Deskilling and the Response of Working Men

While the construction of factory towns expanded economic opportunities for young women, the gradual decline of time-honored crafts narrowed the prospects for working men. As craft workshops increased in size, they hired fewer skilled workers and more men who learned only a single aspect of production—cutting barrel staves or attaching soles to shoes. Like mill operatives, these workers performed distinct tasks, many of which were mechanized over the course of the nineteenth century. The final product was less distinctive than an item crafted by a skilled artisan, but it was also less expensive and available in mass quantities.

The shift from craft work to factory work threatened to undermine working men’s skills, pay, and labor conditions. Soon masters hired foremen to regulate the workforce and installed bells and clocks to regulate the workday. Artisans were offended by the new regime, which treated them as wage-earning dependents rather than as independent craftsmen. As the process of deskilling transformed shoemaking, printing, bookbinding, tailoring, and other trades, laboring men fought to maintain their status.

Some workers formed mutual aid societies to provide assistance in times of illness, injury, or unemployment. Others participated in religious revivals or joined fraternal orders, such as the Masons and the Red Men, to find the camaraderie they once enjoyed at work. The expansion of voting rights in the 1820s offered another avenue for action. The first workingmen’s political party was founded in Philadelphia in 1827, and soon white farmers, mechanics, and workingmen started joining forces throughout the North to advocate for principles of liberty and equality. Self-educated artisans like Thomas Skidmore of New York City argued for the redistribution of property and the abolition of inheritance to equalize wealth in the nation. However, most workingmen’s parties focused on more practical proposals: government distribution of free land in the West, the abolition of compulsory militia service and imprisonment for debt, public funding for education, and the regulation of banks and corporations. Although the success of these parties at the polls was modest, by the 1830s Democrats and Whigs adopted many of their proposals.

Workingmen, like workingwomen, also formed unions to demand better wages and working conditions. In the 1820s and 1830s, skilled journeymen held mass meetings to protest employers’ efforts to extend the workday from ten to eleven hours, merge smaller workshops into larger factories, and cut wages. In New York City in 1834, labor activists formed a citywide federation, the General Trades Union, which provided support for striking workers. The National Trades Union was established later that year, with delegates representing more than twenty-five thousand workers across the North. These organizations aided skilled workers but refused admission to women and unskilled men.

Broad labor organizations proved difficult to sustain because of differences in skill and ethnicity as well as in age and marital status among members. Even workingmen’s parties, which recruited men across occupations and ages, refused to recruit laborers who could not vote—women, new immigrants, and most blacks. With the onset of the panic of 1837, the common plight of workers became clearer. But the economic crisis made unified action nearly impossible as individuals sought to hold on to what little they had by any means available.