Shoe Workers

SHOE WORKERS. One of the earliest unions to embrace socialist doctrines, and one of the rare socialistic Irish-dominated unions, the Boot and Shoe Workers Union (B&SWU) reflected the strength of the nineteenth-century socialist movement. Shoemaking, one of the earliest industries organized on a substantial scale, had seen a durable labor institution, the Knights of St. Crispin, and a republican radicalism of sorts, for decades before the appearance of the socialist movement. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, shoe workers also faced a specific, potentially radicalizing condition of accelerated mechanization. Shoe workers formed the largest single segment of the Knights of Labor in Massachusetts. But with the failure of the Knights to consolidate their position, three distinct shoe workers’ organizations remained in the field. Successful consolidation took place amid an 1890s boomlet of socialistic sympathies in the labor movement. James F. Carey, later a Socialist state legislator, was among the leaders of the new B&SWU formed in Boston in April 1895, as was Carlton Beals (not to be confused with the journalist of the same name), later a Socialist city marshal of Brockton.

From a political standpoint, the shoe workers provided the most important consolidated constituency for the strong Massachusetts urban socialist movement of the 1890s. As shoe workers had since the 1870s turned toward plans of cooperation to offset the emerging factory system, so shoemakers of the 1890s turned toward socialism in hopes of reducing or reversing the swift decline of conditions and wages.

Socialist influence within the B&SWU faded amid mass unemployment and an internecine conflict with the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). The SLP’s Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, unable to woo the B&SWU from the American Federation of Labor, established a dual union, the General Council of Shoe Workers, both unsuccessful in its own right and destructive in its sectarian approach. At a high point of the controversy, Daniel De Leon himself publicly debated shoe workers’ leaders.

Abandoning the SLP, these leaders attempted for a time to guide a socialist union within the labor mainstream. Joining the Social Democratic Party in Massachusetts, they helped greatly to rally support in the election of John C. Chase, a former shoe worker, as mayor of Haverhill, Carey and Louis Scates as state legislators, and Carey repeatedly as city councilman in Haverhill. During this period, Massachusetts gave the socialist movement a higher vote than did any other state.

Shortly after 1900, many shoe workers joined with others in abandoning the socialist movement, one of the Socialist Party’s first major defeats and the eclipse of New England as a center of Socialist strength. The Catholic Church rallied enormous energies against socialism, just as it would do against communism, especially among Irish, French Canadian, and, later, Italian workers. (Attempts by Socialists to field “labor priests” proved a failure in the face of hierarchical opposition.) After 1903, the Socialist Party had passed its peak in Massachusetts, and the leaders of the B&SWU had accepted capitalism (indeed, a number of them eventually took business positions) and Democratic candidates vaguely committed to labor sympathies.

A more conservative, dues-conscious, and undemocratic internal regime followed within the B&SWU, prompting the Industrial Workers of the World and militant socialists to contest for power outside and within the union. Denied victory for elected leadership of the union in 1907, rebels established a radical-led United Shoe Workers of America in 1909, primarily among the highly skilled lasters. In time, the differences between the two organizations lessened, the two weak unions barely surviving the 1920s to grow modestly in the 1930s and the early 1940s. In the postwar period, Communist officers were quickly purged, and the union fell into a decline that runaway shops greatly exacerbated.

Davis, Horace. Shoes, the Workers, and the Industry. New York: International Publishers, 1940.

Laslett, John. Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881–1924. New York: Basic Books, 1970.