Review - The American Telegrapher: a social history 1860-1900

by Jim Haynes

Book Review

	     The American Telegrapher: a social history 1860-1900
	     Edwin Gabler
	     Rutgers University Press, 1988
	     ISBN 0-8135-1284-0 (hardbound), 0-8135-1285-9 (paperback)

I seem to read a lot of books which are at the same time both interesting
and tedious.  This is one such book.  Written by an academic historian
for reading by other academic historians, it is long on footnotes, theories,
and statistics and short on flesh-and-blood storytelling; yet there
is enough of the latter to entertain the casual reader.  Part I of this
review is an attempt to convey the general message of the book.
Part II is for fun: a selection of stories about the lives and times
telegraphers a century ago.

		Part I

There are five chapters: a history of the Great Strike of 1883 as an
introduction to the world of the operators; a description of the
telegraph industry and especially Western Union; a social portrait of the
telegraphers; a study of women telegraphers; and a summary of the
labor movement and politics of telegraphers.  An epilogue compares the
situation of telegraphers in the 1880s with that of the air traffic
controllers a hundred years later.

Telegraph and railroad companies following the Civil War represented an
entirely new kind of business, one in which the company's assets are 
strung out for hundreds or thousands of miles with offices and employees
sprinkled along the lines.  There were other affinities between the
two kinds of companies.  Railroads used telegraphy to support their own
operations.  Railroad rights-of-way were ideal places to run telegraph
lines, affording easy access for construction and maintenance at a time
when there were few roads.  Telegraph business was likely to be found
in the same places the railroads served.  In many small towns the
railroad station served as the public telegraph office, as there was
not enough telegraph business to support an office for telegraph alone.
Some railroads such as B & O operated their own public telegraph businesses.
(cf. Southern Pacific a century later getting into the communications
business.)  Other railroads had contract arrangements with the
telegraph companies, principally Western Union, for use of rights of
way, interconnection of circuits, and providing public telegraph service
at the railroad stations.

These new kinds of businesses needed a new kind of management.  The military
became their model.  Many of the top managers were alumni of the Civil
War military telegraph system.  The companies had divisions, rule books,
general orders and special orders, and chains of command.  Management
style was authoritarian.  As is the case with some companies today,
the telegraph and railroad companies then were headed by a mixture of
people who knew the business and those who were primarily financial
wizards.

Telegraph operators represented the beginning of a new social class,
the lower-middle-class white-collar employees of large corporations.
Many were the children of farmers or of city blue-collar workers.
A great many were of Irish lineage.  For all of these
telegraphy offered a step up the social ladder as well as an escape
from hard physical labor and city slums or rural isolation.
Telegraphy was an occupation open to women, although the majority
of operators were male (and, like the women, young and unmarried).

The national economy was fairly flat or even deflationary during
the period 1860-1890.  Western Union profits rose handsomely throughout
the period.  The operators did not share in this prosperity.
For one thing, there was an oversupply of them.  First-class
operators, who could send and receive thirty to forty words per
minute for hours on end, were assigned to press and market reporting
circuits.  They could command pay two to three times as great as
that of the second-class operators who made up the bulk of the force.
Many operators learned the craft by hanging around small railroad
and telegraph offices; others worked their way up from messenger
and clerk jobs in larger offices; still others were trained at
a number of schools that sprang up around the country.  Most
of the latter seem to have been disreputable if not completely
fraudulent, operating for profit and promising high pay and
mobility to rural youth.  They were the century-ago counterparts
of the for-profit data processing schools of our own times,
the kind that advertised on matchbook covers and turned out an
oversupply of under-qualified graduates for high tuition fees.

Another financial problem for the telegraphers resulted from
their new social class.  Telegraphers' pay was on a par with that
of skilled blue-collar workers; but their living expenses were
greater.  With the move to suits and ties and shined shoes
they felt a need to live in middle-class housing, eat middle-class
meals, and partake of middle-class entertainments.

A few of the operators' perceptions of mistreatment by the companies
were more apparent than real.  The 1840s through 1860s had been
a period when telegraphy was just getting started.  Job opportunities
were abundant and promotions were rapid.  As the industry matured
there were fewer spectacular success stories; telegraphy even seemed
to be a dead-end job.  Other complaints had a more solid foundation.
Mergers of telegraph companies eliminated jobs.  An economic
downturn in the 1870s caused Western Union to institute across-the-board
salary reductions, which were partially offset by monetary deflation.
Operators tended to move around a lot, which allowed the company to
hire cheaper replacements for those who left.

