A Political History of the International

Union of Socialist Youth 1907–1917

Patrizia Dogliani
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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

A Political History of the

International Union of
Socialist Youth 1907–1917

Patrizia Dogliani
 Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
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 Patrizia Dogliani

A Political History
of the International
Union of Socialist
Youth 1907–1917
Patrizia Dogliani
Department of History, Cultures,
and Civilization
University of Bologna
Bologna, Italy

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-20693-1 ISBN 978-3-031-20694-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20694-8

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 Introduction

The creation and early life of the International Union of Socialist Youth
attracted little resonance among historians and had few rare testimonies:
some reconstructions took place early, particularly in the late 1920s,
when the international communist and socialist youth unions vied for the
primogeniture of labor youth movements and the legitimacy of its polit-
ical continuity. Till the 1970s, histories of the Second International forgot
all the existence of a youth international; works marked by congresses,
such as those of James Joll, Roland Bauer, Julius Braunthal, Gerhart
Niemeyer or Patricia Van der Esch, or those devoted to the ideas that
guided the events of international socialism, such as the works of Georges
D. H. Cole and Carl Landauer, had yet to delve into topics like the
women’s and youth movements and their social and political requests.
Only Van der Esch mentioned the existence of the “parallel” interna-
tional unions associated with the Second International, like the Socialist
Inter-parliamentary Commission, or the womens’ international organi-
zation, but she too neglected to mention the Youth one. The French
historian Annie Kriegel was more forthcoming, recalling its existence
in a few lines, not least because her work expressed the need to treat
the history of the International “as an element of contemporary social
history.”1 She understood the history of Union was a chapter in a more

1 A. Kriegel. Les internationales ouvrières (1864–1943). Paris, 1964, 7; and P. Van der
Esch. La Deuxième Internationale 1889–1923. Paris, 1957.

xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION

complex political and social story of the working-class masses in the indus-
trial era. The historical reconstruction of the Youth International was also
limited by the narrowness of the sources used to write an “official” history
of the Second International, which essentially consisted of congressional
reports. It took the expansion of socialist événementielle history through
Georges Haupt’s enormous survey and retrieval work in the 1960s to
formulate projects for a study of “parallel and minor” international orga-
nizations. It was in fact Georges Haupt, in a distant 1977, who nudged
me toward this history as the subject of my Italian university dissertation.
In that year, Italy was troubled by a complex issue of youth, resulting in
protests, alternative cultures and violence. The question of young gener-
ations emerged also in the social and political history of the workers’
movement.
The hesitation was attributed to the scarcity of sources and autobio-
graphical narratives. Few accounts from that time were preserved for us,
such as those of first secretaries Henri de Man and Willy Münzenberg;
they were largely distorted by the ideological and political clash among
national organizations that occurred with the Great War, in the aftermath
of the Russian Revolution and at the birth of the Third International. The
exception was what remained of the correspondence of the second secre-
tary of the Union: the Austrian Robert Danneberg. Part of letters and
congress preparatory documents went to the archives of the International
Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, while much of the documenta-
tion from the secretariats operating in Vienna and Zurich was dispersed or
handed over to the international communist youth movement in Moscow,
which made instrumental use of it between the two-world-wars period.
The first reconstruction of the Union, and in part the only one,
dates from 1929 to 1931 and was carried out by three leaders of
the Communist Youth International: the Austrian Richard Schüller, the
German Alfred Kurella and Russian Rafael Chitarov. Schüller was particu-
larly concerned with reconstructing the first period, the one before the
intervening partition between socialist and communist youth.2 In the
late 1920s, the authors were still involved in the clash between the two
international youth organizations, the socialist and the communist ones,
and communist interest was to discredit the earlier work of some young

2 Geschichte der Komunistischen Jugendinternationale, 3 vols, Berlin, 1929–1931: R.

Schüller. Von den Anfangen der proletarischen Jugendbewegung bis zur Gründung der
KJI .
 INTRODUCTION xv

socialist leaders—especially those who after the war remained loyal to or

returned to the socialist “old house.” Even before a history was finished, a
historiography had begun to undermine interpretation and the historical
reconstruction of events. Any young leader in the 1920s was barred from
these interpretative manipulations.3 The three youth internationals (the
socialist, the communist and the third one based in Vienna) that sprang
up in the immediate postwar period sought to legitimize themselves as
the continuation of the one that was born in Stuttgart in 1907. In the
second postwar, this first imprint remained. Most of the studies on the
socialist youth came from East German historiography; and for several
reasons: narrative continuity, easy access to German language sources
and lack of interest from broader international historiography. To the
already flawed pre-1945 understanding, other unsubstantiated interpre-
tations were added, for example the GDR historians’ overestimation of
the influence on the youth international movement by the Bolsheviks and
Lenin before 1917.4
However, it must also be remembered that Stalinism and Nazism
would soon eliminate, in purges, extermination camps, and through polit-
ical assassinations, the protagonists of the history we are reconstructing
here: Robert Danneberg, Willi Münzenberg, Gyula Alpari, to mention
only the most important ones. Or many lesser-known Italians, who
nonetheless played a key role together with the Swiss in saving the Inter-
national Union from disappearing during the Great War. Several of them
contributed to the birth of the Communist Youth International, and in
the 1920s sought protection from fascism in Soviet Union and disap-
peared in the Stalinist purges. Robert Danneberg, a socialist and a Jew,
died in Auschwitz in 1942. After the repression of the Hungarian revolu-
tion, the life of Guyla Alpari was a constant flight across Europe to escape
the Stalinists, and then the Nazis, until he was killed in the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp in 1944. All that does not include the still unsolved
cause of Münzenberg’s death in a French forest in June 1940.

3 See the historical reconstruction made by three socialist leaders: L. Thaller. Die inter-
nationale sozialistische Jugendbewegung. Wien 1921; K. Korn. Die Arbeiterjugendbewegung.
2 vols., Berlin, 1923, and K. Heinz. Kampf und Aufstieg, Wien, 1932.
4 K.H. Jahnke (ed), Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterjugendbewegung 1904–1945, Berlin
(GDR) 1973; and A. Reinhardt. Rolle und Funktion des Sekretariats der «Internationalen
Verbindung sozialistischer Jugendorganisationen» (Entstehung und Tätigkeit 1907–1917 ).
Ph. Diss., Leipzig, 1965.
xvi INTRODUCTION

This book had its first Italian version in 1983.5 It was the result
of long research thanks to a fellowship at the Einaudi Foundation in
Torin. It retains its original structure, although it is, for reasons of space,
reduced in the very rich set of notes that almost constituted a second
text in itself. The decision to rewrite and publish it in English stems
from two main reasons. First: the lack of an international knowledge on
this history. Secondly, the different approach and reading we can do of
that history today.6 If the factual reconstructions of the history of the
Second International have not progressed very far, the history of inter-
nationalism has made great strides. We can relocate this work in a new
debate on the characteristics and limits of internationalism and transna-
tionalism. The national movements, the struggles and goals they set:
anti-militarism, protection of young workers from exploitation, access
to culture and professional qualification for poor youth, economic and
political networks among youths from different countries are now the
dominant themes of a history of internationalism that not only exam-
ines organizations. Paraphrasing what was written by Glenda Sluga and
Patricia Clavin “when historians addressed internationalism, they presume
its nineteenth-century origins in Marxist-inspired political movements.”7
They showed that we can study other kinds of internationalism, from
liberal-inclined internationalisms to a trans-nationalism led by interna-
tional ideas and institutions. I would like to show here that the Marxism
internationalism of the Second International, 1889–1917, can also be
seen from the perspective of trans-national networks and struggles. And
at the same time, the history of the International Union of Socialist Youth

5 P. Dogliani. La “scuola delle reclute”. L’Internazionale giovanile socialista dalla fine

dell’Ottocento alla Prima guerra mondiale. Torin, 1983.
6 I refer to some of my previous considerations: Dogliani (ed). Internazionalismo e
transnazionalismo all’indomani della Grande Guerra. Bologna, 2020, 7–26, Socialisme et
internationalisme. Histoires du socialisme: Cahiers Jaurès, janvier-mars 2009, n. 191, 11–
30. A different approach can be seen in few new books crossing internationalism and trans-
nationalism: T.C. Imlay. The Practice of Socialist Internationalism. European Socialists and
International Politics 1914–1960. Oxford, 1918; N. Delalande. La lutte et l’entraide. L’âge
des solidarités ouvrières. Paris, 2019; E. Marcobelli. Internationalism towars Diplomatic
Crisis. The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists. Published in
this collection, 2021.
7 G. Sluga and P. Clavin (eds). Internationalism. A Twentieth-Century History.
Cambridge, 2017, 3. In this book, see also the chapters: Dogliani. The fate of Socialist
Internationalism, 38–60, and T. Imlay. Socialist Internationalism after 1914, 191–212.
 INTRODUCTION xvii

can be framed in the history of generation and relations between youth

and adults as it has been developed in recent decades. The book is also
a reflection on how and why large masses of European young workers
were attracted to socialism and Marxism from the end of the nineteenth
century up to the early twentieth century.
As I hand the book over to the press, I want to remember some
maestri who at various times guided and influenced my early studies on
the history of international socialism: Gian Mario Bravo, Enzo Collotti,
Georges Haupt, Madeleine Rebérioux, Herbert Steiner, Claude Willard.
My remembrance and thanks go to them. I would also like to thank those
who allowed this book to be published: Francesca Antonini, Jean Numa
Ducange, Marcello Musto, and the reviser of my English text, Alex Clark.
A brief notice about the notes: as it has been mentioned they have been
reduced. An essential choice has been made of bibliographical references,
quotations and data appearing in the footnotes, while archival references,
pamphlets and newspaper articles have been largely indicated and are
quoted here in their original language, as they appeared at the time, to
better enable their identification and retrieval.
Bologna, September 2022
 Praise for A Political History of the
International Union of Socialist
Youth 1907–1917

“Patrizia Dogliani’s new history of the International Union of Socialist

Youth draws fresh air into the often claustrophobic spaces of the history
of socialism. She reminds us of the interests and agency of a young gener-
ation—in Europe and the wider world—in a volatile period of political
experimentation and ambition, war and peace.”
—Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History and Capitalism, HEC
European University Institute, Florence, Italy

“With this new book, Patrizia Dogliani once again demonstrates why she
is one of the preeminent scholars of modern international and transna-
tional history. Rooted in an impressive array of published and unpublished
sources in multiple languages, Dogliani’s study of the International Union
of Socialist Youth provides a novel window on the international socialist
movement before and during World War I, highlighting the efforts of
young European militants to define and instantiate socialism against
a tumultuous background of depression, war and revolution. It is an
impressive achievement.”
—Talbot Charles Imlay, Professor, University of Laval, Quebec, Canada

“Long recognized as a pioneering historian of youth, Patrizia Dogliani

offers a rich transnational panorama of socialist youth across Europe. She
persuasively links the birth of political rebellion and organizing among
young people to the invention of ‘adolescence’ as a particular economic,

xix
xx PRAISE FOR A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE …

social, and cultural stage of modern life. With an impressive command

of sources in multiple languages, Dogliani provides an essential guide to
political activism among youth across class, gender, and nationality.”
—Mary Gibson, Professor of History, City University of New York, USA
 Contents

