Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-89wxm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T04:24:34.518Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Picket lines and parades: labour and urban space in early twentieth-century London and Chicago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2013

RUTH PERCY
RUTH PERCY*
Affiliation:
Ruskin College, Dunstan Road, Old Headington, Oxford, OX3 9BZ, UK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Garment strikes in London and Chicago provide a setting to consider the role of the city in early twentieth-century labour struggles. While strikers in the two cities shared similar experiences and confronted similar imaginings of the city, they faced different built environments. The comparative approach thus highlights the importance of considering spatial dynamics when studying strikers’ strategies. Journalists’ and other onlookers’ responses to picket lines, parades or mass meetings reflected normative understandings and expectations of workers’ behaviour, especially if those workers were young, women or ethnic minorities. The article considers the ways in which strikers in early twentieth-century London and Chicago transgressed contemporary perceptions of their cities by appropriating city space and by subverting behavioural norms in spaces where they did belong. I argue that the strikers drew attention to their struggles via their atypical use of the city streets and that occupying these spaces helped unify the strikers and thus strengthen the strike.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 456 - 477
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Addams, J., The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York, 1909), 75Google Scholar.

2 Harvey, D., Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Goheen, P.G., ‘The assertion of middle-class claims to public space in late Victorian Toronto’, Journal of Historical Geography, 29 (2003), 73–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harvey, D., Paris, Capital of Modernity (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Herod, A., ‘From a geography of labor to a labor geography: labor's spatial fix and the geography of capitalism’, Antipode, 29 (1997), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurd, M., ‘Class, masculinity, manners, and mores: public space and public sphere in nineteenth-century Europe’, Social Science History, 24 (2000), 75–110Google Scholar; Mitchell, D., ‘Working-class geographies: capital, space, and place’, in Russo, J. and Linkon, S.L. (eds.), New working-class studies (Ithaca, 2005), 78–97Google Scholar; Reiff, J.L., ‘Rethinking Pullman: urban space and working-class activism’, Social Science History, 24 (2000), 7–32Google Scholar; Roberts, J.M., ‘Spatial governance and working class public spheres: the case of a Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 14 (2001), 308–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Witwer, D., ‘Unionized teamsters and the struggle over the streets of the early twentieth-century city’, Social Science History, 24 (2000), 183–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On competing public spheres, see Fraser, N., ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, Social Text, 25/6 (1990), 56–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lefebvre, H. (trans. Nicholson-Smith, D.), The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, H., ‘Space: social product and use value’, in Freiberg, J.W. (ed.), Critical Sociology: European Perspectives (New York, 1979), 285–95Google Scholar; Gottdiener, M., The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin, 1985)Google Scholar; Jackson, P., Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (London, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harvey, D., Social Justice and the City (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar.

5 Winter, J.H., London's Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London, 1993), 165Google Scholar; Birchall, J., ‘“The carnival revels of Manchester's vagabonds”: young working-class women and monkey parades in the 1870s’, Women's History Review, 15 (2006), 229–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Sewell, J.E., Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915 (Minneapolis, 2011), xivCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 I relied heavily on newspapers because of the limited range of archival sources on the strikes. This paucity was particularly problematic because I rarely found equivalent archival sources for both cities (the need to have balanced sources is one of the major challenges of comparative history). Nevertheless, newspaper reports on the comings and goings of a city both produce and re-produce urban imaginations and thus contribute to the construction of that city. Indeed, many scholars referenced elsewhere in this article have also widely utilized newspapers. They are thus an appropriate source to rely heavily on when considering strikers’ use of urban space.

8 Bloch, M., ‘Toward a comparative history of European societies’, trans. Riemersma, J.C., in Lane, Frederic C. (ed.), Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History (Homewood, 1953), 494–521Google Scholar.

9 Cohen, D., ‘Comparative history: buyer beware’, GHI Bulletin, 29 (2001), 27Google Scholar.

10 Particularly violent strikes include the May 1886 McCormick strike that led to the Haymarket Square massacre in Chicago and the Nov. 1887 unemployed rally in Trafalgar Square that became known as Bloody Sunday in London. See Avrich, P., The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, 1984)Google Scholar; Nelson, B.C., Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick, 1988)Google Scholar; Richter, D.C., Riotous Victorians (Athens, OH, 1981)Google Scholar.

11 Lefebvre, ‘Space: social product and use value’, 290.

12 Winter, London's Teaming Streets, 178; Henkin, D.M., City Reading (New York, 1998); Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere’, 62Google Scholar.

