In Memory of Peter Lenihan

I looked everywhere for Peter F. Lenihan, a widely admired labor organizer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.   

The problem was that his name was misspelled in an old issue of the Union Telephone Operator, the trade journal for the telephone operators union.  But it was spelled correctly in the notice of his death.

In 1912, the IBEW sent Peter to Boston to work with a group of women operators who wanted to strike against the New England Bell Telephone Company.  Ultimately he recommended that they focus on forming a local – the Boston Telephone Operators Union – and try to negotiate with the company.

Years later, they remembered his patience, energy, and wisdom.

“Girls,” he told them, “there are only twenty-five of you now, remember you will not always remain this number, you will increase and in less than one year you will be the most progressive Local Union in Boston if not in the Brotherhood.”

Not striking but appealing to the public;
Seattle, 1916

Peter, a shop electrician, probably became active in the union during the late nineteenth century as the labor movement expanded in response to greater industrialization.  The IBEW was founded in 1891 and represented linemen, cable slicers, fixture hangers, trimmers, switchboard men and shop men.  

From sweatshops to meat processing plants, inhumane, unfair treatment and vile working conditions led to labor unrest.  Unions organized aggressively, and often failed.  

Some of the most famous incidents of labor strife occurred during the years surrounding the Panic of 1893, which was triggered by a credit shortage and awakened American workers to the prospect of long-term unemployment. 

The 1892 strike at the Carnegie-owned Homestead Steel Works culminated in death and defeat for the steelworkers. 

In 1894, 100,000 unemployed men led by a progressive-minded businessman named Jacob Coxey marched from Ohio to Washington, D. C.  They asked the U.S. government to provide jobs by investing in the nation’s poorly maintained roads, to no avail. 

Also in 1894, the American Railway Union struck against the Pullman Company.  President Cleveland ordered the army to break the strike and 90 workers were killed or injured.     

The Industrial Workers of the World
("Wobblies") was founded in 1905 with the
goal of being "one big union."

Brother Lenihan, as his colleagues might have called him, found a place in the middle of the action, working behind the scenes.  With a wife, Martha, and four young daughters at home in the Bronx, he tried not to put himself in harm’s way. 

When Peter arrived in Boston in April 1912, he found a list of grievances typical of its time:  excessive hours, low wages, unpaid overtime, petty penalties, no break time, and the company’s use of the dreaded “split trick,” as the split shift was known.  It forced employees to work two shifts per day with no guarantee of a stretch of consecutive hours.  The extra commuting time inflicted stress and exhaustion.

Everyone knew the conditions were bad.  In 1909, Congress had asked the Bureau of Labor to investigate the conduct of telephone companies.  The survey covered 34 Bell Telephone companies and nine AT&T companies nationwide.  Among the many problems cited were poor ventilation, the spread of tuberculosis through receivers and transmitters, eye strain related to flashing switchboard lights, ear strain related to buzzing and the callers’ poor enunciation, and verbal abuse from supervisors and callers alike.  Recent scholarship points to sexual abuse, as well.

While Peter always represented the IBEW, he also worked closely with the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in Boston in 1903.  The WTUL formed in response to the marginalization of working women; the nation’s largest union, the American Federation of Labor, focused on white men.

Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, and Emily Greene Balch, a peace and labor activist who taught sociology at Wellesley College, were among the WTUL’s first officers.  Professor Balch, who would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946, actually went into the field to interview telephone operators, needle workers and other factory women.    

Wellesley College, June 1912: Boston Union Telephone
Operators at an outing organized by Peter Lenihan

  

Perhaps it was Emily Greene Balch who urged Peter to organize an “outing” for the Boston telephone operators in June 1912.  What better place to spend the day than on Wellesley’s beautiful campus?    

Eventually Peter returned to New York.  In 1913 the Boston local struck with little success.  But the women roared back after the Great War, winning major concessions from Bell Telephone.

In 1914, Peter unexpectedly died at home at the age of 39.  In the Union Telephone Operator, his friends in Boston recalled his kindness and strategic thinking.  They wrote:   

The telephone operators always had a “friend in court” in Peter F. Lenihan, and his untimely death was a serious blow to those of us whose happy privilege it had been to work under his guidance.

