Shorter Hours and the Protestant Sabbath: Religious Framing and Movement Alliances in Late-Nineteenth-Century Chicago

Abstract

In the grand scope of American labor history, the fight to abolish Sunday work has been left on the margins of most historical accounts of the more universal fight to shorten the workday. For good reason, some may argue. The Sunday-closing, or Sabbatarian, movement hardly seems comparable in either its scope, its effects, or its long-term significance to the eighthour movement or to an even better known Protestant reform movement: temperance. Nevertheless, the fight to abolish Sunday work represents a significant case study for exploring how cultural influences, particularly religious ones, shaped the late-nineteenth-century industrial landscape. The cultural significance of Sundays drew clergy, labor activists, and employers into a social struggle that was a simultaneous struggle over the meaning of Sundays and how best to put this meaning into industrial and legislative practice.

O be Some other Name

“…Congress finally abolished Sunday mail service in 1912 (John 1990;Rohrer 1987). Similarly, only after the tum of the century were religious leaders able to effectively stop industrial work on Sundays (Mirola 1999). As Gillis (1996:96) notes, "[Ilt was the Victorians who completed what even the Puritans could not accomplish, ... the prohibition of all public trading and leisure activities" on Sundays.…”