But the organized labor movement did not rest with a partial success. The campaign of pressure on the President went on. Finally, although somewhat belatedly, President Van Buren issued on March 31, 1840, the famous executive order establishing the ten-hour day on government work without a reduction in wages.
The victory came after the National Trades' Union had gone out of existence and should be, more correctly, correlated with a labor political movement. Early in 1837 came a financial panic. The industrial depression wiped out in a short time every form of labor organization from the trade societies to the National Trades' Union. Labor stood defenseless against the economic storm. In this emergency it turned to politics as a measure of despair.
The political dissatisfaction assumed the form of hostility towards banks and corporations in general. The workingmen held the banks responsible for the existing anarchy in currency, from which they suffered both as consumers and producers. Moreover, they felt that there was something uncanny and threatening about corporations with their continuous existence and limited liability. Even while their attention had been engrossed by trade unionism, the workingmen were awake to the issue of monopoly. Together with their employers they had therefore supported Jackson in his assault upon the largest "monster" of them all—the Bank of the United States. The local organizations of the Democratic party, however, did not always remain true to faith. In such circumstances the workingmen, again acting in conjunction with their masters, frequently extended their support to the "insurgent" anti-monopoly candidates in the Democratic party conventions. Such a revolt took place in Philadelphia in 1835; and in New York, although Tammany had elected Ely Moore, the President of the General Trades' Union of New York, to Congress in 1834, a similar revolt occurred. The upshot was a triumphant return of the rebels into the fold of Tammany in 1837. During the next twenty years, Tammany came nearer to being a workingmen's organization than at any other time in its career.
(4) The Long Depression, 1837-1862
The twenty-five years which elapsed from 1837 to 1862 form a period of business depression and industrial disorganization only briefly interrupted during 1850-1853 by the gold discoveries in California. The aggressive unions of the thirties practically disappeared. With industry disorganized, trade unionism, or the effort to protect the standard of living by means of strikes, was out of question. As the prospect for immediate amelioration became dimmed by circumstances, an opportunity arrived for theories and philosophies of radical social reform. Once the sun with its life-giving heat has set, one begins to see the cold and distant stars.
The uniqueness of the period of the forties in the labor movement proceeds not only from the large volume of star-gazing, but also from the accompanying fact that, for the first and only time in American history, the labor movement was dominated by men and women from the educated class, the "intellectuals," who thus served in the capacity of expert astrologers.
And there was no lack of stars in the heaven of social reform to occupy both intellectual and wage earner. First, there was the efficiency scheme of the followers of Charles Fourier, the French socialist, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the Associationists. Theirs was a proposal aiming directly to meet the issue of the prevailing industrial disorganization and wasteful competition. Albert Brisbane, Horace Greeley, and the Brook Farm enthusiasts and "Associationists" of the forties, made famous by their intimate association with Ralph Waldo Emerson, had much in common with the present-day efficiency engineers. This "old" efficiency of theirs, like the new one, was chiefly concerned with increasing the production of wealth through the application of the "natural" laws of human nature. With the enormous increase in production to be brought about by "Fourierism" and "Association," the question of justice in distribution was relegated to a secondary place. Where they differed from the new efficiency was in method, for they believed efficiency would be attained if only the human instincts or "passions" were given free play, while the efficiency engineers of today trust less to unguided instinct and more to "scientific management" of human "passions."
Midway between trade unionism and the simon-pure, idealistic reform philosophies stood producers' and consumers' cooperation. It had the merit of being a practical program most suitable to a time of depression, while on its spiritual side it did not fail to satisfy the loftiest intellectual. It was the resultant of the two most potent forces which acted upon the movement of the forties, the pressure of an inadequate income of the wage earner and the influence of the intellectuals. During no other period has there been, relatively speaking, so much effort along that line.
Although, as we shall see, the eighties were properly the era of producers' cooperation on a large scale, the self-governing workshop had always been familiar to the American labor movement. The earliest attempt, as far as we have knowledge, occurred in Philadelphia in 1791, when the house carpenters out on strike offered by way of retaliation against their employers to undertake contracts at 25 percent less than the price charged by the masters. Fourteen years later, in 1806, the journeymen cordwainers of the same city, following their conviction in court on the charge of conspiracy brought in by their masters, opened up a cooperative shoe warehouse and store. As a rule the workingmen took up productive cooperation when they had failed in strikes.
In 1836 many of the trade societies began to lose their strikes and turned to cooperation. The cordwainers working on ladies' shoes entered upon a strike for higher wages in March 1836, and opened three months later a "manufactory" or a warehouse of their own. The handloom weavers in two of the suburbs of Philadelphia started cooperative associations at the same time. At the end of 1836 the hand-loom weavers of Philadelphia proper had two cooperative shops and were planning to open a third. In New Brunswick, New Jersey, the journeymen cordwainers opened a shop after an unsuccessful strike early in 1836; likewise the tailors of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville. In New York the carpenters had done so already in 1833, and the painters of New York and Brooklyn opened their shops in 1837.