Queensware factory workers

Maryland Historical Society

Characterized by exploding economic and demographic growth, the period from Civil War to the World War I was one of rapid industrialization, usually to the disadvantage of workers, both in Maryland and throughout the nation. The growth of national markets linked by the new railroads upset wage and price patterns previously established in relatively isolated local markets. A cycle of prosperity followed by harsh downturns punctuated economic life with large increases in unemployment. Journeymen who had once labored in small units of production alongside their employers, now worked in impersonal factories. Manual skills, once the key to production, gave way to machines-machines that occasionally maimed or killed.

Working-Class Ideology
Faced with this new and difficult world, workers until the 1880s subscribed to an ideology of producer cooperation, a proposed system in which workers themselves owned the means of production. By eliminating capitalist middlemen, workers, in a collective sense at least, would once again be their own bosses. The decade of the 1880s was one of transition. Even as the utopian ideology of producer cooperation reached its peak, an early form of modern liberalism gradually began to supplant it. Many trade union leaders by the mid-1880s began to accept the legitimacy of capitalist competition provided that governments set standards for the humane treatment of labor. Otherwise economic necessity would eventually require all employers to adopt the harsh and immoral practices of the most ruthless competitor. By the mid-1880s many upper- and middle-class reformers were adopting similar ideas. They found labor's demands largely justified, and talk of "dangerous classes" diminished. Shifting cross-class alliances of labor leaders and sympathetic businessmen, professionals, journalists, clergy, academics, or liberal women began to lobby the legislature for needed reforms.

Industrial Magnates

Maryland Historical Society

Producer Cooperation and Independent Labor Parties, 1865 to the 1880s
After the Civil War, returning veterans seeking work poured into Baltimore, the locus of most industrial activity in Maryland. The city's trade unions called for legislation to reduce the typical work day from ten to eight hours in order to spread employment more widely. A massive demonstration helped induce the City Council to institute an eight-hour day for all municipal employees. Such responsiveness was a contributing factor in the fledgling National Labor Union's decision to hold its first congress in Baltimore in 1866. Resolutions called for producer cooperatives, "a sure and lasting remedy for the abuses of the present industrial age," and for the establishment of a national labor political party.

In 1869, Baltimore's labor leaders thus organized a Workingmen and Reform Party only to suffer a crushing defeat with a mere 5 percent of the vote in the municipal and state elections. In 1871, some of the city's shoe workers organized a worker-owned producer cooperative. Like the 1869 experiment in independent labor politics, however, the shoemakers' cooperative soon failed.

Worker housing

Maryland Historical Society

The wrenching depression of 1873-1877 impeded workers' gains. Unions tended to dissolve because workers could no longer afford to pay dues, and strikes were ineffective because replacement workers were readily available among the large number of unemployed. The only major gain for labor during the depression came from an early cross-class alliance that successfully lobbied the legislature for a law forbidding employment of children under the age of sixteen for more than ten hours a day. Some 5,000 children worked twelve to fourteen hours a day in Maryland's nineteen textile mills at a time when ten hours was the standard workday for adult men.

Anger at years of deprivation finally boiled over in the great nationwide Baltimore & Ohio Railroad strike of 1877. Although violence was greatest in Pittsburgh, ten workers died in Baltimore. Troops of the Maryland National Guard fired on crowds which harassed them as they crossed the city to board the train for Cumberland. Strikers already had prevented fifteen trains from departing the station.

The violence of the strike and the privations suffered in the depression led Baltimore's workers to form a second independent labor party. With an eloquent mayoral candidate, blacksmith Joseph Thompson, the new labor party this time gained over 30 percent of the ballots in municipal elections despite substantial fraud by the governing Democrats. Isaac Freeman Raisin, the Democratic political boss of Baltimore, made sure that the Workingmen's Party could not oust his political machine.

The 1880s-the Decade of Ideological Transition
Inspired by the Knights of Labor, the city's workers formed yet another independent labor party in 1882. Despite an attractive platform covering health and safety, weekly pay, child labor, equal pay for women, and compulsory education, the new party suffered an overwhelming defeat. In 1882, the Knights also lost a long strike in the coalfields of western Maryland and began a long decline in influence there.

Labor found an enlightened ally in 1883, Robert M. McLane, Democratic candidate for governor, whose campaign proposals promised relief to workers. The newly formed Baltimore Federation of Labor gave him its full backing. Upon election, McLane sent the legislature a series of proposals constituting what can rightfully be called the nation's first labor program, as opposed to piecemeal reforms. A cross-class alliance of workers and McLane supporters secured legislation that concerned the right of workers to act in combination, created a state labor bureau, addressed health and safety issues, and incorporated unions. Only in proposals concerning an eight-hour day did the alliance meet with failure.

The next milestone in Maryland's labor history was a fourfold increase in the number of organized workers in 1886, a year marked nationally by a great labor upheaval. Many new members of organized labor were unskilled workers who flocked to the Knights of Labor. Two major strikes in Baltimore for an eight-hour day failed that summer, but many in the city gained a nine-hour day. The Knights then organized yet another independent labor party, Maryland's last, which met the same fate as its predecessors in elections that fall. The Knights also formed several unsuccessful worker-owned producer cooperatives in the late 1880s.

Later industrial magnates

Maryland Historical Society

Simultaneously, the Knights steadily lost members as the unskilled dropped out and skilled workers shifted allegiance to the trade unions. The Knights last stand came in a struggle with the United Garment Workers Union in the mid-1890s for exclusive representation of workers in Baltimore's important men's clothing industry, a struggle complicated by another severe depression. The union first supplanted the Knights among the city's sweatshop workers and then among the industry's factory workers. In the early twentieth century the Knights ceased to exist in Maryland.

Modern Liberalism and Lobbying the Legislature, the 1890s to 1916

Industrial workers

Maryland Historical Society

During the so-called Progressive Era from 1900 to 1916, cross-class alliances secured significant legislation on many fronts, including child labor, compulsory education, a shorter workday for females, virtual elimination of the sweatshops, adequate ventilation in coal mines, worker health and safety, and workmen's compensation. David J. Lewis, a former Maryland coal miner turned legislator, was, in fact, the author of the nation's first workmen's compensation act in 1902.

Many other changes occurred in the Progressive Era. In their relations with employers, Baltimore's workers made significant gains. By 1903 about a quarter of the city's unions had won collective bargaining agreements as unilateral decisions by employers gradually gave way. The eight-hour day also became fairly common. Another change was the formation of the Maryland-District of Columbia Federation of Labor, an organization that reached out further into the state than the older Baltimore Federation of Labor. Two weekly labor newspapers kept Maryland's workers informed of the aims and goals of the unions. One new problem tempered the gains, however. For the first time in decades the nation began to experience inflation rather than deflation. Still, the position of labor was significantly better in 1916 than it had been in 1865.

Adams, Henry Carter. Relation of the State to Industrial Action and Economics and Jurisprudence. Dorfman, Joseph, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, reprint 1954.

Crooks, James B. Politics and Progress: The Rise of Urban Progressivism in Baltimore, 1895 to 1911. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

Hirschfeld, Charles. Baltimore, 1870-1900: Studies in Social History. Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series 59. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941.

McFarland, Gerald W. Mugmumps, Morals & Politics, 1884-1920. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975.

Schneirov, Richard. Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.