The first attempt of telegraph workers to organize was the National
Telegraphic Union of 1863.  This was more of a mutual benefit
society than a labor union.  It provided members with sickness and
funeral benefits and aimed to elevate the character of the members
and promote just and harmonious relations with employers.  With
conditions for telegraphers growing worse after the Civil War 
the Telegraphers' Protective League was formed in 1868 as a very
different kind of organization.  It was a secret organization,
because there was nothing at the time to protect its members from
the unbridled power of their employers.  Rather than relieving the
sick and burying the dead it proposed to raise the members to a
financial position in which they could take care of themselves.

The TPL felt strong enough by January 1870 to risk a strike against
Western Union.  It failed after about a week.  There were just too
many operators seeking work, especially in the winter season; the
company was too strong; and the union was too poorly organized.
The operators' situation continued to deteriorate through the 1870s
as Western Union reduced wages, the number of would-be operators
increased, and the company absorbed its competitors.  An attempt
to form another union in 1872 fizzled.  In 1881 Jay Gould took
over Western Union, moving the company closer to being a true
national monopoly.  By the summer of 1882 a number of regional labor
organizations put aside their differences to form the Brotherhood
of Telegraphers of the United States and Canada under the aegis
of the Knights of Labor.  The Brotherhood, unlike its predecessors,
accepted the female operators as members.

In July of 1883 the Brotherhood presented a list of grievances to
Western Union and some other firms, hoping for at least a compromise
settlement and at worst a short strike.  When the company made
no meaningful concessions the telegraphers walked out on 
July 19.  At first things looked good for the Brotherhood.  About
three fourths of Western Union operators honored the strike.
Public opinion was much on the side of the telegraphers, at least
to the extent that it was against the side of Jay Gould and
the W.U. monopoly.  One competing telegraph company settled
quickly with the union; and another (B & O) came close to, but
never close enough.  Union leaders worked hard to keep the
public on their side, urging the strikers to be models of
dignity and sobriety.  The women were as valiant as the men,
if not more so, in upholding the strike.

Still, public sympathy did not feed the hungry; and the strike
dwindled until it was officially called off August 17.  Operators
wishing to return to work had to sign a pledge of loyalty;
those considered militant unionists were blacklisted by the company.
Still, it appears the company was somewhat humbled by the power
of the union and made a few concessions to the operators.
Failure of the strike led to some ill feeling in the larger labor
movement.  The telegraphers accused the Knights of insufficient
support; the Knights leadership felt the telegraphers had acted
impulsively and without sufficient preparation.  The Brotherhood
soon withdrew from the Knights; and union activity reverted to
local groups.  Yet by 1885 there was a new organization, the
Telegraphers' Union of America, which rejoined the Knights in
1886.  This seems to have faded away by the early 1890s along
with the Knights.  Railroad telegraphers formed the Order of
Railway Telegraphers in 1886.  An Order of Commercial Telegraphers
was formed in 1890 but never amounted to much, and allied itself with the
railway telegraphers in 1897-98.  The next attempt to form a
union didn't happen until 1907, with the Commercial Telegraphers'
Union of America, which also suffered disaster in a strike against
Western Union.

Gabler concludes with a discussion of a number of labor and political
issues affecting telegraphers.  One of the Brotherhood's demands had
been equal pay for equal work, male and female.  This seems to have
been widely hailed as the Right Thing to do.  I wonder whether the
male telegraphers supported the demand because it was right; or if
they supported it because they knew if the companies had to pay men
and women the same they would hire only men.

Some wanted a craft union, with membership limited to telegraphers,
with an apprenticeship program that would raise the quality of operators
while reducing their numbers.  There was some interest in government
licensing of operators.  Others favored an industrial union,
open to all Western Union employees.  Some objected to the secret
fraternal rites that were a feature of the Knights of Labor; Catholic
workers were forbidden to become members of secret organizations of
any kind.  The operators wanted to protect their new middle-class
image by being models of respectability and sobriety; some of the
linemen on the other hand had no scruples about cutting wires to
increase pressure on the companies during a strike.  Some felt that
telegraphy should be a government monopoly, as was and still is the
norm in Europe.  Some saw salvation in a worker-owned cooperative,
if they could only convince the banks or the government to put up
the money necessary to establish the system.  Others sought to
improve the status of the working classes through political action;
quite a number were attracted to the United Labor Party of Henry
George.  A hundred years later issues like these are still with us.

