International Typographical Union

INTERNATIONAL TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION. The oldest and historically one of the most democratic unions in the United States, the Typographical Union (ITU) had many antecedents. Following a journeymen printers’ strike in Philadelphia in 1786—recognized as the first recorded strike in U.S. history—many more or less short-lived local printers’ unions or benefit societies were organized.

The delegates from fourteen local unions who formed the National Typographical Union in 1852 (it changed its name to International in 1869 after several Canadian locals had affiliated) assembled in response to a militant “Address to the Journeymen Printers of the United States” drawn up in 1850. Written largely by Martin F. Conway, of Baltimore—later renowned as an abolitionist, lawyer, and judge, a close friend of John Brown’s and a major figure in Kansas politics—the “Address” noted the “perpetual antagonism between labor and capital” and called for the “ultimate redemption of labor” by workers’ self-organization. His class-struggle perspective was quietly ignored by the new organization, but the ITU from the start had many unique features that distinguish it from all other American labor organizations.

ITU law, for example, drawing in part on the oldest traditions of the printers’ craft—the “art preservative of all arts,” the herald of freedom, and the “the tyrant’s foe”—going back to its origins in the late Renaissance and early Reformation, has always had a markedly ultrademocratic tendency. Regular “chapel” (i.e., job site) union meetings on company time, as well as direct referendum vote in all elections and on constitutional changes, gave rank-and-file printers a say in everyday decision-making scarcely dreamt of by most American trade-unionists.

Union printers, moreover, exercised a control of the workplace rarely approached and never surpassed by any other sector of the organized labor movement. On daily newspapers, always the ITU’s stronghold, ITU law provided for automatic work-stoppage if an employer so much as set foot in the composing room. The closed shop and traveling-card system enabled “tramp printers”—a great majority of ITU members “tramped” for a time after completing their apprenticeships, and not a few for the whole of their working lives—to secure work at newspaper and printing offices throughout the country simply by depositing their card with the chapel chairman, bypassing the personnel office altogether. Well into the 1960s there were many thousands of union printers who had never suffered the humiliation of “applying” for a job.

The ITU’s strong internal democracy and high degree of workplace control help explain why so many radicals have found it a congenial organization. The same factors also help explain why, notwithstanding its leadership’s often noncommittal and sometimes downright conservative attitude toward controversial national and international political issues, the ITU long remained the most consistently progressive and least corrupt of all craft unions.

A dictionary of American radicals would contain far more members of the ITU than of any other union. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth, when the ITU was one of the largest and most powerful unions in North America, printers were prominent all across the spectrum of the Left, distinguishing themselves especially as editors of influential radical and labor papers. Among the many ITU members who enjoyed national and in some cases even international reputations as radicals in the 1880s–1890s were Joseph R. Buchanan of the International Workingmen’s Association (the “Red International”); “single-taxer” Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty and many other works; Haymarket martyr Albert R. Parsons; individualist-anarchist Jo Labadie, one of the best-loved personalities of the Detroit Federation of Labor and principal contributor to the Detroit Labor Leaf; and Alzina P. Stevens, organizer and Master Workman of the Joan of Arc Woman’s Assembly of the Knights of Labor, editor of the Chicago Vanguard, and a mainstay of Jane Addams’s Hull House.

After the turn of the century, printers provided much of the leadership of the new Socialist Party. A founding member of the party, and its frequent candidate for office, George Koop was for decades one of the most notable “characters” in the Chicago Federation of Labor. William J. Ghent authored a number of works of socialist theory and criticism, including Our Benevolent Feudalism, which influenced Jack London’s Iron Heel. Ben Hanford was a popular Socialist Party pamphleteer and Eugene Debs’s vice presidential running mate in the 1908 election. Cleveland Citizen editor Max Hayes, an ITU international officer and Sam Gompers’s most serious rival for leadership of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), ran for the U.S. vice presidency on the Labor party ticket in 1920.

Emma F. Langdon, socialist author of an admirable firsthand account, The Cripple Creek Strike, was Denver ITU Local 49’s delegate to the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Louis C. Fraina, a principal founder of the Communist Labor Party in 1919, had a card from New York Typographical Union No. 6. The anarchist presence maintained in the union by Labadie was reinforced by Steven T. Byington, an officer of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, local who is best known for his translation of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own.

