This Day in Labor History: June 6, 1844

On June 6, 1844, George Williams founded the Young Men’s Christian Association in London. While it was not really Williams’ intention, the YMCA would later become a critical allly in the corporate fight against radical unionization and the initial date of its founding is a good excuse to discuss this history.

Williams founded the YMCA as a way to address the problems of unmoored men in industrial cities. The supposed moral decline of the working class got a lot of attention from reformers. They didn’t really blame employers though. That was just the laws of capitalism. So here came the Christians, to show the workers the right way to live through reform mechanisms. We don’t have to romanticize working class cultures to critique what the Y was doing here. Not surprisingly, the horrible conditions of capitalism led to everything from alcoholism to prostitution. These were completely understandable responses to the reality the working class faced. But these weren’t great things to just let roll unchecked. One can see why reformer types would attempt to intervene. They had their blindspots, without question, which included largely believing that industrial capitalism was good for workers and then blaming workers for their own problems.

The Y took awhile to get going in the American workplace, but as it established itself in American cities, there became more interest from employers in using it as a way to tame their workers, especially in heavily male industries and in isolated areas, where both alcoholism and radicalism often were responses to the conditions of life and work. The response for the more Progressive employer was to embrace YMCA-type muscular Christianity as a way to tame these workers and at least theoretically uplift them, which also meant moving them away from radical politics.

Let’s get specific and look at the YMCA in the Pacific Northwest timber industry.

A central purpose of the YMCA was fighting radicalism through “proper leisure activities within a moral environment,” a program which took it from railroad camps to urban centers in the early twentieth century. The YMCA set up several programs in camps beginning in 1911 with the Doty Lumber and Shingle Company in Doty, Washington. Creating home meant providing a place to play in workers’ off hours that would distract them from drinking and radical politics. The Booth-Kelly Lumber Company had a mobile YMCA rail car where workers could visit for “physical, educational, and moral work,” which included everything from a circulating library to a pool table, and outdoor games including boxing, fencing, and log rolling. The YMCA worked with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to cleanse the camps of alcohol. Many timber operators supported temperance as a way to undermine violence in their camps and looked forward to Oregon and Washington’s temperance laws that went into effect in 1916. But they were surprised that drinking did not explain their workers’ radicalism, leading L.T. Hays to express indignation that, “The strike seems to exist whether or not we have the liquor question.” Although the IWW often spoke out against alcohol as a substance that distracted workers from political solutions, some Wobblies justified loggers drinking to forget their unsanitary lives. A 1910 Wobbly newspaper article told loggers to reject prohibition because moderate drinking was an acceptable response to their miserable living environments. Only when “loggers don’t have to sleep in dirty, lousy bunk houses, work hard and long hours like a black slave, and eat rotten grub like a hog in a garbage plant” would temperance make sense.

The YMCA openly sided with employers in the period’s labor battles, with its representatives actively working to keep labor in place. A YMCA general secretary named Sellwood overheard workers talking about moving onto another camp. He acted quickly. Three days later was July 4. He arranged with the camp cook to ship in a special order of ice and fresh fruit to make lemonade and cake and host a big dinner. He convinced the local train line to not stop at the camp on its next run. After the party, not a single worker hopped the train. The YMCA presented Sellwood’s story to timber operators as a prime example of how a general secretary on the ground, listening to the complaints of workers, could hold them in place by providing minor amenities, building loyalty and increasing profits.

But many operators wanted an immediate payoff to the YMCA production of loyal labor. R.R. Lewis stated to his fellow timbermen that he had two camps with the YMCA and one without it. He could not see any discernible difference. Lewis thought the organization’s benefits were good for his workers, but declaring himself “unable to look at it from the sentimental standpoint,” he “wanted to see that it gets in logs cheaper” in order to keep it. Other companies had greater expectations. One mill owner refused to continue paying for a YMCA secretary for his camps after that secretary refused to serve as a spy. He sent a letter excoriating the organization after the YMCA representative did not warn him of a upcoming strike, writing “If the secretary had had the company’s interests at heart and been onto his job he would have been close enough to the men to have prevented this walkout, or notified us of the existence of I.W.W. organizers.” The IWW saw the YMCA in essentially the same terms. It warned loggers in 1912 that the companies brought in the YMCA “to chloroform the workers,” noting, “Whenever the bosses organize their slaves into the Y.M.C.A…it is for the purpose of keeping peace in the interest of the boss and against the interest of the workers.”

The use of YMCA declined after World War I, but not as any rejection of it. The company unionism of the 1920s definitely integrated some of its ideas. The Red Scare and Prohibition helped reduce both of the structural problems that had led employers such as in the Northwestern timber industry to bring in the organization. Maybe more important than any of this was the rise of the inexpensive automobile such as the Model T Ford, which allowed workers to buy cars and commute to work, even in relatively rural places, reducing the all-male camps and general sense of isolation that had bred these conditions in the first place.

I borrowed from Sanford Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the 20th century to write this post. See also, Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920. The lumber industry material comes from my own book, Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests.

This is the 566th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.