Maine Granite Cutter Thompson Murch, the First Union Leader Elected to Congress
The U.S. Senate has been described as the “world’s most exclusive club.” 73 out of our 100 Senators, including Maine Senators Susan Collins and Angus King, are millionaires, even though people of such wealth make up just 7 percent of the U.S. population. If elected this November, fifth generation logger and union organizer Troy Jackson would be the first elected U.S. Senator in history to come out of the labor movement.
But it wouldn’t be the first time Maine made history in electing labor leaders. In 1878, voters in Maine’s Fifth Congressional District elected a 40-year-old Rockland stonecutter named Thompson Murch, who served as the Secretary of the International Granite Cutters’ Union. Murch was one of 14 members of the progressive Greenback-Labor Party elected to Congress during a populist upsurge in the 1878 midterm elections. The other Maine Greenbacker elected that year was 60-year-old druggist George Ladd of Bangor. But it was Murch the labor agitator who really freaked out the establishment political class.
Described as “a handsome and agreeable gentleman,” Murch was prematurely greying with heavy lines on his face, having been exposed to the elements through years of manual toil. Like Jackson, he had also been a logger, but had spent most of his career cutting granite hauled out the island quarries of Penobscot Bay. He carved the stone into monuments, tombs and decorative architectural features like the eagle on top of the New York Post Office, now featured at the Bronx Zoo’s Education Building.
His friends described him as honest, decent, and a devoted family man. Murch was beloved by the working-class quarrymen and stonecutters of his coastal district, which included Knox, Waldo, Hancock and Washington Counties. But the big businessmen and their allies in the media saw him as a major threat to the political and economic order in a state that had been for many years been a safe Republican stronghold.
Like Governor LePage dismissed Troy Jackson as a “dumb logger,” Murch’s detractors called him “an ignorant stonecutter.” Just as TV host Bill Green condescendingly said that Jackson may be qualified to sell a cord of wood, but not to serve in the U.S. Senate in a recent Collins ad, the New York Times called Murch “an ignorant stone-cutter who was never heard of until a few months ago, a Communist, a demagogue of the lowest type.” Another newspaper called Murch “a journeyman stone-cutter, utterly unqualified for a seat in the national legislature.” But Murch would prove all of the elitists wrong.
The Life of an Itinerant Worker
Born in 1838 in Hampden, Murch was the youngest of five siblings. His father. Captain Thompson Murch, died when he was an infant and his mother struggled to support the large family on her own. Their plight worsened after their home burned down. Young Tom Murch left school at age 16 to become a seaman and sailed all over the world from Cuba to England, Italy and the Russian Empire. While delivering troops and supplies on the Rockland ship Charles A. Farwell during the Crimean War in 1854, Murch witnessed the Siege of Sevastopol first hand.
Eventually, he left the sea, traveling first to St. Louis and then Michigan where he became a logger and worked on a dairy farm. He was injured in a tragic accident on the railroad, which he never fully recovered from. His injuries kept him from serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. Following his recovery, he set out on foot through the wilderness from Prairie du Chien to Stillwater, Minnesota. In the course of his journey he got caught in the middle of a battle between two warring tribes and a band of tribal members robbed him of all his money, clothing and camping equipment.
Despite his hardships, Murch finally reached Stillwater, where he worked as a cook in a mill boarding house. After a while he grew restless and travelled 400 miles down the Mississippi to Dubuque, Iowa and then moved on to Illinois before finally moving back home to Maine. He went to work as a rigger and stonecutter on Fort Gorges in Portland Harbor in 1859 and continued to work there throughout the war until 1867. That year, he married his wife Ellen and they had two sons. After working in the granite business in Groton, Massachusetts, Murch went to work in Cape Ann cutting stone for the Boston Post office. In 1871, Murch returned to Maine to cut granite for the New York Post Office on Dix Island, off South Thomaston.
In the 1870s, midcoast Maine experienced an economic boom as granite companies secured lucrative contracts for stone to build federal buildings, monuments and paving block roads. Maine granite was used to build the Brooklyn Bridge, the Washington Monument, Ulysses S. Grant’s Tomb, the Smithsonian and many other structures and monuments. About 3,000 to 5,000 men labored ten hours a day, six days a week at quarrying operations at Dix Island, Spruce Head, Clark’s Island, Hurricane Island, Vinalhaven, Frankfort, Hallowell, Blue Hill and other towns.