1 Proletarian Youth Organizations Before the Stuttgart

Conference 1
1.1 The Condition of Working-Class Youth in Europe
at the End of the Nineteenth Century 1
1.2 Early Bourgeois and Denominational Youth Movements 6
1.3 Early Socialist Worker Youth Organizations 15
1.4 The Typology of Working-Class Youth Associations 23
2 The Birth of the Socialist Youth International 31
2.1 Early Proposals for an International Coordination
of Socialist Youth 31
3 The Anti-Militarist Struggle 53
3.1 Liebknecht: Militarism “External” and Internal
to Countries 53
3.2 Jaurès and the “Armed Nation”: Anti-Militarism
and the National Problem 59
3.3 Typologies of Anti-Militarist Action 73
4 The Organization of Educational Work 85
4.1 Socialist Pedagogy 85
4.2 Sports Activity and Anti-Alcoholic Struggle 92
4.3 The Cultural and Educational Activity of Youth Groups 98
4.4 The “Rekrutenschulen” of Social Democracy 111

xxi
xxii CONTENTS

5 Unionization and the Economic Struggles of Socialist

Youth 121
5.1 The Issue of Apprenticeship in the Stuttgart Debate 121
5.2 Professional Youth Organizations 126
5.3 Economic Struggles and the Relationship with Labor
Organizations 133
6 The Function and Activities of the Vienna International
Secretariat from 1907 to 1914 141
6.1 The Administrative and Organizational Activities
of the Secretariat 141
6.2 The Copenhagen Conference and the Birth
of the French Socialist Federation 151
6.3 Contact with Overseas Youth Organizations: America,
Australia and Argentina 156
6.4 The SIUSY in the Face of Conflicts Between Youth
Organizations and Socialist Parties 161
7 The Danger of War: International Youth Initiatives
from 1912 to 1914 171
7.1 Worker Youth Organizations Emerging
from the Breakup of the Habsburg, Tsarist
and Ottoman Empires 171
7.2 New Forms of Anti-Militarism and the Emergence
of a Youth Left 183
7.3 Another “Congrès Manqué”: the Fourth Vienna Youth
Conference 192
8 The Youth International During World War I 197
8.1 The Role of Neutral Countries in the Preparation
of the Berne Conference 197
8.2 Living and Working Conditions and the Struggles
of Youth During the War 204
8.3 The Activities of Zurich Secretariat and the Personality
of Willi Münzenberg 211
8.4 Youth Participation in the Zimmerwald Movement,
the Russian Revolution and the Dissolution
of the Youth International 218
 CONTENTS xxiii

Conclusions: The End of a History and the Beginning

of a Historiography 223
Index 235
 Abbreviations

AJI Arbeiter-Jugend-Internationale (Berlin)

Am IISG (aJI) Amsterdam: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis.
Archives Socialistische-Jugend-Internationale.
Av L’Avanguardia (Rome)
BSI Bureau socialiste international
CGL Confederazione Generale del Lavoro
CGT Confédération générale du Travail
CYI Communist Youth International Union
FIGS Federazione italiana giovanile socialista, Rome: Italian socialist
youth Federation
GRS Karl Liebnecht, Gesammelte Reden und Schriften
IASJ Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft sozialistischer Jugendorgan-
isation (Vienna)
JA Der Jugendliche Arbeiter (Vienna)
JI Jugend-Internationale (Zurich -Berlin)
Mi BIF Milan: GG. Feltrinelli Foundation’s Library
MS Le Mouvement Socialiste, Paris
NZ Die Neue Zeit, Berlin
POB Parti Ouvrier Belge
POF Parti Ouvrier français
POSR Parti ouvrier socialiste révolutionnaire
PSF Parti socialiste de France
PSI Partito socialista italiano
PSR Parti socialiste révolutionnaire
PSS Parti socialiste suisse
SFIO Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière

xxv
xxvi ABBREVIATIONS

SIUSY Secretariat of the International Union of Socialist Youth/ Inter-

nationales Sekretariat der sozialistischen Jugendorganisationen
/Bureau internationale des jeunesses socialistes, Vienna
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
SYI Socialist Youth International Union
 CHAPTER 1

Proletarian Youth Organizations Before

the Stuttgart Conference

1.1 The Condition of Working-Class Youth

in Europe at the End of the Nineteenth Century
The first proletarian youth associations were formed in Europe in the late
nineteenth century, in a phase of general economic recovery following the
Great Depression, which had hit industrialized countries in the 1870s,
and which had coincided with rapid changes in vocational training and
the labor market. The emergence and rapid expansion, in less than two
decades, of proletarian organization was thus the result of a long period
of transition, after “the failed revolutions of 1848 had marked a turning
point in the political history of youth, effectively ending in Europe the
first period of student agitation and also the independent role of young
people in the ranks of the labor movements.1 ”
The Paris Commune of 1871, even with all its political novelties and
anticipations, constituted an epilogue to an earlier phase which had seen
a deterioration in the security and stability of recruitment and training
methods aimed at worker-craftsmen under early industrialization. The

1 J.R. Gillis. Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations,
1770–Present. New York, 1974. See also J. Savage. Teenage. The Creation of Youth Culture
1875–1945. London, 2007. On generations: A. Esler (ed). The Youth Generation. The
Conflict of Generations in Modern History. Lexington, MA; Toronto; London, 1974; and
M. Mittauer. Sozialgeschichte der Jugend. Frankfurt aM, 1986.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
P. Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist
Youth 1907–1917, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20694-8_1
2 P. DOGLIANI

young people who participated in the European struggles of 1848 and

1871 expressed, perhaps more so than adults, the need to reestablish a
stable social identity: one that had been erased by the crisis of guilds and
trade fraternities. Their rebellion stemmed from conditions of uncertainty
and marginalization rather than from class brotherhood. Stephan Born, a
German socialist printer, went so far in his memoirs as to argue that, in
the 1848 revolution in Germany, there were “two generations, not two
classes” in conflict: the elite class of master craftsmen and store masters;
and the young, increasingly unskilled labor force that nascent modern
industry was creating. The image of sons against fathers was not only
dear to the nineteenth-century bourgeois literature; it also emerged from
descriptions of the “classes labourieuses” of the time. The demographic
growth of the European population between 1750 and the early 1900s
had led to a profound change in customs, mentality and family compo-
sition, and seemed to affect the relationships between generations in the
working-class and petit-bourgeoisie, rather than the relationships between
those whose descendants determined their inheritance of property and
titles.2
Until the industrial era, for the male population, youth was perceived
as a long, indistinct span of time from the end of childhood until personal
and economic independence, marked by marriage and self-employment.
It was a period, from the age of seven or eight to the age of twenty-five to
thirty, during which young men were sent to work away from the family
home as apprentices on farms and in workshops, where they learned a
trade and experienced the system of interrelationships in a productive
and hierarchical micro-community. There occurred, therefore, an early
and definite detachment from the family, brought about by the constant
surplus of children. Education, discipline and the regulation of celibacy
were roles assumed by the trade fraternity or patriarchal peasant commu-
nity. At the end of this long period of training, the young man generally
traveled or “wandered” (the English Tramping, the German Wanderjahr
or the French Tour) and offered his services to the trade guild. This rite
of passage completed his transition from the status of servant to that of
independent worker, and concluded the process of selecting a place to
settle, practice his trade and start a family.

2 S. Born. Erinnerungen eines Achtundvierzigers. Leipzig, 1898.

 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 3

As the population grew and the average life span increased; as nutri-
tion improved; relationships in the countryside and newly industrialized
areas changed; and as the nuclear family emerged, this time span between
childhood and adulthood also took on an articulation, periodization and
collective function that was extremely different from previous centuries.
The figure of the young person became a socially recognized subject with
a specific role in the political and interpersonal relations of the industrial
age. A “youth condition” was thus being highlighted and not only being
recognized in a legal-professional sphere, but also in a social one.
The key point of contrast with the past was a new articulation of this
stage of life in physiological and genetic terms which had emerged with
improved living conditions among the European population since the
eighteenth century, but was also imposed extrinsically, by social and state-
specific forces. Youth began to be articulated in terms of obligations and
recognition. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the intro-
duction of compulsory education across almost all European countries
identified an intermediate age in the years from childhood to early adult-
hood: the age of adolescence. Adolescence had not been identified in
the past because education was conceived predominantly as preparation
for work. The transition from youth to the newly articulated category
of adolescence required new commitments in the contemporary world,
such as military service. Through the call to arms between the ages of
eighteen and twenty, the young person was made citizen to the nation-
state. The regulation, by hours and age, of child labor also introduced a
different valuation of the employment of the youth labor force. In the face
of the crisis of vocational apprenticeship that owed to the simplification
of factory production techniques, wages, as a form of measurement for
the calculation of labor, assumed value for young workers. Apprenticeship
increasingly lost its function as an initiation into social and professional
relationships and became only a waiting period, involving underpaid or
as yet unpaid work, and entitling the apprentice to later wage recog-
nition. By the end of the nineteenth century, trade guilds offered a
limited number of apprentice positions. Young people therefore increas-
ingly remained living with their families of origin, which required them
to contribute wages toward the livelihood of several generations.
Thus ended the nomadism that had characterized the life of youth
in medieval and modern times. There were, of course, new migratory
flows, but they were no longer individual; instead they were collective,
and directed themselves overwhelmingly toward the new industrial cities.
4 P. DOGLIANI

Young men born in the country were drawn by the offer of work to
the industrial and mining basins, where they would move and then stay.
By the mid-nineteenth century, this migration pattern had produced new
villages for the English working class that were largely inhabited by people
under thirty. Those born in a town rarely left, and rarely looked else-
where for work. Settlement became the dominant habitation behavior
of young workers at the turn of the century. With it came a state of
increasing family dependence, and specifically a mutual economic depen-
dence, among the working classes, between parents and children. Parents
who could not support their children from afar kept them at home to
contribute to the family budget. The English social reformer Seebohm
Rowntree studied unskilled English workers on the eve of the Great War,
and observed that their level of poverty increased in the ages between
twenty-eight and thirty-five—that is, when spouses had children not yet
of working age—and then improved to prosperity in the ten years that
followed, when older children began to earn a decent wage (so long as
they left the family). The extended family unit among artisans and peas-
ants—formed, not by close kinship, but by work requirements (children,
hired hands, laborers or apprentices; servants of different ages for house-
hold management), was replaced by the working-class and petit-bourgeois
family, composed vertically of no more than three generations, each with
distinct tasks.3
This forced and prolonged form of cohabitation between the parents
and children of the working classes consequently altered the systems of
social relation among young people. They began to perceive the family
more as a bond of necessity than as a place of learning and educa-
tion, which could be delegated to extra-familial institutions. Nor was real
paternal control any longer exercised—as had been the case in peasant
civilization with the cession of land by inheritance, or in crafts with the
transmission of the trade. Some of the fundamental generational balances
in the social system were broken, and young workers found themselves
with different points of social reference in their individual and collec-
tive lives. Fewer and fewer recognized themselves as producers and even
fewer saw their fathers as the master to be imitated. This was partly
because certain trades had become obsolete and could therefore no longer
be transmitted from fathers to sons. Rebellions broke out against the

