Nationwide, from the 1880s to the 1910s, labor organized to meet the challenges of a corporate-dominated economy and government at all levels that was slow to respond to workers’ interests. Organizing, however, was fraught with internal battles at the national level over what the goals should be and who unions should admit to membership. Founded in Philadelphia in 1869, the nationwide Knights of Labor union was fractured by these internal battles as it struggled for the rights of working people. When the press blamed that union for a deadly bombing at an outdoor Chicago labor rally on May 1, 1886, a serious blow was struck to the Knights’ radical vision of overthrowing capitalism by uniting all workers into one big organization regardless of trades and skills. Repudiating the goals and organizational structure of the Knights, Samuel Gompers of New York fashioned a new union that same year - the American Federation of Labor (AF of L). Whereas the Knights had been highly political and advocated government ownership of the means of production, the AF of L spurned politics and embraced capitalism. Unlike the Knights, the AF of L pursued three clear, concrete goals: higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions. In California, maritime and factory labor in the 1880s and afterward moved increasingly in concert with Gompers’s pragmatic approach.
California, especially its cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, was a major arena for America’s struggles between labor and capital. The Golden State’s struggles were distinguished by a Pacific Rim racial factor, namely, that a fair number of its workers were of Asian and Hispanic ethnic backgrounds. To varying degrees, this factor was present in the campaigns of workers.
White seamen toiled under conditions that differed significantly from those of laborers on land. Crimps, or managers of boardinghouses and taverns for sailors, entered into agreements with ships’ captains to provide needed crewmen. Generally, seamen could not obtain a job without going through a crimp, and captains could not secure a crew without doing likewise. If workers were in short supply, sometimes captains paid crimps “blood money” to “shanghai” seamen. Shanghaiing usually involved plying sailors with alcohol, beating them into submission or unconsciousness, and turning the hapless victim over to a shipmaster. By the time the sailor regained consciousness, the vessel he was aboard might be on its way to Shanghai, China, or some other distant port. Once in the employ of a captain, seamen, unlike workers on land, could not quit a job that they found unrewarding. Under the U. S. laws of that time, sailors abandoning their jobs were guilty of the crime of desertion, making them subject to arrest and imprisonment. Moreover, unlike most toilers on land, seamen could be legally flogged for “justifiable cause.”
Already bad, these conditions worsened in 1885 when shippers reduced monthly pay to $20 and $25 for work done inside and outside ports, respectively. To address these circumstances, Burnette G. Haskell founded the Coast Seamen’s Union (CSU) in San Francisco in that year. By August the CSU had 3,000 members out of approximately 3,500 coasting (distinguished from deepwater) sailors. The following year it was strong enough to force an increase in wages on all coasting vessels to $35 and $40 for work inside and outside ports, respectively.
In 1886 San Francisco shippers, including John D. Spreckels’s Oceanic Steamship Company, fought back by organizing the Shipowners’ Association, which passed over CSU members and continued to work with crimps in hiring seamen. The union picketed the waterfront, blood was spilled, and several men were killed before the CSU ran out of funds and capitulated on September 30. Union membership declined to slightly more than 1,000. Morale was low. Haskell, an avowed socialist whose utopian Kaweah colony in the Sierra would drain union funds, was blamed for the defeat and ousted from leadership.
Distancing itself from socialism and adapting to the change from sail to steam, the union discontinued the office of president, investing the new secretary, Andrew Furuseth, with executive power. These changes paid handsomely, as he - like his friend AF of L President Samuel Gompers - was a pragmatic organizer with financial management skills. Under Furuseth’s leadership, in 1891 the CSU combined with the Steamshipmen’s Protective Union to form the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP). The SUP was headquartered in San Francisco and led by secretary Furuseth, who saw to it that the union joined the city’s powerful Federated Trades Council (see below) an alliance of labor organizations. SUP branch offices would eventually extend to Seattle, Honolulu, and Norfolk, Virginia - exemplifying the sweep of a Greater California labor organization. Furuseth was the driving force behind the passage of the La Follette Seamen’s Act of 1915, which ended imprisonment for desertion and mandated better working conditions for sailors.
