Eight Hours, Greenbacks and “Chinamen”: Wendell Phillips, Ira Steward, and the Fate of Labor Reform in Massachusetts.

In an incident that the Boston Globe politely referred to as "a little unpleasantness," the two epitomes of New England's labor reformers, Ira Steward and Wendell Phillips, turned a labor convention into a hot shouting match and put an end to their nearly decade long collaboration that briefly transcended both class and party. In the first convention of the newly founded Massachusetts Labor Union, Phillips read out and addressed the controversy that had recently erupted in the press over the conduct of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics Labor, the nation's first such agency, that Phillips and the Eight Hour League had lobbied the General Court to found three years earlier.