, reflected in the ideal of earning a ‘competence’, and by
labour discourse’s identification of loss or erosion of autonomy – in a
word, dependence – as the principal threat facing workingmen. Thus
in 1872 the Central Working Men’s Society of Pittsburgh, addressing
‘Working Men of the United States’ about, among other things, the
eight-hour day, noted impatiently: ‘It is made a prominent objection
on the part of some of our fellow workmen, that by association the
freedom of the individual is restrained’. To such ‘objectors’ the
society stressed the need for ‘the subordination of the interests of
individuals to the general interests of the whole body of the people’
if ‘progress’ were to result. It then immediately reassured that through
organisation workingmen restrained ‘not their personal freedom, but
the encroachment of capital’. Revealingly, if paradoxically, this
response ultimately defended labour mutualism in individualist terms;
‘association’ appears as preserving – even enhancing – threatened
manly autonomy.51
Labour’s manliness rhetoric compensated for the potentially unmanly dependency inherent in organised workingmen’s mutualism
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
41
not only by linking it to individual manhood and autonomy, but also
especially by casting it in heroic terms. Indeed, the chief significance
of the trope of dutiful, invincible agency lay less in its echoes,
however ambiguous or unstable, of the discourse of self-made manhood than in its condensation and imaging of romantic, heroic
worker manliness. At the heart of that imaging was an evocation
of millennial mission that subsumed while going well beyond
representations of manly workingmen as the organised defenders of
their rights and interests and, much less frequently, the rescuers/
avengers of degraded working-class womanhood. In this evocation
workingmen appear as heroic, forward-looking agents of momentous
progressive change.
The more familiar version, saturated with republican manhood,
depicted worker sons as pursuing and ultimately fulfilling a glorious
mission equal to or surpassing that of their revolutionary fathers.
Their task, manliness rhetoric declared, was to finish what the latter
had, it turned out, only begun. What this entailed was not always
spelled out, its meaning instead simply assumed or implied. In
general, however, it seems to have meant building in some manner
on the patrimony of political independence. Addressing Brooklyn
mechanics in 1838, Seth Luther declared that ‘our fathers’ ‘laid the
foundation of the temple of Freedom … On us the task devolves to
raise the glorious superstructure’. Another activist announced in
1847, ‘to us has been left the duty of completing the unfinished
work’. Less vaguely, on the eve of the republic’s centennial amid
severe economic depression, an influential labour paper asserted that
the founders ‘but half did their work’. They bequeathed political but
not ‘industrial independence, based upon the supremacy and selfemployment and self-government of labour’. At once like and unlike
those original ‘patriots’, workingmen would assume responsibility for
completing the job. ‘Let us prepare to emulate … the Senior Sons of
’76 and prove that we are their worthy followers’, the paper urged
and promised. ‘Our work is a greater one, and greater will be our
glory’.52
Representations of workingmen’s heroic manly mission did not
always reference the revolutionary past, at least not specifically or
directly. Some, like this proud and anxious exhortation by a speaker
before the Machinists and Blacksmiths’ 1870 convention, could be
breathtakingly vague and sweeping: ‘Oh, working men, your work is
great! Oh, toilers, your work is pressing! Oh, men of iron, your
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
42
GENDER AND HISTORY
strength is demanded! We are moving with lightning speed to
destruction. There must be a check. You are to save’. Save, he meant,
labour, the republic, and ‘humanity’.53
Such imaging of workingmen’s heroic agency complemented, and
was complemented by, the countless paeans to virile, generative
skilled work that marked labour’s larger discourse.54 The trope of
heroic manly agency resonated with the plastic, progressive agency
celebrated in those paeans, even as it shifted attention to skilled
workingmen as agents in, not simply on, the world – men whose
power to subdue nature (not to mention to rescue workingwomen)
surely entailed the capacity to ‘make their own condition’.
More than this, such imaging compensated for and subverted
workingmen’s ‘post-heroic’ generational position, reflected vividly in
the trope of junior sons of ’76.55 Proclaiming workingmen the worthy
sons of manly revolutionary fathers, as labour texts so often did, no
doubt helped to legitimate their cause. But if manhood (and labour
protest itself) aimed at breaking free of dependence, that same
construction (like organised workingmen’s requisite dependence on
one another) was also problematic. How were grateful sons of
founding fathers ever to declare their independence from, let alone
match or surpass the achievements of, those manly progenitors?
Manliness rhetoric, with its clarion call to duty and romantic evocation of heroic mission, pointed the way.
Recurrent linking of duty, agency, and heroic mission amounted to
a gendered, mobilising mythic ideal. Amid uneven but ongoing
proletarianisation, with its attendant erosion (real and threatened) of
artisanal independence, that ideal incongruously projected an
empowering worker manhood both actual and latent. As it did so, it
subtly and symbolically reoriented traditional notions of artisan
masculinity by linking workingmen’s manliness less to their actual
personal independence – the economic dimension of which was for
many increasingly doubtful – than to their determined, collective
efforts to assert or reclaim it.
In these ways, manliness rhetoric beckoned exploited workingmen to a romantic regenerative manhood invested at once with
heroic purpose and promise. Striving middle-class men of the period
denied failure through a ‘language of hope and determination’ that
exhorted them ‘to rise above despair, and plunge back into action
headlong’.56 Through their own language of dutiful, heroic agency
and resolve, organised male workers similarly coped with setbacks to
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
43
their cause by demanding engagement and proclaiming its efficacy.
Defeats could in this way be understood as owing less to the strength
of labour’s opponents than to the weakness of workers’ manliness.
Thus labour texts’ incessant appeals to and assertions of manliness
functioned as linguistic cues, evoking and prescribing a masculine
identity deemed essential to labour’s/the republic’s/humanity’s progress – an identity that, subjectively at least, refashioned dependent,
degraded workingmen into the heroic manly agents of their own and
their posterity’s emancipation.
Paradoxically, however, the optimism and hope that suffused
manliness rhetoric’s accent on efficacious manhood coexisted with an
equally pronounced countervailing mood of pessimism and fear. Like
middle-class men, organised male workers and their leaders were
haunted by the prospect of the failure they resisted and denied. For
workingmen, failure meant not simply the defeat of their combined
efforts to, as they put it, ‘elevate’ or ‘improve’ themselves mentally,
morally, and socially – an agenda that combined character-building
with resistance to their economic and social degradation. Rather,
what they feared at bottom was the nightmarish possibility that their
degradation, and hence their public humiliation as men, might be
self-inflicted.
