Martin A. Foran
Martin A. Foran was a prominent trade union leader and social reformer born in Choconut, Pennsylvania, as the second of eight children in an Irish immigrant family. Initially trained in the craft of barrel-making, Foran's journey took him through various roles, including a soldier in the Civil War and a schoolteacher, before he became deeply involved in the cooper trade in Cleveland in 1868. Recognizing the need for stronger union organization in his field, he played a pivotal role in establishing the Coopers' International Union in 1870, serving as its president for several years and actively promoting workers' rights.
Foran was also a writer, having authored "The Other Side," which is recognized as one of the first American working-class novels. This work sought to vindicate the trade union movement and advocate for harmonious relations between labor and capital. His lengthy career in public service included a tenure as a U.S. Congressman, where he championed labor rights and the establishment of a Bureau of Labor Statistics. After retiring from Congress, he served as a judge on the Cleveland Court of Common Pleas. Foran's commitment to labor advocacy and social reform left a lasting impact on the labor movement in post-Civil War America. He passed away at the age of seventy-seven, remaining connected to both upper-class society and the working class throughout his life.
Subject Terms
Martin A. Foran
- Martin A. Foran
- Born: November 11, 1843
- Died: June 28, 1921
Trade union leader and social reformer, was born at Choconut, Pennsylvania, the second of eight children. His father was an Irish immigrant who owned a farm and a small cooperage shop, and it was from him that Martin Foran learned the trade of barrel-making. Educated in the schools of rural Pennsylvania, he attended college for one year and taught school the following two. At the age of twenty-one, he joined the Fourth Pennsylvania Cavalry and served a year and a half in the Civil War. Afterward, he returned briefly to schoolteaching, then became an oilfield hand in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in order to obtain money to buy cooper’s tools. In 1868 Foran moved to Cleveland and began work as a journeyman cooper.
Trade unionism in the cooper’s field was at a low ebb at the time Foran began working in the trade. No international union existed, and most of the local unions, including the one in Cleveland, were demoralized. Within two years, Foran changed all this. He formed an effective local organization in Cleveland, created a state union, and issued a call for an international contention of coopers. Meeting in Cleveland in May 1870, the delegates organized the Coopers’ International Union and elected Martin Foran president. He was reelected at the 1871 and 1872 conventions.
During the three years Foran was international president, he played a major role in organizing the Industrial Congress (which succeeded the National Labor Union as a center for joint activity by trade unions). Not limiting himself to union activities, he attended law school and was admitted to the bar. He also found time to edit the official organ of the union he headed, The Coopers’ International Journal, and to publish The Other Side, the first novel by an American trade unionist and perhaps the first American working-class novel.
Angered by the anti-trade union bias of an English novel, Put Yourself in His Place, by Charles Reade, published serially in The Galaxy, Foran set out to answer “the author of Foul Play and several other equally foul works,” as he described Reade, for “severely, brutally” handling the trade unions of England. Confessing his lack of training as a novelist and conceding that The Other Side had been written “under many serious disadvantages,” for “most of these pages were written by gas light” after a full day’s labor as a union organizer and international president, Foran declared, nevertheless, that “if anything we have here written will conduce to better and more efficient, thorough organization among workingmen, we will ... find an ample reward for all our toil and effort.”
Foran’s novel was published serially in the Workingman’s Advocate beginning with the issue of September 28, 1872. It was preceded by a tribute from Andrew Cameron, the Advocate’s editor and publisher, who thanked Foran, in the names of American and British trade unions, “for his noble and able vindication of the trade union cause,” and expressed the hope that it would soon appear in book form. It was to appear as a book, but not until 1886 when it was published as The Other Side: A Social Study Based on Fact. (In the Workingman’s Advocate its subtitle read: “A New Trades Union Story.”) In the novel, Foran vindicated trade unionism as necessary for the welfare of both workers and employers and envisioned the approach of an era in which unionism would flourish and harmonious relations between capital and labor prevail, as capitalists recognized labor’s equal value in the creation of the product.
By the time Foran’s novel was published as a book, the author had been, successively, a delegate to Ohio’s constitutional convention, elected by the workingmen of Cleveland; prosecuting attorney for the city; and Democratic member of Congress from Cleveland. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1882 and reelected twice before retiring to private law practice in 1889. In Congress Foran continued his work for the trade union cause. He championed the establishment of a Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in a speech in Congress on April 19, 1884, argued that such a body would help retard the growing domination of the nation by wealth. “The centralization of wealth means the centralization of political power,” he noted, “and the centralization of political power marks the decline and possible death of republican institutions in this country. A republican form of government in any country can be but of short duration when 5 per cent of its people own over 60 per cent of its property and wealth; and yet it is confidently asserted that it is the conditions of things in the United States to-day.”
Foran also sponsored the act of 1885 barring the importation of convict labor. Upon his retirement from Congress, he was praised by labor groups for his persistence in transforming their demands into legislation. Foran married Kate Kavanaugh on December 29, 1868; they had two daughters, Gertrude and Margaret. In 1893, after the death of Kate Foran, he married Emma Kenny.
From 1910 until his death at the age of seventy-seven, Foran was a judge of the Cleveland Court of Common Pleas. Although he urged lawyers to wear dress suits in court, and he himself associated more and more with upper-class society, he neither lost touch with the working class nor abandoned his friendship with the labor movement. An able writer, editor, lawyer, legislator, and judge—as well as an effective trade unionist—Martin Foran was an important figure in the post-Civil War labor reform movement.
There is no biography of Martin A. Foran. Early biographical sketches appeared in the Workingman’s Advocate, September 27, 1873; and G. E. Mc Neill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of To-Day (1887). The story of his life is summarized in National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 19 (1920). An interesting discussion of Foran’s pro-trade union novel, The Other Side, may be found in D. Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967). Foran’s speech in Congress in favor of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (from which his comment on centralization of wealth is quoted) was published as Bureau of Labor Statistics, Speech of Hon. M.A. Foran, of Ohio, in the House of Representatives, April 19, 1884 (1884).