Work in the granite industry could be very dangerous. Dynamite and nitroglycerine were used to blast granite out of the earth while high tension cables extracted the stone out of quarries and transported them on ships. Granite cutters contracted the lung disease silicosis from breathing in silica dust in the poorly ventilated cutting and polishing sheds. Many would end up spitting up blood in their later years. In the winter, workers would chip away at the granite in the snow-covered pits and in the summer the sun reflecting on the rocks would heat up the quarries like a furnace.
The demand for skilled granite cutters was so great that companies recruited immigrant workers from Italy, Sweden, Finland, Scotland and England. The skilled stonecutters from Europe mentored local Maine boys like Murch who had previously only made their livings on the sea and farming the land. Most of the workers lived in large company boarding houses with the rent deducted from their paychecks. Even workers who lived in private homes found they were taxed by the company for lodging.
The conditions in the boarding houses were cramped and workers slept three or four to a bed. The company charged workers 75 cents to commute on the company boat, but many rowed back and forth on whaling boats from the mainland to the islands. For fun, the workers would race boats and bet on the winners. Gambling over cock fights was also a popular past time. Ethnic tensions between immigrant workers would occasionally flare up over religion and political loyalties.
The Catholic Irish workers harbored deep resentments toward the Protestant Scots and English who were sponsored by the British crown to colonize Northern Ireland in the 17th century. The indigenous Irish were displaced from their lands and treated like second class citizens. Beginning in the 1830s, Irish immigrants began fleeing their homeland due to a series of famines that the British government refused to address. While the Irish starved, the British imported food out of Ireland to be sold on the open market. On Dix Island two large boarding houses, the Shamrock and the Aberdeen, housed the Irish and Scots respectively. As one observer wrote,
“A Scotsman would have slept on the ledge before he would have stayed in the Shamrock all night and the Irish would no more thus demean themselves by asking for lodging at the Aberdeen .... Race feelings ran high at times and the man who wasn’t ready to fight for the honor of his house didn’t stay on the island for long. It was fight first and explain afterward, and rough as the life was it bred that manliness which is only born of boom and bustle.”
Irish Nationalist stonecutters on Vinalhaven formed the first Fenian Circle in Maine in 1865 to advocate for a free Ireland. These chapters of the Fenian Brotherhood organized members, built solidarity, hosted community fundraisers, and collected money and weapons to support Irish independence from British rule. In April, 1866, Maine Fenians took part in a raid on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, then under the authority of the British government, in a failed effort to force Great Britain to withdraw from Ireland.
The Granite Ring
Granite barons General Davis Tillson & Joseph R. Bodwell
By the 1870s, granite operations had consolidated into a handful of companies. Just as Gilded Age robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan controlled the oil, rail, shipping, steel and banking industries, General Davis Tillson on Hurricane Island, Mark St. John on Clark Island, C.A. Dixon on Dix Island and Joseph R. Bodwell on Vinalhaven dominated Maine’s granite industry. The four Republican business men were known collectively as the “Granite Ring.” These companies held a near-monopoly on lucrative federal contracts for Maine granite thanks to their connections to powerful Republicans in Congress.
Although most of the blue-collar workers were Democrats, granite bosses aggressively pressured them to vote for the Republican ticket because GOP politicians kept the contracts coming. In those days, political parties would hand out different colored tickets to voters on election day, which made it easy for employers to see how their employees voted. Murch himself was fired by the Bodwell Granite Company for voting the Democratic ticket in the 1876 election. He got another job working on Clark Island shortly after.
In 1875, a letter appeared in the Democratic Rockland Opinion that infuriated General Davis Tillson, a Civil War hero-turned wealthy granite magnate. The letter, written by an anonymous stonecutter, alleged that Tillson kept account of all the voters on Hurricane Island, which he owned with two partners, and made them attend captive audience meetings during which he pressured them to vote for his preferred candidates. Tillson notoriously told the workers that “any man who voted the Democratic ticket is my personal enemy.” A stonecutter named P.W. Henrick later testified in Tillson’s libel trial against the Rockland Opinion that he voted for Democrats before working for Tillson, but “democracy has been scared out of me.”