13 See, for example, Stansell, C., City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar; Ryan, M.P., Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, 1990)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deutsch, S., Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York, 2000); E. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; Sewell, Women and the Everyday City.

14 As David Montgomery has noted, by the early twentieth century Chicago ‘could challenge London for the title of trade-union capital of the world’. Montgomery, D., The Fall of the House of Labor (Cambridge, 1987), 269Google Scholar.

15 The World 1910 Almanac and Encyclopedia (New York, 1910), 571; Census of England and Wales 1931. County of London (London, 1932), viii.

16 Rappaport, E., ‘Art, commerce, or empire? The rebuilding of Regent Street, 1880–1927’, History Workshop Journal, 53 (2002), 94–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mace, R., Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire, 2nd edn (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

17 Mearns, A., The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (London, 1883), 6–7Google Scholar; Engels, F., The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1884 (London, 1892), 27–8Google Scholar.

18 H. James, ‘London’, quoted in Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 15; London, J., The People of the Abyss (New York, 1903), 6Google Scholar. See also Winter, London's Teeming Streets, 11–12.

19 Stedman Jones, G., Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (1971; repr. London, 1984), 13–14Google Scholar; Jackson, Maps of Meaning, 89–100.

20 Census of England and Wales 1911, vol. IX: Birthplaces (London, 1913), 57 and 59. See also Brodie, M., The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885–1914 (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 110; Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London; Harkness, M., In Darkest London (London, 2009)Google Scholar.

21 Kershen, A.J., Uniting the Tailors: Trade Unionism amongst the Tailoring Workers of London and Leeds, 1870–1939 (London, 1995), 98, 111Google Scholar; R. Percy, ‘Women or workers: the construction of labour feminism in London and Chicago, 1880s–1920s’, University of Toronto Ph.D. thesis, 2006.

22 The World 1910 Almanac and Encyclopedia, 317; 15th Census of the United States: 1930, vol. I: Population (Washington, DC, 1931), 23; Cronon, W., Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

23 Sandburg, C., ‘Chicago’, Poetry, 3 (1914), 191–2Google Scholar; Cronon, Nature's Metropolis.

24 R. Lewis, Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (Chicago, 2008), ch. 1, esp. 43; Bae, Y., Labor in Retreat: Class and Community among Men's Clothing Workers of Chicago, 1871–1929 (Albany, 2001), 72–83Google Scholar.

25 Steveens, G., The Land of the Dollar (New York, 1897)Google Scholar, quoted in Lewis, Chicago Made, 60.

26 13th Census of the United States: 1910, vol. II: Population (Washington, DC, 1913), 504; Cohen, L., Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar.

27 ‘Our Russian exiles: views in the Hebrew quarter on the West Side’, Chicago Tribune (19 Jul. 1891), 20.

28 Barrett, J.R., ‘Unity and fragmentation: class, race, and ethnicity on Chicago's South Side, 1900–1912’, in Hoerder, Dirk (ed.), ‘Struggle a Hard Battle’: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants (DeKalb, 1986), 229–53Google Scholar; Barrett, J.R., Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana, 1990)Google Scholar; Pacyga, D.A., Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 (Columbus, 1991)Google Scholar; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 21, 24; Lewis, Chicago Made.

29 Brodie, The Politics of the Poor; Stedman Jones, Outcast London; Lewis, Chicago Made, 41–2; Pacyga, Polish Immigrants; Cohen, Making a New Deal.

30 Pacyga, Polish Immigrants, 150; Green, D.R., ‘Lines of conflict: labour disputes in London, 1790–1870’, International Review of Social History, 43 (1998), 231–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Koven, S., Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Lewis, Chicago Made, 39.

33 Hart, Shaffner and Marx had a total of 48 shops across Chicago and employed around 10,000 workers. Shop 5 was located at 1922 South Halsted Street, at 21st Street and was one of the smaller former sweatshops the company had purchased in the early twentieth century and probably had around 20 to 30 workers. Fraser, Steven, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York, 1991), 30Google Scholar.

34 UGW organizer quoted in, ‘Clothing firm noted sweater’, Chicago Daily Socialist, 1 Oct. 1910, 3.

35 ‘45,000 will strike’, Chicago Daily Socialist, 27 Oct. 1910, 1.

36 M.I. Brush, ‘Garment workers prepare “valley forge” for winter siege’, Chicago Tribune: Workers’ Magazine, 27 Nov. 1910, 1. The 1910 census reported a total of 65,535 workers (38,905 of whom were women) employed in both the men's and women's garment industry in Chicago. 13th Census of the United States: 1910, vol. IV: Population: Occupational Statistics (Washington, DC, 1914), 153–66.

