George Edwin McNeill

• George Edwin McNeill
• Born: August 4, 1837
• Died: May 19, 1906

Labor organizer and writer and advocate of the eight-hour day, was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts, the son of John McNeill, a Scotch-Irishman who had emigrated to the United States in 1821, and Abigail Todd (Hickey) McNeill.

McNeill grew up in an atmosphere of reform. His father was an abolitionist who wrote tracts in behalf of that cause. He attended public school until he was in his early teens and went to work in a woolen mill in Amesbury. In 1851, when the workers struck after the company lengthened their working day, he took part in the strike and, though only fourteen years old, managed to organize a union of mill operatives. The strike failed, but McNeill resolved to continue fighting labor’s battles. Discharged from the mill, he learned shoemaking, a trade he practiced when he moved to Boston in 1856. There he met Adeline J. Trefethen, whom he married in December 1859. They had five children; Alice Josephine, Addie, George Leonard, Ira Steward, and Grace.

Boston was a center of reform movements, and McNeill championed the causes of abolition, temperance, and utopian socialism, as well as of labor. During his life he contributed much in various ways to the labor movement, but he is best known as a proponent of the eight-hour day. During the Civil War he embraced the eight-hour philosophy of the reformer Ira Steward, with whom he worked closely in the following years. Eventually he surpassed Steward in winning supporters for this labor strategy.

In speeches and pamphlets McNeill argued that shortening the workday to eight hours would raise the physical, moral, and cultural conditions of workers. His assumption was that workers with more leisure time would develop new and more elevated tastes and desires; in order to satisfy them, the workers would demand, and receive, higher wages. Higher wages would generate still greater desires that would demand satisfaction. As a result of this process, McNeill believed, capitalist profit would gradually be eliminated until finally a cooperative socialist system would come into being.

A Christian socialist, McNeill found the Marxist notion of unremitting class conflict unappealing; he believed instead that the golden rule of the Gospel was actively working to bring about the gradual evolution of a just and harmonious economic and social order. In 1872 McNeill helped organize the socialist Christian Labor Union, and he later was a close associate of William Dwight Porter Bliss, the prominent Christian Socialist minister. McNeill became a member of the Boston Society of Christian Socialists and was a warden of Bliss’s Church of the Carpenter.

Once McNeill embraced the eight-hour philosophy, he spent many years forming organizations and working within existing ones to advance the cause. As secretary of the Grand Eight-Hour League of Boston in 1863-64 he proposed to place the issue before the Massachusetts legislature. At this time Steward and McNeill shared the belief that political agitation was the best means of obtaining the eight-hour day. In general, however, these efforts proved fruitless. Though the federal government established the eight-hour day for its employees in 1867, most state legislatures refused to enact it, and those that did neglected to create enforcement agencies.

For a while in the late 1860s McNeill and Steward worked with Wendell Phillips to form a labor party in Massachusetts, but when Phillips and the party endorsed greenbackism, they withdrew. In 1869 they formed the Massachusetts Eight-Hour League in order to keep their cause before the public. McNeill served as its president for eight years.

In 1878 following the panic of the previous year, McNeill and Steward helped organize the International Labor Union (ILU), which brought together socialists of various outlooks. The group included Marxists who believed that trade union activity was the only way of initiating the class consciousness that would lead to a collective society, as well as proponents of the eight-hour day who believed that legislative enactment of their cause would bring on the evolution of a cooperative socialist order. Under McNeill’s presidency the union grew for a while, particularly among textile workers, but after several unsuccessful strikes it sank into insignificance. The importance of the ILU is that it represented the first well-planned effort in the United States to organize unskilled workers and to concentrate on wage demands.

With the tremendous growth of the Knights of Labor during the depression years of the 1880s, McNeill came to see in that organization the promise of a mass union, committed to organizing all workers and also to winning the eight-hour day. The Knights of Labor assembly had, in 1876, accepted as its platform a declaration of principles issued by a labor congress in 1874, much of this declaration had been written by McNeill and included a demand for the eight-hour day.

McNeill joined the Knights in 1883 and rose to power within the order. In 1884 he was elected treasurer of Massachusetts District Assembly 30. But growing rivalry between the Knights and trade unions forced McNeill to resign his office and membership in 1886. By this time the trade unions, alarmed by the Knights’ efforts to absorb their organizations in order to advance the interests of unskilled workers, were considering breaking off. McNeill attempted to work out a compromise, but a majority of the delegates at the May 1886 meeting of the Knights assembly voted it down. Later in the year the Knights called on its members to quit their trade unions. This action led McNeill to abandon the Knights and throw his support behind the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was organized in December 1886.

McNeill’s decision was influenced by his belief that unions should be organized along trade lines. Moreover, the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions, the precursor of the AFL, had been championing the eight-hour day since 1884. Its call for a general strike to attain this goal received only lukewarm support from the Knights’ leadership.

Misreading the pure-and-simple trade unionism of AFL president Samuel Gompers, McNeill attached his millennial hopes to the federation and began publishing the Labor Leader, the organ of the Massachusetts AFL. He believed, until his death, that the AFL would be the instrument that would establish the cooperative system of which he had dreamed for so long.

McNeill brought to the Labor Leader years of experience with labor newspapers; he had begun to submit articles to newspapers when he was a teenager. His first employment on a newspaper was with the Boston Daily Voice in 1865. He was later associated with labor journals in New York City; Fall River, Massachusetts; and Paterson, New Jersey. In addition, he was the author of several books and pamphlets. One of these, The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (1887), which he edited (and much of which he wrote), was the most ambitious history of the American labor movement up to that time.

He also wrote A Study of Accidents and Accident Insurance (1900), which relied heavily on statistical analysis. McNeill had demonstrated his talent in this area as deputy chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1869 until 1873, when he was dismissed because of his labor activities (although it was his agitation for the eight-hour day that helped persuade the state legislature to create the bureau in the first place). During his tenure the bureau published information that advanced the cause of industrial legislation. The enactment of a state law limiting the work hours of women and children to ten a day was a direct result of the bureau’s activities.

In 1883 McNeill organized the Massachusetts Mutual Accident Association, an insurance company, of which he was treasurer and general manager until his death. This job left him ample time to devote to the labor movement. He made an unsuccessful campaign for the Boston mayoralty on the United Labor party ticket in 1886. On several occasions he arbitrated strikes.

McNeill was a lifelong supporter of temperance and spoke out on behalf of woman suffrage and black rights. Toward the end of his life he was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League and the International Peace Society. He died at the age of sixty-eight in Somerville, Massachusetts.

In addition to the writings cited above, McNeill’s publications include Eight-Hour Primer (1889); The Philosophy of the Labor Movement (1893); and Unfrequented Paths: Songs of Nature, Labor, and Men (1903). Biographical sources include the Dictionary of American Biography (1933). There is also a brief discussion of him in A. Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (1954). See also P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (1947). Additional information can be found in Who’s Who (1906-07); J. R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, vol. 2 (1918); F. K. Foster, “George E. McNeill,” Massachusetts Labor Bulletin, July-December 1907; and The Boston Evening Transcript, May 21, 1906.