The anonymous letter kicked a hornet’s nest: Tillson burst into the offices of the Opinion spewing curses and demanding that the editor give him the name of its author. While the newspapermen didn’t give up the granite cutter’s name, Tillson had his suspicions. He soon discovered incriminating letters in a trunk in the room of a stonecutter named Timothy McQueeny at a boarding house on the island.
Tillson promptly fired McQueeny, had his belongings thrown into the street, and ordered him to leave the island aboard a steamer to Rockland. The General then announced to everyone in the street that McQueeny was “a convicted thief, liar, reptile, perjurer” and other epithets not fit for print.
“He authorized that any of us who found McQueeny on the island should eject him,” a witness recalled. “That if we hurt him a little it was all right and if we hurt him a great deal he would pay for the damages.”
McQueeny told Tillson he would leave when he was “good and ready” — after all, he paid taxes on the island and had a right to stay.
“To hell with the law,” Tillson retorted. “I own this island and I will be master here. You get off of it.”
Another stonecutter named Sewall L. Haywood, whom Tillson fired for writing articles critical of the granite industry in the Boston Herald and Rockland Opinion, found out the extent of his bosses’ wrath. Seeking a new source of income, Haywood purchased a home on Hurricane Island to rent out to granite workers. But he quickly learned that Tillson had ordered his employees not to rent out rooms from Haywood or they would face dismissal. The former stonecutter-turned-landlord sued the General for damages, but the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Tillson was simply exercising his right to freedom of contract. Tillson also made it known that any worker caught reading a pro-labor newspaper would be fired.
In February, 1877, Murch was once again fired while working on Dix Island. Edwin Sprague, a government superintendent overseeing granite contracts who also owned the Republican Rockland Free Press, ordered the labor agitator to be discharged. Sprague was deeply involved in Republican politics and was appointed to several patronage positions for his work for the party.
The granite barons often held back wages for months on end, paying stonecutters in credit slips known as “scrip,” which could only be redeemed at the company store. The Bodwell Company was notorious for fleecing its own employees by selling groceries and basic necessities at inflated prices. One writer to the Rockland Opinion described how the Bodwell Granite Company squeezed his employees by withholding pay for three or four months, “thus obliging them to trade at its store, and so got the money pretty much all back, besides getting the work of the men.”
Bodwell aggressively collected debts and successfully sued workers who owed back rent or debts for lodging or his company store. Some workers ended up leaving their debts to the granite company to their widows when they died. It’s no wonder granite workers often compared themselves to slaves to the company.
Bodwell Granite Company scrip that could only be redeemed at the company store.
On Hurricane Island, Tillson taxed workers to support a church on the condition of their employment regardless of their religion. Granite workers complained that they had to pay taxes for the church and hospital even when religious and health care services weren’t provided. Eventually, Tillson was forced to withdraw the church tax after a public backlash to the practice.
As Maine labor historian Charlie Scontras noted, granite cutters were initially paid very well (between $4.25 and $5.00 a day), but it was not because of the benevolence of the Granite Ring. Granite contractors were guaranteed 15 percent above their gross expenses, known as the “15 Percent Contracts.” However, these contracts led to rampant corruption because the higher the cost of the job, the larger the gross percentage went into the pockets of the company. Scontras wrote that stone workers were allowed to double the amount of time it took to complete tasks. Contractors paid apprentices $1.00 a day, but they charged the government based on the full rate for experienced stonecutters. Sometimes the companies would put employees on non-government work, but still kept them on the government payroll. The Rockland Opinion alleged that General Tillson required his employees to sign vouchers certifying that they had been paid when they had not.
Then in 1877, U.S. Attorney General Charles Devens declared that the 15 Percent contracts were illegal because they extended over a number of years, while only Congress could make annual appropriations. Granite contractors were suddenly forced to bid competitively for work, which put downward pressure on wages. Granite companies slashed wages for $4.00 or $5.00 to less than $2.00 a day. Men who extracted the rock from the quarries saw their wages cut to less than $1.00 a day for ten hours work. One granite cutter on Vinalhaven expressed his anger and frustration in a “Plea for Liberty:”
“We are crushed down by the great soul-destroying corporations .... Their Ring masters come here as poor as Job’s turkey and have fattened and feasted on us... There are many who have no alternative but to do as the Ring commands - and that is to toil and work for a miserable pittance, paid when the Ring chooses to pay it, in such commodities as they have, for which they charge any price they see fit. ... My God! How long will this community permit itself to be doomed to misery, poverty, and degradation?”