37 Historians who have written on the strike from a feminist position include Weiler, N.S., ‘The uprising in Chicago: the men's garment workers’ strike, 1910–1911’, in Jensen, J.M. and Davidson, S. (eds.), A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike (Philadelphia, 1984), 114–39Google Scholar; Sive-Tomashefsky, R., ‘Identifying a lost leader: Hannah Shapiro and the 1910 Chicago garment workers’ strike’, Signs, 3 (1978), 936–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hyman, C., ‘Labor organizing and female institution building: the Chicago Women's Trade Union League, 1904–1924’, in Milkman, R. (ed.), Women, Work and Protest: A Century of US Women's Labor History (London, 1985), 25–8Google Scholar; Payne, E.A., Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women's Trade Union League (Urbana, 1988), 86–92Google Scholar; Buhle, M.J., ‘Socialist women and the “girls strikers”, Chicago, 1910’, Signs, 1 (1976), 1039–51Google Scholar; Pastorello, K., A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (Urbana, 2007)Google Scholar. The strike is also addressed in Foner, P.S., Women in the American Labor Movement: From the First Trade Unions to the Present (New York, 1979), 159–63Google Scholar; Bae, Labor in Retreat, 85–115; Budish, J.M. and Soule, G., New Unionism in the Clothing Industry (New York, 1920), 118–24Google Scholar; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 40–76; Nelli, H.S., Italians in Chicago, 1880–1930: A Study in Ethnic Mobility (Oxford, 1970), 81–3Google Scholar; Wolman, L.et al.(ACWA Chicago Joint Board), The Clothing Workers of Chicago, 1910–1922 (Chicago, 1922), 17–48Google Scholar.

38 Fraser, Labor Will Rule, esp. ch. 3; Wolman et al., The Clothing Workers of Chicago, 17.

39 A total of 158,860 people worked in the London garment trade in 1911, including 122,779 women. Census of England and Wales 1911, vol. X: Occupations and Industry Part I (London, 1914), 36–7.

40 ‘The strike of the tailors’, Daily Chronicle, 15 May 1912, 7; ‘Tailors’ strike spreading’, Daily Chronicle, 3 May 1912, 5.

41 ‘East-End tailors to join the strike’, Daily Chronicle, 9 May 1912, 5; ‘Tailors’ new charter’, Daily Chronicle, 11 May 1912, 5.

42 ‘East-End tailors win’, Daily Chronicle, 27 May 1912, 3.

43 Editorial, Daily Herald, 5 Jun. 1912, 6.

44 Hobsbawm, E., ‘Labour in the great city’, New Left Review, 166 (1987), 44Google Scholar. See also Hollen Lees, L., ‘Strikes and the urban hierarchy in English industrial towns’, in Cronin, James and Schneer, Jonathan (eds.), Social Conflict and Political Order in Modern Britain (London, 1982), 52–73Google Scholar.

45 Rocker, R., The London Years (London, 1956), 225Google Scholar.

46 ‘Tailors’ strike’, Daily Herald, 4 May 1912, 10.

47 Worker from Kuppenheimer's quoted in ‘Holding the fort: the Chicago garment workers’ strike’, Life and Labor, Feb. 1911, 52.

48 ‘Tailors demonstrate’, Daily Chronicle, 14 May 1912, 7.

49 Rocker, The London Years, 219. See also Jackson, Maps of Meaning, 114.

50 Hansards HC vol. 38 col. 362 (7 May 1912) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1912/may/07/tailors-strike-london#S5CV0038P0_19120507_CWA_95.Acc-essed 21 Feb. 2012.

51 Mace, Trafalgar Square, 87–8; McClelland, K., ‘“England's greatness, the working man”’, in Hall, C., McClelland, K. and Rendall, J. (eds.), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), 71–118Google Scholar.

52 ‘Trade union and labour topics’, Reynold's Newspaper, 5 May 1912, 4. Its central location meant other reformers such as suffragists also hired the Pavilion.

53 ‘East-End tailors to join the strike’, Daily Chronicle, 9 May 1912, 5.

54 ‘Spread of the tailors’ strike’, Times, 9 May 1912, 7.