In Manhood and the American Renaissance, David Leverenz
provocatively argues that ‘Anyone preoccupied with manhood, in
whatever time or culture, harbours fears of being humiliated, usually
by other men’.57 Leverenz’s proposition helps us to recognise and
make sense of the anxieties and doubts folded into labour’s language
of manliness. One notes, for example, the uneasy tension between
uncertainty and confidence that marked the conditional, ‘oracular’
mood of much of that rhetoric: if only workingmen would act as
men, their triumph must soon follow.58 Even William Sylvis’s
seemingly rhetorical question that began this essay – ‘Are we not fullgrown men?’ – was fraught with gender (and, connected to that,
racial and sexual) anxiety. Sylvis’s stunningly revealing question gave
voice to the central preoccupation with emasculation running
through manliness rhetoric. For adult, skilled white workingmen, it
raised the spectre of mortifying regression to the dependencies associated with boyhood and apprenticeship.59 Less obviously, perhaps, it
hinted at alarming possible parallels between their own precarious
status and the position of two groups seen by the wider culture to
most epitomise dependence – women and black slaves.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
44
GENDER AND HISTORY
Like the rhetoric it inflected, Sylvis’s question – raised before an
audience of moulders in response to opposition by ‘capitalists’ to
trade unions – also registered fear of workingmen’s humiliation by
other men with confirmed or at least potential power over them. So,
too, more plainly, did the Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International
Journal, reporting in 1872 on the efforts of a railroad corporation to
dismiss ‘a number’ of men for ‘the high misdemeanour of being
prominent members of our organisation’. A committee sent to meet
with ‘officers of the company’ received not ‘a respectful hearing, such
as would be granted by honourable men’, but insults instead. Their
manliness thus challenged, the men had only two choices: ‘either doff
their manhood and cringingly bow to the decrees and insults of men
devoid of honour, or promptly resent the uncalled for and barefaced
effrontery of the officers’. Though they rejected the first alternative,
the Journal’s narrative of this conflict, on one level confident, is on
another redolent with anxiety about the status of their manhood and
indeed that of all the union’s members. Imagery like ‘doff their
manhood and cringingly bow’, and the Journal ’s subsequent
romantic/melodramatic representation of the struggle as deciding
‘once and forever … whether the Machinists and Blacksmiths of
America will be freemen or become slaves’, signal the combined
presence of gendered and racialised fears of not only humiliating
domination, but also shameful and emasculating unmasking. Might
honourable (white) freemen turn out in fact to be debased (black)
slaves?60
And how much worse if, as the words ‘doff their manhood and
cringingly bow’ alarmingly hint, workingmen – arbiters of their
own destiny – were themselves ultimately to blame. Dread of selfabasement, something Leverenz’s hypothesis overlooks, was the nightmarish counterpart to dreams of heroic manhood triumphant. It
showed up starkly (and darkly) in manliness rhetoric’s persistent,
often blistering jeremiads denouncing and lamenting workingmen’s
unmanly facilitation of their own oppression. An ‘Address to the
Journeymen House Carpenters of the City and County of
Philadelphia’ asserted self-critically in 1828: ‘long have we been wont
to complain of oppression, while we have actually suffered none,
other than that which we brought on ourselves: and as long as we
have thus tamely worn the yoke, without endeavouring to wrench it
from our necks, we have deserved its galling; for it is evident that
man’s happiness or misery, prosperity or adversity, is in great measure
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
45
the work of his own hands’. Almost fifty years later the Pittsburgh
National Labor Tribune, in an editorial titled ‘Our Neglected
Interests’, glumly announced that ‘we are showing to the world how
we can lay down our necks to be trodden upon by an aristocracy of
our own making’. Another labour paper identified two ‘foes of
labor’: ‘capitalists’ and ‘workingmen … their own worst enemies’.
The recurrent ironic trope of citizen workmen suffering degradation
through neglect or misuse of their exceptional ‘rights and privileges’
as American freemen was a variation on the general theme of unmanly
complicity. Castigating workers for supporting political parties that
failed to support them, for example, Sylvis declared: ‘We fail to come
up to that standard of manhood, and aim not for that proud position
which entitles us to the appellation of a free people. We are slaves, not
because we must be, but because we will be’.61
Statements like the foregoing, framed often in explicitly selfaccusatory terms (‘we’, ‘our’), depicted workingmen as actuated by a
‘servile’ rather than manly spirit. References to necks yoked and
trodden upon connoted, that is, both an objective and subjective, an
exterior and interior state. Labour’s language of manliness decidedly
accented servility within. Hence the admonition of New York
workingmen, cited before, that ‘the citizen who will submit to [an
employer’s political] dictation, is forgetful of the dignity and spirit
that ought to distinguish a freeman’. Jonathan Fincher declared
three decades later: ‘We contend that every surrender of the
prerogatives of labor – every acknowledgement of a distinction other
than that which is based upon merit, is a servile submission unworthy
of our manhood’.62
Here, in this negative counter-image to heroic manly workers,
gender and race powerfully converged. Looming up from and over
such language was the quintessential Other in white republican
slaveholding America – the Black Slave. David Roediger has carefully
delineated how nineteenth-century workingmen used (and helped
perpetuate) this ‘othered’ figure while creating for themselves a white
racial identity. But for organised white male workers, clearly,
whiteness was constructed out of profound gender as well as racial
anxieties and the interplay between them. Simply put, their discourse
equated manliness and whiteness. It did so in no small measure by
associating a want of the former with not merely the manifest outward dependence of African-American slaves, but also, far worse, the
inner slavishness (or ‘servile’ spirit) that apparently precipitated and
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
46
GENDER AND HISTORY
sustained so abject a condition. Significantly, moreover, it did so in
tandem and in tension with an antebellum ‘rhetoric of race’ that
‘equated working-classness with blackness as often as it differentiated
between them’. Noteworthy in this connection is that ‘servile’, which
in manliness rhetoric evoked the (black) slavishness that signalled
loss of/incapacity for manhood, connoted, according to the OED,
not only slavishness but also slavish – i.e. ‘mechanical’ – labour.63
Ironically, whiteness could enable white workingmen to affirm their
own manhood by denying the manhood of free black male workers
who, like white workingmen themselves but without their advantage
of full or secure civil rights, sought recognition as men. Reflecting
decades later on the National Labor Union’s refusal in 1869 to admit
black workers as members, W. E. B. Du Bois caught this gendered
aspect of white workingmen’s racism when he observed that ‘the
white worker did not want the Negro in his unions, did not believe in
him as a man’ (emphasis added).64
The mix of gender and racial anxieties animating workingmen’s
fears of self-inflicted degradation lent at times an almost manic quality
to their manliness rhetoric’s urgent conflation of manhood and
agency. Yet the same rhetoric also prescribed restrained and consensual agency in contrast to its imaging of heroic worker manhood.
Specifically, it figured an eminently respectable activism – lawful,
orderly, upright, and fair. Modifiers like ‘constitutional and peaceable’, ‘legitimate’, ‘honourable’, and ‘just’ were repeatedly invoked to
describe the means organised workingmen employed.65 Respectable
workmen defended their rights and interests, but sought neither
revolution nor unfair class advantage. Thus the Philadelphia
Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations announced in 1827 that ‘we
cannot desire to injure nor take the smallest unjust advantage, either
of that class or community called employers or of any other portion’.
Fincher’s Trades’ Review warned workingmen against striking simply
because they could win: ‘we should display a manly independence,
and show to the world that our demands are made in justice and
equity, and … not merely … in the prodigality of power. Nor are they
dependent upon the condition of trade, but upon the “eternal
principles of right”’. Respectable activism was a kind of manly, moral
middle ground between passion and submission. Cautioning against
‘hot-heads’ and ‘fire-eaters’, the Iron Molders’ Journal explained that
it endorsed neither ‘cowardly submission’ nor ‘forbearance to a fault’.
‘Sacrifice prejudice, control temper, make all honorable concessions’,
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
47
it advised, ‘but in no case either yield your rights or surrender your
manhood’.66
As this last quote hints, the emphasis on restrained agency may
rightly be read as part of calculated efforts by trade-union leaders to
discipline their rank and file. Or, related to that, as attempts to garner
public support. More was involved, though, than these readings
singly or together imply. Embedded in the vocabulary of respectable
activism, as the last quote also suggests, was a prescriptive ideal of
manly character defined by not only duty but also its prerequisite,
self-control, and coupled with an assimilationist moral claim to
equitable social respect for workers on the basis of their character as
(white) men. Thus if duty and agency were ingredients/indicators
of character and manliness, character itself prescribed resolute yet
tempered manly backbone in keeping with the claim to social
respect.