Although the influence of radicals within the ITU has varied greatly over the years, union printers have consistently stood in the forefront of the great struggles of the broader labor movement. Their role in the prolonged crusade for the eight-hour day was second to none, and they continued to uphold the demand for still-shorter hours after the eight-hour day was won. In 1945, when most unions no longer gave even lip-service to a further reduction of working time, ITU members initiated an eventually successful drive for a seven-hour day.

The ITU was the only craft union that supported the Committee for (later Congress of) Industrial Organizations (CIO); ITU president Charles P. Howard served as the first secretary of that body. Although the printers’ union did not actually join the CIO, in 1938 its members refused, by overwhelming referendum vote, to pay the AFL’s anti-CIO “war tax,” whereupon the AFL expelled the ITU, one of its founding affiliates. According to the study Union Democracy, CIO organizers found that “when they entered cities and towns in anti-union areas such as the South, the one place they could obtain any help was the ITU local in town. Many ITU leaders in the South became temporary and in some cases permanent organizers for CIO unions.”

No union was hit harder by the 1947 Taft-Hartley “Slave Labor” Act, and no union worked harder to overturn it. One of three unions that refused to sign the Taft-Hartley affidavits—the others were the United Mine Workers and the IWW—the ITU led organized labor’s first major anti–Taft-Hartley strike in a twenty-two-month battle with the Chicago newspapers that began in November 1947.

On broader social issues the ITU has generally pursued a policy far in advance of other unions, though not always as far in advance as its more radical members would have preferred. African Americans were welcomed into the union at an early date, but remained a very small minority of the membership. Among black ITU members was West Indian-born Otto Huiswood, pioneer American Communist, member of the African Blood Brotherhood, and the first American black to meet Lenin.

The ITU was the first national union to admit women (1869); the first to elect a woman, Augusta Lewis, to national office (1870); and the first to demand equal pay for men and women doing equal work (1873). More recently, Jean Tussey of Cleveland Typographical Union No. 53 and Mollie West of Chicago Local 16, both longtime radicals, helped found the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974.

The ITU’s once-numerous foreign-language locals—German, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Czech, and Yiddish—were an important part of the union for many years; only the New York Italian local survives. The German and Yiddish locals tended to be among the most radical printing trade unions. For several years before it received a charter from the ITU in 1894, Chicago Deutsche-Amerikaner Typographia No. 9, of which Haymarket martyr Adolph Fischer was a member, carried on as an independent anarchist union.

The contributions of union printers to workers’ culture, and indeed, to American culture as a whole, are enormous. Such popular authors as Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Fredric Brown were all card-carrying, dues-paying Typographical Unionists. The clubs that once flourished in every ITU local—chess clubs, singing clubs, athletic clubs, mutual aid societies, the Old-Time Printers Association, and so on—reflected a kind of trade union utopianism in which the union truly was the vital center of working-class life. ITU brass bands were for years an indispensable part of every Labor Day parade. Formed in 1908, the Union Printers International Baseball League is still around today, the oldest amateur baseball league in the country. Finally, it was printers, more than anyone else, who made America’s working public conscious of the significance of the union label as an emblem of solidarity and craft pride.

Severely weakened by the ongoing Cold War against labor that started with Taft-Hartley, and ravaged by rapid technological changes in the printing industry throughout the same period, the ITU survived as a dignified but increasingly powerless relic of a once-great union. Several of its strikes in the 1960s and 1970s were notable for their militancy and creativity, and many ITU locals have continued to exemplify the finest traditions of progressive unionism. But steadily declining membership as the industry bows to electronics and computerization has placed ever-narrower limits on the printers’ field of action. After unsuccessful attempts at merger with the Newspaper Guild, the Graphic Communications International Union, and even the Teamsters, in 1986 the ITU became the Printing, Publishing and Media Workers Sector of the Communication Workers of America. All but a few of its locals, however, have retained the time-honored name of Typographical Union.

Guérin, Daniel. One Hundred Years of Labor in the USA. Translated by Alan Adler. London: InkLinks, 1979.

Kelber, Harry, and Carl Schlesinger. Union Printers and Controlled Automation. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Upset, Seymour Martin, Martin Trow, and James Coleman. Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union. New York: Doubleday, 1956.

Rosemont, Henry. Benjamin Franklin and the Philadelphia Typographical Strikers of 1786. Chicago: Union Printers’ Historical Society, 1980.

Tracy, George A. History of the Typographical Union. Indianapolis: International Typographical Union, 1913.

International Typographical Union Local 99 Records. University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/search/results.aspx?t=k&q=WAUTypographicalUnionInternationalLocal99Northwest3178.xml