		Part II

Dr. Gabler had access to a vast amount of material: census records,
archives of the telegraph companies, contemporary newspaper accounts,
magazines published for the edification and amusement of operators,
and even novels in which telegraphers were used as characters. 
The footnotes and bibliography take up 48 pages.  One page in the
book is an illustration of advertisements in a telegraphers'
magazine of 1883.  They include a book on shorthand, a book of
money-making secrets, a book on the mysteries of love-making,
a book on fortune telling, watch charms with microscopic pictures,
a book of advice to the unmarried, a package of stationery,
a book on politeness, a book of letters for all occasions, playing
cards with marked backs, a book of magic tricks, a book on
business, and a book on ballroom dancing.  The theme is that
these appealed to working-class young adults who felt a need
to learn how to behave properly as new members of the middle-class.

A number of telegraph operators rose to prominence.  Thomas Edison
and Andrew Carnegie are the best known; Theodore N. Vail was a
founder of AT&T; others found success in business or politics; and
almost all the upper management of Western Union was drawn from the
ranks of operators.  In 1885 there were five doctors and one
dentist moonlighting as telegraph operators - maybe medicine and
dentistry didn't pay all that well in those days.

Thomas Edison, as a young telegrapher in the 1860s, would work a
full day and then stay in the office at night, listening to a
press circuit to get high speed code practice.  Later he worked
the Boston end of a New York circuit with an operator named
Jerry Borst.  Operators formed friendships with their counterparts
at the other end of the wires.  The telegraph companies insisted
that operators should work at whatever circuits they were assigned.
Edison and Borst conspired to change three characters of the
code, so that nobody else could copy their transmissions and
they could always work together.  Cockroaches were such a
problem in the office that Edison devised a bug zapper to protect
his lunch from the little beasties.

Friendships over the wires were nourished during lulls in traffic
by exchanges of jokes and local news, and by checker games.  Sometimes
love and courtship blossomed too.  At other times operators were
rude to one another.  On one occasion two operators got so
angry at each other that they arranged to meet at a town halfway
between their posts and settle the matter with fists at 1:00 AM.
"Salting" (sending too fast for the receiving operator) was a frequent
source of irritation.  Salting was also part of the common practice of
hazing new operators.

Operators frequently got privileges, such as free passes to
theaters and on trains.  With the chronic oversupply it was common
for operators to travel back and forth across the country looking
for work, or for better conditions.  Operators didn't get vacations,
paid or otherwise; but in the summer months telegraph offices would
open in the resort towns where the rich took their vacations, and
operators could find work there.

In 1883 Western Union employed 444 telegraphers in New York City,
96 in Boston, 88 in St. Louis, and 83 in Chicago.  This seems to
support a conjecture of mine that W.U. was weakened all its life
by overattention to serving New York City and insufficient effort to
develop the business in other parts of the country.

There was friction between the city operators and the rural operators.
The city operators were proud of their skills, and wanted to move
the traffic.  They resented they way country operators would frequently
interrupt transmissions.  The country operators, usually working
in railroad depots, countered that telegraphy was but a small part
of their duties.  They had to answer questions from the public, sell
tickets, meet trains, tend switches and signals, handle freight,
and keep the lamps burning.  They commonly worked shifts as long
as twelve or even sixteen hours.

Development of duplex and then quadruplex operation greatly
increased the pressure on operators, as the receiving operators
could not interrupt the senders.  Gender stereotyping held
that only male operators had the stamina to handle these
heavily-loaded circuits; yet the book cites a number of examples
of women who worked these circuits.  Women were consistently paid
less than men.  The companies were well aware that women
were a bargain compared with men, and continually tried to
replace men with women.

Nellie Welch had full charge of the telegraph office in Point
Arena, California in 1886.  She was eleven years old.

Western Union and the Cooper Union Institute in 1869 jointly
started a free eight-month telegraphy course for women.  It lasted
through the early 1890s, turning out about 80 graduates a year.
They would first take non-paying jobs assisting regular operators,
and then be hired as operators on lightly loaded city circuits.
This school was much despised by men for its contribution to the
oversupply problem, thought it probably hurt the opportunities
for women more than those for men.

Beginner and less-skilled operators were called "plugs" or "hams."
(Note the endless controversy over the origin of the term "ham"
for amateur radio operators.)  The schools that turned out these
operators were called "plug factories."

Craft magazines sought to shame operators who taught telegraphy.
They were urged to pass on the secrets of Morse only to brothers,
sisters, sons, and daughters.  At least one railroad operator quit
his job rather than cooperate with a student placed with him
by the company.  (Some other material I have read tells of operators
who took on students for a fee; and notes that the operator not only
gained the income but also used the students to run errands for him.)
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