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The article focuses on the impact of the local conditions and the labor consciousness on the struggles for power among leather workers in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. Locals of national organizations had little connection with the national unions. Consequently, when they did affiliate with national organizations, local concerns and group loyalty transcended national policies. The important ties with other outside unions were of an informal nature. Ties to nonlocal workers and unions were usually confined to feelings of brotherhood and solidarity, which manifested themselves in aid for union struggles. The paper shows how the workers rallied their community of fellow workers to fight against the companies. Since Lynn's wage earners viewed their city as a community of workers, the strike provides a picture of a community in struggle. The community gave the workers strength and support to resist the employers, their friends and relatives were workers and union members, and their unions controlled most of the shops in Lynn. The same community, however, also gave them a false sense of their power to affect their demands against organized capital.

The article discusses manuscript sources in American radicalism. Scholars interested in American radicalism must be prepared to travel widely if they expect to inspect manuscript sources. Virtually every state, almost every university library of any stature, has some such holdings. Socialists, and other radicals, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, speeches and pamphlets. They also tended to keep extensive minutes of meetings of branches, committees, national boards, and even of factions. Moreover, most Socialists had a sense of history and preserved their records. Unfortunately, there is no single repository for this Socialist material. At one time it was expected that the Tamiment Institute-then called the Rand School-Library in New York would house the material. But Socialists, in the course of human events, split into innumerable factions, and the leaders of different factions gave their papers to various libraries some of them thousands of miles apart. There were also geographic reasons for the dispersion: the early Socialists of the Nineteenth century lived in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, and (after 1880) California.

This article presents the journal of S. C. Hewitt, appointed lecturer of the Fall River Mechanics' Association and labor organizer in Massachusetts in the early 1840s. Students U.S. labor movement know that the most important development of the 1840s was the ten-hour movement, and that the organization which spearheaded this demand was the New England Workingmen's Association which came into existence in the fall of 1844 to give support to the shorter workday crusade. The association was largely the product of the mechanics of Fall River, Massachusetts. Early in 1844 these men organized a Mechanics' Association to further the ten-hour day in their community. The association distributed pledge cards binding the signers not to work for more than ten hours and conducted a number of strikes for the shorter working day. In April 1844, the Fall River Mechanics Association set up a publishing committee, headed by Thomas Almy, to print a four-page weekly paper, "The Mechanic," to advocate the cause of the oppressed mechanic and laborer in all its bearings. The Mechanics' Association secure the services of S. C. Hewitt as a lecturer. Readers of "The Mechanic" were already familiar with Mr. Hewitt.