About The Workingman's Advocate

The Workingman's Advocate

The Workingman's Advocate was a labour newspaper founded in 1864 in Chicago by the Chicago Typographical Union, the printers' organisation, and edited by A. C. Cameron, a leader of that union. Historians regard it as the first significant labour journal in Chicago and the primary voice of the Chicago labour movement and the Chicago Trades Assembly through the 1860s and into the early 1870s. Born from the typographical union's strike against the Chicago Times, it passed to Andrew Cameron's control when that strike failed in December 1864, and under him it campaigned nationally for producer cooperatives, the eight-hour day and an independent labour party, advocated for and reported the formation of the National Labor Union, allied in 1874 with the Industrial Congress of the United States, and continued publication until 1879 in the University of Illinois's account, though reference summaries often date its effective end to the mid-1870s.

The Advocate's importance outruns its lifespan. Labor historians treat it as one of the most important labour newspapers of the 1860s and 1870s, both for its influence on the movement and as a source of information about it, and its files, digitised with National Endowment for the Humanities funding through the National Digital Newspaper Program, are now a central primary source for the history of post-Civil War Chicago labour and the national eight-hour movement.

Founded by Printers in a Strike Year, 1864

The Workingman's Advocate was founded in 1864 by the Chicago Typographical Union. The context was conflict: the printers were engaged in a strike against the Chicago Times, and a union paper served the strike as both bulletin and weapon, carrying the union's case to workers and the public when the city's commercial press sided with employers. Richard Schneirov's scholarship on Chicago labour, the standard account on which this directory's fact base draws, identifies the Advocate, founded by the typographical union in that year, as the first significant labour journal in the city.

Printers were the aristocracy of nineteenth-century labour: literate, organised, comparatively well paid and in control of the means of publication itself. That the city's first significant labour paper came from their union is therefore no accident. The typographers could write, set and print their own argument, and the Advocate's founding demonstrated the craft's unique capacity to give a whole movement a voice.

Andrew C. Cameron Takes Control

The union's strike against the Times ended unsuccessfully in December 1864, and control of the Workingman's Advocate passed to Andrew Cameron. Cameron, an active member of the Typographical Union and himself one of the striking Times employees, had been involved with the paper from its founding, and he brought far greater ambition than the original editors, whose scope had been focused narrowly on the strike. Under Cameron the Advocate outgrew its strike-bulletin origins to become a general labour journal of national reach.

Cameron became prominent in the labour movement nationally, especially in the formation of the National Labor Union, and he later organised the Chicago Grand Eight Hour League in 1865 as a political organisation independent of the major parties, operating through fourteen branches across the city and holding mass meetings for eight-hour reform. After the Advocate, he went on to become a founding editor of the Inland Printer, widely considered the most important newspaper of the printing trades. His career links the Advocate to both the political and the craft wings of American labour organising.

Voice of the Trades Assembly

The Advocate was the primary voice of the Chicago labour movement and of the Chicago Trades Assembly, the coalition formed in the wake of the 1864 strike, which by the following year counted some 8,500 members in twenty-four unions. The Trades Assembly and the Advocate worked as a pair, the assembly organising and the paper arguing, reporting and recruiting. Through the 1860s and into the 1880s the assembly remained the crucial advocate of labour reform in Chicago, though its strength rose and fell with economic conditions, and in the Advocate's years it possessed a journal worthy of its ambitions.

Schneirov's analysis defines the constituency precisely: the Trades Assembly and the Advocate served relatively privileged workers, the city's best organised, best paid and most stably employed trades, dominated by the native-born. Apprenticeships ran to members' sons and connections, and women, convicts, children and non-Anglo immigrants were largely excluded from the craft unions, with exceptions for the English, Welsh and Scottish born. The Advocate's reformism carried the limits of its base, a fact historians note because the excluded workers' alternative, ethnically based unions became a rival pole of Chicago labour in the same years.

