Labor Movement and Unions

The organized labor movement in the United States has contributed in important ways to American conceptions of manhood grounded in working-class experience and, usually, in whiteness. While some labor organizations, such as the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and sections of the American Federation of Labor, have challenged the association of unions and working-class masculinity solely with white men, most organizations have consistently focused on skilled or semiskilled white male workers and have largely failed to include women, unskilled workers, or nonwhites.

The first labor movement in the United States emerged in the 1820s and 1830s, when industrialization left journeymen (artisans who had completed their apprenticeships) increasingly unable to escape wage work. Journeymen, like other Americans, associated manhood with the political and economic independence made possible by property ownership, and they were fearful that as wage earners they would be forever dependent on others for income. They therefore formed politicized unions to fight the wage system and employers' control of the work process, which they saw as infringements on their liberty and manhood. These nascent unions represented white skilled workers and shunned those Americans they associated with unmanly dependency and wage work, particularly women and African Americans.

Although early unions were often prominent in major urban areas during the antebellum period, it was not until the Civil War that union activity became a widespread and dominant feature of urban, industrial America. Unlike antebellum journeymen, the approximately 200,000 men who joined Civil War–era unions never expected to escape wage work. Instead of seeking property ownership and control of the work process, Civil War–era unionists—applying a definition of masculinity based on their roles as family breadwinners and providers—fought for the job security, wage increases, and shorter workdays they deemed necessary to support and lead a household of dependents.

After the Civil War, as the labor movement grew larger, two main articulations of manhood dominated the movement, the first from the Knights of Labor and the second from the American Federation of Labor. The Knights emerged as a national labor organization in the 1880s, representing 750,000 workers by 1886. The Knights' platform drew heavily on antebellum ideals of manly independence, envisioning a republic without class conflict populated by self-employed men whose economic independence would ensure political virtue. Unlike antebellum journeymen, however, the Knights, at least to a limited degree, challenged older working-class associations of masculinity with whiteness and skilled labor by seeking to organize not only skilled workers, but also women, unskilled workers, and African Americans. In practice, however, the organization remained largely the province of white, skilled, or semiskilled men.

By the late 1880s, as skilled and semiskilled workers increasingly considered independent proprietorship unattainable, and as their interests came to be opposed to those of business owners, they rejected the Knights' reluctance to accept class struggle. Embracing notions of working-class manliness based on economic independence rather than property ownership, they joined the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886, in growing numbers. Unlike the Knights, the AFL did not attempt to reassert the power of the male property owner. Instead, the AFL took as its model member the male breadwinner and sought to improve his ability to provide for his family. In the AFL, this model union man was white. Although AFL president Samuel Gompers actively encouraged the inclusion of nonwhites, local unions usually refused. They explicitly saw themselves as protecting the dignity of white breadwinners from employers' attempts to lower wages or dictate work processes, and they excluded women and African American workers, whom they assumed to be naturally subservient.

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