3 B.S. Rowntree. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. London, 1914.

 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 5

old fraternities and guilds (which were increasingly selective, and inad-
equate in relation to the new labor market) and young workers began
instead to recognize themselves as situated specifically in the place and
city of work. This new self-identification, accentuated as we have seen
by a shift toward settledness, was accompanied for the first time by a
collective identification, among the young, with a particular social condi-
tion: that of youth. In the new industrial phase that intervened after
the Great Depression, young people underwent a state of “prolonged
and dependent youth,” experienced and articulated more and more in
psychological and economic terms, as a rung in the hierarchical ladder
of the productive world. They reacted accordingly: grouping by age and
by neighborhood or village; and perfecting group codes and behaviors
that more emphatically set apart the youth from the adult world. At
the same time, those rituals, that in the pre-industrial age were occa-
sions for initiation into adult life, and which very often exhausted all
forms of violence in play and farce, came to an end. In England in the
mid-nineteenth century, traditional dances and pantomimes experienced
a decline. E.P. Thompson recalled that the early Luddite movement had
resorted to traditional masquerade as a form of revolt. Louis Cheva-
lier and Mona Ozouf in turn pointed out that, in France, the crisis of
compagnonnage expressed itself in street clashes and infighting between
apprentices and young artisans of different guilds, and turned labor festi-
vals—instituted during the French Revolution—into scenes of violence.4
For this reason, some socialist youth organizations explicitly condemned
the carnival custom. For example, in Belgium in 1903 the Jeunes Gardes
promoted “a decisive struggle against carnivals that are nothing but a last
remnant of centuries of ignorance” and wanted to prevent, above all, that
“it be allowed to our groups to favor their extension.”5

4 L. Chevalier. Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié

du XXe siècle. Paris, 1958; E.P. Thompson. Making of the English Working Class. New
York, 1964; and M. Ozouf. Symboles et fonction des âges dans les fêtes de l’Europe
révolutionnaire. Annales Historiques de la Révolution française. Paris, 1970, n. 209, 569–
593.
5 See R. Briquet. Le Congrès des Jeunes Gardes Socialiste. Le Mouvement Socialiste,
thereafter MS, V/X, 15 août 1903, n. 126, 591–599; and POB. Compte-rendu du XVIIIe
Congrès Annuel tenu à la Maison du Peuple de Bruxelles les 12 et 13 avril 1903. Bruxelles
1903, 53.
6 P. DOGLIANI

In large industrial cities, the new category of juvenile “deviance” was

added to, or often came to be substituted for, the concept of the “dan-
gerous class,” or the dangerous individual not integrated into social rules.
Forms of antagonism with the adult world began to characterize urban
life, for instance juvenile crime and the refusal of young people to inte-
grate into school and the military-disciplinary apparatus of the state; but
so did new antagonisms between the youth groups themselves, which
differed in social class regional identity. All European governments began
to intervene, directly and indirectly. In Germany from 1890, the Prussian
government promoted initiatives for recreational activity, while simulta-
neously restricting all forms of political socialization. At the same time as
the enactment of legislation regulating child labor and public education,
a series of repressive criminal measures against minors were introduced.
As a result, a unique punishment status for “delinquent” juvenile acts
was brought in through the Criminal Code, which established courts,
prisons and rehabilitation centers for juveniles, and through the extension
into civilian society of the Military Criminal Code, which repositioned
anti-militarist protest and insubordination (on the part of conscription-
obligated youth) under military jurisdiction. Of the organizations that
fell subject to the judgment of laws and courts, more generally it was the
youth groups of the late nineteenth century that aroused the most social
concern and disapproval. Bourgeois as well as proletarian youth soon
became the subjects of sociological, psychological and medical studies that
attempted to identify the nature of adolescent behavior.6

1.2 Early Bourgeois

and Denominational Youth Movements
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the first associa-
tions aimed at young people emerged, such as the German Wandervögel ,
formed in Berlin in 1897, or the English Boy-Scouts movement, created
by General Baden-Powell in 1908. There is much debate in the liter-
ature over whether these associations were to some extent alternatives
to the prevailing social and educational system, or whether they actively
lead young people away from a more careful adherence to social rules

6 Read more in P. Dogliani. L’apprendistato nella modificazione della professionalità

operaia dalla grande depressione alla I guerra mondiale. Annali della Fondazione Luigi
Einaudi, XIV, 1980, 469–536.
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 7

and conventions in adulthood. These studies, however, have been more

concerned with examining the structure and behavior of these associa-
tions than with identifying the social components that constituted them.
We cannot infer from the bourgeois ideologies that inspired new forms
of social arrangement among the youth, how many and in what way
working-class youth were drawn to them. In the writings and policy docu-
ments of the socialist youth organizations of the early twentieth century,
there is a keenness for proletarian youth enlistment to be prioritized over
the enlistment of the bourgeois. The success of the groups was probably
facilitated by the apparently apolitical nature of the sports and recre-
ational activities that they involved. At first, the seeming nonchalance and
fellowship of youth groups made even the Wilhelmine authorities fear
that the Wandervögel were to some extent a distraction from the military
discipline on which public educational life was based. Indeed, the osten-
sible camaraderie and equality, and the distribution of tasks and offices
by valor and ability rather than by class, helped to produce a democratic
appearance that invited the access of the popular classes much more gener-
ously than conservative and militarist student organizations such as the
Jungdeutschlandbund, the British Cadet corps or the French and Italian
nationalist circles. On the other hand, we also know that after World
War I these forms of spiritual, class-traversing solidarity took up openly
anti-worker positions and formed the basis of mass youth consent to
authoritarian regimes. One need to only recall the 1933 Nazi propaganda
film: Hitlerjunge Quex to summarize this evolution; or young Theodor,
the protagonist of Joseph Roth’s novel The Spider’s Web, and how his
revolt against squalid petty-bourgeois civic life resolved itself in his symbol
and ritual-laden affiliation with the Pro-Nazi Freikorps.7
At the first international socialist youth conference held in Stuttgart
in 1907, a proposal was made to deal “also with the opposing youth
organizations” (nationalist, liberal, clerical, neutral, anarchist, etc.). As a
result of under-research, the project had to be postponed, but a cross-
sectarian urge is clear to see: “the national federations will have, to their

7 See W.Z. Laqueur. Young Germany. A History of the German Youth Movement.
London, 1962; H. Pross. Jugend, Eros, Politik. Die Geschichte der deutschen Jugend-
verbände. Bern-Munchen-Wien, 1964; J.O. Springhall. The Boy Scouts, Class and
Militarismus in Relation to British Youth Movements. International Review of Social
History, XVII, 1972, n. 4, 3–23; and P. Wilkinson, English Youth Movement 1908–
30. Journal of Contemporary History, IV, 1969, n. 2, 3–23. Consult also for an overview:
Dogliani. Storia dei giovani. Milan, 2003.
8 P. DOGLIANI

profit, to study more closely the forces and methods of their oppo-
nents, who in many countries are numerically superior to us and from
whom we can learn more than we currently believe.”8 The Dutch Chris-
tian Youth League (which had nearly 9000 members in 1906) and a
similar Danish league (which comprised 28,000 teenagers) were cited as
proof. Only a few workers’ youth federations in the following years went
beyond simple political confrontation with “opposing” factions, to make
sense of their popularity among young people. Organizations in Italy and
France, for instance, interpreted anti-militaristic and secular attitudes as
basically anarchist or republican, and opposed on principle any nationalist
or confessional explanation.9
German workers’ youth organizations were more careful. Unlike
the French, Italian or Scandinavian avant-garde, they had set them-
selves the goal of becoming true mass organizations and establishing
widespread workers’ education. In Germany and Austria, government
control over the lives of youth was characterized as class conflict. In
1908 in Germany, the Wilhelminian government banned all forms of
political sociability under the age of eighteen, also smuggling in height-
ened control over non-political groups through subsidy. Beginning in
1911, the governments of the states of Prussia and Hesse funded recre-
ational youth organizations and sports that were reliably loyal to the
state, and supported its pedagogy. Also in 1911, at the initiative of a
number of ministries (including those of the Interior; the Army and
Navy; Agriculture; Industry and Crafts; and influential private groups,
such as the industrial group Krupp and the financial groups Mendelssohn
and Fürstenberg), the Jungdeutschlandbund, with its headquarters in
Berlin, was founded throughout the imperial territory. Confrontation
with this new association became inevitable for the young German Social
Democrats, who were forced practically into political hiding, and forced
to configure themselves as “counter-society.” On the eve of the Great
War, the German working-class youth had no viable choices. Bankers and

8 L’Internationale ouvrière et socialiste. Rapports soumis au Congrès socialiste interna-

tional de Stuttgart (18–24 août 1907) par les organisations socialistes d’Europe, d’Australie
et d’Amérique sur leur activité pendant les années 1904–1907 , vol II: Augmenté d’une note
complémentaire sur le mouvement ouvrier et d’une étude sur l’organisation internationale
de la Jeunesse socialiste. Bruxelles, 1907, 493–584. From now on: Organisation.
9 Amsterdam, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis: Archives Socialistische-
Jugend-Internationale. From now on: Am IISG (aJI), III/16: J.F. Keesing, in Laren, to
Danneberg, March 28, 1913.
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 9

shipowners provided them with opportunities for recreation and to live

among their peers, often accompanied by the sports and martial exercises.
The state, through the Jungdeutschlandbund, would provide a young
man with half-price railroad tickets (the Wanderkarten) and barracks,
military camps or other public spaces available to him for weekends as
hostels. The Jungdeutschlandbund also offered field kitchens and army
victualling, and rewards and career advancement were offered to those
state teachers and educators who participated in propaganda distribu-
tion, and to those who engaged in after-school and after-work activities
for minors. In the early integration into a functioning, protective and
disciplined national structure, the young German found a solution to the
imbalances of the industrial working environment and the difficulties of
urban family life.10
It was no accident that secular bourgeois forms of social ordering
such as workers’ organizations were a purely urban phenomenon in
Germany and other industrialized countries, and that they were linked
especially to those cities that had experienced industrial expansion around
an original historic core, and in which the new generations of the late
nineteenth century inherited the confrontation of material and profes-
sional conditions between old and new bourgeoisie (as between artisans
and unskilled laborers). In large cities such as Berlin, the character
of the organization varied even according to the social composition
of the neighborhood. From the bourgeois Berlin suburb of Steglitz
had sprung the Wandervögel movement, which rejected “metropolitan
culture.” Then there was the working-class neighborhood of Neukölln,
the original nucleus of the apprentice defense movement, which, as a
result, gave rise in 1906 to the Social Democratic Youth Federation of
Northern Germany. However, these organizations remained phenomena
that revealed a complex youth condition that was difficult to control. In
1912, for example, the burgomaster of Neukölln, at a meeting of the
Deutsche Zentrale für Jugendfürsorge (a kind of parastatal youth body
composed of state and local officials and church representatives), reported
that there were 10,000 young people between the ages of fourteen and

10 R. Danneberg. Die Rekrutenschulen der internationalen Sozialdemokratie. Die sozial-

istische und die bürgerliche Jugendbewegung in den Jahren 1910 bis 1913. Wien, 1914,
20–22.
10 P. DOGLIANI

twenty in his district, and that of these, only 600 belonged to denomi-
national and secular associations; a further 100 to the local Social Demo-
cratic circle. According to these figures, eighty-four percent of the youth
population in this area—the most politicized area in “Groß-Berlin”—
remained completely alien to any institutional form of community.11 It
is difficult to detect the existence of other informal places of urban aggre-
gation. People most probably accumulated in traditional public places,
where the Prussian government had tried insistently to prohibit, the atten-
dance of all minors since the 1880s. To control public order during the
war from October 1915 in Germany, the sale of tobacco and liquor to
young people under the age of seventeen was prohibited by martial law.
Public places such as cinemas and dance halls were forbidden to them,
curfews were imposed and loitering was banned. Ordinances set rent
levels for people under the age of eighteen, but were soon abandoned
amid strong opposition from working-class parents.
Socialist organizations also had to guard against competition from the
clergy, who catered almost exclusively to young workers and appren-
tices. Tolerated and often supported by the state, the clergy made itself
dangerous, pitting religious associations within the working class (with
clear purposes of education and economic assistance), against socialist
and trade union youth associations. Karl Korn, a young Social Demo-
cratic leader, attempted in 1910 on behalf of the SPD to compile an
informative list of the size and activity of denominational youth move-
ments in Germany. Along with a hundred or so local Social Democratic
youth groups, comprising fewer than 18,000 members, there was the
congregation of German Catholic youth centers, the Zentralverband der
katholischen Jugendvereinigung Deutschlands, founded in 1896, which
numbered, in 1910, 1615 groups with about 200,000 adherents, 70
percent of whom were between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, the
rest older. After the age of seventeen, the majority of adherents moved
on to two other Catholic associations, either the Verein junger Arbeiter
or the Jugendabteilung des Arbeitervereins, which, together with the
Bavarian Catholic Young Apprentices’ Association (Bayerische Burschen-
vereine, founded in 1898), made the German Catholic youth movement,
with its 10,500 adherents, number almost 300,000 in total. The type