Granite workers were also angered that the companies were not following an eight-hour workday law for workers on federal projects passed by Congress in 1868. Federal departments responded to the law but cutting wages by 20 percent, drawing protests from organized labor like the National Labor Union, which had union affiliates in Maine. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a proclamation prohibiting the reduction of wages paid to workmen on federal projects in response to the eight-hour day law.
However, federal contractors ignored the proclamation. In 1872, Congress passed a resolution restoring any wages withheld by the federal government to federal workers who labored under the eight-hour day law. The Granite Ring honored the law for about a year before going back to the 10-hour system. Granite cutters who were denied their full pay protested that the companies owed them back wages and overtime during the years that the law was in effect.
The Founding of the International Granite Cutters’ Union
Wage cuts, irregular payments, layoffs, oppressive workplace rules and the company store were all grievances that influenced Maine granite cutters to finally take the leap to unionize in early 1877. The movement started on Clark Island where workers formed the first Granite Cutters’ Union local on Feb. 19, 1877. Two Clark Island stoneworkers, Fred Killman and James Demster, were discussing their low wages and long hours when they decided to do something about it. They launched the union drive at a meeting in an old shanty, known as the Shovelers Home, on Clark Island in 1876. A committee was formed to visit the other local quarries.
Thompson Murch and others organized unions on Vinalhaven, Spruce Head and Hurricane Island. On March 10, 1877, all of the locals met in Rockland to form the Granite Cutters’ International Union of the United States and the British Provinces of America. Aside from Murch, most of the union organizers were from the British Isles where they had previously had experience with labor unions. It wasn’t long before the Granite Cutters became one of the fastest growing unions in the country, spreading to the West Coast, Canada and the British Isles.
The granite cutters elected Murch as the union’s first leader. The new union sought to improve wages, reduce working hours, ensure workers were paid on time, formalize apprenticeships and provide death, sickness and accident benefits to members and their widows. As Murch proclaimed:
“Come with us, then, for ‘in union is strength,’ and ‘united we stand, divided we fall.’ It now remains with you, Granite Cutters, to make our Union strong and powerful, known, felt and respected, and as the patriots of old made a powerful nation of a few feeble colonies, so let us make a powerful Union out of our young society and so show to the world at large that we are worthy sons of worthy fathers and that the spirit of independence, for which they spent blood and treasure to maintain. is still alive in our breasts.”
Murch lobbied Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes for better terms for granite workers on federal contracts, relaying their concerns over wages, hours and working conditions. He argued that workmen believed the government should do the work to prevent private companies from exploiting workers and defrauding the government. Murch sought to have provisions in new contracts that would require contractors to pay fair wages, but they failed to convince the Hayes administration and the Commission on Contracts.
The union stone workers carried out their first strikes at Spruce Head, winning part of their lost wages. Between April and May, 1878, Murch led a 24-day strike at the Bodwell Granite Company on Vinalhaven after it fired 30 union men. Joseph Bodwell, who was elected Maine Governor in 1887, pledged “to smash the union out of existence before it should become strong enough,” but ultimately failed in that endeavor. With a couple notable exceptions, few union members crossed the picket line.
One of the scabs was Bushrod Clay of South Thomaston, who also served as a State Representative. Recognizing the growing political power of the Granite Cutters Union, Republicans recruited Clay to run for the Maine Legislature in a special election because they needed a candidate who could win over disaffected Republican stonecutters disgusted with the Granite Ring’s grip on the party. However, Clay quickly destroyed his reputation when he crossed the picket line.
Some younger union men burned Clay in effigy and rode it on a rail through the streets od Vinalhaven before hanging it by the neck on the hill near the soldiers’ monument. The company portrayed the union as a bunch of lawless ruffians and urged the Knox County Sheriff to assemble a posse to deal with a potential riot on the island. The sheriff went over, but didn’t bring a posse. A group of Vinalhaven merchants and a selectman issued a statement that the strikers were orderly and there was no reason to anticipate any violence.
Eventually Murch met with Bodwell and hammered out an agreement to end the strike. The company agreed to rehire the 30 men it fired and the workers would go back to work at the old rates. The company also agreed to provide an advance on work. It was a victory for the union but workers still complained of low wages.
