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Founding, Enforcing, and Sustaining the First Culture Workers Union, 1853 – 1875

Friedrich Wilhelm Hagemeyer knew the neighborhood, but he had never been inside 10 Stanton Street until a few minutes before ten that Friday morning in February of 1868. As a rank and file member of the newly-formed Musical Mutual Protective Union (MMPU), Hagemeyer was making his first appearance at the quarterly Executive

Committee meeting to answer for his violation of the union’s bylaws. On his way into the heart of Kleindeutschland, or “Little Germany,” Hagemeyer passed his neighbors at work in the metal cornice and coffin factories, German Evangelical Church, and variety hall just around the corner on the Bowery.¹ Once inside, and after the previous meeting’s minutes were read and approved, the six-member Executive Committee of the Musical Mutual Protective Union turned to Hagemeyer’s case. After a brief discussion, he was fined four dollars for playing with non-members at a ball three weeks earlier, a violation

1 This chapter is based on the Minutes of the Executive Committee [ECM] of the Musical Mutual Protective Union, available on microfilm at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, Bobst Library, New York University. Manhattan, New York City [map]. 1868. 50:1. Perris &

Browne, Insurance Maps of The City of New York II. NYC Fire Insurance, Topographic and Property Maps, NYPL Digital Collections. 10 Stanton Street was also the headquarters for the Granite Cutters Union, the Tailors’ Benevolent Society, the Social Relief Benevolent Society. The MMPU had no formal

“clubhouse,” and its meetings were held in various locations in lower Manhattan with some connection to the Union. This likely kept costs down but also could bring problems. While meeting at 10 Stanton Street on the morning of June 10, 1875, President Papst was appointed a committee of one “to inform the proprietor of this house, Mr. J. M. Schmidt, that if he cannot manage to keep band playing out of hearing during our meeting, we are compelled to change our meeting place.” As the organization was entering its second decade, the EC approved the purchase of a bookcase, or writing desk with large drawers for the safe keeping of books and papers which have accumulated during the nine years of the existence of the

association.” ECM, December 10, 1872.

of Section 1, Article III in the bylaws. When called to defend himself, Hagemeyer did not deny the charge. As he explained to the committee,

he did play but a few numbers only, as he was present on the occasion as a guest not as a musician, his children were present for instruction to learn dancing and he played a few tunes out of compliment of the dancing master, without receiving any remuneration.²

As one of hundreds of men fined for this violation in the union’s early decades,

Hagemeyer’s dilemma illustrates the most significant challenges facing the MMPU, the oldest labor union of culture workers in the world.First, the fine demonstrates the

difficulty of enforcing what labor historians call a “closed shop” in a line of work with no formal credentialing program and an endless supply of starry-eyed amateurs. It also indicates how the burden of this rule fell on rank and file musicians—men like Hagemeyer and the anonymous member who reported him—and not on employers.

While the union was formed primarily to pressure theater managers for fair

compensation, the organization’s routine administration was directed at ordinary players.

Hagemeyer’s dilemma also demonstrates how orchestra players of the 1860s negotiated multiple registers of value. Like the journeyman typographers and tailors who danced to the violinist’s quadrilles, instrumental musicians formed protective associations because they saw disproportionate prosperity among theater managers and band leaders, and because they felt that the path to such success and stability was out of reach. But union activity did not mean that musicians understood the market as the sole determinant of the value of their work. The dance floor was a place of work, pleasure, and familial obligation, and players were beholden to union bylaws, social rules, and a spontaneous

2 ECM, February 7, 1868.

call to participate. Musicians were responsible to the union, to their families, to social behavior, and to their music, and they had to handle these obligations in real time. The construction and enforcement of union rules offer unparalleled insight into the daily lives of working musicians, making visible the key conflicts faced by people making art within but not fully beholden to the logic of the culture industries.

The most thoughtful writing on musicians’ unions names these conflicts as artistry versus labor.³ This is an important component of the story and was often the language used by union leaders and opponents alike. But this framing assumes these poles were self-evident, fully-formed, and oppositional by the time of the union’s emergence in the 1860s. Instead, any indication of the dissonance of art and work—the surprise you felt when learning that musicians organized during the Civil War, for

example, or the critique made of the “mere mechanics” who called themselves artists and workers—is better understood as a contingent binary created through perpetual activity.

