190 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTLand, Ladies as Well as Gentlemen," in 1833, and four years
earlier Thomas Skidmore in his "The Right of Man to Property"
had advocated the equal division of property. In 1840, a Working
Men's Protective Union of Boston announced that "The Money-
Power must be superseded by the Man-Power" and "Universal
Monopoly must give place to Societary ownership, occupancy
and use.... Our Lowells must be owned by the artizans who
build them.... Lynns must give the fortunes made by the dealer
and employer to those who use the awl and work the mate
rial. ..." Industrial congresses were held annually in the United
States from 1845 to 1856, and were attended by such prominent
figures in the history of social reform as Brisbane, George Ripley,
Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles A. Dana, Ger¬
ritt Smith, Cassius M. Clay, Horace Greeley, and Hermann
Kriege. Although the agenda of these gatherings covered a mul
titude of proposals, from the ten-hour day to free homesteads,
they provide abundant evidence of an America in ferment which
was seeking progress in many different directions.
Working conditions in the 1840's and 1850's account for the
rise of labor organizations and the resort to strikes and boycotts.
The census of 1850 revealed that the average wage for factory
labor in the United States was sixty-five cents a day. In the 1840's,
bricklayers in Cincinnati were receiving $7.00 a week; the bakers
of Boston were working eighteen to twenty hours a day; and the
carpenters of Philadelphia were being paid $1.25 a day. Despite
President Van Buren's effort to establish the ten-hour day as a
standard, many American men and women still worked from
sunrise to sunset. During the first half of the 1850's, the demand
of the organized crafts of New York was for shorter hours and
a base pay of $7.00 a week. Unskilled Irishmen were receiving
sixty-five cents a day and lived in hastily constructed shanties
because they could not afford to pay rent in the tenements. Strike
breakers were readily available, and on one occasion when Irish
men laid down pick and shovel and demanded better treatment,
their jobs were filled with newly arrived German immigrants, and