Self-mastery and respectability, labour’s manliness rhetoric instructed, echoing the injunctions of middle-class manhood, demanded
sober, self-improving rectitude. Hence the periodic denunciations in
labour texts of behaviours – intemperance especially – that one paper
blasted as the ‘beastly indulgence of … animal appetites’. Intemperate
behaviour characterised the rough drinking and sporting culture of
young, unmarried, unskilled (or apprentice), and, particularly after
1840, foreign-born male workers, though not all native-born skilled
workers embraced temperance. Inevitably, then, manliness rhetoric’s
stress on respectable self-control compounded the labour movement’s ‘othering’ and exclusion of black male workers associated by
their skin colour with unmanly dependence and ‘permissiveness’. It
also contributed to divisions among white workingmen themselves
between temperate skilled and intemperate skilled and unskilled,
between rough, or ‘traditionalist’, and respectable; it probably
exacerbated labour-movement nativism as well, though trade unions
were by and large open to rank-and-file skilled Irish.67
Fairness or honourable behaviour toward other men was an equally
important dimension of manly respectability and self-control. Beyond
simply proclaiming or urging organised workingmen’s fairness, manliness rhetoric often melodramatically juxtaposed reasonable workmen and their unmanly, because avaricious and dishonourable,
employer opposites. The National Trades’ Union, praising in 1835
the efforts of Boston’s journeymen housewrights to obtain the tenhour day, charged that the housewrights’ ‘generosity, their forbearance,
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
48
GENDER AND HISTORY
were lost on the cold, selfish, and blindly avaricious Employers’. Four
decades later, the Iron Molders’ Journal denounced employers who,
‘when they thought they had the power to do so’, broke a longstanding agreement that brought them ‘great pecuniary benefit’,
while their ‘employe[e]s’ received ‘far less wages than they could have
demanded and received, had they been disposed to ignore the agreement … ; but they were honorable [i.e. manly because self-controlled]
men’. Contrasting the selfless homefront behaviour of ‘journeymen
mechanics’ during the Civil War with the selfishness of employers
when wartime labour shortages eased, William Sylvis asked: ‘After
placing them beyond financial care by the labor of our hands, is it
manly, is it right [emphasis added], that they should now higgle, and
chaffer, and cheapen us down to starvation wages?’68
This juxtaposition appeared in new form after mid century.
Anticipating both the American Federation of Labor’s ‘prudential
unionism’ at century’s end and a key component of American labour
relations beginning in the 1880s, the leaders of developing national
unions, facing stiff employer resistance, looked to arbitration or
negotiation to prevent potentially ruinous strikes by member locals.69
More than simply a way for precarious unions to avoid potentially
self-destructive strikes, arbitration represented at bottom an effort to
hold workmen and employers alike to an ideal of manly fairness,
which effort, not incidentally, helped to counter employers’ characterisation of unions as ‘selfish’ or led by ‘demagogues’. Sylvis, for
example, denounced employers’ ‘refusal to accept offers of arbitration’ and the ‘vindictive spirit [they] manifested on every occasion
of difference between men and employers’.70
Thus organised workingmen invoked manliness both to appeal to
employers and to critique the unjust among them. Not workingmen
themselves, but rather those perceived to avariciously and vindictively
exploit workingmen’s labour are figured as bereft of fairness and selfmastery, honour and generosity – bereft, that is, of manly character
and respectability. Note Sylvis’s telling, if unconscious, dichotomy:
‘men and [vengeful] employers’. We are at the intersection again of
gender and class.
We are in the presence, also, of gendered assimilationist desire. For
if recurrent juxtaposition of manly workingmen and their unmanly
employers on one level bespoke class feeling or resentments, on
another they bespoke longing to be recognised and treated as men by
other men (especially employers and, more generally, male members
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
49
of an emergent middle class) able to bestow or withhold such
recognition. Nowhere is that desire more clear than in manliness
rhetoric’s shaping of an overarching, assimilationist collective identity
for workingmen that, grounded in manly character, at once incorporated and transcended the fact of their manual labour or class
position. Informed by and implicit in all that has been discussed thus
far, and in tension with manliness rhetoric’s simultaneous equation of
manhood and worker solidarity, this identity expressed a deep-felt,
gendered moral claim to rightful social respect.
The Daily Evening Voice articulated it by anticipating the day when
trade unions, filled with respectable workingmen, would ‘present
themselves before the world as dignified bodies of men, claiming the
consideration which belongs to reasonable, self-respecting and useful
citizens. Members of their own trades, intelligent and dignified, we
should like to know what body of men could command more respect
or have more influence, than such a body of workingmen’. For the
National Labor Tribune, the opportune moment to demonstrate
what the Voice envisioned came ten years later in July of 1877.
Responding to the unprecedented violence surrounding the nationwide railroad strikes that had erupted twelve days earlier, the Tribune
from its vantage point in Pittsburgh, scene of the worst violence
against property and persons, urged workingmen to unite ‘with all
good citizens in restoring peace and order. Than the present there
never will be a more propitious occasion for the workingmen to show
their maligners that they are worthy of respect and honor; that they
are worthy of the proud title of American citizens; and last, though
not least, that they are laborers worthy of their hire’. Given the
realities of power at that moment (militia units and federal troops had
been called out to repress the strikes), the Tribune’s comments made
pragmatic good sense.71
Their real significance, however, lies elsewhere. Like the Voice’s
remarks, they point to the continuous gendered and assimilationist
cultural battle skilled workingmen and their leaders waged for the
dignity of labour. Beyond (though related to) this, they remind us
that for workingmen seeking not simply better wages but recognition
as men, employers were not the only or necessarily even the most
serious obstacle. As Jonathan A. Glickstein has shown, and as skilled
workers knew all too well, nineteenth-century American culture
evinced profound contempt for manual labour. Moreover, the
period’s emergent middle class staked its own claim to respectability
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
50
GENDER AND HISTORY
on the culture’s ‘manual–nonmanual [labour] dichotomy’.72 In
response, labour discourse protested that workingmen were in effect
twice robbed. In William Sylvis’s affecting formulation, ‘capitalists
not only appropriate to themselves all the profits, but all the honor
and glory; while humble labor goes unrewarded but by the taunts and
jeers of the usurper’.73 They appropriated, he might just as well have
said, workingmen’s very manly identity.
Such protests notwithstanding, labour discourse generally and
manliness rhetoric specifically reveal profound ambivalence about
hand work, an ambivalence labour historians have largely ignored.74
It is evident, for example, in the defensiveness of countless paeans to
labour as the source of progress and civilisation; in the attention
drawn to the mental component of artisan labour; and in the
celebration of notable men who had left manual labour behind.
Above all, however, it is evident in the ‘double consciousness’ (to
borrow W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous formulation75) at the heart of
labour’s manliness rhetoric. Ely Moore warned members of New
York’s General Trades’ Union in 1833 that they ‘seem to have lost
sight of’ the social standing ‘to which, as mechanics and as men
[emphasis added], you are entitled’. This doubleness received
aphoristic expression when the president of the National Typographers’ Union declared in 1858 that his organisation sought ‘to
make the Man a better Printer – the Printer a better Man’. More
generally, it was revealed in a term that appeared with increasing
regularity in labour texts as time went on – namely, ‘workingmen’
(before mid century typically two words, sometimes hyphenated).76
Workingmen’s own exploitation and the profound cultural bias
against them not only aroused such ambivalent doubleness, but also
in the end rendered problematic any collective self-identification
simply as workers. As we saw earlier, ‘in the nineteenth century,
middle-class men’s work was vital to their sense of who they were’.