11 Der Kampf der Parteien um die Jugend. Ein Erörterungsabend herausgegeben von
der Deutschen Zentrale für Jugendfürsorge in Berlin. Berlin, 1912. Cf. A. Lange, Das
Wilhelminische Berlin. Zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Novemberrevolution. Berlin, 1967.
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 11

of activity carried out by these circles was not dissimilar to that of

the socialist workers’ circles. They performed predominantly pedagog-
ical functions and offered vocational assistance: offering evening classes,
games, walks, visits to museums and historical sites, and musical or
theatrical evenings.
The network of German evangelical youth centers pursued the same
aims, but with a less centralized structure. The Jünglingsverein in Frank-
furt, with 500 young people from ages fourteen to twenty-five, was
formed around 1908. There was also the Christlicher Verein junger
Männer: the Protestant Youth Association in Western Germany had
around 15,000 people under seventeen and nearly 9000 between seven-
teen and twenty-one; Eastern German contingent numbered 26,000; and
its Southern section gathered about 10,000 young people. Then the
300 apprentices of the Lehrlingsfeierabend in Stuttgart or the strong
evangelical youth welfare center in Hamburg; also the Jugendbund für
entschiedenes Christentum with another 8000 adherents, almost all over
seventeen. On top of this, the Jewish Youth Association was established,
which had 7000 members, mainly in Cologne and Frankfurt. Well orga-
nized, with libraries and reading rooms, it was essentially preoccupied
with the vocational training of young people in the Jewish community,
with a focus on commerce.12 At least half a million German youths
belonged to church associations. If we consider that in 1907 there were
just under 5 million German youths between the ages of fourteen and
twenty employed in industry, services or the primary sector, we can esti-
mate that something like one-tenth of working-class German adolescents
were approached by the churches.13
Although not with such conspicuous results as in Germany, every
national denomination or religious community in Europe made appeals
to young Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century, drawing on
the same channels of communication and proselytizing from previous
centuries that were used to reach villages and peasant communities, and
renewing them in language and pedagogy in a new metropolitan context.
An example of the now obvious connection between church activity and
secular and political engagement among young workers (in conjunction

12 K. Korn. Die bürgerliche Jugendbewegung, Herausgegeben von der Zentralstelle für

die arbeitende Jugend, Berlin, 1910.
13 See the classical work of J. Kuczinsky. Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter in
Deutschland von 1800 bis in die Gegenwart. Berlin (GDR), 1949.
12 P. DOGLIANI

with the ongoing battle for the enlargement of suffrage) can be found
after 1905 in Austria, when the involvement of Catholic educators in the
organization of students and working youth (Anton Orel founded the
Bund der Arbeiterjugend Österreichs in that year) and the direct interven-
tion of the Christian Social Party in the social welfare of young workers
was heightened. The secretary of the Socialist Youth International, the
Austrian Robert Danneberg, had to point out in a study he made on
the Austrian Catholic youth movement that, in a few years, the church
had delegated care of the youth to the Christian Social Party; a move
that made them the template for the modern moderate party. Using
words taken from a clerical newspaper, he went so far as to assert that
“the Catholic movement did not originate on the soil of the Catholic
Church; it derives rather from a revolutionary impulse, for it is in imita-
tion of the Social Democratic youth organization and nurtures its own
aspirations.”14 Indeed, the Austrian Christian Social Party began, from
September 1905, to subsidize the Catholic youth movement, to welcome
it into the ranks of the party, to root it in schools and apprenticeship
courses, and to intervene in legislature with a moderately reformist welfare
policy.15
The political parties consolidated at the end of the nineteenth century
recognized that the sphere of the political had taken on new values, and
was expanding to the working-class and petit-bourgeoisie. Within it, the
relationship of the younger generation with an everydayness of choices,
rights and civic obligations became precocious. In 1907, universal male
suffrage came into effect in Austria. Young people over the age of twenty-
five went to the polls. A similar law, but extended to women, was
discussed in Denmark in early 1913. In fact, campaigns for the exten-
sion of suffrage were led in various nations by socialists and liberals in
the early twentieth century (Holland, Belgium, Italy, Sweden).16 Polit-
ical forces began to apprehend, in the social figure of the young person,

14 Danneberg. Maulchristen. Christlichsoziale Geständnisse für Jung und Alt. Wien,

1913.
15 Programm und Organisation der christlichen Jugendbewegung. Wien, 1910; Die Pfin-
gsttagung 1911 der christlichen Jugend Österreichs. Wien, 1911; and O. Glöckel. Schule
und Klerikalismus. Wien, 1911. See E.J. Görlich. Anton Orel und die “Freie Christliche
Jugend Österreichs”. Zur Geschichte einer österreichischen Jugendbewegung. Vienna, 1971.
16 AM IISG (aJI), II/14 and III/16. Letters from Copenhagen to Danneberg, May 1,
1912, January 13 and February 4, 1913.
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 13

a potential voter. Youth associations aimed at the working classes were

no longer only bodies of social control or, in the case of socialists, class
education, but also instruments of persuasion and collective propaganda.
The types of political intervention expected of the youth shifted in accor-
dance: young workers were now recognized as a stable social subject that
formed the connective tissue between generations, and no longer just the
protagonist of rhapsodic protest movements, such as the days of struggle
of 1830, 1848 or 1871. The close connection between popular forces and
students that had marked the political phase of the first half of the nine-
teenth century was vanishing by the 1870s/1880s (although channels
of collaboration did persist in particular cases, e.g., in France between
socialists and young radicals—in defense of common republican victo-
ries against Boulangism or monarchical revanchism; and in Italy, through
student centers of positivist-socialist inspiration, in opposition to nation-
alism). Socialism maintained constant contact with that “intermediate
social stratum” (Michels) composed of middle-class intellectuals, who also
formed part of the leadership of the workers’ parties.17
To a large extent, conflict prevailed over alliance. It prevailed especially
in those countries (such as Germany and Italy) where the autonomous
participation of middle-class youth in the struggles of the Risorgimento
and national unification had been expressed longer and more forcefully,
and where the process of merging economic capitalism with the state
had more rapidly drawn them back into nationalist, irredentist or mili-
tarist ranks.18 This turn was examined by socialist theorists. In an 1894
paper in the Neue Zeit, Franz Mehring denied that after the heroic period
of Burschenschaft (youthfulness) “which began at Waterloo” and ended
in the days of ’48, “the students, as a class, could once again return
to the scene of historical development,” that is, that they could once

17 R. Michels. Proletariato e borghesia nel movimento italiano. Torin, 1908. This text
opened a big debate inside the Italian Socialist Party, see the article: Un profilo storico
del movimento socialista italiano. Avanti!, a. 12, 11 gennaio 1908. See also Michels.
Storia critica del movimento operaio italiano. Dagli inizi sino al 1911, Florence, 1926.
On Italian case, see the recent work of E. Papadia. La forza dei sentimenti. Anarchici e
socialisti (1870–1900). Bologna, 2019.
18 About the appeal to a socialist tradition of Risorgimento cf. L’Avanguardia (from
now on: Av), I, n. 4, 29 settembre 1907. See also C. Papa. L’Italia giovane dall’Unità
al fascismo. Rome-Bari, 2013.
14 P. DOGLIANI

again become actors, even protagonists, in a social and political evolu-

tion understood in Marxist terms.19 It would not be the educated classes,
but of course young proletarians who would participate most centrally
in the Marxian procession of history. Addressing the first German Social
Democratic youth groups in 1903, Karl Kautsky stated it assuredly: “The
bourgeoisie no longer has, today, ideals, and the youth can only surpass
the elderly in their skepticism, fatigue, despair, misanthropy or in their
brutalization and débauche. The proletariat, on the other hand, is today
the class of revolutionary idealism, and the role that the students have
been playing for half a century now passes to the proletarian youth… it
is the source from which enthusiasm for our cause radiates unceasingly,
and it is by it that the best intellectual and moral progress of the working
class can be measured.”20
Austrian socialists in the 1910s, particularly Otto Bauer and Max
Adler, responded with more nuance. Bauer and Adler were faced with the
expansion of a student movement (most significantly in the non-German-
speaking Habsburg territories) that was too politically ambiguous to
vindicate the ideological characterizations of Mehring and Kautsky in
Germany. Somewhere between reactionary patriotism and democratic
nationalism, the movement included, not only university students—whose
social background and needs as a privileged class were in no doubt—but
also middle school students. The latter were evidence of the precocious-
ness and idealism of the youth’s political commitment, and of how the
social expansion of education was making social differentiations possible
in the student body. Since public vocational schools had been entrusted
with the preparation of the apprentice, a poorly defined student-worker
social category had emerged: a young man who, depending on the season,
divided their time between school and work. Animated by the demonstra-
tion against the caravan staged by the Viennese proletariat in 1908, Max
Adler, in his Students and Workers, reflected thus:

A whole people poured into the streets, workers and students: ... it was
not, however, a repetition of that grandiose spectacle of 1848, the memory
of which still illuminates with glory the juxtaposition of these two names,
arousing in the workers a feeling of respect that is, on the other hand,

19 F. Mehring. Die Sozialdemokratie und die Studentenschaft, Die Neue Zeit (from
now on: NZ), XII, 1893–1894, I, pp. 705–709.
20 Cf. Kautsky’s introduction to Organisation, 493–498.
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 15

entirely alien to the great mass of students. Students and workers, but the
students were now no longer together with the people (...) but divided
from it and against it, separated by an abyss of mutual hatred and anger,
separated above all spiritually, dragged by a complex of ideals of which they
had not understood 1a real nature.... The strong aversion to the people, so
often misunderstood, arose, at least as far as the students were concerned,
from their ideals of freedom, nationality, and homeland, which the more
intimately they lived, the more they sharpened their sense of enmity and
hatred, as if they were in opposition to other ideals.21

1.3 Early Socialist Worker Youth Organizations

Czech historian Radomir Luza believed that the main reason for the
emergence of socialist-inspired worker youth organizations was the disap-
pearance of occupational tasks particular to younger age groups: “in
less than two decades the number of young workers had, for example,
doubled in Germany: while workers of both sexes between the ages
of fourteen and sixteen amounted in 1892 to 208,835, by 1908 their
number had reached 440,225.”22 Because they could very productively
do “unskilled” work, young laborers felt in no way different from the
equally unqualified adult worker, professionalized by big industry. Young
men became aware of their role as producers no different than adults,
and sought to associate with other young workers to cope with the crisis
of recruitment and lack of assistance from the trade guilds. In October
1894, a document drafted by a provisional committee of young workers
was circulated across vocational courses in Vienna. It read: “We want to
put an end to the inhuman exploitation of apprentices; we want to do for
them what the animal protection societies do for dogs or horses…. We
will not concern ourselves with political issues, although we cannot help
but admit that we see in the Social Democratic workers the real elements
capable of defending and representing us.” This document, later remem-
bered as one of the earliest declarations of associational autonomy, was
invoked by historians (Luza and Nittel) as evidence for that harsh “mate-
rial conditions” were the driving impetus for the emergence of workers’

