General Trades Union Strike (1835)

Essay

The first general strike in the United States occurred in Philadelphia in 1835 when the short-lived General Trades’ Union (GTU) of the City and County of Philadelphia led a citywide general strike to demand a ten-hour workday. The successful action set a precedent followed by other labor organizations in the nation later in the nineteenth century.

A black and white advertisement for the Morris Iron Works. Top image shows the interior of a factory with a foreman speaking to workers at machines, lower image depicts a worker operating a large smelter.
Life was difficult for working-class men in the early nineteenth century. Workdays were long and wages were slim, and they labored under the constant threat of imprisonment for minor debts. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

The GTU strike occurred after several failed attempts to organize working people through the creation of a Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations and a Working Men’s Party. In 1833 Philadelphia labor leaders met in hopes of reigniting the city’s nascent labor movement, and they created the GTU the following spring. The GTU, which broke barriers as one of the first labor organizations to accept unskilled workers, became the most remarkable citywide union of its time.

The strike began as an impromptu affair in late May 1835 when coal heavers of the Schuylkill docks went on strike for a ten-hour day. As they paraded down the streets of the city on June 3, cordwainers, carpenters, and other tradesmen followed with the shouts of “We are all day laborers!” Throughout the week leaders of the GTU used labor presses, posters, and parades complete with drum and fife corps demanding a ten-hour day, to rally Philadelphia workers to join their brethren in the fight. By June 10 over forty trades and nearly twenty thousand workers, including city employees, joined the strike. Shortly after city workers struck, the Common Council announced that workers employed under the authority of the City Corporation would be granted a ten-hour day. By the end of June, most laborers received the concessions they asked for, and membership in the GTU soared.

Portrait of John Swift, Mayor of Philadelphia during the General Trades Union Strike.
John Swift, mayor of Philadelphia during the General Trades Union strike of 1836, set high bails for arrested strikers but failed to break the strike. (New York Public Library)

With this initial success, worker solidarity expanded to include unskilled workers, traditionally omitted from unionizing efforts. In the spring of 1836 Schuylkill dockers clashed with coal merchants when they sought a wage advance from their employers. When dockers struck, merchants won the assistance of Mayor John Swift (1790-1873), who had eight day laborers arrested and set their bail at an exceedingly high rate of $2,500 in hopes of breaking the strike. Swift’s plan backfired, however, as the high bail made martyrs of those arrested. The GTU came to their aid, admitted the dockers into the organization, and helped fund their defense, which proved successful when they were acquitted of both breaching the peace and of charges of conspiracy.

GTU power helped to organize the city’s labor and gained the workers of Philadelphia the ten-hour day. Every strike funded and supported by the GTU in the seven months following the general strike ended in victory for the workers, including that of the unskilled dockers. But the organization met a sad end. Many who joined the union left once concessions were made. Workers also faced a backlash from employers who formed masters associations to defeat striking workers. By 1837 only thirty unions remained, down from fifty-one in 1836. That year the first effects of the Panic of 1837 were felt by city workers, and within a year the organization was dead.

While the GTU of Philadelphia proved short-lived, its significance to organized labor movements reached into the next century. The General Strike of 1835, the nation’s first general strike, proved successful and was employed by other American labor movements in the postbellum years, most notably in St. Louis in 1877 and throughout the nation in 1919. By admitting unskilled dockers into their union, the GTU of Philadelphia set a precedent not replicated until after the Civil War when it became a primary objective of the Knights of Labor. Together, the general strike and the inclusion of unskilled laborers in unions ultimately proved effective for organized labor during another dire period for American workers: the Great Depression.

Patrick Grubbs is a Ph.D. candidate at Lehigh University who is writing his dissertation entitled “The Duty of the State: Policing the State of Pennsylvania from the Coal and Iron Police to the Establishment of the Pennsylvania State Police Force, 1866–1905.” He has been employed at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, since 2009 and has taught Pennsylvania history there since 2011.