The white SUP members were not the only sailors on the West Coast. According to historian Robert J. Schwendinger, at least 80,523 Chinese employees served on American commercial vessels during the years 1876-1906. They were not slaves, indentured workers, or contract laborers, but wage earners and free men. Most were Chinese nationals, but toward the end of the century an increasing number of crewmen were Chinese Americans, mostly from California. They were employed by the two dominant San Francisco-based steamship companies: Pacific Mail and Occidental and Oriental. The crews aboard these vessels were largely Chinese with some whites; the officers were invariably Caucasians. Wages for Chinese crewmen ranged from a low of $14 to $18 per month for coal handlers to a high of $45 to $60 per month for cooks.
California labor unions despised and denigrated Chinese maritime workers, who, consequently, were not admitted into membership. Furuseth, who did more than anyone to upgrade the treatment of American seamen of European ancestry, shared the prejudice of white laborers toward Asians, warning at a 1902 Senate Immigration Committee hearing that unless more white men entered maritime work “yellow” men would take over the seagoing labor force. Chinese sailors were cowards, he testified; they allegedly showed a lack of courage in several shipwrecks that he mentioned. Additionally, Furuseth insisted that ship hands be drawn from “native born” workers. This seems especially odd given the
Fact that he had been born in Norway and came to the United States as an adult immigrant before becoming a Pacific Coast seaman.
Either out of ignorance or oversight, Furuseth did not mention the role of Chinese sailors in the Battle of Manila during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Commodore George Dewey enlisted the aid of 29 Chinese on his flagship Olympia. Moreover, his squadron had leased two Chinese support vessels from Hong Kong, carrying munitions and coal. The crews of both vessels were mainly Chinese. Because of the “courage and energy” shown by these crewmen, Dewey petitioned Congress to allow them to immigrate to America. Given the rampant anti-Asian sentiment across the land, and especially in California, the naval hero’s request was denied.
The shipping companies employing Chinese crews also expressed positive views about their workers. Owners and officers of these firms attested to the value of their Asian crews and defended successfully the right of their companies to employ Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino seamen. Most likely the comparative advantage of lower labor costs for nonunionized employees was a major factor responsible for these positive assessments. However, the fact remains that these Asian maritime workers were judged to be among the best in the labor pool.
Like maritime workers, California factory employees struggled to improve their lot amid the depression-driven wage cuts and layoffs of the 1870s and 1890s. By the latter decade San Francisco had emerged as the strongest center of trade union activity west of Chicago and remained so until about 1920. In the early twentieth century Los Angeles gave birth to a less powerful though more radical labor movement of its own.
From 1878 to 1884 the San Francisco Trades’ Assembly served as the umbrella labor organization for Bay Area factory workers. While it shared the goals of the Workingmen’s Party of California, its leaders distrusted Denis Kearney and did not want the Trades’ Assembly to become a pawn of Kearney’s political party. Led by socialist Frank Roney, Trades’ Assembly members were vehemently anti-Chinese. The organization fell victim to factionalism, leading to Roney’s resignation and its demise in 1884.
The following year a larger and more effective labor organization emerged in San Francisco, the Federated Trades Council. It was animated by the same virulent antiChinese sentiment as its predecessor but differed in that the Federated Trades Council included unions outside the Bay Area, even in other western states. In 1886 the Council led a boycott of Chinese goods and several anti-union newspapers, whose printers had gone on strike. That year Roney took the helm of the Council as strikes and boycotts spread in the Bay Area and throughout other large American cities. In effect, a labor renaissance swept the City by the Bay. Two years later California’s Labor Commissioner estimated that 81 unions operated in San Francisco with more than 19,000 members. The Council had been a major generator of this growth. Factionalism, as often was the case with unions, began to plague the Council in the early 1890s, and was compounded by antagonism with the newly formed San Francisco Building Trades Council. After mediation, the two rival organizations combined, forming the San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC) in 1892, which embraced 31 unions. Due largely to the SFLC, San Francisco workers in the early 1900s enjoyed higher pay and better working conditions than their non-union counterparts across the nation.