21 M. Adler, text from an Italian translation: Il socialismo e gli intellettuali. Bari, 1974,
168.
22 R. Luza. History of the International Socialist Movement. Leyden, 1970, 15.
16 P. DOGLIANI

youth groups. Another condition was the protest against compulsory mili-
tary service, introduced in the major European states after 1870, which
led working-class youths to engage in efforts to mitigate the hardships
and injustices faced by conscripts.
Later attempts were also made to circumscribe these two forms of
struggle and assistance geographically. Again Luza argued that youth anti-
militarism was born in Western Europe, and that it only gained sufficient
enough momentum to initiate unrest in Central European organizations
(such as those in Austria or Germany) by the turn of the century. At
the birth of the Youth International, in the summer of 1907, the Provi-
sional International Secretary drew up a table of the activities of young
socialists across the nation up to that time. The data suggested that,
while all the organizations had engaged in education, few had developed
services specifically for young workers and apprentices (Austria, Hungary,
Bohemia, Germany and Switzerland). Austria and Germany had not even
sustained a particularly anti-militarist struggle. But the table was conve-
niently compiled—drawn from national reports in the news—to better
emphasize the points of distinction in politics and militancy between one
youth federation and another. In reality, the differences between work-
ers’ youth organizations lay elsewhere: in the size of their membership, in
their political programs and not least in their relationship with other adult
organizations: the party and the trade unions. Another Czech historian,
Milan Hübl, has argued in this vein that a further reason for the emer-
gence of independent youth associations lay in the lack of generational
turnover in the political formations of the Second International.23
All these interpretations have the value of capturing some of the polit-
ical and economic factors that motivated youth socialist organization, but
they make the mistake of taking the founding dates of national organiza-
tions as their historical point of departure. We know that between the late
1880s and the first decade of the twentieth century almost all workers’
youth groups nationally unified: in 1888 in Holland, in 1889 in Belgium,
around 1895 in Sweden, in 1900 in Bohemia, in 1903 in Austria, Italy
and Norway, in 1904–1906 in Germany, in 1906 in Spain, Denmark and

23 M. Hübl, cit. in Luza, 71. See also H. Nittel. Kampf und Aufstieg. Die Geschichte
der sozialistischen Jugendbewegung. Wiener Neustadt, 1964; W. Neugebauer. Bauvolk
der kommenden Welt. Geschichte der sozialistischen Jugendbewegung in Österreich, Vienna,
1975; and H. Steiner. Die arbeitende Jugend Österreichs und ihre Organisation. Vienna,
1954.
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 17

Hungary, in 1907 in Bulgaria and finally in 1912 in France. These dates

are rough indicators, marking in each case the first time a “nationwide
congress” was held in each country. At these meetings, attempts were
made to write a program of action and determine a central location for
national coordinating and press operations, which was almost always the
capital of the country. After these dates, there were profound changes
in the organizational structure of the national federations. In Sweden and
Italy there were schisms—in Sweden in 1905, and in Italy in 1907—which
led to the exclusion of anarcho-syndicalist currents. These splits were
significant enough that, in the imaginary of young Italian and Swedish
socialists, they were the birth-dates of their nationhood.24
A chronology of Dutch youth activity is more difficult. While they
were the first, along with the Young Belgian Guards, to appear on the
European political scene in the mid-1880s with the specific goals of
fighting against conscription practices and fighting the use of conscripts in
strike repression, they did not follow the upward parabola of the Belgian
confederation, which presented itself in Stuttgart as one of the strongest
and most compact national youth organizations. Instead, they moved
with the oscillations of the Dutch labor movement.
The first Dutch youth groups were formed in Amsterdam and the
Frisian region beginning in 1885, merging into a national federation in
1888. Soon, because of the anti-militarist nature of their action and the
lack of a socialist presence in the country (a Social Democratic Party in
Holland did not come into existence until 1894, and it was small and
socially selective), they sided with the anarchists, and became influenced
by the thought of Domela Nieuwenhuis and Wink, who started to publish
a youth journal in 1903—De Jonge Werker (“The Young Worker”)—
which released only a few issues. By 1892, the Dutch youth movement,
in the midst of internal disagreements over military service and general
strikes, gradually dwindled to a hundred or so people. Only in 1901 did
“Henriette Roland Holst and other comrades” within the Dutch Social
Democratic Party “present a motion for the formation of a committee to
deal with youth organization and propaganda in an anti-militarist direc-
tion.” Having been reborn, the youth federation dissolved again in 1903,
overwhelmed by the failure of that year’s general strike. After two years

24 Die Internationale Organisation der Sozialistischen Jugend. Bericht des Sekretariats

der internationalen Verbindung der sozialistischen Jugendorganisationen—August 1907 .
Leipzig, 1907.
18 P. DOGLIANI

of assiduous work toward re-union (led once again by Roland Holst), the
federation was reestablished on April 23, 1905, under a new statute that
limited the association’s activities “only to the education of its members,”
so as to hedge the risk of another dissolution.
The Belgian affair was different. Young Guards pursued the anti-
militarist goal steadily, and without internal trauma, facilitated by a
Belgian Workers’ Party that had homogenized the political components
of the working class (unions, cooperatives, leagues, youth groups) into a
confederal body, excluding any purely anarchist tendencies. The Young
Belgian Guards movement thus became, from the beginning, an inte-
gral part of class political organizing, with the prerogative to conduct
specific anti-militarist action. The first demonstration against the discrim-
inatory practice of drawing lots in the draft was held in November 1886
in Ghent with the first Lotelingskring (conscripts’ circle). In the following
years, other youth socialist circles were formed in Antwerp, Brussels,
La Hestre and Liège, all of which were nationally confederated at the
Brussels Congress of 1889, with a common program that nevertheless
safeguarded, through newspapers and local branches, the linguistic and
economic-social differences between Flemish and Walloons. The anti-
militarist struggle, which in the second half of the nineteenth century
particularly affected Holland, Belgium and northern French, made the
properly political commitment of the young people who participated in
it, whether anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist or socialist-inspired, immediately
assume connotations not unlike those paired with adult workers, whose
political concerns were characterized as general: general strike, resistance
to the use of public force in labor conflicts, struggle for universal suffrage.
Youth organizations faced a second phase of evolution when labor
parties and unions posed a “youth question.” The “youth question”
referred to a felt need to broaden the pool of recruitment to emerging
social subjects, such as women and minors. The first autonomous workers’
youth associations dated back at least a decade before the establishment of
workers’ youth organizations with political aims and regional or national
reach. In essence, the socialist youth movement (along with the socialist
and social democratic parties of the Second International) was the result
of the political changes that occurred in the second industrialization and
in the early process of the formation of European mass society. Youth
organizations spread around Europe when new and diverse functions were
entrusted to the generations that were eligible for party-political involve-
ment, and when the problem of the turnover of grassroots cadres and
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 19

the enlargement of intermediate cadres arose for the first time at the
beginning of the century.
We lack sufficient information to draw an accurate picture of early
working-class youth organizations. Any picture must be formed out of
the local histories of the proletarian movement. These were essentially
after-work youth groups, engaged in sports and recreational activities.
Only later did they wear a more assured badge of political operability.
In Austria, for example, the first sports associations (generally gathering
membership from the ages between fifteen and thirty), came into being
in the sixties. In the seventies, they drew up an initial program intended
to combine sports with health support for workers, which eventually
developed into a service for the assessment of the economic and social
condition of young workers. Also in Austria, the first cycling groups were
formed in the 1890s. Cycling groups were common to other countries
too—such as Belgium, France and Italy—resulting in many young people
performing cycling-specific socialist propaganda roles in the countryside
(the “red cyclist” teams). A similar chronology is observable in Germany
and Switzerland. According to a local research on the youth movement in
Frankfurt, the first working-class youth sports group was founded in the
city in 1893, probably at the instruction of the newly formed Arbeiter-
Turnerbund Deutschlands (Gymnastic Federation of Germany), which,
grouping together other new and similar sports associations across the
country, had held its first congress in Gera, Thuringia, during the Whitsun
of 1893.25
In Switzerland, sports-educational associations, aimed particularly at
apprentices, remained for a long time the only points of reference for
young workers among the local array of class organizations. In 1874,
the Grütli-Turnverband sprung up from five local sections. On the
initiative of socialists and Protestant pastors particularly committed to
assisting working-class youth, this type of association would develop into
a more political shape until, in February 1914, a clear separation emerged
between the bourgeois and proletarian contingents, which each numbered
around 4000 on the eve of the war. But unlike in Belgium with the Young
Guards, youth associations in Switzerland overcame existing linguistic,
local and economic differences only very late, around 1910. By 1907,
a youth federation encompassing the French-speaking cantons had not

25 Arbeiterjugendbewegung in Frankfurt 1904–1945. Material zu einer verschütteten

Kulturgeschichte. Vorwort von W. Abendroth. Frankfurt aM, 1978.
20 P. DOGLIANI

yet been formed. The Jeunesse socialiste had been formed in Lausanne
in 1901, and was reabsorbed into the activities of the Socialist Party,
which had also transformed its eponymous press organ, now in its seventh
issue, into the periodical Le Socialiste. The activity of young Swiss workers
continued to be concentrated in the industrial center of Zurich. In March
1900, Protestant Socialist pastor Paul Pflüger opened a youth house in
the city, attended essentially by apprentices from the canton. At first it
had offered a place for debates, readings and physical education, but
then gradually “took on the character of a socialist struggle organization,
carrying on educational action, anti-militarism and syndicalism.” A “sec-
retariat for the protection of apprentices” was also set up, which spread
out into youth branches in Zurich’s industrial hinterland: Wiedikon,
Altstetten and Höngg. On Christmas Day 1906 the national federa-
tion of Jungburschenvereine was established in Zurich, which continued
in the following years to develop almost exclusively in the German-
speaking territories (in Bern, Lucerne, Schaffhausen, Basel, St. Gallen,
Constance), and always considered the physical and recreational education
of its members to be paramount.26
National youth movements were determined by varying legislation and
political experiences, so it is difficult to arrive at a clear typology. In
France, the working-class youth movement was affected by localism and
the organizational dispersal of the working class. In the 1890s, the Alle-
manist Party had created a youth federation that, like the adult party,
based its strongholds in the artisanal and early metalwork districts of
Paris, as well as in some localities in the Ardennes and Yonne. Little is
known about this federation. At the Stuttgart conference, it was reported
on a single 1902 issue: Feuille du Soldat, printed on the occasion of
the drawing of lots for the military draft. A few years after the birth
of the first organization, the Dreyfus Affair motivated a tactical recon-
sideration among participants in the anti-militarist struggle, particularly
in the Guesdist party (POF)—which emerged in 1890–1894, and in the
party founded in 1898 by Vaillant, the Parti socialiste révolutionnaire:
Psf. Both parties created youth organizations, distributed only across
the controlled regions and inspired by the specific anti-militarist and
revolutionary traditions from which each drew. In 1899, the Vaillantist
party recorded “about 200 groups scattered throughout France, among