Copyright 2017, Rutgers University

Gallery

Men At Work

Library Company of Philadelphia

Philadelphia was in many ways the vanguard of the American labor movement. It was here that the first labor strike was executed in 1786. In 1806, the Philadelphia Mayor’s Court ruled that striking cordwainers were guilty of conspiring to force a wage increase. And in 1828, Philadelphia’s Working Men’s Party became the nation’s first labor party. As industrialization increased, workers were subjected to grueling workdays that could exceed fourteen hours for coal heavers. The Working Men’s Party campaigned for the rights of the working class by running reform candidates in the city’s elections. Their platform was not limited to labor policy, but extended to other concerns of the city’s poor. Though the union was destroyed by factionalism after just three years, many of its platforms were passed shortly after the union's demise, including free public school for all children, the elimination of debtor’s prisons, and a ten-hour workday.

John Swift, Mayor of Philadelphia

New York Public Library

John Swift was born in Philadelphia and served as the city’s mayor from 1832 to 1838, then 1839 to 1841, and 1845 to 1849, as well as being a prominent lawyer.

In the spring of 1836 Schuylkill dockers clashed with coal merchants when they sought a wage advance from their employers. When dockers struck, merchants won the assistance of Swift, who had eight day laborers arrested and set their bail at an exceedingly high $2,500 in hopes of breaking the strike. Swift’s plan backfired, however, as the high bail made martyrs of those arrested. The GTU came to their aid, admitted the dockers into the organization, and helped fund their defense, which proved successful when they were acquitted of breaching the peace and conspiracy charges.

Founders of the Knights of Labor

Library of Congress

While the General Trades Union of Philadelphia proved short-lived, its significance to organized labor movements reached into the next century. The General Strike of 1835, the nation’s first general strike, proved successful and was employed by other American labor movements in the postbellum years, most notably in St. Louis in 1877 and throughout the nation in 1919. By admitting unskilled dockers into their union, the GTU of Philadelphia set a precedent not replicated until after the Civil War when it became a primary objective of the Knights of Labor, the first national industrial union in the United States.

The founders of the Knights of Labor are shown here in an 1886 lithograph. Together, the general strike and the inclusion of unskilled laborers in unions ultimately proved effective for organized labor during another dire period for American workers: the Great Depression.

To the Mechanics and Working-Men of the Fifth Ward

Library of Congress

In the decades preceding the General Trades Union Strike, the printing of broadside became a tool of the working-class to promote and share ideas among the people. This particular broadside from the 1820s was politically motivated and called upon the Mechanics and Working Men of Philadelphia's Fifth Ward to condemn the utopian beliefs of Robert Owen.

This broadside states, "It must be known to you, that Robert Owen, acting under the influence of one of the wildest fancies that ever entered into the imagination of man, conceived himself capable of subverting entirely the organization of civilized society, and reorganizing it upon a plan of his own view." The utopian views of Owen and his son R.D. Owen were seen as anti-thetical to the values of the "mechanics and working men" of Philadelphia, so in order to prevent the spread of these values, they were pushing for the election of Anthony Lamb to become alderman, as his values and interests were aligned with the working class of Philadelphia.

Former Site of the Schuylkill Wharves

Along this section of the Schuylkill River in May 1835, coal heavers on the wharves went on strike for a ten-hour day. The dockers were joined by the city’s other tradesmen and eventually won the ten-hour limit. A year later in the spring of 1836 the dockers sought a wage advance from their employers, leading to more labor conflict. In the twenty-first century, this stretch of the riverbank became known as the Schuylkill Banks, a popular river-trail park bound on one side by water and on the other side by train tracks, a reminder of the river’s industrial past.

In this April 2015 photograph showing the section roughly between Walnut Street and South Street, the tracks on which the string of oil tankers sat run to refining facilities just south of central Philadelphia. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia)

Related Topics

Themes

Time Periods

Locations

Essays

Related Reading

Bernstein, Leonard. “The Working People of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the General Strike of 1835.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 74, No.3 (July 1950).

Commons, John. “Labor Organization and Labor Politics, 1827 – 1837.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Feb., 1907).

Davis, Susan G. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Laurie, Bruce. Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

_________.  Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Nicholson, Philip. Labor’s Story in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991.

Rondinone, Troy. The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865 – 1950. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788 – 1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Related Places

Site of Schuylkill Wharves, east bank of Schuylkill River, Philadelphia.

Links

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