By the turn of the century San Francisco’s women, who in increasing numbers had entered clerical and service occupations, had organized their own labor unions. In 1901 hundreds of city waitresses went on strike for higher wages, resulting in the shutting down of nearly 200 restaurants. Female laundry workers did likewise in 1907, as did female employees at the Ghirardelli chocolate factory, who demanded higher pay and an end to dangerous and insanitary working conditions.
These actions brought positive results that spurred more action. Four years later, a state law limited the workday to eight hours for women (excluding farm labor), and in 1913 California passed a minimum wage law for women. In 1919, 1,300 female telephone operators stopped work and successfully battled for the right to bargain collectively.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles began showing signs of labor activity. With a much smaller population than San Francisco in 1880 (11,000 Angelinos compared to 233,000 San Franciscans), Los Angeles was on the cusp of a real-estate boom (see Chapter 7) that would transform the “cow county” metropolis into a port city with a broadened economic base. Amid this transformation, marked by labor strife, the city would become a national leader of the “open shop” movement. Theoretically, open shop businesses were those that hired irrespective of whether a job-seeker was a union member. Often, however, union membership disqualified an applicant seeking employment. An open shop city or business, in other words, was anti-union.
In the Southland, Los Angeles Times publisher and conservative Republican Harrison Gray Otis led the campaign against labor unions, eventually heading the most powerful anti-union business association in America. This is a bit ironic given the fact that as a 15-year-old printer he had quit a job with a newspaper because the proprietor refused to unionize, and later as an employee of the Government Printing Office in Washington, D. C., he had joined the Typographical Union.
In 1890, by which time southern California’s economic boom had ended and few labor organizations existed in Los Angeles, Otis announced a 20 percent pay cut and locked his union printers out. When the printers picketed, Otis brought in well-paid strikebreakers from San Diego and elsewhere, all the while keeping up a steady stream of anti-union and anti-reform articles in the Times. The strike collapsed, as did the subsequent union-led boycott of the newspaper.
In the early 1900s Los Angeles corporations organized to combat growing union strength. By 1903 the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association (M&M), founded in the 1890s to promote free enterprise, had become an anti-union juggernaut, smearing boycotters as “un-American, unjust, unwarranted, and illegal.” M&M member-businesses refused to work with employers who negotiated with unions. The consortium also arranged with banks for the withholding of loans from such businesses. To broaden the base of anti-union efforts, Otis and Henry Huntington helped launch a so-called Los Angeles Citizens’ Alliance, which served as a chapter of a larger national organization with that same goal.
This anti-labor activity generated renewed energy for organizing among the city’s toilers, which, in turn, produced a counter-offensive led by the M&M. In 1910 Mexican workers on the street trolleys were joined by laborers in other industries in striking to gain recognition. The city council, pushed by Otis and the M&M, responded by outlawing picketing and striking.
By then labor relations in Los Angeles were a tinderbox. Union funds from San Francisco helped finance a strike of 1,500 Los Angeles metal trades workers on June 1, 1910. It constituted the largest work stoppage so far in the city’s history. The Times denounced the strike, and major labor unions nationwide denounced the Times.
Then, early in the morning on October 1, amid the metal trades strike, a stupendous explosion destroyed the Times building, resulting in what the city’s anti-union forces called the “crime of the century.” Twenty men died and 17 were injured. Labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers, denied any union responsibility. However, a federal investigation, followed by a trial and confessions by three defendants, confirmed that the dynamite bomb had been the work of extremists in the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union. That union was headquartered in Indianapolis, and its three convicted members included Ortie McManigal, John J. McNamara, and his brother James B. McNamara. In the face of compelling evidence, their attorney, Clarence Darrow, convinced the men to plead guilty to save their lives. Tarnished by the violent episode, Los Angeles remained a citadel of the open shop for decades afterward.
Figure 8.4 The ruins of the Los Angeles Times building, 1910. The destruction of this building inflamed business-labor relations in the city for decades afterward. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
World History