26 Die schweizerischen Jungburschenvereine. Eine kurze Wegleitung für Freunde der

sozialistischen “Jugend-Organisation”. Zürich, 1909.
 1 PROLETARIAN YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS BEFORE … 21

which some counted up to 600–800 members with quotas, especially

in the Saône-et-Loire.” There were groups also in Paris, in the neigh-
borhoods where the Communard and Blanquist traditions had survived;
in the Cher region, and in some of the territories bordering the Massif
Central, conquered by Vaillant in the first electoral campaigns of 1893
and 1898. In the early twentieth century, the Vaillantist youth federation
in the Southeast also began publishing a weekly newspaper: Drapeau-
rouge. At the same time, the Guesdist youth (strong in the North, South
and Center-East of France) went about educational initiatives, promoting
some eighty youth clubs and publishing a periodical, which appeared
from May 1901 to May 1902: La Jeunesse Socialiste. The Guesdist and
Vaillantist youth federations collaborated in January 1900 when they
began jointly publishing and circulating a new journal aimed at recruits:
Conscrit. Upon the national unification of the POF with the PSR in
1901, however, “the new party [the PSF] refused to give a national youth
federation the right to exist within it.”27 A similar decision was made
when the SFIO was formed in 1904. The new party, born into a context
of opposing political currents, opted not to maintain an anti-militarist
organization within it that it could not control, moving instead locally,
toward anarchism and greater contact with syndicalist formations. Some
Parisian Vaillantist groups survived 1904 and formed the 42nd section
of the Seine Socialist Federation, tacitly supported by Vaillant, and later
by Jaurès. Two regional youth associations remained autonomous; that
of the Ardennes, in direct contact with the action of the Young Belgian
Guards, and that of the agricultural region of Yonne, which was influ-
enced by Gustave Hervé’s anti-militarism, and became popular at the turn
of century, through the reach its periodical: Pioupiou de l’Yonne, managed
to achieve outside the region.
In Germany, by contrast, only the impediment of Prussian legislature
prevented the unification of young socialists. Since 1853, a law had been
in force in Prussia prohibiting freedom of expression and political asso-
ciation for those under the age of eighteen. As a result, workers’ youth

27 News from Organisation, 579–582, and Le Socialiste, a. 28, n. 361 and 382, 2–9
juin, 27 octobre–3 novembre 1912; and also from general historical reconstructions: M.
Rebérioux. Jaurés et la nation. Actes du Colloque Jaurès et la nation. Toulouse 1965,
1–27; and C. Willard. Le mouvement socialiste en France. Les guedistes. Paris 1965, 87–92.
Only two works have addressed the specific subject: Y. Cohen. Les jeunes, le socialisme et
la guerre: Histoire des mouvements de jeunesses en France. Paris, 2000; and C. Bouneau.
Socialisme et jeunesse en France 1879–1969. Pessac, 2009.
Another random document with
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of the cannon used in the Revolution.[121] The Hope Furnace at
Scituate, R. I., famous for many years, was started about 1735 by
Daniel Waldo.[122] A nail mill was in operation at Milton, Mass., about
1740 or 1742. Another was started at Middleboro about 1745, on
information stolen, it is said, from Milton by a mechanic disguised as
a rustic.[123] A mill for making scythes was in operation at Andover in
1715, and a “heavy” forge was in operation at Boston in 1720.[124]
Nearly all the cannon for the early American frigates were cast in and
about Providence. Capt. Stephen Jenks was making arms in North
Providence at the beginning of the Revolution.[125] An account of the
early attempts in iron manufacture in Rhode Island can be found in
Vol. III of Field’s “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”
[121] Bishop, Vol. I, p. 489.
[122] Field: “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” Vol. III, p.
331.
[123] Weeden, Vol. II, p. 499.
[124] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 498.
[125] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 793.

The Jenks’ influence had spread to Rhode Island as early as 1655

when Joseph Jenks, Jr., who had learned the business with his
father, moved from Lynn to the headwaters of Narragansett Bay, and
founded Pawtucket. He built a forge near a bog-ore mine and water
power, and began making domestic utensils and iron tools. The
settlement was destroyed by the Indians in 1675, during King Philip’s
war, but was soon rebuilt. The son of this Jenks, the third Joseph
Jenks, was born there, and later became a very influential man in the
colony. He was governor for five years and was interested in many of
its activities.[126] Providence, from its better situation commercially,
early became a trading center, but nearly all the manufacturing was
done at Pawtucket on account of the abundant water power. In fact,
it was not until the steam engine rendered manufacturing
independent of water power that Providence took the lead as an
industrial center.
[126] Goodrich, pp. 18-23.
 In the enterprises centering about Pawtucket and Providence, one
finds continually the names of Jenks, Wilkinson, Brown and Greene,
among the latter that of Nathaniel Greene, the Revolutionary
general, who had a cannon factory at Coventry. Of these early
families the Wilkinsons were the most influential. Oziel Wilkinson, a
Quaker, came to Pawtucket from Smithfield, R. I., established an
anchor forge there in 1784, and soon became the leading man in the
community. He built an air furnace in 1791, and three years later he
furnished castings for the Cambridge drawbridge and for canal locks,
probably those first used on the Merrimac River.[127] He and his
family had a most important part in the development of early
manufacturing in America. He had six sons and four daughters. Four
of the sons worked in two partnerships, one of Abraham and Isaac
(twins), the other of David and Daniel. The fifth son was also a
successful manufacturer. One of his daughters married Samuel
Slater, who will be mentioned later; one married Timothy Greene,
another, William Wilkinson, and the youngest, Hezekiah Howe, all of
whom were manufacturers. The remaining son, the only child
unaccounted for, died at the age of four years.[128]
[127] Ibid., p. 51.
[128] Israel Wilkinson: “Memoirs of the Wilkinson Family,” pp. 220, 461.
Jacksonville, Ill., 1869.

In 1794 David Wilkinson built a steamboat and made a trip in it of

three and one-half miles from Winsor’s Cove to Providence. He was
not impressed with the practical value of it, and dismantled it after
their “frolic.” Before it was destroyed, however, a young man named
Daniel Leach examined it carefully with the greatest interest. Later,
when Fulton made his plans for the “Clermont,” the drawings were
said to have been made by this same man, Leach.[129]
[129] Ibid., pp. 509-513; also, Field, Vol. III, p. 372. The name here is
given as French.

In 1797 David Wilkinson invented a slide lathe which was patented

the next year. The writer has not been able to obtain an accurate
description of this. The most direct reference to it is a letter of
Samuel Greene to Zachariah Allen, a prominent Rhode Island cotton
manufacturer, dated June 17, 1861, which says: “I suppose David
Wilkinson to be the inventor of the slide lathe, at first applied to the
making of large press screws, for which I believe he got a patent. I
know he made application to the British Government, and I have
heard said did get a grant.” The patent ran out before the lathe came
into general use. Fifty years later Congress voted Wilkinson $10,000
“for benefits accruing to the public service for the use of the principle
of the gauge and sliding lathe, of which he was the inventor.”[130] He
seems to have been working on it in America at the same time as
Maudslay in London.[131] Sylvanus Brown, who helped Slater build
the first Arkwright cotton machinery at Pawtucket, is also said to
have invented the slide lathe still earlier (in 1791) and to have also
used it for cutting wrought-iron screws for sperm-oil presses.[132]
There are good records of Maudslay’s slide lathes; in fact, screw-
cutting lathes made by him prior to 1800 are in the South Kensington
Museum at London. Priority can hardly be claimed for these
American lathes until something more is known of them, and
whether they were the equal of Maudslay’s in design and quality.
[130] The Senate Committee which recommended this action consisted of
Rusk of Texas, Cass of Michigan, Davis of Mississippi, Dix of New York, and
Benton of Missouri. The bill passed the Senate in June, and the House in
August, 1848.
[131] “Memoirs of the Wilkinson Family,” pp. 506-508, 518. Goodrich, p.
51.
[132] Goodrich, p. 48.

The Wilkinsons were closely identified with the early textile

enterprises. As the gun industry developed the interchangeable
system, so the cotton industry developed the American general
machine tool. At the close of the Revolution, many attempts were
made to start textile industries, by Orr in 1786, Cabot at Beverly in
1787, and Anthony at Providence in 1788, and also at Worcester. A
man named Alexander is said to have operated the first loom with
the flying shuttle in America, which was later moved to Pawtucket.
Moses Brown, about 1790, imported a few spinning frames to
Providence, but they proved a failure.
Samuel Slater, who married Wilkinson’s daughter, was an
Englishman who had served his time with Arkwright and Strutt, and
had become thoroughly familiar with the Arkwright machinery. In
1789 he had emigrated to America with the purpose of starting a
textile industry. We have already mentioned the embargo which
England placed on mechanics and on all kinds of machinery. This
had compelled Slater to use the greatest caution in leaving the
country. Disguised, it is said, as a rustic, he went to London and
sailed from there, giving no indication of his plans until after he had
gone, when he had a letter sent to his family. He went first to
Philadelphia, but hearing of Moses Brown’s attempts at spinning in
Providence, he wrote to Brown and made arrangements to go to
Pawtucket and reproduce for him the Arkwright machinery. Slater
was at that time only twenty years old. After a winter of hard work he
succeeded in making several frames with a total of seventy-two
spindles, and two carding machines. These were started in a small
building, later known as the Old Slater Mill, with an old negro named
“Primus” Jenks as motive power. During this winter Slater lived in the
family of Oziel Wilkinson and married his daughter. The second mill
was started in 1799 by Oziel Wilkinson and his three sons-in-law,
Slater, Greene and Wilkinson.[133]
[133] Ibid., pp. 39-51.

Doctor Dwight, in his travels, in 1810,[134] writes of Pawtucket:

[134] Vol. II, pp. 27-28.

“There is probably no spot in New England of the same extent, in

which the same quantity or variety of manufacturing business is
carried on. In the year 1796, there were here three anchor forges,
one tanning mill, one flouring mill, one slitting mill, three snuff mills,
one oil mill, three fulling mills, a clothier’s works, one cotton factory,
two machines for cutting nails, one furnace for casting hollow ware—
all moved by water—one machine for cutting screws, moved by a
horse, and several forges for smith’s work.” This was long before
Lowell, Lawrence and Manchester had come into existence.
The Wilkinsons were interested in other things as well as in the
cotton industries. David established a shop and foundry in
Pawtucket, where for one thing he made cannon which he bored by
an improved method consisting of “making his drill and bore
stationary and having the cannon revolve about the drill.” He built
textile machinery for almost every part of the country, from northern
New England to Louisiana, and made the machinery used at New
Bedford and other whaling ports for pressing sperm oil.[135] About
1816 David and Daniel Wilkinson bought out a man named Dwight
Fisher and manufactured nails until 1829, their output being about
4000 pounds daily.[136] In 1829 David Wilkinson moved to Cohoes,
N. Y., and with DeWitt Clinton, Stephen Van Rensselaer and others,
started the textile industries in that city.[137] In 1832 Zebulon White
started up one of the abandoned Wilkinson furnaces, which three
years later was known as the Pawtucket Cupola Furnace Company.
This afterwards became the firm of J. S. White & Company.[138]
[135] Goodrich, p. 69.
[136] Field: “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” Vol. III, p. 373.
[137] Van Slyck: “Representatives of New England Manufacturers,” p. 515.
[138] Field, Vol. III, p. 372.
Figure 26. Samuel Slater
 Oziel Wilkinson died in 1815, but the influence of the Wilkinson
family continued for many years. Slater steadily widened his
operations and was so influential in laying the foundations of the
textile industry that he became known as “the father of the American
cotton industry.” How rapidly the cotton industry spread is shown by
a memorial to Congress in 1815, stating that there were 140 cotton
manufactures within thirty miles of Providence, employing 26,000
hands and operating 130,000 spindles.[139] Only a few of the more
important ramifications can be given.
[139] Bishop, Vol. II, p. 214.