The Rise of the Greenback Labor Party
Frustrated with both political parties, Thompson Murch decided to put his feelers out to gauge local interest in running a progressive labor candidate against incumbent Republican Congressman Eugene Hale, a powerful politician with deep ties to U.S. Senator and Republican power broker James Blaine of Augusta. In February, 1878, Murch organized a meeting in Rockland featuring Greenback-Labor leader and farmer Solon Chase of Turner as the guest speaker. A former state legislator and colorful character, Chase founded the state chapter of the Greenback-Labor Party, an independent movement of farmers and workers focused on currency reform and workers’ rights.
Officially known as the Independent National Party, the Greenback Labor Party was founded in the depths of a crippling economic depression in 1874. It supported an inflationary currency policy and opposed going back to the bullion-based system that lowered the prices of farm products and made it harder for farmers to pay back their debts. Greenbackers believed that only the government, not private banks, should issue currency. It strongly opposed the Resumption Act of 1875, which required that all currency, including greenbacks, could be redeemed in gold and provided for the gradual reduction of greenbacks in circulation. As Scontras writes, the National Labor Union supported cheap money as means of financing self-employment and co-operatives to escape wage dependency and capitalist exploitation.
The Greenback Party also supported the eight-hour day, workers’ rights, the creation of a national bureau of labor, women’s suffrage, a graduated income tax, abolition of prison labor, taxpayer supported public education, banning Chinese immigration and the breaking up of rail monopolies. Chase became known from coast to coast for his catch phrase “them steers.” In his stump speech, he would talk about how his pair of steers shrank in value, but if instead he had bought government bonds his investment would have grown.
“I was robbed of my hay and the same bond that would buy my steers at three years would buy them steers at four years old,” Chase wrote in 1909. “The bond holder gets by that operation not only the growth of the steers between the ages of three and four, but he also got the hay that made ‘em grow.”
Chase’s message was that it was farmers and workers who produced all of the wealth in the country, but it was being sucked up a elite, parasitical money class. His words not only appealed to indebted farmers, but also to union stonecutters who packed the hall to see him speak on that winter night in 1878. On the same night, the Greenbackers nominated the committee president Captain Hanson Gregory to run for Rockland Mayor. Gregory is credited with inventing the doughnut in 1847 as a teenage sailor aboard a lime schooner. Murch got to work immediately organizing the party and it soon spread like wildfire up and down the Midcoast. Most voters hadn’t thought much about expanding the volume of currency, but soon it was the talk of the town as a way to alleviate the suffering of workers and farmers during the worst depression the United States had ever seen.
Murch saw a way of building a coalition of Mainers fed up with both major parties because they were doing very little for the working man. In March, the Greenbackers made a test run with the Rockland mayoral election. While Greenbacker Hanson Gregory didn’t prevail, Democrat George Gregory defeated incumbent Republican Caleb G. Moffitt. Despite the setback, the Greenbackers decided to field a candidate to dethrone Congressman Hale, even though they initially didn’t have much hope they could defeat the Granite Ring’s preferred candidate. For the granite workers of Knox County, Murch was the natural choice for nominee to serve the sprawling rural district.
Since he could legally vote, Murch was a staunch Democrat, even though he condemned the pro-slavery, secessionist wing of the party. He also differed from the Democratic Party’s position on tariffs, going even further than the Republicans to support blanket prohibitory tariffs on everything that could possibly be produced in America in order to support jobs at home. He also was a temperance man. Rockland Opinion editor and prominent DemocratOliver Otis was one of Murch’s most prominent backers and wrote several columns in support of the union leader as a champion for the downtrodden.
On a bright summer morning in July the Knox County delegates piled into a little boat headed up the coast to the Greenback Labor Party nominating convention in Belfast. The men had a kettle of clam chowder, but most of them were too excited to eat anything. Following the opening of the convention, Rockland lime manufacturer George L. Snow drew wild applause when he proclaimed that it was not a “convention,” but “a mass-meeting of the people rising in their might to crush the money power.”
Murch did not have an easy path to the nomination. Judge Miller of Lincolnville nominated former Republican-turned-Democratic politician and newspaper man William M. Rust, who edited the Belfast-based Progressive Age, a leading news organ in the Greenback movement. Miller called Rust a pioneering Greenback Party organizer who knew what it was like to work hard, laboring 14 hours a day on his newspaper. Camden businessman Wilder W. Perry, who founded the insurance company Allen Agency, also threw his hat in the ring. He told delegates that he had also done a lot of work for the party, declaring, “If we do nothing now for our rights, we shall be slaves, and this country will be a monarchy.”