This understanding best does justice to the lives of players like Hagemeyer, who did not see an inherent conflict in identifying as artists, laborers, composers, Germans, grocers, New Yorkers, and fathers. It is true that as musicians became more closely aligned with the powerful labor organizations that closed the nineteenth-century—tenuously with the Knights of Labor, and in a more lasting partnership with the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—labor politics likely occupied a larger space in the average instrumental musicians’ self-conception. It is our imposition that understands this identification as

3 Sandy Mazzola, “When Music is Labor: Chicago Bands and Orchestras and the Origins of the Chicago Federation of Musicians, 1880-1902 (PhD diss., 1984); James P. Kraft, “Artists as Workers: Musicians and Trade Unionism in America, 1880-1917,” Musical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (1995); Michael James Roberts, Tell Tchaikovsky the News.

foreclosing others, rather than an experiment within the multiple systems of value that commercial musicians came to occupy.

The opposition between an organization for artists and one for laborers is clearest in the 1890s, and in the historiography that takes this moment as a starting point. This argument focuses on the antagonism between MMPU President Alexander Bremer and Samuel Gompers in 1896, when the AFL recognized the American Federation of Musicians. Bremer’s avowal that “no members of the Musical Mutual Protective Union would consent to association with what they termed ‘mud-gutter musicians’’ has since been understood as the MMPU’s refusal to participate in modern labor activism.⁴ But it is also true that the MMPU had already been a founding constituent in the two previous national musical labor organizations, neither of which had served the needs of New York musicians. Furthermore, as a conservatory-trained leader with plum spots in bands and at the Metropolitan Opera and an eye on a political career, Bremer’s career was not

representative of the wider membership.⁵ Most importantly, the simple dichotomy

4 NYT, October 19, 1896. Exemplary of this tradition is an early article by John Commons, the Wisconsin labor economist, who tied changes in musicians’ self-definition to the development of organizations.

According to Commons, musicians relinquished their identity first as artists, in the formation of the National League, and then as members of a profession, with the establishment of the AFM. More recently, James Kraft has argued that the largest obstacle to musicians’ unions wasn’t changing working conditions but their “their own reluctance to recognize and act on their common concerns as workers.” While self-definition is extremely important, this approach assumes that identifying as a worker is inevitable and, once accomplished, permanent, rather than a response to specific changes in the structural changes of

commercial entertainment. John R. Commons, “Types of Musicians’ Labor Unions—The Musicians of St.

Louis and New York,” Journal of Quarterly Economics 20, no. 3 (May, 1906), 419-422; Kraft, “Artists as Workers,” 513.

5 Bremer was born in Copenhagen in 1850, accepted to the Royal Opera House training program for French horn at 15, and came to New York two years later. He played in the city’s best-known orchestras and bands, and was a particularly vocal opponent of “foreign” musicians during the 1885 Foran Act controversy, as well as a strong advocate for the six-month residency clause and the naturalization requirement, and the rise of the initiation fee to $100. Bremer was also a minor play in New York’s Democratic Party, serving as District Court Clerk, Deputy City Paymaster, Examiner of Accounts, and City Inspector of Music; he was also Secretary of the Morris Heights Property Owners Association. Ernest Erdmann, “Erdmann’s Musical Review of New York,” Jacob’s Band Monthly 6 (February, 1921): 84-88.

between artists and workers—in which 1896 serves as the mark of transition from the former to the latter—obscures the MMPU’s earlier use of labor tactics.

In contrast to Alexander Bremer, Friedrich Hagemeyer’s career is both harder to trace and more typical of union members. Born in Bremen in 1824, he sailed to New York in 1845 and, five years later, was living with his new wife and mother-in-law, both German women named Katherine, on the Lower East Side. According to the union’s directory, Hagemeyer worked as a violinist and a violist. He also tried his hand at composing, publishing the piano tune “Amelia Waltzes” with Oliver Ditson in 1867.