Thus they developed and displayed a ‘passion for work’.77 While work
was also clearly an important part of male skilled workers’ identity, it
signified at the same time their social inferiority and, increasingly,
their emasculating exploitation by other men – in short, their workingclassness/blackness. If workingmen took pride in their work, they
also sought to limit, through organised activism, not only the hours
it consumed but also its power to define them in middle-class eyes
as well as their own. As nineteenth-century Americans they aspired,
for themselves and their crafts, to ‘social’, ‘physical’, ‘intellectual’,
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
51
and ‘moral’ ‘improvement’ or ‘elevation’, not simply more hand
labour.78
Thus their rhetoric constructed and projected an ambivalent,
double identity that discursively resisted their reduction to workers.
In an 1835 editorial defending the respectability of ‘honest labour’
the National Trades’ Union announced that in assessing a man, ‘we
are not accustomed to look at his employment, but at the man
himself’. It was, after all, ‘the man that honors and elevates the
business’, not the other way around, ‘and on this principle many
kinds of employment which were once thought low and vulgar have
been raised to … a respectable footing, by men of character, ability,
and industry’. There could then be ‘no reason why a person may
not be just as gentlemanly and worthy of regard, so far as the strict
sense of these terms is concerned, in one sort of business as in
another, although in his dress and personal appearance he may
exhibit the marks of his vocation and the dust and soil of his
calling’. The paper insisted on seeing past, or through, superficial
markers of class to the man within. So, too, did the workingmen of
Charlestown, Massachusetts, who declared in an address five years
later to their brethren throughout the nation: ‘Our pockets may
be empty, our faces may be sunburnt, and our hands may be hard,
but we are men, with the souls of men, and the rights of men. … We
feel that we were made for something better [than mere toil, poverty,
and ignorance], and that we have a right to aspire to something
higher’. William Sylvis, whose photographs show a dignified, upright, determined Victorian gentleman, most eloquently caught the
assimilationist ambivalence and desire encoded by the ideal of manly
respectability. ‘We must learn to respect ourselves, and be proud of
our occupations and positions’, he exhorted. ‘We must hold up our
heads, and not be ashamed nor afraid to walk upon the fashionable
side of the street’.79 Labour’s manliness language proffered a group
(and individual) identity that promised to transcend artificial
distinctions of class and secure for skilled workingmen the social
respect denied them as workers but due them as men. Like whiteness,
then, manliness in this respectable construction provided exploited,
denigrated, and organised (as well as organising) white workingmen with, to borrow again from Du Bois, ‘a … public and psychological wage’.80
And, not unlike whiteness,81 manliness could blunt the radicalism
of labour’s oppositional vision. True, the gendered notion that (to
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
52
GENDER AND HISTORY
quote Sylvis) ‘manhood and mammon are incompatible’ could inform or even provide the basis for a stinging moral critique of
employer exploitation and capital accumulation82 – one that could as
easily encompass the gender ideology of separate spheres as
alternatives to the wage system like cooperation (Sylvis, for example,
embraced both). Simultaneously, the assimilationist/romantic/
melodramatic dimensions of manliness could also point to accommodation rather than structural change.
Thus, for example, Sylvis coupled an attack on the brusque,
‘dictatorial’ tone employers adopted when labour shortages caused by
the Civil War eased, with longing for the ‘peace and harmony which
ought to exist between the two classes’.83 ‘During the past three
years’, he recalled, ‘it was our pleasure to witness a closer assimilation
of feeling and interest between employers and journeymen, and, in
proportion as this equality was recognized, we saw old prejudices
vanishing, and harmony and true sociability growing’.84 Until, that
is, employers abandoned their honourable and manly bearing toward
journeymen.
For Sylvis as for other trade unionists, the issue of wages mattered
not alone but only in relation to the manliness of all concerned. He
indicts employers not simply for exploiting but also, tellingly, for
refusing to treat (and thus acknowledge) their workers as men. His
reflections are governed as much by the logic of gender as of class.
Hence his wish for employers to ‘meet’ workingmen on ‘equal and
honorable terms’; for ‘the workingman [to be] lifted up to the social
standard of the employer, without detracting one iota from the
position or the interests of the latter’; and for ‘congenial association
[between the two], and a mutual recognition of each other’s rights’.
The tone is consensual, the vision assimilationist. Rather than confrontation, Sylvis seeks accommodation and legitimacy on the basis
of not only an economic identity of interest – prosperity – but a
shared manly identity. He wishes for employers to treat workingmen,
individually and collectively, with the seriousness, respect, and
equality owed one true man by another – treatment that would
signify workingmen’s assimilation into the cross-class ranks not of
employers but rather of men. The phrase ‘mutual recognition of
each other’s rights’ gestures toward a cross-class mutualism of gender
– a workplace counterpart, perhaps, to the cross-class community
fraternalism of nineteenth-century voluntary organisations like the
Odd Fellows.85
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
53
What Sylvis longed for became the tidy resolution of an immensely
popular story serialised in the Workingman’s Advocate in 1872–3 and
later published as a dime novel. The Other Side, by Martin Foran,
president of the International Coopers’ Union, treated the subject of
exploited wage labour melodramatically in terms of good and bad
men.86 The story’s hero, aptly named Richard Arbyght (a play on the
German word for work), possesses the requisite ‘manly heart’ and
plies (of course) the cooper’s trade. Equally appropriate, there are
two employers for whom he works at different times, one honourable
and the other not.
Arbyght’s mean-spirited employer, Relvason (an ironic anagram
for ‘no slaver’), is also, fittingly, the story’s villain. Relvason not only
exploits his numerous ‘employees’ and opposes their efforts to
organise, he demands of them potentially emasculating deference.
In a key scene redolent with masculinised assimilationist resentment
and longing, he reprimands Arbyght for not paying his employer
(the ‘owner of these shops’) proper respect. Man of character that
he is, Arbyght anticipates the real-world advice of the Iron Molders’
Journal (quoted above) by steering clear of both temper and
submission in his riposte. ‘What you … call impudence’, he lectures
Relvason calmly yet firmly, echoing nearly fifty years of labour
rhetoric, is rather ‘the vindication of my own sense of honor; for
I would have you remember that I, too, am a MAN as well as you’.
This scene, like the story itself, enacts the double consciousness/
identity intertwined with masculinised assimilationist yearning:
Arbyght is in fact one of Relvason’s workers, a fact he does not
contest, but he is also, he insists, a man nonetheless. Properly selfrespecting, he asserts and retains his manhood by refusing the other
man’s demeaning gaze – by refusing, that is, to be put in his (class)
place. (‘Assume the place of man’, exhorted the labour song quoted
earlier.)
Relations between Arbyght and his new employer, the honourable Fargood, become ‘more harmonious, closer and closer’ over
time. ‘The workman’, Foran narrates, ‘was active, vigilent [sic] and
provident of the employer’s interest. He labored, if not with the
same zest, at least with the same assiduity and care as if he were
both employer and workman. His conduct toward Mr. Fargood was
on all occasions straightforward, manly, independent’. For his part,
an appreciative Fargood ‘paid [Arbyght] willingly and voluntarily
even more than that upon which they had mutually agreed’. (Note
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
54
GENDER AND HISTORY
the man-to-man relationship, unmediated by trade unionism.) True
to his name, Fargood’s ‘bearing … was never that of a master. …
There was no impertinent, supercilious surveillance, no impudent
domineering bossism manifested by [him] in his dealings with
those whom he employed’. Relations between the two ‘were
preeminently those that should ever exist between all employers and
employees [and, Foran’s point was, between all true men]: MUTUAL
OR RECIPROCAL INDEPENDENCE AND DEPENDENCE’.