In his nominating speech for Murch, George Snow said that 2,000 granite cutters were unanimous in support for their union leader, and will not vote for anyone else. Someone shouted back “Then they are not Greenbackers!”
Then Murch got up to address the convention. He acknowledged that he had never spoken in public and that he rose as “working-man, not as a politician, or as a speaker.” But, he said, “if you do me the honor to nominate me you will never regret it.” Murch said he knew he couldn’t match how much money had been spent on the district’s congressional races in the past, but he would make a formidable challenge to Hale. Judge L. R. Campbell of Rockland then got up to support Murch with his fiery “Bread or Blood” speech which brought the house down.
When the first round of votes was tallied, Rust was ahead with 71 votes, followed by Murch with 69, Perry with 11 and Knowlton with 4. The hall erupted in shouts of “Murch! Murch!” and “Rust! Rust!” as the Waldo and Knox County delegates attempted to drown each other out. Perry then shot to his feet and shouted, “I wish to withdraw, as would be expected of me. And I must further remark to all those who voted for me that I desire them to throw their next ballot for my old friend Mr. Murch.” Rust, who was sitting next teo Perry, abruptly got up and stormed out of the hall. Cheers and hisses followed. The stonecutters were elated. Murch shouted that although it had been said that only stonecutters would vote for him, he thought all laboring men would work for him, as he would for them.
A voice cried out, “You’ll learn, same as I did,” drawing laughter. Murch replied that he supposed he should always find a tongue to express his honest convictions. A second ballot was then taken and Murch came out on top with 84 votes to Rust’s 67. The convention voted to make the vote unanimous. Murch humbly accepted the nomination, stating that he didn’t expect to win it, given the strong qualifications of the other Greenback candidates. He said he hadn’t been inside a school house since he was 16, but was well-versed in politics. Thanking the convention, he said if elected, he would do his duty as far as voting was concerned, but he could not be expected to make speeches. Like Troy Jackson, Murch was a work horse, not a show horse.
After the Greenback Labor Party Convention adjourned, shouts and cheers could be heard blocks away. One observer remarked that there was more amusement than any show in Belfast in recent years, “with the sole exception of Barnum’s great circus.” Murch and the Rockland delegation received a hearty greeting from a crowd assembled on the docks when the steamer returned to Rockland. But while the granite workers of Knox County were thrilled with the nomination of their leader, local newspapers were not.
Rust wrote a bitter diatribe in the Progressive Age calling Murch unfit for office because he wouldn’t even give a speech at the convention. He took aim at Murch for his lack of formal education, claiming he didn’t have a dollar to his name. Rust blasted the stonecutter for “boasting of his lack of acquired ability” and “his unsuitableness to take care of the money of the people, having never earned or at least taken care of his own.”
“But we fear that while his boasted lack of fitness may make him popular with the stone cutters it will have an unfavorable effect with the rest of the people of the district, even were it not notorious as it is, that he has been the head centre of all the strikes and troubles which have occurred on the granite islands,” wrote Rust.
While Rust would eventually come around to support his former rival, Republicans would use his words against Murch in the general election. The Belfast Republican Journal expressed astonishment that the “brotherhood of bush-hammer and chisel could come to this city by the steamboat load, wrest the greenback congressional nomination from the very father of the cause in the district and bestow it upon an unknown man.” The editorial claimed that Murch only won the nomination by intimidation, threats and shouts over “right and reason.” The Republican Kennebec Journal decried Murch as the “the hateful, cloven foot of communism,” calling him “the apostle of communism, ignorance, turbulence and pauperism.”
“It was a convention of roughs, or adventurers, of irresponsible men – of men who strike for higher wages when they are receiving from three to five dollars a day; who embarrass business and cripple industry, by the dictations of their inner secret councils of trades unions,” the KJ blustered.
A Shocking Political Upset
Meanwhile, Murch got to work campaigning, determined to visit every single town in his district. With a budget of just $1,000, he purchased campaign literature and hired halls and brass bands for his events. At a large meeting at the Captain Lindsey House on Lindsey Street in Rockland “Democrats, Greenbackers, and anti-Hale men and anti-everything and anti-everybody” congregated to hear Murch kick off his campaign from the hotel porch, according to the New York Sun.
