The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a labor history discussion

The Road Not Taken: Pearl McGill and the Promise of Inclusive Unionism, 1894-1914

A conversation with labor historian Dr. Janet Weaver

Wednesday, March 8, 2023, 7pm

Register here to join this event on Zoom.

At the East Side Freedom Library, we like to say that we promote conversations between the past and the present. We hope you will read Janet Weaver’s essay and join her for a conversation about parallels between today’s organizing thrust and the efforts of workers in the WWI era.

Janet contextualizes her article: Young workers today are leading a surge in unionization campaigns at traditionally anti-union strongholds like Amazon and Starbucks.  The question these workers raise for today’s labor movement, says Association of Flight Attendants international president Sara Nelson, is whether it can keep up with them.

Nelson’s observation takes us back to an earlier upsurge of youth-led organizing campaigns during the Progressive Era. These proliferated as workers across the country rose up against almost insurmountable odds to demand the right to decent wages and working conditions through inclusive unionism.  As young women filled low-wage jobs in burgeoning industrial sectors, their enthusiasm for inclusive unionism was part of a vital impulse that swept the country.  That impulse propelled the uprising of women workers in the garment industry in New York and Chicago in 1909 and 1910, the textile industry in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and the button industry in Muscatine, Iowa in 1911.  In these industries, women emerged as leaders in what 17-year-old Iowa button worker and union leader Pearl McGill described as a “big fight for justice.”

Pearl McGill is emblematic of the many youthful voices of wage-earning women activists and militant labor leaders that rang out across the country. Like McGill, most of these women did not find a career path open to them through established labor institutions of their day and returned to unexceptional careers as teachers and housewives, largely disappearing from historical memory. A few, like McGill, left traces on the historical record that upend our understanding and interpretation of the events they helped shape. The letters of Pearl McGill were donated to the Iowa Women’s Archives by her niece Jean Burns following McGill’s induction into the Iowa Labor Hall of Fame at the 2006 convention of the Iowa Federation of Labor, which Jean Burns and Janet Weaver attended together. The letters had been carefully preserved by her family in this cigar box after McGill’s tragic murder in Buffalo, Iowa, in 1924, allegedly by her former husband. Courtesy of the Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa Libraries.

In “The Road Not Taken,” in the latest issue of Labor,  I argue that the radical unionism of Pearl McGill straddled two union cultures: those of inclusive unionism and of the AFL.  Her support for inclusive unionism was rooted in her experience in Iowa.  But it was also part of a longer tradition of early struggles for a living wage and workplace rights through collective action that pushed the boundaries of the exclusively white, male, and craft-dominated AFL through the Knights of Labor and federal unions.  When McGill actively participated with the IWW in the Lawrence strike, she confronted the limits of the AFL’s trade unionism.  Her role in the strikes of button workers in Iowa and textile workers in New England shines a light on the ways in which grassroots activists invested hope that AFL “federal labor unions” (local unions directly affiliated with the national AFL) might serve as a vehicle for their inclusive union aspirations.

McGill’s letters, archived at the Iowa State Historical Society and researched by Dr. Weaver,  reveal not only that McGill never adopted the nativist rhetoric and sentiments prevalent among some WTUL and AFL leaders but instead remained consistent in upholding the broad-based principles of inclusive unionism she had learned.

When connected with rich local history narratives such as that of the button workers of Muscatine, a fresh look at the institutional history of the labor organizations of this period reveals that the AFL’s eventual dominance resulted from a less certain and more contingent trajectory. The vulnerability of elite craft unions in the AFL (epitomized by the older, male-dominated craft unions in textiles and steel) comes into better focus as the full force of new mass production technologies swept the country and a new generation of radical, youthful semiskilled and unskilled mass production workers rose up to demand their rights.

Janet Weaver is curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries, where the papers of Pearl McGill are preserved.  She is the author of articles on Chicana activism in Iowa, and principal coordinator of the award-winning Migration is Beautiful website.  She is currently working with the Davenport Community School District to develop lesson plans about Black and Latino history in Iowa for K-12 teachers. Join us for what is certain to be a lively and productive conversation.