By story’s end, Relvason has been unmasked as the villain who
murdered Arbyght’s father, justice has been served, and Arbyght has
risen to the prominent ranks of Chicago’s merchant class. But like
his former employer, Fargood, he remains a true man. Arbyght and
his business partner, Foran concludes, ‘employ a great number of
men, whom they treat as business and social equals, pay well, and in
turn have their work performed better and more satisfactorily than
any other men in the city. Their workmen are ever prompt, ever
diligent and provident, taking as much interest in their employers’
welfare as their own’. In an improvement on the wage system,
Arbyght’s workers benefit from profit-sharing (some, presumably,
will follow in his footsteps).87 Significantly, however, their world
remains divided into ‘employers’ and ‘workmen’ – a division bridged
less by the latter’s stake in the firm than by the mutual manly
character and conduct of both groups alike.
The story summarises well the ambivalence and doubleness, the
gendered assimilationist implications, at the heart of both manliness
rhetoric and the activism/identity it articulated and thus helped to
define.
Manliness rhetoric served the labour movement as an organising
language in the broadest sense. It facilitated the economic and
political self-organisation of many skilled white workingmen. It also
helped to organise their understanding of labour institutions,
opponents of labour activism, ‘other’ workers (including white male
workers who scabbed or resisted organisation), and especially their
cause and themselves. Not least, it spoke to, even as it shaped,
the hopes and fears of workingmen whose social and gender condition were made vulnerable by economic change and cultural
proscription.
But the same rhetoric served to organise many workers by excluding, marginalising, or subordinating still others – blacks, women,
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
55
the unskilled, and recent immigrants – deemed unmanly or, in the
case of women, best suited for the private sphere of home. Moreover, while it offered psychological compensation for the declining
circumstances of many skilled workingmen, ultimately its logic and
romantic-melodramatic cast could explain workingmen’s setbacks or
defeats only in terms of their own deficient manhood. If they were
humiliated or seemed in danger of being so, then their manliness was
deficient; and if their manliness was or seemed deficient, then they
were not, or at least might not be, true men. While the rhetoric’s logic
assuaged the anxieties it generated with optimistic representations
of dutiful, heroic agency, optimism easily dissolved into pessimism or
doubt, only to be subverted again by optimism. At the same time,
crosscurrents of individualism flowed against, and into, the rhetoric’s
construction of manly solidarity. In the final analysis, these dimensions combined with manliness rhetoric’s respectable/assimilationist
thrust to mute radical class-consciousness by accenting, however
imperfectly, as much a gender as a class identity, as much the personal
and the moral (both individual and collective) as the structural.
What became of manliness rhetoric in the fifty years after 1877?
While any answer must be suggestive, several points merit brief
discussion. First, from the late nineteenth century forward, labour’s
true men now displayed a pronounced physical or muscular manhood. This development both contributed to and reflected a gradual
culture-wide eclipse of ‘manliness’ by ascendant ‘masculinity’ with its
emphasis on virile manhood as opposed to moral character. Thus, for
example, one labour paper in 1887 ‘described a national convention
of workingmen’s parties as an assertion of virility’.88
If initially ‘physical strength and moral responsibility’ – especially
the responsibility of workingmen as patriarchal breadwinners – were
viewed as related components of working-class manhood, by the early
twentieth century labour iconography placed more stress on the male
worker’s elemental physicality. One sees this in the iconography of the
Industrial Workers of the World, whose ‘core imagery was that of
brute strength, nominally in the service of capital with the power and
will to break free from its chains’.89 One finds it also, and especially,
in 1930s labour imagery, which featured muscular, larger-than-life,
intensely masculine male workers. Ironically, given mid nineteenthcentury organised workingmen’s resistance to being defined solely by
the physical signs and components of their hand work, these figures
fairly shout ‘MANUAL LABOUR’! 90
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
56
GENDER AND HISTORY
In a second and related important development, working-class
manhood became centrally bound up with labour’s demand in the
decades following the Civil War for an American standard of living,
or living wage. The virile manly worker was one who worked for a
living wage that allowed him to meet ‘civilised needs’ within the
context of the patriarchal household. In a crucial shift, as Lawrence
Glickman has shown, with the living-wage demand came a reorientation of working-class manhood and character from production to
consumption. Manliness, in short, meant the ability to consume, and
this new gendered working-class identity thus helped usher in
America’s modern consumer society.91
Even as working-class manhood became defined in physical and
consumerist terms, there is evidence that paternalistic employers at
least, like the fictional Fargood and Richard Arbyght, formed bonds
with their workers on the common ground of masculinity. As Lisa M.
Fine has shown, for example, the Reo Motor Car Company successfully appealed in the teens and 1920s ‘to their male workers as men’.
‘When it came to values of masculinity, management and workers at
Reo found more on which to agree than to disagree’.92 Masculinity,
in other words, allowed for working-class and company identities and
interests to merge.
Amidst all these developments, the gendered identity of organised
workingmen continued to unite white male workers by excluding
others. Thus the masculinised labour iconography of the 1930s
represented the worker as male, thereby downplaying and obscuring
women’s participation in the labour protest of that decade. With the
rise of labour’s demand for a living wage that would support an
American standard of living, women were defined as nurturers of
male breadwinners, whose ‘essential function was to preserve rather
than challenge manhood’, while African Americans, Asians, and even
recent European immigrants were deemed incapable of the ‘civilised’
consumption at the heart of the American standard. And at the Reo
Motor Car Company, working-class masculinity embraced only the
native-born and Americanised who were loyal to family, company,
and country.93
One is struck, in the end, by the shaping power of notions of
manhood among organised white male workers in the nineteenth
century and beyond – notions whose legacy workers in the United
States at the dawn of the twenty-first century must still contend
regardless of their national origin, race, or gender.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
57
Notes
For their comments and encouragement I would like to thank Ava Baron, David Bensman, Bret
Carroll, Tom Dublin, Melvyn Dubofsky, Barbara Glass, Stephen Rice, Darell Shaffer, Kate
Wittenstein, and my colleagues in Professor Dubofsky’s 1996 NEH Summer Seminar on
‘Ethnicity, Race, and Gender in United States Labor History’, especially Dennis Deslippe, Paul
Mishler, and Ellen Todd.
1. James C. Sylvis (ed.), The Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William Sylvis (1872; repr.
Augustus M. Kelley, New York, 1968), p. 109.
2. For studies that focus on workingwomen see esp., e.g., Mary H. Blewett, We Will Rise in
Our Might: Workingwomen’s Voices from Nineteenth-Century New England (Cornell
University Press, Ithaca and London, 1991); Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The
Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (Columbia
University Press, New York, 1979); Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor
Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (Macmillan, Free Press, New
York, 1979); Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the
United States (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1982); Susan Levine, Labor’s
True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Temple
University Press, Philadelphia, 1984), which inspired the title for this essay; Christine
Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Alfred A. Knopf, New
York, 1986); Carole Turbin, Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community
in Troy, New York, 1864–86 (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1992).
3. Among those that do so in passing are David Bensman, The Practice of Solidarity:
American Hat Finishers in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, Urbana
and Chicago, 1985); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and WorkingClass Culture in America (Verso, London and New York, 1987); David Montgomery,
Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor
Struggles (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, London and New York, 1979), which
informs Denning’s treatment of manliness; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness:
Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991; rev. edn Verso, London and
New York, 1999). See also Ava Baron, ‘An “Other” Side of Gender Antagonism at Work:
Men, Boys, and the Remasculinization of Printers’ Work, 1830–1920’, in her important
anthology Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Cornell
University Press, Ithaca and London, 1991), pp. 47–69; Baron, ‘Acquiring Manly
Competence: The Demise of Apprenticeship and the Remasculinization of Printers’
Work’, in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed.
Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,
1990), pp. 152–63; Mary H. Blewett, ‘Manhood and the Market: The Politics of Gender
and Class among the Textile Workers of Fall River, Massachusetts, 1870–1880’, in Work
Engendered, ed. Baron, pp. 92–113; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist
(University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago and London, 1982). Important recent
work by Marla Hughes and Paul Michael Taillon on working-class manhood has focused
on the railroad brotherhoods of the late nineteenth century.
4. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (Free Press, New York,
London and Toronto, 1996); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (Basic Books, New York,
1993); Baron (ed.), Work Engendered, p. 30. See also Ava Baron, ‘On Looking at Men:
Masculinity and the Making of a Gendered Working-Class History’, in Feminists
Revision History, ed. Ann-Louise Shapiro (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick,
1994), pp. 146–71.
5. For convenience, throughout this essay ‘language’ and ‘rhetoric’ are used interchangeably
to describe what I most often refer to as labour’s manliness rhetoric, while ‘discourse’ is
reserved for the larger language of organised labour activism, of which manliness rhetoric
was one important idiom (others included republicanism and producerism). Rather
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
58
6.
7.
GENDER AND HISTORY
traditionally and unapologetically, my focus is on words, both written and (originally)
spoken. Also rather traditionally, I believe that if we wish to understand how organised
skilled white workingmen in an expansive culture of print and public speaking thought of
themselves – if we wish to hear them as they heard themselves – we must take their formal
public words as seriously as did they (and their opponents). My approaches are informed
by, amongst others, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism:
Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (Basic Books, New
York, 1986); Baron (ed.), Work Engendered, esp. ch. 1; Lenard R. Berlanstein (ed.),
Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (University of Illinois
Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1993); Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The
Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
and New York, 1989); Kenneth Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks
… and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996); Michael
Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Basic Books, New York, 1995), esp.
‘A Note on Method’, pp. 285–6; J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on
Political Thought and History (Atheneum, New York, 1973); Daniel T. Rodgers,
Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (Basic Books,
New York, 1987); Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics
of History (Columbia University Press, New York, 1988), esp. ch. 3; Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; rev. edn Oxford University Press,
New York and Oxford, 1983). For a vigorous, if somewhat unfair, critique of social
historians’ ‘linguistic turn’, see Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification
of Language and the Writing of Social History (Temple University Press, Philadelphia,
1980), followed by Jane Caplan’s review in The Nation, 251 (1990), pp. 173–5.
Use of such sources, with their inevitable bias toward labour activists and leaders, raises
the question of to what extent they reflect the views and language of rank-and-file
workers, an issue raised for example by Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power:
The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1993), p. 29, p. 29 n. 44. I have sought to compensate for this problem by
threading throughout the essay the words of William Sylvis (1828–69), perhaps the
period’s most influential and popular national labour leader. His speeches were widely
reproduced and presumably also widely read. On Sylvis, see Jonathan P. Grossman,
William Sylvis: Pioneer of American Labor (1945; repr. Sylvis Society, n.p., 1986).
Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford
University Press, New York and Oxford, 1991), p. 25, summarises concisely the basic
context in which organised labour activism and its manliness rhetoric developed:
‘Although many crafts were at first less affected, especially in smaller centers, commercial
boom had inaugurated an irreversible proletarianization of the mechanic class’. These
ongoing deepening conditions set the stage for the emergence and recurrence of trade
unionism (eventually extending from citywide to national bodies), workingmen’s or
labour parties, and related reform efforts (such as ten- and then eight-hour associations).
In 1877, the year this study concludes, the United States experienced its first nationwide
strike in the great railroad strike of that summer. See, in addition to Sellers, Stuart M.
Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City,
1760–1900 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1989); Bruce
Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, Noonday Press, New York, 1989); Lawrence M. Lipin, Producers, Proletarians,
and Politicians: Workers and Party Politics in Evansville and New Albany, Indiana,
1850–87 (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1994); Roediger, Wages of
Whiteness; W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in
America (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1986); Steven J. Ross, Workers
on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890
(Columbia University Press, New York, 1985); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New
York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford University
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
59
Press, New York and Oxford, 1984). See also John R. Commons et al., History of Labour
in the United States (Macmillan, New York, 1921), vols 1–2; David Montgomery, Beyond
Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967; repr. University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago and London, 1981); Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon
Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (State University of New
York Press, Albany, 1967); Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840–1860: The
Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (1924;
repr. Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1964).
Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, p. 146.
Quoted in Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, p. 12.
Mechanics’ Free Press (Philadelphia), 5 July 1828; Fincher’s Trades’ Review (Philadelphia),
5 November 1864; Daily Evening Voice (Boston), 2 April 1866; Working Man’s Advocate
(New York), 11 October 1834. See also The Awl (Lynn, MA), 18 January 1845;
Proceedings of the Second Annual Session of the Coopers’ International Union … (W. S.
Robison, Cleveland, 1871), p. 43; Montgomery, Workers’ Control, p. 13; and Teresa
Anne Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform and Gender in Early New England
(Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1992), pp. 200–201.
Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 16.
Philip S. Foner (ed.), American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century (University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago and London, 1975), ‘Song’, p. 61; ‘Cosmopolite’, in
Mechanics’ Free Press, 7 June 1828.
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, pp. 59–60, 56, 55. For related studies of whiteness see Noel
Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, New York and London, 1995);
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America (Verso, London and New York, 1990). For an interesting
recent study that connects gender and race, see Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood:
Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press,
Durham, 1998).
Montgomery, Workers’ Control, p. 12.
The Man (New York), 14 June 1834; Workingman’s Advocate, 18 June 1868; Iron
Molders’ Journal, 10 April 1877, p. 293.
Foner (ed.), Labor Songs, p. 35; Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International Journal, 8
(1870), pp. 56–7.
Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 168.
David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (Yale
University Press, New Haven and London, 1990), p. 46. See also Peter N. Stearns, Be a
Man! Males in Modern Society, 2nd edn (Holmes & Meier, New York, 1990), p. 100: ‘For
many in the working class, uncertain about their manly status in the workplace, periodic
protest, shared among brothers, was a vital way to claim their masculinity, a reward in
itself.’
Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison,
1978), esp. pp. xi–xv. Bercovitch stresses the jeremiad’s optimism, while acknowledging
its considerable pessimism.
William English, Oration Delivered at the Trades’ Union Celebration of the Fourth of July,
1835, in The Radical Reformer (Philadelphia), 1 August 1835, pp. 125–6; Sylvis (ed.),
Life, pp. 119–20, 220. Sylvis’s rhetoric affords a fine example of how workingmen and
their spokesmen turned the bourgeois language of domesticity against employers and
capitalists. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1993), p. 196; Stansell, City of
Women, pp. 138–9.
Christine Stansell observes that in the mid 1830s the journeymen of New York’s General
Trades’ Union ‘tended to support [‘organized’] women in those trades [like shoemaking]
with a strong tradition of family-based production and in those where a rigid sexual
division of labor protected men from female competition’ (Stansell, City of Women, p. 142).
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
60
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
GENDER AND HISTORY
English, Oration, pp. 126–7. On the ‘family wage’ construct, see Wally Seccombe,
‘Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Norm in NineteenthCentury Britain’, Social History, 11 (1986), pp. 53–76.
Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 71; Sylvis (ed.), Life, pp. 217, 219–22. Turbin, Working
Women, pp. 113–14, stresses Sylvis’s belief that, in her words, ‘male trade unionists could
offer the most help to women who helped themselves’. The evidence, I am suggesting
here, is more ambiguous than this implies.
Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor, pp. 192–3, 197–9. See also Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women,
and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910
(University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1988), pp. 77–8.
Eileen James Yeo, ‘Gender and Class: Women’s Languages of Power’, Labour History
Review, 60 (1995), p. 16, notes that among radical workers in nineteenth-century Britain,
‘class exploitation was sometimes conveyed in images of sexual assault’.
Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor, pp. 199–200; Sylvis (ed.), Life, pp. 217, 220. The trope of
manly chivalry also marked the rhetoric of radicals and Chartists in nineteenth-century
Britain. See Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British
Working Class (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1995),
pp. 170, 222.
