The Last Union Town

SO MUCH IN Philadelphia changed, in the days following the Revolutionary War, that some critical events have faded into oblivion. Consider the Cordwainers Conspiracy Trial, which may have shaped the city as much as anything that happened next door in Independence Hall.

Cordwainers made boots and shoes. They made each pair by hand, back then, to fit their customers’ feet. There were a lot of cordwainers, since every citizen needed footwear. Shortly after the war, though, a few cordwainers in Philadelphia realized they could sell more shoes, more efficiently, by employing a crew of less-skilled makers to turn out stock shoes, which they could ship wholesale to customers around the infant America.

Almost immediately, in 1794, some of those crew members did something novel: They formed the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers, the first American union. In 1799 they went on a strike, during which they tried to prevent non-Society workers — called “scabs” even then — from working. They did the same in 1805, using rougher tactics, and eight of the Society’s leaders were brought to court on charges of “threats, menaces and unlawful means”: the first showdown between management and labor in America.

Two teams of Philadelphia lawyers raged for and against the Society members’ behavior: They had harassed non-Society workers, roughed them up, thrown potatoes studded with boot nails through their windows.

The case closed in a near-stalemate, with the Society men told to pay $8 and the lawyers’ fees, but allowed to continue their Society work. They had created a model for how labor in Philadelphia — and the country — could organize. And they had demonstrated the importance of solidarity in the workforce, exemplified in a subtle slogan: “Organize or die.”


ETHNICITY DIDN’T ALWAYS threaten the city’s unions. Quite the opposite: It once saved them.

As decades passed, some of Philadelphia’s prominence waned, as the industrial belt rusted and the city had no automobile or steel industry to keep it growing. But Philadelphia’s unions — particularly the building trade unions — would outlast those elsewhere, because the city had a core stronger, even, than steel: It had the Irish. It had the Italians. It had the Polish. That is, it had neighborhoods.

“Sheet-metal workers, carpenters, masons, electricians. Great strength,” says Walter Licht, the Annenberg professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. “That strength came from ethnic kinship.”

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