55 The Journeyman (28 May 1912); B. Squire, ‘On strike with strikers: how girl pickets work’, Chicago Tribune: Workers’ Magazine, 11 Dec. 1910, 1

56 Winter, London's Teaming Streets, 177; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight.

57 Ryan, Women in Public, esp. chs. 2 and 4.

58 Hurd, ‘Class, masculinity, manners, and mores’; Enstad, N., Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

59 Adickes, S., ‘Sisters, not demons: the influence of British suffragists on the American suffrage movement’, Women's History Review, 11 (2002), 675–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nym Mayhall, L.E., The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar.

60 Daily Herald, 4 May 1912, 6.

61 ‘Women to strike picket centers’, Chicago Tribune, 29 Oct. 1910, 3.

62 See for example ‘Armed mob led by girl in fight’, Chicago Tribune, 3 Nov. 1910, 4, and ‘Riots in strike: 5 girls arrested’, Chicago Tribune, 2 Nov. 1910, 1.

63 The Journeyman, 8 Jun. 1912; Coll. Misc. 1102. British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics.

64 Sidney Hillman quoted in Josephson, M., Sidney Hillman: Statesman of America (Garden City, 1952), 47Google Scholar. See also Weiler, ‘The uprising in Chicago’. Sidney Hillman went on to become the first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Fraser, Labor Will Rule.

65 ‘Riots in strike; 5 girls arrested’, Chicago Tribune, 2 Nov. 1910, 1.

66 Chicago Daily Socialist, 14 Nov. 1910, 1; ibid., 17 Nov. 1910, 1; ibid., 29 Nov. 1910, 1; Chicago Tribune, 3 Nov. 1910, 1.

67 ‘Armed mob led by girl in fight’, Chicago Tribune, 3 Nov. 1910, 4.

68 Emphasis added. Wolman et al., The Clothing Workers of Chicago, 31.

69 ‘Police slug girls and beat strikers in garment war’, Chicago Daily Socialist, 14 Nov. 1910, 1.

70 ‘Riots in strike’, Chicago Tribune, 2 Nov. 1910, 1.

71 Lewis, Chicago Made, 2.

72 ‘Enthusiasm for “special issue”’, Chicago Daily Socialist, 15 Nov. 1911, 1.

73 Addams, The Spirit of Youth, 99. See also, Hurd, ‘Class, masculinity, manners, and mores’; Goheen, P.G., ‘Parading: a lively tradition in early Victorian Toronto’, in Baker, A.R.H. and Biger, G. (eds.), Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the Past (Cambridge, 1992), 330–51Google Scholar; Custer, P.A., ‘Refiguring Jemima: gender, work, and politics in Lancashire, 1170–1820’, Past and Present, 195 (2007), 127–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Winter, London's Teeming Streets, 77.

75 ‘Tailors strike scenes’, Daily Chronicle, 7 May 1912, 7.

76 ‘Many tailoring firms concede terms’, Daily Chronicle, 18 May 1912, 7.

77 ‘The tailors’ great struggle’, Daily Herald, 7 May 1912, 1. Sewell makes this point in relations to soap-box suffrage meetings. Sewell, Women and the Everyday City, 157–8.

78 Quoted in, ‘Tailors’ strike scenes’, Daily Chronicle, 7 May 1912, 7.

79 Emphasis added. ‘Tailors’ strike may spread’, Daily Chronicle, 6 May 1912, 5.

80 Mayhew, H., London Labour and the London Poor (1861; repr. New York, 1968)Google Scholar, vol. III, 233. See also Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch. 1.

81 Rocker, The London Years, 221; Fishman, W.J., East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914 (London, 1975), 296Google Scholar.

82 Morris Mindel, quoted in White, J., Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887–1920, new edn (London, 2003), 254Google Scholar.

83 ‘Strikers parade’, Chicago Tribune, 14 Nov. 1910, 4.

84 Barnum, G., ‘The story of the garment workers’ victory: how the big strike has been supported’, Morrison's Chicago Weekly, 1, 26 Jan. 1911, 15Google Scholar. See also Cameron, A., Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana, 1995), 117–69Google Scholar; Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 171–6; Slayton, R., Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago, 1986), 111–29Google Scholar; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 21.

85 ‘Tailors’ war’, Daily Herald, 8 May 1912, 7.

86 LSTT circular quoted in ‘Tailors’ strike’, Reynold's Newspaper, 12 May 1912, 3.

87 ‘Tailors demonstrate’, Daily Chronicle, 14 May 1912, 7.

88 Mace, Trafalgar Square; Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 295–6.

89 ‘The common welfare: to arbitrate garment strike’, Survey, 25, 10 Dec. 1910, 413.