Telephone operators at work, 1920

See post: 5/16/18
 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/06/in-memory-of-peter-lenihan.html

I'd Like to Place a Call

Bell Telephone used this idealized image of the telephone
operator in its publications; World War I era

In January 1921, a trade journal called the Union Telephone Operator made its debut.  It hit the ground running, Vol. 1, No. 1, with an editorial that surely provoked J. Edgar Hoover:

The trade unionist is interested in other things than shop conditions.  Every economic, political and social question attracts him.  This type of worker is not favored by anti-union employers, anti-union newspapers, anti-union business men, anti-union bankers and their political agents  . . .  Those interests want a slave class, not in name but in fact. 

Although the FBI would not be formally established for another few years, in 1921 Hoover was chief of the General Intelligence Division within President Warren Harding’s Department of Justice.  There he dedicated himself to rooting out radical political activity and oversaw the Palmer Raids, through which more than 500 foreign nationals were arrested and deported.

In light of the focus on “Reds” – Communists, Bolsheviks, anarchists and leftists – unions inevitably fell under scrutiny.

Agitate! Educate! Organize!  The goal of the new journal was to inspire telephone operators to demand better wages, better hours, and better working conditions.  The workers were largely women and had been since 1878 when the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company hired a woman named Emma Nutt.  The job appealed particularly to women who did not wish to work in manufacturing.

But problems existed.  The women had to conform to certain body proportions because they worked in very tight quarters.  They were required to maintain perfect posture throughout nine-hour shifts.  They were not allowed to speak to each other and always had to be patient and polite, even to rude customers.  These were several of the indignities.  

Switchboard operators, 1914
(Source: Library of Congress)

In 1892, the operators became members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. They had no voice, however, largely because men feared “petticoat rule.”  

Then, in 1918, activists formed a Telephone Operators’ Department within the IBEW.  Julia O’Connor, the daughter of Irish immigrants, led the new department.  A determined strategist and talented writer, she had worked as a telephone operator since 1908 until she became disgusted and left to be an organizer.   

Among O’Connor’s victories was the 1919 telephone operators’ strike in Boston.  In a way, the strike brings to mind the New York City Blizzard of 1888, which brought daily life to a dead stop for more than a week.  During the 1919 Boston telephone operators’ strike, communications ground to a halt for two days, which paralyzed New England.  

The outcome of the Boston telephone operators’ strike affected the local only, although it inspired operators nationwide. The local came away with higher wages, an eight-hour day, and the right to organize. But the strike also convinced the telephone company that it couldn’t afford to depend on the operators. 

Indeed, the heyday of the telephone operator had already passed.  Even in the first issue of the Union Telephone Operator, Julia O’Connor explained why: the advent of “the automatic” – also known as the dial telephone.

The union assured telephone operators that their services would be needed for at least another generation, as it would take a long time to phase in the automatic system.  In fact, operators continued to handle many local calls and all long distance calls.  And it wasn’t till 1954 that New York Telephone finally abandoned the switchboard, as shown in this amusing instructional film, “How to Dial Your Telephone": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuYPOC-gCGA   

The Union Telephone Operator did not last long.  Its final issue appeared in December 1922. Julia O'Connor wrote many of the articles, expressing chagrin that American laborers lived in the "back wash" of World War I. 

1921 sketch of a telephone operator

On immigration she was ambivalent, even as the daughter of immigrants. The Johnson Quota Act of 1921 restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe.  By and large, organized labor supported these restrictions because immigrants would work for less money than would unionized workers.

But she celebrated the Sheppard-Towner Act, which funded health clinics to provide maternity and child care. O’Connor knew from the 1920 census that more women than ever – over 8 million – occupied the workforce.  Like most labor activists, she lobbied for a safety net for women and children.  Sheppard-Towner passed in 1921.  

And Julia O’Connor was not without a certain sense of humor.  On the back page of one issue, a “Marriage Notice” appeared:

Miss Low Wages and Mr. Nonunion Worker were married at the home of the bride, Industrial Centers.  Mr. 100% Profit Employer, the father, gave the bride away without any ceremony.  Mr. Longer Hours blessed the union.

Scandal mongers are circulating the rumor that the couple are not happy because the newly wed husband has been flirting with Miss Join D. Union.  The bride’s father however is reported to be opposed to any talk of divorce.