Murch harnessed his horse and drove all up and down the coast meeting voters and giving speeches. In his opponent’s hometown of Ellsworth, he spoke to a packed hall. Young workers acted as surrogates, giving speeches all over the district. The Greenbackers accused Hale of allowing the government to be defrauded by corrupt granite contractors while their employees were forced to work 10 hours a day, six days a week in violation of federal law.
Murch’s supporters accused moderate Democrats of nominating Democrat Joseph H. Martin to siphon away votes from the Greenback Party and help Hale. Republicans were confident that the stone worker didn’t stand a chance against Hale and scoffed when attorney and future judge William Henry Fogler warned the State Republican Committee that Waldo County was hopelessly in the hands of the Greenbackers. As Election Day approached, Republicans realized that Martin’s presence in the race was actually helping Murch and tried to get him to drop out. But Murch’s allies worked behind the scenes to keep Martin in the race.
The Granite Ring responded to the surging grassroots Greenback movement by ordering their employees to vote for Hale. But Murch and his men were prepared for the Ring’s voter intimidation tactics and worked with Oliver Otis to print Greenback Party tickets to resemble the color and shape of Republican tickets so company spies wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Republican poll watchers were flummoxed when they saw granite cutters passing out what appeared to be Republican ballots outside the Vinalhaven polling place on Election Day. When someone brought in a white ticket, a Republican poll watcher would raise his hand to signal that a Democrat voted. They thought they had the election sealed up for Hale after counting what they thought were all of the Republican voters.
They were shocked when that night granite cutter Joe Porter raced through the village shouting “Murch has carried the island!” Soon word spread up and down the coast that Murch had carried town after town, defeating Hale by a margin of 11,353 to 9,911. Martin polled just 9 percent. On the day of the election, Murch spent all morning distributing Greenback tickets. By noon he was so exhausted that he went to a nearby hotel to take a short nap, only to fall into a deep slumber. He didn’t wake up until after the polls closed, so he never got the opportunity to vote for himself.
The ReadingEagle (PA) described Murch as “the man who broke the Blaine, Hale, Hamlin Ring,” referring to the three most prominent Republican politicians in Maine. The voters of Maine had elected the first working-class candidate to Congress and reduced the number of Republican lawyers representing Maine from five to three. Seasoned political operatives had to admit that the union-led movement was brilliantly executed. They seriously miscalculated the anti-incumbent mood of the electorate and the potential for a grassroots upsurge.
In addition to the election of Greenbackers Murch and George Ladd to Congress, the Greenback Party claimed eleven of the thirty-one State Senate seats, and sixty-four of 151 seats in the Maine House of Representatives. Waldo County elected the largest combination of Democratic and Greenbacker candidates to the Legislature as well as a Greenback sheriff, county commissioner and treasurer. Murch’s former Greenbacker rival Wilder W. Perry also won a seat in the Maine House. Although the Greenback Party’s gubernatorial nominee Joseph Smith didn’t win, he came in second place, ahead of the Democrat in the race.
But it was Murch’s election that particularly infuriated men of wealth and standing. The Kennebec Journal expressed outrage that the Fifth District could elect such “a mischief making tramp” to Congress. The Springfield Republican called him “an ignorant laboring man and vicious communist.” The conservative Portland Daily Press called Hale’s defeat “a national calamity,” proclaiming that Maine’s congressional delegation “consists of three honest money men, one soft-money demagogue and one wild-eyed Communist.” Murch vehemently denied that he held any Marxist views. He simply wanted a fairer and more just economy for working people.
The Rockland Opinion reported that Murch was “well pleased but not unduly elated, with his magnificent victory.” He was “not at all troubled by the malignant sneers of those who affect to think he has no brains.” He planned to “go straight to the people” and visit each town and city in his district to find out what the needs of his constituents were. He pledged to listen to both workers and businessmen, but would not seek guidance from politicians and party bosses. Murch assured the Granite Ring that it had nothing to fear from him, but that anyone caught defrauding the government would be punished.
Unfortunately, making change as one of only a handful of progressives in Congress proved extremely difficult at a time when laissez-faire economics was the dominant ideology in Washington. When Murch ran for re-election in 1880, some stonecutters expressed disappointment that he had not been able to improve their wages. As one granite cutter told the Boston Advertiser, “See here, Mister, we were to have a better day. He is having a jolly time among big fellers in Washington. That’s all nice; but we ain’t no better off. No sir.”