Unlike Bremer, and unlike the Executive Committee who fined him for playing at the dancing lesson, Hagemeyer never held the stable and prestigious positions in reputable theater orchestras and established bands. The census-taker listed his occupation as

“musician” in 1870, but in the preceding decades he was identified as a “grocer” in multiple places and as a mason in the ship’s manifest at immigration.⁶ The violinist also faced many of the challenges of aging musicians; in the last year of his life, in 1880, he was out of work due to a broken finger.⁷ But Hagemeyer’s decision to play at his children’s dancing lesson twelve years earlier paid dividends after his death, as all the traceable Hagemeyer children entered the twentieth-century as New Yorkers either married to or as white-collar workers in New York.

6 1850 U.S Census, population schedule. New York Ward 1 Eastern Division, New York, New York;

Roll: M432_534; Page: 27A; 1870 U.S. Census, population schedule. New York Ward 18 District 14 (2nd Enum), New York, New York; Roll: M593_1040; Page: 394B. All subsequent census records are

population schedules and were accessed via the www.ancestry.com database.

7 1800 U.S. Census. New York City, New York, New York; Roll: 891; Page: 360D; Enumeration District: 487. The Battery Conservancy has digitized the Registers of Vessels for Castle Garden migrants.

Original is Registers of Vessels Arriving at the Port of New York from Foreign Ports, 1789-1919.

Microfilm Publication M237, rolls 1-95. National Archives at Washington, D.C.

This chapter moves from the opera choruses’ strikes to the formal cultural labor organizing undertaken by New York’s professional instrumental musicians. This category is more complex than it seems, broad in some ways and narrow in others. With rare exceptions, these musicians were European or European American men who played in theater orchestras and other commercial spaces, and who accompanied the city’s many social functions, such as balls, parades, and picnics. Some worked as music teachers, and in the 1860s many mustered into military bands, but many were able to make some kind of a living as entertainers. It is also important to note that the many hats worn by

musicians were stratified by race and gender. In the 1860s, white women instrumentalists played in private settings or, occasionally, as touring stars. Black musicians who played for money did so in the most casual settings, often in the context of domestic service at summer watering holes or retreats and, occasionally, in military bands or in the early African American minstrel tours.

Even within the category of European men, the union’s players occupied various class positions. Few could make a living solely as “professional” musicians, a term that can be misleading because it implies a close relationship to credentialing and academic training, and because it suggests a permanence or reliable employment out of reach for most members.⁸ A lucky few served as leaders for established bands and orchestras, which often included work arranging and composing; the next rung held semi-permanent positions with bands and orchestras. Most members—and there were 1065 in 1877,

8 Burton Bledstein connects the rise of the professions with the expansion of university education and, as a consequence, the endurance of a middle-class identity. While many New York musicians were trained in European academies or in apprenticeship-style relationships in bands, orchestras, and families, the centrality of university training to “the professions” and to middle-classness does not apply in the same way to musicians. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976).

making the MMPU the largest local of all the musicians’ unions throughout the nineteenth century—strung together one-night gigs and occasional month-long engagements. These marginal professional players, whose work made possible the glittering careers of celebrity soloists and conductors, experienced the most dramatic transformations in their working conditions in this period.

A bird’s eye view above the Bowery grants us a vision of the arrival of industrial relations in the orchestra pit, from the rise of foremen (or bandleaders) who supervised employees across an increased division of labor to the industrial workers’ demand for shorter working days to the mounting influence of proprietors circulating and growing capital investments. But without nuance, this perspective describes a stadial model of development in which orchestra musicians once as artists and then, with the onset of the entertainment industry, were newly transformed into workers. This chapter proposes an alternative model for conceptualizing the condition of the working commercial musician, in which the player navigates the simultaneous imperatives of aesthetics and industry.⁹

9 All historical subfields debate the efficacy and portability of concepts and paradigms. In labor history this energy is generated both by the political stakes of the project, but also by the field’s grounding in stadial models. Labor history does often deal with terms and processes based in developmental stages that other subfields might not. (See, for example, Philip Foner’s statement that the American labor movement was “a logical and inevitable concomitant of the industrial development of this county,” in History of the Labor Movement in the United States: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor I [New York: International Publishers, 1975], 48). Even when it comes without a prefix, industrialization contains an implied antecedent and successor. One response has been to turn completely against these terms: Christopher Tomlins argued that “industrialization” could not be a paradigm—it had no