In 1822 Samuel Slater, Larned Pitcher and three others bought a

little two-story building at what was then Goffstown, on the Merrimac
River, and founded the great Amoskeag Manufacturing Company,
and the city of Manchester, N. H. It is now known as the greatest
textile mill in the world, but the company’s original charter was very
broad, and, in addition to its other interests, the company operated
for many years one of the largest and most influential machine shops
in the country, where were built locomotives, engines, boilers, all
kinds of textile machinery, machine tools and mill machinery.
Alfred Jenks, who learned his trade under Slater, moved to
Holmesburg, near Philadelphia, in 1810, taking with him drawings of
every variety of cotton machinery, as far as it had then advanced,
and commenced its manufacture.[140] He furnished the machinery for
the first cotton mill in that portion of Pennsylvania and for the first
woolen mill in the entire state, and developed what was for many
years one of the most important plants for the building of textile
machinery in the United States.
[140] Ibid., Vol. III, p. 18.

Eleazer Jenks built a machine shop at Pawtucket in 1813 for

heavy forging and for the manufacture of spinning machinery, which
was occupied by David Wilkinson for many years.[141] The same
year, Larned Pitcher also started a shop there, and soon took in P.
Hovey and Asa Arnold. In 1819 Ira Gay was taken in, and the firm
became Pitcher & Gay, one of the largest manufacturers of cotton
machinery. Gay remained in Pawtucket until 1824, when he went to
New Hampshire in connection with the Amoskeag Manufacturing
Company and the Nashua Manufacturing Company, then just
starting.[142] A few years later Ira Gay and Zeba, his brother, started
a shop at North Chelmsford for building textile machinery. With the
growth of the Merrimac textile interests, this plant became very
influential and is running today. The firm has changed several times
with the deaths of various partners, and is now known as the North
Chelmsford Machine & Supply Company. It has preserved many of
the old tools used in the early days, and there are few shops of
greater historical interest in this country.
[141] Goodrich, p. 64.
[142] Ibid., p. 66.

Capt. James S. Brown, son of the Sylvanus Brown referred to,

who had worked for David Wilkinson in 1817, succeeded Ira Gay in
the Pawtucket shop, the firm becoming Pitcher & Brown. In 1842
Brown became sole owner and greatly enlarged the works. The shop
which he built in 1847 was 400 feet long and employed over 300
workmen. Brown lived for many years and made many valuable
inventions, which included a beveled gear cutter, boring machine,
grinder, improvement in the Blanchard type of lathe, and many
improvements in textile machinery. Some of the lathes which he
himself built in 1820 were in use for seventy years.[143]
[143] Ibid., pp. 71-72.

Col. Stephen Jenks started a shop in 1820 for the making of nuts
and screws, which later became the William H. Haskell Company of
Pawtucket. Alvin Jenks, of Stephen Jenks & Sons, went to Central
Falls in 1829 and the next year entered into partnership with David
G. Fales. This firm, known as Fales, Jenks & Company, built cotton
machinery for many years, and moved to Pawtucket in 1865.[144] The
Jenkses of the Fales & Jenks Machine Company, as it is known now,
are lineal descendants of the original Joseph Jenks of Lynn.
[144] Ibid., p. 72. Also, Field, Vol. III, p. 373.

In 1834 Jeremiah O. Arnold, who as a young man worked for

David Wilkinson, and his brother, Joseph Arnold, started in
Pawtucket the first press for making nuts. Later, Joseph Arnold
retired and William Field took his place, the firm becoming William
Field & Company. They moved to Providence in 1846, and in 1847
became the Providence Tool Company.[145] The Providence Forge &
Nut Company was organized by some men from the Tool Company
in 1852, and a plant was built. Four years later the new venture was
absorbed by the parent company, which moved to the new plant.
The Providence Tool Company had a wide influence for many years,
manufacturing the Household sewing machine and the Martini rifle,
as well as a line of tools. In 1883 it was reorganized and became the
present Rhode Island Tool Company.
[145] Goodrich, p. 75.

The Franklin Machine Company was started by Stanford Newell,

Isaac Thurber and others, about 1800. The plant was always
referred to in the old records as “The Cupola.” During the War of
1812 it was busy making cannon under the charge of Isaac
Wilkinson, one of Oziel’s sons, who was then a boy only seventeen
years old.[146] The Builders Iron Foundry, formerly known as “The
High Street Furnace,” began business some time prior to 1820. The
American Screw Company had its beginning in the Eagle Screw
Company, organized in 1838 under the leadership of William G.
Angell. Hampered by serious litigation and sharp competition, it
continued with indifferent success until 1849, when Mr. Angell,
adopting a machine invented by Thomas J. Sloan of New York,
brought out the pointed screw. The New England Screw Company,
whose inventor, Cullen Whipple, had come from the earlier
Providence Screw Company, united with the Eagle Screw Company
in 1860, forming the present American Screw Company.
[146] Field, Vol. III, p. 375.

The Corliss Machine Works were started in 1848.

Brown & Sharpe, the most important and influential of all the
Providence plants, was established in 1833 by David Brown and his
son, Joseph R. Brown. The history of this company is so important
that it will be taken up in a separate chapter.
 One can hardly turn from the history of manufactures in
Providence without some reference to the manufacturing of jewelry.
A Cyril Dodge made silver shoe buckles “two doors north of the
Baptist meeting-house” about the time of the Revolution, but the first
real manufacturer of jewelry in Providence was Nehemiah Dodge,
who, just after the Revolution, started in a little shop on North Main
Street as a goldsmith and watchmaker. He also made necklaces,
rings and miniature cases. Dodge lived to be over ninety years old
and to see the industry spread wonderfully. By 1805 there were three
other jewelers, one of whom, by the way, was a Jenks, and they
employed all told about thirty workmen. In 1810 there were 100
workmen; in 1815, 175; and in 1832, 282. The census writers of
1860 give eighty-six shops with 1761 workmen; in 1880, 148 shops
with 3264 employees, and in 1890 there were 170 shops employing
4380. These figures cover Providence only. Many other shops were
located in near-by towns. These were all small and tended to
multiply. The journeymen were the highest paid artisans anywhere
about, earning from $5 to $10 a day, and two or three were
constantly setting up for themselves. The oldest jewelry firm in or
about Providence is said to be the Gorham Manufacturing Company
now located in the suburb of Elmwood. Jabez Gorham, its founder,
was first engaged as a jeweler with four others about 1813. In 1831
he formed a partnership with H. L. Webster, a journeyman
silversmith from Boston, and specialized on the making of silver
spoons, thus starting the Gorham Manufacturing Company.[147]
Palmer & Capron, another old firm, was founded about 1840.
[147] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 377-381.

There were other early centers of mechanical influence. With the

invention of steam navigation, New York became a center of engine
building for the steamboat trade, and the Allaire, Quintard, Fletcher,
Delamater, and other works, were well known many years ago, but
for some reason New York City has never been conspicuous for tool
building, the Garvin Machine Company being the only large firm in
this field. Worcester, Hartford, Philadelphia and Windsor, Vt. (small
and secluded as it is), have contributed signally to tool building
throughout this country and Europe, and will be taken up later. We
have considered Pawtucket first, because it was the earliest center
and because its wide influence in building up other centers is little
realized. The extensive water power available in the Merrimac Valley
gave rise to the great textile interests of Manchester, Lowell and
Lawrence, which have far outstripped those centered about
Pawtucket, but the textile industry began in Pawtucket and with it the
building of machinery and tools.
 CHAPTER XI
THE RISE OF INTERCHANGEABLE
MANUFACTURE
It is well, in beginning, to define what we mean by the
interchangeable system. We will consider it as the art of producing
complete machines or mechanisms, the corresponding parts of
which are so nearly alike that any part may be fitted into any of the
given mechanisms. So considered, it does not include the
manufacture of separate articles, closely like each other, but which
do not fit together permanently into a mechanism. If this were meant,
the work of the early typefounders would clearly antedate that of the
modern manufacturers, as they produced printing types by the
process of casting which were similar to each other within very close
limits. There is, however, a wide difference between this and the
parts in such a mechanism as a gun, for individual types are not
permanently articulated.
The interchangeable system was developed by gun makers. It is
commercially applicable chiefly to articles of a high grade, made in
large numbers, and in which interchangeability is desirable. Of the
typical articles, such as firearms, bicycles, typewriters, sewing
machines, and the like, now produced by the interchangeable
system, guns and pistols are the only ones which antedate the
system itself. These were used in great numbers, and in military
arms especially interchangeability was of the highest value. Under
the old system with hand-made muskets, in which each part was
fitted to its neighbors, the loss or injury of a single important part put
the whole gun out of use until it could be repaired by an expert
gunsmith. Eli Whitney, in a letter to the War Department in 1812,
stated that the British Government had on hand over 200,000 stands
of muskets, partially finished or awaiting repairs.[148] The desirability,
therefore, of some system of manufacture by which all the parts
could be standardized and interchangeable, was well recognized.
There existed a demand for military arms which could meet this
condition, but it was felt at the time that it was impossible to meet it.
[148] Blake: “History of Hamden, Conn.,” p. 133.

The system of interchangeable manufacture is generally

considered to be of American origin. In fact, for many years it was
known in Europe as the “American System” of manufacture. If
priority be assigned to the source which first made it successful, it is
American; but the first suggestions of the system came from France.
We have already seen that the French mechanics were the first to
work upon many of the great mechanical improvements; but here, as
in the case of the slide-rest and planer, they seem to have caught
the idea only. It was left to others to make it a practical success.
At least two attempts were made to manufacture guns
interchangeably in France, one in 1717, the other in 1785. Of the first
we know little. Fitch, in his “Report on the Manufactures of
Interchangeable Mechanisms,” in the United States census of 1880,
speaks of it, but says it was a failure.[149] We know of the second
from an interesting and surprising source. Thomas Jefferson, while
Minister to France, wrote a letter to John Jay, dated August 30, 1785,
which contains the following:
[149] p. 2.

An improvement is made here in the construction of muskets, which it may be

interesting to Congress to know, should they at any time propose to procure any. It
consists in the making every part of them so exactly alike, that what belongs to any
one, may be used for every other musket in the magazine. The government here
has examined and approved the method, and is establishing a large manufactory
for the purpose of putting it into execution. As yet, the inventor has only completed
the lock of the musket, on this plan. He will proceed immediately to have the
barrel, stock, and other parts, executed in the same way. Supposing it might be
useful in the United States, I went to the workman. He presented me the parts of
fifty locks taken to pieces, and arranged in compartments. I put several together
myself, taking pieces at hazard as they came to hand, and they fitted in the most
perfect manner. The advantages of this, when arms need repair, are evident. He
effects it by tools of his own contrivance, which, at the same time, abridge the
work, so that he thinks he shall be able to furnish the musket two livres cheaper
than the common price. But it will be two or three years before he will be able to
furnish any quantity. I mention it now, as it may have an influence on the plan for
furnishing our magazines with this arm.[150]
[150] “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” Edited by H. A. Washington,
Vol. I, p. 411. New York, 1853.

