“Bab” Andrews & the Strikebreakers

 

"University Athletes Ship as Stokers"

It sounded like a great adventure, one that would yield $30 per man and a bounty of stories to tell. The seven University of Chicago freshmen were already on the top of the world because they played for Amos Alonzo Stagg, one of the twentieth century’s most winning college coaches.

These guys were hot stuff: fullback Sherburne Wightman, quarter-miler “Tommy” Taylor, high jumper Arthur Sullivan, tackle Frank G. Burrows, shot-putter Burt Gale, and track star “Jimmy” Carroll.

And the group’s leader, freshman class president Barrett Clendenin “Bab” Andrews, told reporters that Stagg had recruited him for the baseball team.

Founded in 1892 with a $600,000 gift from the oilman John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago was young compared with the nation’s major research universities.

Rockefeller, who would donate $35 million more to Chicago during the next decade, chose as its president William Rainey Harper, a rotund 36-year old Semitology scholar and Baptist minister who had taught previously at Denison and Yale.

Rockefeller (left) and Harper walking
to Chicago's tenth anniversary celebration
(University of Chicago Special Collections)

The ambitious Harper set forth to innovate. He established departments of Egyptology and Sociology and one of the first university presses in the U.S. He poached many a professor. And he capitulated to the craze for college sports, with the university joining the Big Ten Conference in 1896.

The football team achieved fame and glory. They were the “Mighty Maroons” until 1946, when Chicago withdrew from the conference.

 

***

But now it is April of 1903 and an agent of the Marine Carriers Association, which represents the owners of the steamers that ply the Great Lakes, meets with Stagg and some of his athletes. Stokers have struck at the port in Buffalo, N.Y. Surely the coach’s brawny young men are up to the work of shoveling coal into the freighters’ furnaces. 

They were not the nation’s first student strikebreakers. In 1901, UC-Berkeley athletes had unloaded cargo on the San Francisco docks. The San Francisco Labor Council denounced the students but UC president Benjamin Wheeler cheered them on.

Two years later in Chicago, William Rainey Harper kept mum after the student “stokers” made the news. But when representatives of the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Material Trades Council demanded an explanation, Harper issued a statement:

-        *I was out of town when the athletes decided to act as strikebreakers

-        *The students did not consult with university officials

-        *University officials would have discouraged the students from proceeding

-        *The university places no requirements on students except that they behave like gentlemen and perform their duties

-        *Students may absent themselves from their studies but must accept the consequences

-        *The university is not responsible for its students’ opinions

-        *The university does not take a side on any question; students and professors are free to think and do as they see fit

As the editor of American Industries noted, “President Harper of Chicago University Gets Solidly on Both Sides of the Question.”

Indeed, Harper would have been foolish to laud the students despite Rockefeller’s (and possibly his own) anti-labor stance. The university was in the midst of a building spree with a gymnasium, commons, bell tower, and law school under construction, not to mention perennial modification of the wooden stands that encircled the football field. 

Chicago could not afford a strike and never again—to my knowledge—would its students cross a line. But others did.

Historian Stephen H. Norwood, University of Oklahoma, has written extensively about student strikebreakers.

Columbia students broke a subway workers strike in 1905. Harvard students were called upon by university president A. Lawrence Lowell to help break the Boston Policemen’s Strike of 1919. Students were paid or volunteered to be strikebreakers well into the 1920s.   

Norwood attributes student strikebreaking to several issues:

-        *the early-twentieth-century cult of Christian masculinity, of which President Theodore Roosevelt was a proponent

-        *the brutality of football

-        *bans on violent hazing practices which left a void for aggressive social behavior

Further, the 1900s saw the rise of the “gentlemen’s C.” Many male students were not serious about their education and spent much of their time in pursuit of adventure—“larks.”  

Class of 1906 president "Bab" Andrews, far left

“Bab” Andrews, leader of the Chicago strikebreakers, was the king of larks.

A few months before heading to Buffalo, he had rounded up ten students on behalf of the Wisconsin Central Railroad, whose officials were trying to identify an embezzling conductor. Andrews et al purportedly found the culprit and declared that they’d had a great time.

Not so fast, observed the editor of the Chicago Tribune:

 

Though the young man may flatter himself with the titles of detective and strike-breaker, he has really earned the degree of “Spotter” and “Scab” and all the dishonor pertaining thereto.

Indeed, anti-unionism among middle- and upper-class Americans lay at the heart of the strikebreakers’ capers. Most students who could afford to attend college at the turn of the twentieth century would likely side with capitalists over laborers.

Especially for the fun of it.  

Circa 1906

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/01/bab-andrews-strikebreakers.html?m=1

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?m=1