Reform, Not Revolution

The Trades Assembly and the Advocate did not attempt to challenge the underlying basis of Chicago's economic and political systems. They fought for candidates and for legislation to ameliorate the plight of the workingman in Chicago, not for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism or representative democracy. The paper campaigned for ameliorative legislation, labour-reform candidates and, centrally, the eight-hour day, representing the skilled, native-born trades in a politics of improvement within the existing order.

Within that frame, Cameron held one uncompromising position: political independence. He believed only a separate labour party could keep the movement independent of the nation's dominant parties, and the Advocate argued editorially for the eight-hour workday, producer cooperatives and the formation of such a party with equal energy. Reformist in economics, separatist in politics: the combination defined the labour-reform tendency that Schneirov's Urban Revolt anatomises, and the Advocate was its Chicago voice.

The Eight-Hour Campaign

The eight-hour day was the Advocate's signature cause and the era's great unifying labour demand. Cameron's Chicago Grand Eight Hour League, organised in 1865, pressed the demand through branches and mass meetings as a political campaign independent of the major parties, while the Advocate argued the case in print week by week. The eight-hour idea, theorised nationally by figures such as Boston's Ira Steward, held that shorter hours would raise workers' living standards and employment alike, and Chicago under Cameron became one of its strongholds.

The campaign's afterlife is part of Chicago history: the eight-hour movement of the 1860s built the organisational habits and the demand that culminated, a generation later, in the great eight-hour strike of May 1886 and the Haymarket events. Histories of that later explosion begin, necessarily, with Cameron and the Advocate's league-building of the 1860s.

The National Labor Union

Cameron used the Workingman's Advocate both to advocate the formation of the National Labor Union and to report the process of its formation. The NLU, founded in 1866, was the first national labour federation in the United States to attempt organising across trades, and the Advocate functioned as one of its principal public organs, carrying its arguments to the skilled trades of the Midwest. The paper thus operated at two levels simultaneously: the voice of Chicago's Trades Assembly locally, and a national movement journal in the federation debates.

When the National Labor Union dissolved in 1873, weakened by its turn into party politics and the era's economic turmoil, the Advocate adjusted rather than died with it. In 1874 it allied itself with the Industrial Congress of the United States, labour's successor attempt at national coordination. Cameron continued publishing through that transition, and the University of Illinois's newspaper project dates the paper's continuation to 1879, when it ceased, while many summaries date its effective end as the movement's primary voice to the mid-1870s. Either chronology gives the Advocate a decade-plus run at the centre of the movement, remarkable for a labour paper of the period.

A Source for Historians

The University of Illinois Library's Illinois Newspaper Project, introducing its newly digitised run, states the scholarly consensus: despite varying amounts of original labour news in its columns, historians consider the Workingman's Advocate one of the most important labour newspapers of the 1860s and 1870s, in influence and as information. Because labour movements leave few institutional archives, their newspapers are their archives, and the Advocate's files preserve meeting reports, union intelligence, correspondence and debate available nowhere else.

Digitisation with National Endowment for the Humanities funding, as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, has made those files openly searchable, extending the paper's research life a century and a half after its founding. Schneirov's Urban Revolt, the California labour scholarship built on such sources, and generations of Chicago labour history all rest partly on Cameron's columns.

Cameron's Afterlife in Print

Cameron's own trajectory after the Advocate closes the paper's story fittingly. The editor who had turned a strike bulletin into a national labour journal became a founding editor of the Inland Printer, the trade journal that professionalised the printing industry and endured for generations. The movement from labour advocacy to craft institution-building mirrors the Advocate itself: a paper that began by fighting an employer ended by helping to define its trade's standards.

The Workingman's Advocate therefore stands at the head of two traditions: Chicago labour journalism, which it founded in significant form in 1864, and the American labour-reform politics of the eight-hour day, producer cooperation and independent labour parties, which it argued into national debate. A printers' strike paper that became a movement's voice is a fitting first chapter for the labour history of the city that would later host Haymarket, the Pullman strike and the modern American labour movement.