William Sylvis’s question to moulders/workingmen – ‘Are we not selfish and unfeeling,
to be so absorbed in our own interests as to lose sight of all that pertains to the welfare
of the weaker sex?’ – is in this regard revealing (Sylvis (ed.), Life, p. 217).
Kimmel, Manhood in America, p. 7.
The Century Dictionary, quoted in Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (University of Chicago
Press, Chicago and London, 1995), p. 18; The Compact Edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971), p. 3523, hereafter cited as OED.
My understanding of melodrama has been influenced by Clark, Struggle for the Breeches,
pp. 169, 222–3; David Grimsted, Melodrama Revisited: American Theatre and Culture,
1800–1850 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1968).
Warren I. Sussman, ‘“Personality” and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture’, in
New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul F. Conkin
(Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1979), p. 214; H. Percy Smith
(ed.), Synonyms Discriminated: A Dictionary of Synonymous Words in the English
Language, 2nd edn (1903; repr. Gale Research, Detroit, 1970), pp. 557–8; Stefan
Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930
(Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, Oxford and New York, 1991), p. 100.
Rotundo, American Manhood, p. 71.
Bensman, Practice of Solidarity, p. 55, briefly notes the importance of ‘duty’ in the ‘man’s
culture’ of unionised nineteenth-century hat finishers, but virtually nothing has been
written about this critical ingredient of workingmen’s manhood. See also Salvatore, Debs,
pp. 19, 23.
Working Man’s Advocate, 31 October 1829; Ely Moore, Address Delivered before the
General Trades’ Union of the City of New York … (James Ormond, New York, 1833),
p. 15; Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International Journal, 9 (1871), p. 443; Sylvis, quoted
in Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Session of the Iron Molders’ International Union …
(W. R. Seldeimer, Philadelphia, 1866), p. 19.
OED, p. 820.
Vulcan Record, 1 (1874), p. 18.
Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 132–3.
See, e.g., Constitution and Rules of Order of the Iron Molders’ Union of North America …
(Robert Clarke, Cincinnati, 1876), p. 23; Proceedings of the Second Annual Session of the
Coopers’ International Union …, p. 42; Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International
Journal, 8 (1870), pp. 5–6; Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Session of the National
Typographical Union … (Barton & Son, New York, 1858), pp. 3, 6.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
61
Coopers’ Monthly Journal, 3 (1872), p. 557.
I am indebted to Ava Baron for this insight.
OED, p. 820.
Montgomery, Beyond Equality, pp. 202–4. Moreover, Montgomery and the few
historians who have followed up on his insight (e.g., Denning, Mechanic Accents, p. 272)
treat ‘free agency’ as part of an ‘ideological syndrome’ of self-advancement and thus slight
its function as an ideal or trope central to workingmen’s collective mobilisation.
The Man, 14 June 1834; Workingman’s Advocate, 19 November 1870; Sylvis (ed.), Life,
p. 109; Fincher’s Trades’ Review, 3 September 1864.
‘P’, in Mechanics’ Free Press, 21 June 1828; Seth Luther, An Address Delivered before the
Mechanics and Working-Men of the City of Brooklyn … (Alden Spooner & Sons, Brooklyn,
1836), p. 18; Daily Evening Voice, 30 June 1865. See also the quotation from Sylvis,
pp. 35–6 above.
On the self-made man ideology, see John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1965); Kimmel, Manhood in
America, chs 1–2; Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal
America, 1790–1820 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1987),
pp. 10–11, 64–70.
An argument advanced most forcefully by John Patrick Diggins, ‘AHR Forum: Comrades
and Citizens: New Mythologies in American Historiography’, American Historical
Review, 93 (1985), pp. 624–8. For criticisms of Diggins’s argument see, in addition to
the responses by other ‘Forum’ participants, Leon Fink, ‘The New Labor History and
the Powers of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights
of Labor’, Journal of American History, 75 (1988), pp. 115–36. See also Jonathan A.
Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (Yale University Press,
New Haven and London, 1991), pp. 491–3 n. 137; David Montgomery, The Fall of
the House of Labor (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1987),
pp. 4, 171.
Rorabaugh, Craft Apprentice, pp. 158–9; Denning, Mechanic Accents, p. 168; Herbert
G. Gutman, ‘The Reality of the Rags-to-Riches “Myth”: The Case of Paterson, New
Jersey, Locomotive, Iron, and Machinery Manufacturers, 1830–1880’, in Gutman, Work,
Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and
Social History (Random House, Vintage Books, New York, 1976), p. 221; Montgomery,
Beyond Equality, pp. 207–15; Charles Stephenson, ‘“There’s Plenty Waitin’ at the Gates”:
Mobility, Opportunity and the American Worker’, in Life and Labor: Dimensions of
American Working-Class History, ed. Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher (State
University of New York Press, Albany, 1986), pp. 81, 89.
Though he is not concerned with the formal public ideology of the labour movement,
Denning, Mechanic Accents, p. 172, finds both ethics in the cheap-story ‘workingman
hero tales’ of the 1870s and 1880s.
Sylvis (ed.), Life, pp. 116, 201.
I am grateful to Ellen Todd for helping to clarify this point.
‘Hurrah! for the Working Men of New York!’ (Pittsburgh, n.p., 1872), [pp. 2–3]. See
also ‘Individual Effort’, in Fincher’s Trades’ Review, 16 January 1864.
Luther, Address, p. 23; Mike Walsh, in The Subterranean (New York), 8 May 1847;
National Labor Tribune (Pittsburgh), 25 September 1875.
Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International Journal, 8 (1871), p. 217.
See, e.g., Sylvis (ed.), Life, p. 188. For an extended discussion, see also Gregory L. Kaster,
‘“We Will Not Be Slaves to Avarice”: The American Labor Jeremiad, 1827–1877’ (PhD
diss., Boston University, 1990), ch. 1.
For the concept of an antebellum ‘post-heroic generation’, see George B. Forgie,
Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age
(W. W. Norton, New York, 1979).
Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 181–2.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
62
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
GENDER AND HISTORY
David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Cornell University Press,
Ithaca and London, 1989), pp. 72–3.
My understanding of the ‘oracular’ quality of this rhetoric has been aided by Aileen
Kraditor, The Radical Persuasion, 1890–1917: Aspects of the Intellectual History and the
Historiography of Three Radical Organizations (Louisiana State University Press, Baton
Rouge and London, 1981), p. 128.
Baron, ‘An “Other” Side of Gender Antagonism’, pp. 48–9.
Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International Journal, 9 (1872), pp. 515–17.
Mechanics’ Free Press, 14 June 1828; National Labor Tribune, 17 October 1874; Sylvis
(ed.), Life, pp. 182–3.
Fincher’s Trades’ Review, 5 November 1864.
See Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, pp. 11, 55–6, 178–9, on the connections between
manliness and whiteness. On the ‘rhetoric of race’ and ‘servile’, see, respectively, Lott,
Love and Theft, p. 71; OED, p. 2742. Jonathan A. Glickstein has questioned the primacy
of ‘skin color’ in shaping the ‘self-definition’ of antebellum skilled white male workers
(Glickstein, ‘Pressures from Below: Pauperism, Chattel Slavery, and the Ideological
Construction of Free Market Labor Incentives in Antebellum America’, Radical History
Review, 69 (1997), pp. 141–3, 158 n. 114).