Unsurprisingly, Julia O’Connor became a New Dealer.  She died in 1972.   

Julia O'Connor

 
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/05/id-like-to-place-call.html

The Cigar Maker

My grandfather (right), cigar store proprietor;
the helpers wearing aprons worked with the cigars -- early 1920s

 

Genealogical research yields are so many small revelations, like when I found out that my mother’s father had been widowed before he married her mother, and that the wife who died had been pregnant.

Those types of discoveries, not advertised by Ancestry.com, have the potential to shock and hurt. However, that is not always the case.

Me:       Mom, what would you say if I told you that your father had been married previously?

Mom:   At my age, nothing would surprise me.

Her father, Joseph Stromberg, emigrated along with nearly two million Jews from Russia to the United States during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. During these years, Russian Jews were subjected to unspeakably violent pogroms conducted by the Cossacks, which Czar Nicholas tacitly encouraged. The Ukrainian town of Letichev, where Joseph lived, underwent a wave of brutality between 1903 and 1906.

Joseph’s story is not remarkable; notable perhaps because he was just 14 years old and traveled alone. On November 5, 1906, he boarded the ship Smolensk, which departed from the port of Libau, in western Latvia on the Baltic Sea, arriving at Ellis Island on November 23.

The next time Joseph showed up was in 1916, petitioning for naturalization. He renounced all allegiance and fidelity to “Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias.” And his occupation was “cigar manufacturer.”

Cigar manufacturing in the United States, like much of what is learned about American history, reveals itself to be a story about labor strife. Often, cigar makers worked in the tenements where they lived and the entire family participated. Ribbons of leaves were stripped from the stems, the smaller leaves crushed and assembled, and the ribbons carefully rolled around the filler and secured with vegetable paste.

Larger shops had division of labor. “Casers” prepared the leaves by moistening and bending them. “Strippers” removed the large ribs of the leaves and stems. “Bunchbreakers” prepared the filler. “Rollers” rolled the filler, wrapped the strips of leaves around it, and cut the open ends. “Packers” put the finished cigars in boxes.

The English-born Samuel Gompers, who became the first president of the American Federation of Labor, started as a shoemaker’s apprentice at the age of seven but switched to cigar making when his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1863.

Within a few years Gompers had become a master cigar maker and moved to a larger shop where he was influenced by German socialists. In 1875, when the Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU) merged with United Cigar Makers of New York, Local 144, Samuel Gompers became its president.

Subsequently, Gompers began lobbying the New York State Legislature to ban cigar manufacturing in tenement houses. In 1882, he published a report about the working conditions of tenement cigar makers.

No. 90 Cannon St. is a five story double tenement house. Fifteen families live in the house, an average of four on each floor. Each family has a room and a bedroom; the size of the room is 11 by 13 feet, the bedroom 5-1/2 by 7-1/2 feet . . . *

The families worked from 6 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. The rooms were filthy, filled with tobacco residue. Worst of all were the discarded tobacco stems, which became rotten and moldy, discarded in piles in the corners of the rooms.

In 1883, the New York State Legislature passed a bill abolishing cigar making in tenements. But the manufacturers danced around it and despicable conditions persisted. Cigar manufacturers and the CMIU continued to do battle for years.

Cigar Makers Journal, published by the Cigar Makers International Union
between 1875 and 1972

Who knows if Joseph Stromberg worked in tenement conditions? I think not (perhaps I would rather think not) because he lived in a part of Brooklyn where there were houses, no tenements. Either way, he made cigars until 1919 when he married Sarah Litowitz, the daughter of a shirt manufacturer who owned a factory that employed 77 people.

In the 1920 census, Joseph described his occupation as collar manufacturing, so he probably went to work for his father-in-law.   

But Sarah died of eclampsia in the spring of 1920. That is a dangerous condition of pregnancy involving very high blood pressure.

Joseph stopped making collars and returned to cigars, but this time he started his own shop with its own brand, “Dick Robin.”

He remarried in 1927. He met my grandmother because he was a boarder in my great-grandmother’s house.

Joseph remained a cigar store proprietor until the early 1930s, when he went into the luncheonette business. But that’s another story.

My grandfather advertised his own cigar brand,
"Dick Robin," in The Retail Tobacconist, 1922.

*Cannon Street is now an alley on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/06/the-cigar-maker.html