“developmental pattern with predictable and generalizable causal effects,” as it was instead “a set of processes sufficiently variable in their historical expressions as to offer no inherent explanatory capacities per se (no-ism), nor a reliable chronology.” For Tomlins, “industrial” is an unsatisfying tool of analysis because artisans in the antebellum period moved back and forth between “small businessman” and

“proletarianized laborer.” Christopher Tomlins, “Not Just Another Brick in the Wall: A Response to Rock, Nelson, and Montgomery,” Labor History 40 (1999), 48. Movement across categories does not mean that such categories are irrelevant or inconsequential, but instead that they have to be understood in context; the changing valence of the word “mechanic” over the last two hundred years is a prime example. My attempt to think through the dynamic, relational quality of the terms associated with culture workers during industrialization is one way to approach this broader question.

This approach both allows us to see the development of musicians’ unions as more open-ended, rather than marching through early failed experiments towards the recording industry, and it keeps the story open to include players who are excluded from unions.

Rather than ignoring trade unions because they represented only a small number of workers, I understand the boundaries set by the union to be as important for those who were excluded as for those who were protected.

This chapter begins with the following questions: what were these

transformations, what decisions did musicians make in response, and within what structural and ideological parameters? What were the long-term consequences of these decisions for the management, organization, and perception of artistic labor? I begin with an explanation of the MMPU’s founding moment, detailing the key social and

demographic commonalities of its members, before moving into a thorough examination of the routine difficulties the union dealt with in its Executive Committee. The chapter concludes with an analysis of a key early battle with theatrical managers, which marked the union’s most aggressive and public-facing action.

The Founding of the Musical Mutual Protective Union

Understanding how the binary of “art versus labor” became an interpretive

framework for musicians requires reconstructing the early history of musicians’ unions in the United States. A careful reading of the meeting minutes of the MMPU provides a counterpoint to received wisdom, written primarily from limited newspaper coverage and a handful of scholarly books. Most histories of organized American musicians locate their center of gravity in the twentieth-century, with early chapters extending backwards

to the founding of the American Federation of Musicians in 1896 and its affiliation with the AFL, and, occasionally, to the Musicians’ National Protective League in the early 1870s and the National League of Musicians in the 1880s, which were both temporary organizations formed out of independent locals in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. The Musical Mutual Protective Union appears in this litany as one chapter in the AFM’s pre-history, in a vague nineteenth-century fog before professional musicians realized their interests were best protected by the militant trade union practices that characterize the 1942-44 wartime strikes under James Petrillo, which remain the longest-lasting work stoppages in the history of show business. This creation story is powerful because it maps onto a familiar narrative where the rise of the recording industry is the watershed moment for instrumental musicians that initiates their replacement by mechanization.

In fact, the earliest stirrings of a musicians’ union in New York began a full decade before 1863, the year given in both scholarly accounts and the union’s charter.¹⁰ While the later date did mark a new chapter in the union’s form, identifying its activity a decade earlier ties the union both to the year of Maretzek’s tangle with Salvi and to the very orchestra pit that supported the star singer. Domenico La Manna was a violinist in Maretzek’s orchestra at Niblo’s and the President of the Musical Mutual Protection Association. “Signor La Manna is one of the best and most painstaking orchestral conductors in the City,” wrote the Times in 1854, on the occasion of conducting the orchestra for Le Grand Smith’s La somnambula. “We are glad to see him in a position

In fact, the earliest stirrings of a musicians’ union in New York began a full decade before 1863, the year given in both scholarly accounts and the union’s charter.¹⁰ While the later date did mark a new chapter in the union’s form, identifying its activity a decade earlier ties the union both to the year of Maretzek’s tangle with Salvi and to the very orchestra pit that supported the star singer. Domenico La Manna was a violinist in Maretzek’s orchestra at Niblo’s and the President of the Musical Mutual Protection Association. “Signor La Manna is one of the best and most painstaking orchestral conductors in the City,” wrote the Times in 1854, on the occasion of conducting the orchestra for Le Grand Smith’s La somnambula. “We are glad to see him in a position