The Lynn Shoemaker Strike of 1860

The first treadle sewing machine appeared in Lynn,Mass.in 1852.Before that technological event,Lynn had a workshop tradition dating back to the seventeenth century.Lynn was well known as the shoemaking capital before the treadle sewing machine appeared.Shoemaking was a home based craft with all members of the home assisting in the making of the product.The sewing machine disrupted this long-established system by increasing the pace at which uppers could be sewn.Shoe factories furnished with rows of sewing machines opened in Lynn;uniform shoe sizes were introduced,as were shoe boxes to safeguard the product.The new term"factory"implied a place of workers and bosses,strict hours,oversight and the constant hum of machines.By 1860,only 25% of the shoe workers were Lynn natives and many of the local journeymen and skilled home stitchers had been driven from the family hearth to occupy factory benches in town.

In the pre-factory era, a worker looked forward to his "competency",the amount of savings that would carry into old age or used for disability.With the new system factory owners,not independent workers,controlled hours and wages as well as availability of work,and "competency"was no longer a sure thing.Lynn shoemakers were displeased by this loss of egalitarian balance,angry that they ,the actual producers of the town's wealth,were forced to see their share of the shoe business's material rewards diminish even as their futures grew more uncertain(sound familiar).

Around 1860,the nation entered into a national recession and the owners cut wages and hours of the Lynn workers.The outraged workers saw an effort to degrade permanently the wages paid shoemakers in Lynn and declared a strike,demanding a standardized wage.This began the first nationally watched labor battle in U.S.history.On Washington's birthday,Feb.22,1860,the shoemakers marched in protest,holding aloft placards bearing images of the first president stating"Our cause is just and our union perfect".Sympathetic workers from surrounding towns joined the Lynn workers. The factories began to secretly send shoes to market.The striking workers disrupted this process and a town constable who intervened was mobbed and knocked down.The town asked Boston to send thirty policemen to maintain order.Violence continued the next day with the police but they left in a day and the strike continued without violence.On March 7th,eight hundred women trudged in falling snow through the main streets joining the men against the shoe making establishment.

The 1860 Lynn shoemaker strike against authoritarian dictates of the factory system proved something of a last gasp.Technically it gained little in terms of better wages or working conditions.The strike was a success for it's display of worker militancy and the free public discussion of labor issues than any specific results. Fifteen thousand male and two thousand female shoemakers had entered the fold of organized labor and lasting connections had been made between workers of neighboring manufacturing towns.In 1860, the town elected a shoemaker the new mayor of Lynn.On March 5th,1860,Abraham Lincoln was campaigning in Hartford,Conn. when a reporter asked him about the strike.He answered"I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to".

More from "There is Power in a Union" by Philip Dray soon.