The story of labor and the Linotype is unexpected in many aspects. For this Labor Day, I’ll share a bit on the subject from my book Hot Type. (Links to buy the hardback and audiobook versions and signed copies are here).
Printers waged their first strike against publishers in occupied New York in the winter of 1776. They came together to form what would become the International Typographical Union (ITU) in 1850.
All through the nineteenth century, a few hundred inventors tried to build the machine that would automate typesetters’ work. One might think, then, that they would follow in the paths of the Luddites and Captain Swing and destroy the contraptions. But those earlier protests were against feudal factories more than technology; the workers were not yet not organized into unions like the typesetters; and Swing’s followers ended up swinging from gallows. Besides, typesetters watched the experience of pressmen; with the introduction of steam-powered presses, their ranks shrank but then grew as publishing did.
More than the machine, typesetters feared the intrusion of women into composing rooms and forbade entry of black men — most notably Frederick Douglass’ son. (In Hot Type, I tell his story and that of Gussie Lewis Troup, who organized the first, regrettably short-lived women’s typographical union.) Typesetters were generally sanguine about the machine because so many of the 300 attempts at building one had failed.
Until the Linotype, the machine at the center of my book. On July 3, 1886, the first working Linotype invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler was hoisted up into the nonunion composing room of the New York Tribune, under the eye of its publisher, the villain of my tale, Whitelaw Reid. From Hot Type:
At the start of July 1886, a decade after he first met [his muse, James O.] Clephane, Mergenthaler supervised the installation of a Linotype in the New York Tribune composing room. “Through the Frankfort Street end of the composing room ran a huge flagpole,” that machine’s first operator, John T. Miller, recalled fifty years later, in a commemorative issue of the company newspaper, The Linotype News. “To that pole, that memorable afternoon in 1886, a block and tackle was attached. Nine stories below, in the street, was the first Linotype. It was completely boxed, and on top of it stood a man to guide it up through the network of telegraph wires. . . . As the man who made the dangerous ascent (I’m sorry I can’t remember his name, if I never knew it) threw one leg over the large window sill, he gave loud expression to his relief.” The composing room foreman gave that man thirty-five dollars for his perilous duty. “And soon Ottmar Mergenthaler and Charlie Letsch” — a nineteen-year-old assistant who had accompanied the machine from Baltimore — “had the Linotype in working order.”
The Tribune composing room was lined with hundreds of compositors’ typecases, which ran from one side of the building to the other. There were also three Burr machines, an unwieldy typesetting device that had survived multiple inventors, owners, bankruptcies, and names (it was later called the Empire). The Burrs composed and distributed type as [the machine Mark Twain backed] Paige’s Compositor did, a letter at a time. “The middle one of our three Burr machines had been shunted aside to make way for the new device,” Miller recounted. “Naturally, the arrival of the new and improved contraption made a big stir. All of us who could manage to, crowded about for a good look at it. Most of the hand men didn’t think much of it, and many said so. Even we Burr operators were a little skeptical.” The Burrs would soon be sold and four more Linotypes ordered.
The New York local of the ITU — known as Big Six — had a spy in Reid’s scab composing room. “‘The experiments were carried on in a partitioned-off end of the composing room floor, doors locked: entrance, except to pass-holders, forbidden,” J. W. Sullivan of Big Six recalled years later. “But one of № 6’s half dozen card men under cover on the then non-union Tribune got me a sketch of the machine with some of its type-faced slugs, explained its principles. . . . I could not rid myself of the conclusion that Gutenberg’s epoch-making invention of movable types had had its day.”
Here’s the surprising bit: The ITU did not forbid the machine. It embraced the machine, but under one condition.
The next year, the ITU dispatched “some of its most thoughtful and conservative members” to witness an “improved Linotype first-hand and report back. “It was found that this machine was capable of some excellent work, considered from a mechanical stand-point, and produced lines perfect in spacing and with a clear face, from which plates were made as readily as from type,” their report said. The delegation gathered data from twelve days’ work in one composing room in Brooklyn and another in Manhattan, where an experienced compositor was pitted against an expert typist. (The typist was a tad faster.)
The committee came away with a recommendation impressive for its foresight: “It is concluded that printers ought to stand ready to operate the machines, and that unions should in no way discourage their use, but should insist that their members be employed” to operate them. “It is not thought that there is anything apprehensive in the situation or that there is need of a panic in typographical circles.” They advised against “the foolish effort to stand in the way of mechanical improvement.”
And so, the typographers’ union made a bold and strategic decision not to reject the Linotype but to control it. On March 3, 1889, a newspaper publisher asked the union whether it would object to his introduction of a machine. “It is the sense of this union,” №6 resolved in reply, “where an employer desires to introduce typesetting machines the union should merely insist payment of the scale of the union and the employment of its members to do the work.” The national union followed suit, directing that “where typesetting machines are used, practical printers shall be employed to run them and also that subordinate unions shall regulate the scale of wages on such machines.” . . . .
The ITU came to recognize the inevitability of technology invading its sphere. “This is the day of the machine,” said a report to the union’s 1893 convention. “The machine is with us, and it behooves us as craftsmen to get closer together, en masse, and take care of it in a manner to show our appreciation of so important an invention and reap whatever benefits it may be possible for labor to derive from labor and dollar-saving machines. The web press is with the pressmen as the typesetting machine is with the compositor.”
It was a risk. By one accounting, the ITU lost 36,000 positions in short order, including older members who felt incapable of learning a new way to work. But with the new technology, media industries exploded.
“After 5 years the trade has about adjusted itself to normal conditions, and the membership of the printers’ union is to-day greater than its membership of compositors ever was,” the ITU’s Donnelly testified in 1900. “The policy adopted by the typographical union was not to oppose the machine, but to admit its success and make the best of it; to try and master it,” he explained. “The spirit that was manifested by the members was something of this kind: ‘Here is something that will take my bread and butter away from me and I must try and become its master.’ They endeavored to learn the machine as quickly as possible.”
One key to printers’ survival and success was that publishers chose not to pocket their machine dividends — a 66-percent saving in the cost of typesetting, with half the errors to boot. Instead, proprietors invested in more, bigger, and more competitive publications.
In my research, I was impressed to see federal commissions convened at the turn of the century to study the impact of new technologies on work and the economy. If only our current government were capable of such sane and sober study and analysis of AI’s entry into the workplace and culture; we need it.
There seems to be a lesson in the ITU’s actions: Rather than fighting and trying to forestall the inevitable arrival of new technology, it is better to take control of it. That worked well for the ITU for three-quarters of a century as it lobbied successfully for the eight-hour work day and drastically improved the working conditions — and health — of its members. The ITU — and particularly New York’s Big Six — became immensely powerful.
Until they weren’t. In the 1960s and ’70s, new technologies threatened: punched paper tape that could run a Linotype without an operator, like the robot it appeared to be; cold type (shining light through letters onto photographic paper to set text); computerized hyphenation and justification of text; computers in newsrooms, allowing publishers to “save keystrokes” and eliminate typesetting in composing rooms; and finally PostScript, which turned letters into shapes to be described to and displayed by computers and printers.
This time, the ITU tried fighting the technologies. A series of strikes over these issues killed six of nine New York newspapers — and eventually the union along with them.
The lessons the ITU and its leadership faced with these new technologies was different from the lessons learned with the Linotype. For all these fascinating stories, you’ll need to buy the book.
Happy Labor Day.