Louis Arrington: An Early American Labor Leader
by
John J. Dunphy
The glass industry played an important role in the River Bend. William Eliot Smith and Edward Levis purchased a small, bankrupt glass factory from John Hayner in 1873 and moved the operation to the railway near East Broadway three years later. Their Illinois Glass Company prospered at the new site. Illinois Glass employed 74 workers in 1873. By 1905, that number had swelled to 3,200.
When Illinois Glass celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1923, the Alton plant served as the flagship of a company that included seven factories throughout the Midwest and East. The Owens-Illinois Glass Company was formed in 1929 when Illinois Glass merged with the Owens Bottle Company of Toledo, Ohio. The Alton plant closed in 1984.
Relatively few workers enjoyed the benefits of union membership in the laissez-faire economic climate of the United States in the nineteenth century. The glass bottle blowers employed at the Illinois Glass Company in Alton, however, were organized in 1877 by one of the giants of the American labor movement — Louis Arrington.
Born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1837, Arrington began working in a bottle factory in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1851 and was formally apprenticed a year later. Upon completing his apprenticeship in 1856, he discovered that he was unable to get a job in the glass bottle trade unless he was willing to displace an older employee or work for meager wages. He took a job in the rail mills but left in 1861 to enlist in the Second West Virginia volunteers. Arrington was mustered out with his regiment in 1864.
Arrington returned to the glass bottle factory and joined the Glass Bottle Blowers Association in 1866. Founded in 1842, the GBBA was one of the earliest labor unions in the United States. Arrington dedicated the rest of his life to building the GBBA and bettering the lives of the men who belonged to it.
The union assigned Arrington to an organizing drive in the Midwest, which brought him to Alton. In 1877, he organized the glass bottle blowers at Illinois Glass into Local 31. The members of the Alton local elected Arrington to represent them at the first session of the Western Division of the GBBA, and he later served on its executive committee. Arrington was manager of the Western Division when that organization joined the Knights of Labor in 1886.
A national labor organization, the Knights of Labor boasted a membership of about 700,000 that year. Arrington rose rapidly and became National Master Workman of District 143. In 1890, the eastern and western divisions of the GBBA merged to form the United Green Glass Workers Association of the United States and Canada and elected Arrington to its presidency.
An unsuccessful railway strike and competition from the rival American Federation of Labor, however, seriously eroded the Knights of Labor’s membership. Arrington sensed that the organization was no longer an effective vehicle for American workers and withdrew the United Green Glass Workers Association from the Knights in 1891. When his term of office expired in 1894, Arrington began a shoe business in Alton.
But Arrington’s retirement from the labor movement was short-lived. He became treasurer of Local 2 in Alton in 1895. Arrington gave up his shoe business in 1897 when Illinois Governor John Tanner appointed him chief state factory inspector. Arrington was a good friend of President William McKinley and played an influential role in devising the glass schedule of McKinley’s tariff bill. He also appeared before the Congressional Ways and Means committee as a spokesman for American glass workers. Plagued by health problems as he grew older, Arrington still managed to serve as a delegate to union conventions held in Milwaukee in 1909 and Atlantic City in 1910.
Arrington died of cancer at his home, located at 931 East Third Street in Alton, in 1911. A newspaper obituary eulogized him as “the father of the glass blowers union in the United States.” He requested that his funeral service be conducted by an old friend rather than a clergyman. Arrington’s old friend was a former glass blower.
Contributions from River Bend residents and union members across the United States funded the creation of an 8-foot granite monument to mark Arrington’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery, which is now known as St. Patrick’s Cemetery. Carved in Vermont, it was set in place in 1912 and formally dedicated at a ceremony attended by Alton Mayor J.C. Faulstich and a host of union officials that included the treasurer of the American Federation of Labor.
Owens-Illinois Glass Company and its union locals are long gone. After numerous name changes and mergers with other unions, the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers International Union, which was the linear successor to Arrington’s union, merged with the United Steelworkers of America in 2016. Louis Arrington’s legacy lives on.
Bibliography:
“Death Summons Louis Arrington,” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph; January 5, 1911.
“Arrington Monument Fund Is Completed,” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph; August 2, 1911.
“Arrington Monument Completed,” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph; April 20, 1912.
”Monument to Memory Of Louis Arrington,” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph; May 20, 1912.
“Arrington Monument Dedication,” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph; May 27, 1912.
Dunphy, John J. “An Alton giant of the labor movement;” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 3, 2007.
Duvernoy, Bernadette, Huber, Don, St. Peters, Robert and Stetson, Charlotte. Alton Remembered. St. Louis: G. Bradley Publishing, Inc., 2000.