During Murch’s four-year tenure in Congress the most significant legislation he backed was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigration to the U.S. At the time, the labor movement blamed Chinese laborers for undercutting wages of white workers and used dehumanizing, racist stereotypes about East Asians to back their position. It wouldn’t be until 1938 that a Democratic Congress would finally enact the eight-hour work day.
Murch’s most notable achievement in Congress was securing the first congressional appropriation to build Rockland’s iconic breakwater using 700,000 tons of stone, most of it quarried from Vinalhaven. In the end, Murch made good on his promise to be an advocate for both workers and the granite businesses of Penobscot Bay. The breakwater became known as the “Murch Monument.”
Thompson Murch served just two terms before he was defeated in 1882 when his district was eliminated in redistricting. By that time, the Greenback Labor Party was in rapid decline as it split into two factions. One faction advocated for continuing to run as a more progressive third party and the other supported a fusionist strategy with the Democrats. As the economy improved and the Democratic Party absorbed some of its platforms, the Greeback Labor Party’s core base began shifting priorities. In the 1890s, many Greenbackers would join the People’s Party of Maine, commonly known as the Populist Party, though it wouldn’t come close to the successes progressives achieved in 1878.
After his defeat, Murch moved to Boston to pursue business opportunities, but his mental and physical health began to decline. He died in an insane asylum in Danvers, Massachusetts on December 15, 1886. He was just 48. Even in death the newspapers couldn’t resist kicking Murch on the way out. A short death notice that ran in several newspapers described him as “one of a large class of men who ‘cannot stand prosperity.’” His union brothers lovingly carved the ornate granite tomb that marks his final resting place at the Locust Grove Cemetery in Hampden.
Thompson Murch’s Legacy
I believe that Murch’s greatest legacy is his work organizing the granite cutters of Maine into a powerful and influential union at a time when there were few labor unions in the state. Although he was unsuccessful in passing federal legislation to reduce the work day, the Granite Cutters International Union eventually won the eight-hour day through collective bargaining as wells as higher wages and a five-day week in their contracts. They also fought for and won improved workplace safety and ventilation to protect themselves from inhaling the deadly silica dust.
Inspired by the solidarity of the granite cutters, in the mid 1880s thousands of Maine workers and farmers joined the Knights of Labor, which sought to transcend capitalism and create a “Cooperative Commonwealth” governed by the principles of brotherhood and cooperation, instead of cutthroat competition. As Scontras noted, much of the membership of the Knights was furnished by the paving cutters, quarrymen, and other workers in the granite industry.
The Knights of Labor would accept anyone who engaged in “honorable toil”— men and women, skilled and unskilled, black and white, merchants and farmers. By 1887, Maine Knights had established a state-wide organization with a membership of nearly 28,000, distributed over 127 locals throughout the state. Scontras estimated that about 41 percent of the state’s wage earners were members of the Knights at one time. Midcoast Maine elected the most members of the Knights of Labor to the Maine Legislature. Responding to the surge in labor strength, the Maine Democratic Party adopted several pro-worker planks including a shorter work day, the right to unionize, credit reform, more equitable distribution of property, support for worker cooperatives and more.
Thanks to the Knights’ agitating, the Maine Legislature established the Department of Labor and passed laws requiring regular fortnightly pay days, providing free text books for students, a ten-hour day for minors and limiting the use of convict labor. In 1891, the Maine labor movement finally got the Legislature to pass the secret ballot law, ensuring that workers would never again risk being fired for exercising their constitutional right to vote.
By the turn of the 19th century, the Rockland area had become a hotbed of progressive populism and labor radicalism that helped ignite a new era of activism and political reform in Maine. Unionized workers won the citizen initiative, supported women’s suffrage and crusaded against child labor. Union workers continued to form third parties that called for a minimum wage, a graduated income tax, a national pension system, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, the right to unionize and more. Many of these reforms were later adopted by the Democratic Party and became law. In the 1930s, militant organized workers fought for some of our most popular social welfare programs like Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and more.
Unfortunately, Murch has largely been forgotten, but Maine has never lost that populist streak that elected the first union leader to Congress. As hundreds of union members and community volunteers knock on doors this week for Brother Troy Jackson, there is a very good chance Maine could once again make history by electing the first worker to come out of the labor movement to the U.S. Senate.