Quoted in Herbert Hill, ‘The Problem of Race in American Labor History’, Reviews in
American History, 24 (1996), p. 194. The relationship between the idioms of whiteness
and manliness in the rhetoric of organised white workingmen in nineteenth-century
America has not been much explored, but see Gregory L. Kaster, ‘Are We Not FullGrown Men? Race, Gender, and Organized White Workingmen in Nineteenth-Century
America’ (paper contributed to the Conference on Labour and Difference in Africa, USA
and Britain, July 1997), pp. 8–11, 14–19; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, pp. 54–5,
178–81; David Roediger, ‘What if Labor Were Not White and Male? Recentering
Working-Class History and Reconstructing Debate on the Unions and Race’,
International Labor and Working-Class History, 51 (1997), p. 89; Paul Michael Taillon,
‘Manhood, Whiteness, and the Fraternal Culture of the Railroad Brotherhoods’ (paper
presented at the Pullman Centennial Conference, September 1994). See also ‘Gaining a
Hearing for Black–White Unity: Covington Hall and the Complexities of Race, Gender
and Class’, in David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race,
Politics, and Working Class History (Verso, London and New York, 1994), pp. 127–80,
quote on 131.
See, e.g., National Trades’ Union (New York), 30 April 1836; Awl, 31 July 1844; Daily
Evening Voice, 20 December 1864; ‘Platform of the Chicago Trades’ Assembly’, in
Workingman’s Advocate, 16 May 1868; Machinists and Blacksmiths’ International
Journal, 9 (1871), p. 442; Bensman, Practice of Solidarity, p. 56. For a related discussion
of respectable activism and manhood, see Blewett, ‘Manhood and the Market’.
Mechanics’ Free Press, 9 August 1828; Fincher’s Trades’ Review, 13 February 1864; Iron
Molders’ Journal, 10 August 1877, p. 418. See also Sylvis’s report to the 1864 moulders’
convention, in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Session of the Iron Molders’ International
Union … (Fincher’s Trades’ Review, Philadelphia, 1864), p. 13. This evidence lends
support to Kenneth Cmiel’s insight (in his review of Leverenz, Manhood and the
American Renaissance) that manliness in nineteenth-century America did not necessarily
entail dominance of others (Cmiel, ‘Be a Man!’, Reviews in American History, 18 (1990),
pp. 53–4).
New England Artisan (Pawtucket, RI), 8 February 1834; Alan Dawley and Paul Faler,
‘Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and
Rebellion’, Journal of Social History, 9 (1976), pp. 466–80; Jill Siegel Dodd, ‘The
Working Classes and the Temperance Movement in Ante-bellum Boston’, Labor History,
19 (1978), pp. 510–31; Elliot Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in
America (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1986), pp. 129–35; Walter Licht,
Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press,
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
LABOUR’S TRUE MAN
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
63
Baltimore and London, 1995), p. 72; Kimmel, Manhood in America, pp. 44–50; Lott,
Love and Theft, p. 148; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, p. 107; Peter Way, Common
Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780–1860 (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1993), pp. 173–5. On trade unions and Irish
immigrants, see Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, pp. 103, 105–6.
National Trades’ Union, 8 August 1835; Iron Molders’ Journal, 10 May 1875, p. 291;
Sylvis (ed.), Life, pp. 438–9.
On the Federation’s ‘prudential unionism’, see Laurie, Artisans into Workers, pp. 13,
198–9; on arbitration, see Bensman, Practice of Solidarity, pp. 104–7; and David
Montgomery, ‘Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America’, Social Science History, 4 (1980),
p. 89.
Sylvis (ed.), Life, p. 152.
Daily Evening Voice, 12 January 1867; National Labor Tribune, 28 July 1877. On the
railroad strikes, see Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (1959; repr. Quadrangle
Books, Chicago, 1970); Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (Monad Press,
New York, 1977).
Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor, esp. ch. 1; Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class,
p. 128.
Sylvis (ed.), Life, p. 111. See also Mechanics’ Free Press, 20 November 1830; Daily
Evening Voice, 14 January 1865.
One of the few scholars to recognise this ambivalence is Jonathan A. Glickstein, who
believes that workers and labour reformers felt some discontent over manual labour due
to the pressure of liberal capitalist values (Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor, pp. 492–3
n. 37).
Du Bois put forward his conception of the African American’s double consciousness in
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (A. G. McClurg, Chicago, 1903). In the
context of this essay it is worth noting Du Bois’s belief that the divided self would
culminate in ‘self- conscious manhood [emphasis added]’. See David Levering Lewis, W. E.
B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (Henry Holt, New York, 1993), p. 282.
Moore, Address, p. 20; Seventh Annual Session of the National Typographical Union, p. 4;
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, p. 55.
Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 168, 176.
See, e.g., Mechanics’ Free Press, 23 August 1828; Awl, 4 September 1844; Seventh
Annual Session of the National Typographical Union, p. 4. For a fascinating and in some
ways parallel discussion of nineteenth-century French artisans’ assimilationist longing to
transcend their working lives, see Jacques Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’
Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Temple University Press,
Philadelphia, 1989); Ranciere, ‘The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a
Category of Social History’, International Labor and Working Class History, 24 (1983),
pp. 4–9; Ranciere, ‘A Reply’, International Labor and Working Class History, 25 (1984),
pp. 42–4.
National Trades’ Union, 18 April 1835; Third Grand Rally of the Workingmen of
Charlestown, Massachusetts, Held October 23d, 1840 (n.p., Boston, 1840), pp. 6–7; Sylvis
(ed.), Life, p. 114.
I am influenced here by David Roediger’s application of Du Bois’s concept in Wages of
Whiteness, pp. 12–13. For a criticism of Roediger’s position, see Arnesen, ‘Up from
Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History’, Reviews in
American History, 26 (1998), pp. 164–5.
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, pp. 13, 87.
Sylvis (ed.), Life, p. 367.
Sylvis (ed.), Life, pp. 437, 439.
Sylvis (ed.), Life, p. 437.
Sylvis (ed.), Life, pp. 152, 437; Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class,
Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989), pp. 172–7;
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.
64
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
GENDER AND HISTORY
Brian Greenberg, Worker and Community: Response to Industrialization in a NineteenthCentury American City, Albany, New York, 1850–1884 (State University of New York
Press, Albany, 1986), p. 101. Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse
on the Social Order in America (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1995),
pp. 141–3, calls attention to Sylvis’s emphasis on antagonism between capital and labour
but overlooks evidence of the cross-class, gendered assimilationist desire discussed here.
The story ran from 28 September 1872 to 29 March 1873 and was accorded prominent
space by the Advocate. For background on it and the author, see Denning, Mechanic
Accents, pp. 43–4. Kimmel, Manhood in America, pp. 108, 409 n. 80, cites the story as
an example of ‘republican, artisanal manhood’ but offers no analysis of it.
Denning, Mechanic Accents, p. 173, notes that profit-sharing was a plot device employed
in dime novels ‘to reconcile self-advancement with mutualism’. As I am suggesting,
manliness itself also functioned as a plot device, but one that reconciled workingmen and
(honourable) employers.
For background, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, pp. 12–19; Elizabeth Faue,
Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in
Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London,
1991), pp. 94–5; Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making
of Consumer Society (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1997), p. 43.
Glickman, Living Wage, p. 43; Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle, p. 94.
For examples of such imagery, see Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle, pp. 75–6;
David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with
Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge and New York, 1993), p. 23.
Glickman, Living Wage, pp. 88–9, 78.
Fine, ‘“Our Big Factory Family”: Masculinity and Paternalism at the Reo Motor Car
Company of Lansing, Michigan’, Labor History, 34 (1993), p. 277.
Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle, p. 98; Glickman, Living Wage, pp. 44, 78,
85–91; Lawrence Glickman, ‘Inventing the “American Standard of Living”: Gender,
Race, and Working-Class Identity, 1880–1925’, Labor History, 34 (1993), pp. 221–35;
Fine, ‘“Our Big Factory Family” ’, pp. 284–5, 281.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.