Six months later he wrote a letter to the governor of Virginia, which

is almost a copy of this one. In another letter written many years later
to James Monroe, Jefferson gives the name of this mechanic as Le
Blanc, saying that he had extended his system to the barrel,
mounting and stock, and stating: “I endeavored to get the U. S. to
bring him over, which he was ready for on moderate terms. I failed
and I do not know what became of him.”[151] We wish to give full
credit to this genius who seems to have caught a clear idea of some
at least of the principles involved, those of interchangeability and the
substitution of machine work for hand work. The account makes no
mention of gauges or of the division of labor, but this might easily
have been due to Jefferson’s unfamiliarity with the details of
manufacture.
[151] “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” Edited by Paul L. Ford, Vol. VIII,
p. 101. New York, 1887.

We have seen in a previous chapter that a close approach to the

interchangeable system was made in the Portsmouth block
machinery of Bentham and Brunel. This was rather an application of
modern manufacturing principles than a specific case of
interchangeable manufacture. The interchangeability of product
obtained was incidental to good manufacturing methods, not a
distinct object aimed at, and there does not seem to have been any
system of gauging during the processes of manufacture, to insure
maintaining the various parts within specified limits of accuracy. In
fact, the output itself did not require it, as ship’s blocks do not call for
anything like the precision necessary in guns or the other typical
products of the interchangeable system.
We have seen, too, that John George Bodmer began about 1806
to manufacture guns at St. Blaise in the Black Forest, using special
machinery for much of the work previously done by hand, especially
for the parts of the lock, which “were shaped and prepared for
immediate use, so as to insure perfect uniformity and economize
labor.” In both of these instances, the Portsmouth block machinery
and the St. Blaise factory, definite steps which form part of the
interchangeable system were taken, but it does not seem probable
that the system existed in anything like the completeness with which
it was being developed at that time in America.
In 1798 and 1799 two contracts were let by the United States
Government for firearms, one to Eli Whitney in 1798, the other to
Simeon North in 1799. These contracts are of the greatest
importance. Whitney had invented the cotton gin in 1792. This
invention, as is well known, had a profound economic effect on the
whole civilized world, but the condition of the patent laws at that time
and the very value of the invention itself made it impossible for him
to defend his rights; and, although he had practically created a vast
industry, he actually lost more money by the invention than he
gained. By 1798 he made up his mind that he must turn to
something else. He chose the manufacture of muskets, and
addressed a letter to Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, in
which he said:
I should like to undertake the manufacture of ten to fifteen thousand stand of
arms. I am persuaded that machinery moved by water, adapted to this business
would greatly diminish the labor and greatly facilitate the manufacture of this
article. Machines for forging, rolling, floating, boring, grinding, polishing, etc., may
all be made use of to advantage.[152]
[152] “New Haven Colony Historical Society Papers,” Vol. V, p. 117.

His contract of 1798 resulted. From the very start Whitney

proposed to manufacture these arms on a “new principle.” He built a
mill at Whitneyville, just outside of the city of New Haven, utilizing a
small water power. Nearly two years were required to get the plant
into operation, as he had to design and build all of his proposed
machinery. In 1812 when making application for another contract for
15,000 muskets, Whitney writes:
The subscriber begs leave further to remark that he has for the last 12 years
been engaged in manufacturing muskets; that he now has the most respectable
private establishment in the United States for carrying on this important branch of
business. That this establishment was commenced and has been carried on upon
a plan which is unknown in Europe, and the great leading object of which is to
substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist
which is acquired only by long practice and experience; a species of skill which is
not possessed in this country to any considerable extent.[153]
[153] Ibid., p. 122.

In another place it is stated that the object at which he aimed and

which he accomplished was “to make the same parts of different
guns, as the locks, for example, as much like each other as the
successive impressions of a copper-plate engraving.”[154]
[154] Denison Olmstead: “Memoir of Eli Whitney,” p. 50. 1846.

Mr. Whitney’s determination to introduce this system of

manufacturing was ridiculed and laughed at by the French and
English ordnance officers to whom he explained it. They said that by
his system every arm would be a model and that arms so made
would cost enormously. Even the Washington officials were skeptical
and became uneasy at advancing so much money without a single
gun having been completed, and Whitney went to Washington,
taking with him ten pieces of each part of a musket. He exhibited
these to the Secretary of War and the army officers interested, as a
succession of piles of different parts. Selecting indiscriminately from
each of the piles, he put together ten muskets, an achievement
which was looked on with amazement. We have not the exact date
of this occurrence, but it was probably about 1800.[155]
[155] Blake: “History of Hamden, Conn.,” p. 138.

Meantime Simeon North, who unlike Whitney was a gun maker by

trade, had completed his first contract for 1500 pistols, and had
executed a number of others. In these no mention was made of
interchangeability, but whether independently or not, he very soon
began to develop the same methods as Whitney. In a letter to the
Secretary of the Navy in 1808, North says:
I find that by confining a workman to one particular limb of the pistol untill he has
made two thousand, I save at least one quarter of his labour, to what I should
provided I finishd them by small quantities; and the work will be as much better as
it is quicker made.[156]
 [156] S. N. D. and R. H. North: “Memoir of Simeon North,” p. 64. 1913.

He also says in the same letter:

I have some seventeen thousand screws & other parts of pistols now forgd. &
many parts nearly finished & the business is going on brisk and lively.

Here is clearly the principle of subdivision of labor and the

beginning of the standardizing of parts. In 1813 North contracted to
furnish 20,000 pistols. This agreement contained the following
significant clause:
The component parts of the pistols are to correspond so exactly that any limb or
part of one Pistol may be fitted to any other Pistol of the Twenty thousand.[157]
[157] Ibid., p. 81.

It is stated in the valuable memoir of Simeon North, by his great-

grandsons, that this is the first government contract in which the
contractor agreed to produce arms having interchangeable parts,
and it is consequently claimed for Colonel North that he originated
this process.
We have not had an opportunity to examine the official records in
Washington in regard to Mr. Whitney’s dealings, but it is quite clear
from his letter of 1812 that he had been operating on this basis for
nearly ten years, although it may not have been formally recognized
in his contracts with the Government. Capt. Decius Wadsworth, then
inspector of muskets, wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury in 1800
as follows:
But where the different parts of the lock are each formed and fashioned
successively by a proper machine, and by the same hand, they will be found to
differ so insensibly that the similar parts of different locks may be mutually
substituted. The extending of this principle to all parts of a musket has been a
favorite idea with Mr. Whitney from the beginning. It has been treated and ridiculed
as a vain and impracticable attempt by almost all those who pretended to superior
knowledge and experience in the business. He has the satisfaction, however, now
of shewing the practicability of the attempt. Although I am of the opinion that there
is more to please the imagination than of real utility in the plan, yet as it affords an
incalculable proof of his superior skill as a workman, and is what I believe has
never been attempted with success before, it is deserving of much
consideration.[158]
 [158] Blake, p. 296.

Furthermore, Jefferson, in the letter to Monroe written in 1801,

says in speaking of Whitney:
He has invented molds and machines for making all the pieces of his locks so
exactly equal, that take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the 100
locks may be put together by taking the pieces which come to hand.[159]
[159] See note 150, page 130.

In a letter to the Secretary of War in June, 1801, Whitney writes:

“... my system and plan of operations are, I believe, entirely new and
different from those heretofore pursued in this or any other country.
“It was the understanding and expectation of the Secretary of the
Treasury, with whom I contracted, that I should establish a
manufactory on the principles which were then pointed out and
explained to him. This system has been uniformly pursued from the
beginning.”[160]
[160] Blake, p. 300.

It would seem that the stipulation in North’s contract of 1813 was

not so much the beginning of a new method as a recognition of
methods which had already come into existence. It seems almost
inevitable that the two men, pioneer manufacturers and government
contractors in closely allied industries, and located but twenty miles
apart, must have known more or less of each other’s work and have
been influenced by each other’s methods. Without trying to
differentiate the credit between them too closely it is quite certain
that in the work of these two men the interchangeable system had its
birth. Colonel North’s work for the Government was invariably well
done, and for more than fifty years he continued to supply, first
pistols, and later rifles for the army and navy. Of the two, Whitney
had the greater influence in spreading the interchangeable system
throughout the country. He was well known and influential through
his invention of the cotton gin and was located in a larger center. He
was called upon by the Government for advice, and at its request
sent to Springfield some of his best workmen to introduce his system
there, and also help to start it at Harper’s Ferry. Whitney built his
factory in 1798 or 1800, and employed at the start about sixty men.
Colonel North moved from Berlin to Middletown in 1813, and built a
factory at a cost of about $100,000, where he employed seventy
men and produced about thirty pistols a day. The interchangeable
system was well begun in both of these factories by 1815.
The Springfield armory had been started during the Revolution,
mainly for making cannon. In 1792 Congress authorized the
President to establish two arsenals for small arms. These were
located at Springfield in the North, and Harper’s Ferry in the South.
In 1811 Captain Hall was granted a patent for a gun which was
adopted as the government standard in 1819 and the Government
undertook to manufacture them at one of its own armories. Captain
Hall was placed in charge of the work and the plant at Harper’s Ferry
was equipped for interchangeable manufacture.[161] Later many of
these rifles were made by private contractors, such as Colonel
North. By 1828 in one of Colonel North’s contracts we find the
principle of interchangeability extended still further. It is guaranteed
that the component parts should be interchangeable, not only in the
lot contracted for, but that they may be exchanged in a similar
manner with the rifles made or making at the national armories.[162]
[161] “Memoir of Simeon North,” pp. 168-169.
[162] Ibid., p. 160.

In 1836 Samuel Colt invented his revolver, and the first lot
contracted for by the Government was made at the Whitney works in
1847. Mr. Colt determined about 1850 to establish his own factory,
moved to Hartford, and in 1854-1855 built the present Colt’s Armory,
in which the principles of interchangeable manufacture were adopted
in a most advanced form. Hand work was practically eliminated and
automatic and semi-automatic machinery substituted. A type of
manufacturing miller, built for this work by George S. Lincoln &
Company, is still known as the Lincoln miller. E. K. Root,
superintendent under Colt, had a profound influence in the
development of manufacturing at this time. He put the art of die
forging on its present basis. At first he used a type of hammer in
which four impressions were arranged in four different sets of dies.
The hammers were lifted, first by a set of dogs, later by a central
screw, and the operator walked around the machine, using the
impressions successively. A few years later the present form of
board drop was developed. Two of George S. Lincoln & Company’s
men were Francis A. Pratt, superintendent, and Amos Whitney,
contractor, who later founded the firm of Pratt & Whitney.
In 1857 Smith & Wesson began manufacturing revolvers at
Springfield along similar lines. Mr. Smith had worked in the old
Whitney shops. Another firm of great influence was that of Robbins &
Lawrence, later the Windsor Machine Company, in Windsor, Vt.
Frederick W. Howe built there a number of machines for profile
milling, rifling, barrel drilling, and is said to have designed the first
“universal” miller in 1852.[163] The Ames Manufacturing Company in
Chicopee, which had been founded in 1829, was also engaged in
this work. By 1850 the interchangeable system began to extend its
influence abroad. Robbins & Lawrence had an exhibit of
interchangeable guns in the exposition at London in 1851, which
attracted much attention. In 1853 a British Commission came to this
country and visited the government and private armories, the Ames
Manufacturing Company and Robbins & Lawrence. During the visit
of this Commission at Springfield, Major Ripley, superintendent of
the armory, ordered ten guns, which had been manufactured in ten
successive years, from 1843 to 1853, to be stripped, and the parts to
be reassembled at random.
[163] Not to be confused with the Brown & Sharpe universal milling
machine, which was invented by Joseph R. Brown in 1871.